APPLAUSE
Well, hello, hello, hello,
hello and welcome to QI where tonight we plot the whole history
of humanity with four prime specimens of the human race.
The highly evolved Jo Brand.
APPLAUSE
The ho-ho-homo erectus Jimmy Carr.
APPLAUSE
The creature from the black gloom Jack Dee.
APPLAUSE
And the HOME OWNER Alan Davies.
APPLAUSE
Let's see what your buzzers have evolved in to. Jo goes...
BUBBLING AND CROAKING
I really do go like that.
We recorded you when you weren't looking. Jimmy goes...
ROARING AND CHIRPING
Well, pardon me.
Jack goes...
MONKEYS SCREAM
- And Alan goes... - FOOTBALL CHANTING
Evolved backwards into an Arsenal supporter.
Let's start with this, describe the perfect man.
BUBBLING AND CROAKING
A dead one.
Oh! Jo Brand!
- There we have three specimens there. - Are you fishing for compliments?
Can I just say that one in the middle is bloody gorgeous!
- Is that my husband? I do believe it is! - Really?!
Perfect as in the physical specimen?
A sort of physical specimen.
Can you see from that that there is no such thing as being big-boned?
They all have the same structure and they've never found a fat skeleton.
I'm afraid that's true.
Actually, steering you slightly awry here,
humans are homo sapiens, sapiens is a species of animal
and every species of animal has a definitive version called a holotype
by which all others are judged so where is the human being
which a standard example of a human being?
Is he standard or perfect, cos there is a difference?
- There is. - I don't mind being perfect, but to just be average...
The honour should go to the first person who described humanity in terms of its animal origins.
- Darwin. - Not Darwin, before Darwin. Who came up with the phrase homo sapiens?
- Was it Henry VIII? - No.
Good effort.
It was a Swede who gave everything classification.
Do you know who this Swede was?
- Ulrika Jonsson? - Not Ulrika Jonsson.
It must be the other one, Sven-Goran Eriksson.
- The other one?! - It was ABBA.
Poor Sweden. I apologise.
He was called Carl Linnaeus. You DID know that.
The Linnaeic system of naming things.
It was felt that the honour should go to him. Then an American paleontologist volunteered.
He was called Edward Drinker Cope and he left in his will that he wanted to be the holotype.
They got his skeleton and he was going to be the type,
but unfortunately, he had syphilis and it was present in the skeletal structure.
How embarrassing!
JIMMY: They don't put that on the little leaflet at the doctor's.
Essentially, there is none. There is no perfect human.
The position is vacant?
They've suggested Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bob Hope, Raquel Welch.
I think she'd be distracting for the scientists.
She might, but it is a vacant position.
But... Mmmmm... Why am I making that noise?
- Who's that? - Jesus. - With legs out. - Oh, Leonardo Da Vinci's...
- Do you know what he's called? - No... - Vitruvian Man.
- Oh, the guy... - That one.
He's done too many arms and legs. He's a bloody fool.
- Are you the same width as height? - It's showing proportions.
In one, the man is spread-eagled and is fitting a circle.
In the second one, he's fitting a square.
When we fit a circle like that, the absolute centre of the circle is the navel,
but when we fit a square, the centre is the...ahem!
- Genitalia? - The genit - as you rightly say - alia.
The tummy banana is the term.
Or it is in our house.
- Who was Vitruvius? Why is he called Vitruvian Man? - Is that not him?
He was a Roman architect who wrote about man's dimensions
being the criteria by which you should design architecture.
It goes like this. Your height is equal to the span of your arms.
What I want to know
is what is the bloke behind doing that's...
They never tell you.
..that's made him open his legs like that.
Did the bloke in front know that the bloke behind was doing that?
It's like an old-fashioned version of doing that behind someone when they're having their photo taken.
But it must have taken hours,
"Oh, come on. The joke's wearing off."
The proportions are correct. You head is an eighth of your body height.
Your head's about a quarter of your body height.
- Is it? - Yeah, cos your brain's so massive...
APPLAUSE
The width of your shoulders is equal to the distance from the elbow to the tip of the fingers.
It's the same as your shoulder span. There's a lot of proportion going on.
Where would you see this mostly if you were in Italy?
- The internet. - There are millions of them all over Italy. Why is that?
- Beer mats. - Not beer mats.
I didn't mean that as a joke. It was a guess.
It's the one-euro coin, it has this on the obverse. He was so gifted,
that when he was a boy, he was an apprentice to a master painter
and typical in those days, there was a huge fresco that the pope had commissioned
and Leonardo was told to do one of the angels
and went and did the angel and the master came and looked at it
and broke his own brushes and walked out and never painted again.
Some people are just peevish.
People call him Leonardo and Da Vinci is just the place came from.
Name a painter who only used their first name.
Leonardo Da Streatham.
- Hmm, yes. - Rolf of Australia.
APPLAUSE
That is true.
Michelangelo. His surname was Buonaroti, but he was known as Michelangelo.
Raphael, we call by his first name.
It's like cooks - Delia, Nigella, Jamie.
- Jamie Da Essex. - That's the one.
If you think you're the perfect man, there may be a job for you in a museum somewhere.
As long as you don't have syphilis.
On you're way there, how would you spot a Neanderthal if you saw one on the bus?
MONKEYS SCREAM
He'd be the one who sits next to me.
Nearly always.
BUBBLING AND CROAKING
He's the one already sitting next to me cos I'm married to him.
Is this going to be the humiliate my husband show?
- He doesn't watch this. - Fine.
He doesn't really understand it.
Is he the one looking at the wheels, going, "What the hell...?"
Have they got the lump in their forehead or is that the Cro-Magnon?
The point is we'd be hard pushed to tell the difference.
- Admittedly, it's an unusual... - That's our producer.
If we shaved and dressed our producer one day,
and popped HER on a bus...
- ..she might look like a normal person. - So far, we haven't. - We've not managed that.
Is that a model?
That's a model of how they might look.
We think of them as stupid, but they had religious rites, buried their dead, made ornaments.
At one point we were one species that diverged and these two branches of humanity lived in Europe.
In fact, Neanderthals lived in Europe for four times longer than we ever have.
They had a long period of living there.
- Did we cross over? - We did and no-one quite knows
why they went extinct, whether we bullied them, outsmarted them.
They were stronger than us.
- We invented the bus. - We did invent the bus.
They didn't invent the bus. You can't give them that one.
About 1-4% of our DNA is Neanderthal so we cross-bred.
So were there ever homo sapiens who married Neanderthals?
- Well... - Imagine a wedding like that.
That's going to be a punch-up in a car park.
Go to Basildon any Saturday night.
I'm glad you said that. I just want to tour again one day.
Says a resident of Norfolk!
Yes, there was interbreeding. There are many theories.
Some think that we kept Neanderthal girls as sex slaves.
Possibly it's the other way round as they were stronger than us.
There was a lot of interbreeding, but for some reason, they died out.
Probably the first genocide, first of many that we've proudly executed over the century.
Maybe we teased them to death.
- They couldn't take it anymore. - Neanderthal!
Little bit simple. Oh, I can run fast, very good(!)
Why are they called Neandarthal?
Is it an anagram?
Probably is.
- Anagram of LEATHER DANT. - LEATHER DANT.
- That's a period in time, isn't it? - No, it isn't. It's a valley
near Dusseldorf, in Germany where they were found.
Can you name other species...?
I like the idea of having another species of human
who is just a little bit stupid, but friendly
- and lived with us and were happy to do all the jobs for us. - It's Brave New World,
isn't it? The Gammas.
I like the idea. I'm not a nutter.
- Who wouldn't mind. They'd be simple and... - And could be your sex slave.
- Can we go back to the picture of the man that looks like a gnome? - Oh, yes.
The producer.
I don't fancy that as a sex slave. I'm not being overly fussy.
Bear in mind, this is before the invention of electric light. It was gloomy.
- It's cold. - You'd be in a cave. It's cold.
Have a few beers, you'd be fine.
He looks like quite a friendly bloke for a Neanderthal.
I saw this really good anthropology series.
A fantastic depiction of the tree of evolution with all the different branches
and all the various homo this and homo the other that didn't make it.
Yeah, we're the only one left.
Presumably, though, if it's evolution, we're not finished.
- No. - So when we go on evolving...
JACK: There is hope for you.
They should keep a breeding population of us cos I think we'd make excellent pets.
We don't half moan though. Who wants a pet that moans?!
You want a dog that bounds up to you. Not, "Oh, God, I'm tired."
"I didn't have a breakfast."
Specifically, having Alan Davies as a pet, that would be good. Take him for a walk in the morning.
You played a dog in a radio show.
Yes, I don't like the direction this is going. He wants to tease me into extinction.
I did play a dog.
It's very hard to say. There's a great fallacy
that things that happen to you in your lifetime, you pass on to your children.
Your DNA doesn't alter because you text a lot.
People say, "Because we text a lot, we'll all have flat thumbs." That's a misunderstanding of evolution.
Why might you take a fossil into a nightclub?
BUBBLING AND CROAKING
If you were going to Stringfellow's you wouldn't need to.
Is it...? I'm going to guess the UV.
- Yes, you are so right. - Something in the UV, cos people's teeth
- look weird in clubs. - You're right.
- His teeth are weird anyway. - I don't know why.
There's quite a business in fossils.
- People want a perfect fossil and there's a lot of money charged for these... - Ammonites.
Like the ammonites, trilobites
and a lot of them are dodgy and they've got plastic in.
Take it under the UV light and the plastic will show up completely differently
to the original fossil so that's the reason to take it into a nightclub.
Do you get a lot of that in clubs?
I don't know, but now that I've suggested it...
I have to say, my wife wouldn't be very pleased with that explanation.
"No, darling, the reason
"I went into the back room of the club..."
Can I just say, on a completely unrelated note,
because dear Peter Stringfellow came up in that picture,
he won't let fat women go in his club in case they break the antique chairs.
No?
- Indeed. - But fat MEN?
So all fat ladies to Stringfellow's later and we'll sit on his antique face.
LAUGHTER
If you gave him - and when I say "him", I mean a Neanderthal man - a tracksuit and a haircut,
he would attract no more attention
than any of the other nutters on the bus.
- Which bit of you is evolving the quickest? - BUBBLING AND CROAKING
- Is it my propeller? - LAUGHTER
- What? - You have a propeller?
- What did you say? Revolving? - No, EVOLVING!
Wouldn't it be brilliant, though?
- If you had a propeller? - If we had a propeller. - It would be, rather.
Do you think there's any animals that have got propellers?
There's a thing that lives in the sea that has a propeller mechanism.
- It was used as the... - Is that a boat? - LAUGHTER
A hippo's tail - it's slightly less savoury -
the hippo uses its tail and it revolves it to spread its faeces
- in as wide a way as possible... - That's what I do in swimming pools.
- And what do you revolve to help that happen?! - Just anything.
- Always so embarrassing when it happens. - Well, it does it to mark out more territory...
I suppose I shouldn't do it from the top board.
It's always been a distinction,
there's a big difference between pissing IN a pool and INTO a pool.
- True. - I pooed in the sea once. - LAUGHTER
Did you? I'm not going in THERE again.
- I was only about 12... - JIMMY: Cost BP a fortune.
..and I really needed to go, I was quite far out.
"I could just go here, I mean, fish go in the sea all the time".
And I thought, "Good, that's gone",
but I hadn't allowed for the fact that it just bobs up.
- Whoa! - LAUGHTER
"Plop", and then it's right there next to your face.
You've not got rid of it at all... Swimming along...
Is that how you learned to swim?
LAUGHTER
It goes right into shore with you.
- I would advise not to do that. - Yeah.
- What was the question, again? - About evolving. - Yes.
I always thought... Whenever they mention on the news, "Scottish devolution",
- I think that sounds like they're losing their opposable thumbs. - De-evolving.
- If you're evolving because of breeding... - Yes... - I can't imagine what it is about human beings
that will be changing. We've got the sofa, the telly, the fridge -
- they're building our environment to fit the way we are now. - Exactly.
- We're not going to grow wings because we build aeroplanes. - Yeah.
We'll just be developed with a remote control in our hand.
Evolution isn't just a smooth thing.
- You get mutations which actually accelerates the process. - Indeed.
An animal is born with a very long neck and can get to the top leaves
and therefore that is a more successful creature...
And there's another female that's done the same thing...
Another female, and they say, "Oh, you've got a long neck, let's have long-necked babies..."
And they have themselves a giraffe family.
I saw a Family Fortunes once...
JIMMY: Finally, back to my level again.
..the question was, "Name a bird with a long neck".
Oh, no...
And the guy said, "Naomi Campbell".
It's like...my favourite one on The Weakest Link was,
"What are Chardonnay, Shiraz and Pinot Noir?",
and they said, "Footballers wives."
My favourite one was, "Name a dangerous race".
The guy said, "The Arabs".
I think they were hoping for "Grand National", or something.
Where were we? Oh, yes...
- Are we halting evolution? - There's no evidence that we are.
But would it be our stomachs that have evolved the quickest?
Because our diet has changed massively in the last 2,000 years.
You're right. It seems, though, that the part of the body
that has changed most recently in the last 10,000 years is the nose.
We're not quite sure why.
Are you going to tell us that more highly evolved people have got
- slightly bent-to-one-side noses? - Yes, there is that element...
The most highly evolved people have got THREE noses.
By the look of you. Yeah,
dogs, which were domesticated about 15,000 years ago -
and humans have complementary smell,
and it was around the time we were learning to cook, as well -
it just seems that we lost the need
to have the kind of smell that dogs have,
- maybe because we... - Isn't it the most powerful sense memory?
The idea that if you get a smell, you're back there immediately and it's the most powerful thing?
Yeah. It's very odd that, isn't it?
You can smell something and not be sure what it is
in a way that you couldn't SEE something and not be sure what it is.
You wouldn't show someone a picture of an elephant and then go,
- "Oh, it's a tennis racket! No..." It's very odd, that... - Its...
..although it's very powerful, it's also very elusive.
It feels like smell is the one thing that's miles away from language.
- It's so difficult to describe what's going on with it. - But it can trigger a memory instantly.
There is a widespread assumption that we've CEASED evolving -
I don't think it's true, but of course, it does take SO long.
Like what I was saying about Neanderthal man
having lived in Europe for four times longer that we have.
You say that we never notice it,
- but people are getting taller by generation. - Yes.
That's a nutritional thing.
It is, and you can see it in the Japanese who only ate fish and things -
the moment they started eating beef again, the Japanese, in a generation and a half...
- Uh-oh. Watch out for them. They'll be back. - ..got a lot taller.
LAUGHTER
So, it seems that our noses are evolving quicker than any other part of our body.
Who knows what we will look like in the future? In fact, who are you looking at here?
It's to do with the proportion
- in which we are able to sense things from our body... - Yes,
it's the amount of brain space and processing that is given
to our own bodies. These are called cortical homunculae,
a rather nice name.
Our cortex gives over a huge amount of processing to understand and feel
the hands and our ears and our tongues, er, quite a lot to
our genitalia, so much so that we felt the need to be decent.
- I see the one on the left is actually a lady. - That is Jo, in fact.
- It really is. - How dare you?! - That's Jimmy...
and that's you and that's you.
- Oh, I see... - With your eyes made bigger and your mouths made bigger,
- you are in there. - I'm quite happy with that torso. - Which one's me?
- The female one. - That one? - I think we look a lot crazier than those two.
Don't we? We look properly out of control.
I actually quite want to shag you now.
LAUGHTER
MACHO VOICE: Little bit of that, yeah.
We're very grateful to Steve, the artist who made these for us.
- I'm not grateful. - I'd like to go on record with Alan and say
I'm not grateful at all.
I think we might do a drawing of Steve later.
See how he likes it.
- So this is where the sensory... - Yeah, it was the brainchild of a man
called Dr Wilder Penfield, a Canadian neurosurgeon
who died in about 1979,
and because he'd been doing surgery on epileptics,
he realised he could map the parts of the brain that were responsible
for the feelings, dimensions, senses of each part of the body,
and that's what he came up with. So, to the brain, as it were, that's how we are.
A good rule of thumb for a first date -
- "These are the areas you should be concentrating on". - Yeah.
- And some people, like Andrew Marr, actually ARE like that. - LAUGHTER
Martin Clunes, perhaps. Yeah, the brain is, of course,
remarkably complex. It's the most complex thing we know of in the universe.
We don't know of anything more astonishingly complicated.
Have you filled in a VAT return?
Not easy.
- It's 100 billion neurons in the brain, roughly... - Yeah...
..as many brain cells in your brain as there are trees in the Amazonian forest.
- So if you've ever flown over the forest... - Maybe not any more.
Each cell makes between 1,000 and 10,000 connections,
so even the brain of a three-year-old child
has about a quadrillion, which is 10-15 synapses.
- 15... - It's a huge number. It's almost incalculably vast.
- No, I've done it. - Well done!
LAUGHTER
And it's 80% water, the brain. Extraordinary.
- Kind of like a weak lager. - Yeah!
The brain works with chemical reaction, always.
- Yes, electricity, essentially. - Electricity, is it?
That's why... An epileptic fit is when
the electrical impulses in your brain sort of overload,
and they cause you to...
Yeah, to have a seizure.
In fact, that's how they invented ECT,
because some Italian doctor noticed that a tramp he was experimenting on
was a lot more cheerful when he had an epileptic fit,
so they thought, "If we induce one..."
Why was he more cheerful when he'd had an epileptic fit? Was there a chemical reason?
He didn't know, but he just thought...
They still don't really know, but the thing about ECT is it does often work.
My mother went to a fete recently,
and someone had spelt "etc" wrong,
and it went, "This way to the stalls and ECT".
Be great to get at a fete, wouldn't it?
Anyway...the cortical homunculus is YOU,
if the size of your body parts reflected
how much brain power they use. How would you like to huddle up to one of these?
Oh, my God. How did you get a picture of my scrotum?
LAUGHTER AND GROANS
You got the teeth and everything.
Would a scrotum be much more attractive if it had little eyes and teeth?
The only thing the scrotum is good for is testing anti-wrinkle cream.
- Works a treat. - Yep, it would.
This little animal has only recently been discovered?
It is a recent discovery.
- In Africa? And it's hairless? - Yes, it is.
- It's called the naked mole rat. - How long is it? - About three inches.
So exactly the same proportion.
- Er...! - LAUGHTER
It's neither a mole nor a rat, in fact,
it IS a rodent, it's a mammal, and it's a most extraordinary creature.
Bizarrely, there was a zoologist
who predicted in the 1970s that there might be
an as-yet undiscovered social mammal that lived underground,
and this exactly fits the bill.
It has a queen, who is the only one who gives birth,
a harem of three males, and all the rest are diggers -
workers and slaves, just like an ant colony. It's most unusual.
When you said "social", I thought you meant it asks its friends round.
Ah!
The workers, they do the child rearing and the digging, the school run, as it were,
- I mean, all those sorts of jobs. - The school run(!)
I suppose its friends have to say that they'll come over.
They can't say, "Staying in, washing me hair tonight".
True! You get a colony of about 300 and they sleep like this to keep themselves warm -
they're virtually cold-blooded.
If you just glance at that, it's quite distressing.
It looks like something that happened at Chelsea Football Club's Christmas party.
- They do look disturbingly... - Do we know why
- they became like that? - It seems it's the best way
for them to survive in what is very stuffy burrows.
It's very difficult, and they just huddle together for warmth,
and maybe sometimes it's very hot and their fur is too much,
so a way of regulating their heat is just to be naked
and sleep on top of each other.
But they're quite interesting for us -
their genes have been sequenced
and they seem to have resistance to certain forms of cancer, as well as having other interesting properties.
That's because they don't smoke. LAUGHTER
They have healthy lifestyles, really.
They don't have something called Substance P,
which transmits pain in us and other animals...
So Substance P transmits pain?
- Yeah. - Are you sure that's science?
Are you sure you haven't misread that?
"You know, Substance P for Pain".
- It's a neurotransmitter... - Of course it is(!) - But if we were able
to replicate the way it works, we may find a perfect painkiller for us, rather than opiates,
which we still use.
Yes, the naked mole rat is a personal hero of mine,
but describe the effects of hero syndrome.
A psychological disorder where you put your trousers on before your pants?
It is a psychological disorder, a very good description of it.
Is it where you THINK you're a hero?
- Kind of... - Is it anything to do with Hero the person in mythology?
Oh, as in Hero and Leander? No.
Oh, I thought I sounded really intelligent then.
- You did! - You think you're a hero, you behave like a hero...?
Yes, it's worse than that, it's really pretty sick...
- Do you make something terrible happen so you can look like a hero? - Exactly.
- So you set a building on fire then rescue everyone? - Especially fire,
yes, it's a real problem, particularly in America...
- Like Munchhausen's? - It's like a kind of Munchhausen's.
Are we saying this is illegal?
- I had no idea, I'm sorry. - So keen are they to present themselves as heroes
that they will set fire to buildings then be the one who goes in and...
Would these be just regular people or someone that's in a profession?
- It's firemen. - Firemen are sort of a hero for a JOB -
it's a weird job when you think about it.
Couldn't it be the other way round,
that they know they're arsonists but they've got a guilty conscience so they become firemen as well?
- There is an element of that. - Did you hear about
that Crimewatch presenter in Brazil who found that the show wasn't
- exciting enough, so he started killing people. - Yeah.
His name was Souza and he was supposed to have commissioned five murders...
The police got suspicious when his camera crew turned up before he phoned in.
..and he went on the run and then turned himself in.
So yes, in South Carolina in 1993 and '94,
- they discovered 47 - in one year - had done this. - All by the same guy?
No, 47 different incidents.
- 47 different arsonist firemen? - Yeah.
It's a weird thing, cos it's a very noble thing to want to be, a hero.
- A pretty nice thing to want to be, but so misguided. - I know, it is.
It's not quite related, but there was a Japanese customs officer
who was training a sniffer dog,
and he decided to hide quite a large wodge of cannabis
on a random passenger,
who didn't know about it,
he just basically planted it.
The idea was that the passenger would go through, the dog would sniff and find it.
The dog didn't get it!
The passenger just walked through and got a free brick of cannabis!
- LAUGHTER - Got home, "What?!"
Very strange.
I'll fly with THEM again.
LAUGHTER
Usually, it's just a pack of cashews.
Only got a wash bag with the other guys!
Most extraordinary.
You don't have to be a hero to be a worthwhile person
but how much are you worth?
- You mean if you sold all your bits? - Basically, yeah, not forgetting your bank account and your social entity.
Kidneys, liver...
- Let's start with the basic, just your meat. - Your flesh? - Your flesh, if you prefer to call it that.
I don't know who you're going to sell it to. Possibly Lidl, Aldi, maybe...
In Moldova there were a couple of women stopped who were selling human flesh
and they were charging £1.30 a kilo.
So that would make the average-ish human, it would be about £100 of flesh.
I think he'd go for more, if he had a restaurant in Chelsea or something.
We think there's a problem with the national debt? We're sitting on a goldmine.
- There's 60 million of you out there. - And there's leather. There's a skin.
Isn't there a scientific thing here?
You've got a very tiny bit of calcium in your body
but that's saleable. Or there's tiny bits of metal.
There's gold.
- Is there gold? - Yes. - In me?
0.4 of a milligram.
Worth about 8 pence.
It's something.
It's a trace element.
You remember the German who advertised on the internet...
- My goodness. - "I vould like to invite you over and eat your body."
And someone said, "Yes, I would like you to do that."
So he went round to his flat and he said, "Good evening, would you like a drink?"
"Yes, thank you." "And I'm going to kill you now."
Did they not get confused because they both sounded alike?
Good point.
The weird thing about that, that did happen and he killed the guy
but the guy that came first backed out at the last minute.
He was about to kill him and he went, "Oh, I don't really fancy it,"
- and they watched Ocean's 12 instead, and he went home. - Oh, that's sweet.
The guy that got away.
- I've seen Ocean's 12, I'm not sure that was a good deal. - I'd rather be eaten.
So OK, we got the meat, the meat's £100. What about leather?
How much does your skin weigh?
- 40 quid. I'll give you 40 quid for your skin. - The biggest organ in the body, isn't it?
Large-ish. It's about 8lbs, 3.6kg.
- I would hope mine would go to Louis Vuitton. - It could do, it's about 22 square foot.
About the size of an average door, say.
If you were charging the same as cow hide, that would only be about £20, I'm afraid.
Be a shame if you ended up a bag for life.
Most unfortunate!
I think the coin purse alone would fetch a couple of grand.
- The coin purse. Very nicely put. - My Jimmy Carr coin purse.
Then we come to the big ones, the transplantable organs. A pair of corneas can be £4,000.
You get good money for your eyes.
How much would you pay for a heart?
- £50,000. - Not bad. £40,000 you could probably get one for.
What about a kidney? That's the classic thing.
Anything from £10,000 to £20,000.
You know last year I donated a kidney. Of course, they wanted to know where I got it from.
Lungs?
- £25,000 a pair. - £75,000. Very valuable, lungs. - Very, very valuable...
All your body parts are, we reckon, about £400,000.
So you've got £400,120 so far.
The thing is, when you get your donor card, it says, "We'll donate your stuff"
and you go, "Yeah, OK, I'll donate it."
- Should be able to sell it, shouldn't you? - You could, I suppose.
- I carry a donor card but I... - That's so you can got a kebab at night.
No, I... LAUGHTER
I carry it but I haven't signed it because I want someone else to have the use of it after I've died.
APPLAUSE
And then there are the chemical components which we mentioned.
Ten gallons of water, which doesn't go for much,
- enough carbon for a sack of coal... - Sorry, enough carbon for a sack of coal?!
We're a carbon-based life form. It's our main feature.
A packet of bone meal fertiliser you could get out of a human.
A bag of salt, a few nails from the iron.
And the small trace elements, like the 0.4mg of gold, which is not much.
You probably wouldn't get much change out of £10 but it's not very much for all your worth.
So, frankly, half a million if you're very, very... in good order.
It's silly to burn it, then, at the end, isn't it?
Quite a lot going on there.
If it wasn't the organ donation type thing, if it was just the chemicals and the stuff we're made of...
About a tenner. In reality, of course, everybody's priceless.
What is the point of teenagers?
Are they the only group that you're legally allowed to punch?
- I might have dreamt that. - You probably did. - Oh, right.
The thing about teenagers is that they don't think of themselves as remarkable and strange.
People look at them and think they sound odd, they speak oddly,
but they communicate amongst themselves very efficiently...
- Absolutely right. - ..and really ought to be breeding.
- In fact, in many areas... - They are. Almost pre...
Cos they like being together, they don't want to be with anybody else
and they are sexually ready for children. That's the point of teenagers.
They do think differently. You can use MRI, and there were a number of experiments
with adults and adolescents, with brain scans
and they were both shown, for example, a woman in a particular emotional state
and they were asked what emotional state it was.
All the adults answered correctly
but lots of the teenagers couldn't interpret the emotion.
It was found they use a different part of their brain to do so.
So when an adult is having a row with a teenager and they're not understanding each other,
it's really because they have different ways of thinking.
They don't like it if you try and use their language.
- I remember going up to some teenagers outside the pub, going, "Look at that - minge-er - over there."
And they went, "Oh, for God's sake, it's minger."
And one of them went, "And that's my mum," so, obviously, I...
There are those who propose the argument, like Alan, that they are the proper state
and we've grown down from that into our rather more fixed, rigid and rational...
- It's the best time of life, in a way. - Yeah.
When you're very sad as a teenager, you feel like everything is going to end
but the next day, something amazingly brilliant happens, like you hear a new band.
You're right, absolutely.
And then everything's just great again.
If you see a film you like, you just love it and watch it eight times.
You never forget it, the whole of your life.
The things you really love or discover at that age stay with you for the rest of your life.
I agree. The Republic of Adolescence is a fine place to live and it's a shame ever to leave it.
Maybe teenagers are the real thing and it's the adults who are behaving oddly.
Oh, the humanity! It's time for General Ignorance, so fingers on buzzers if you please.
Name the fastest human runner of all time.
Ah, now...
ROAR I'm going to go Usain Bolt
He is! Did you not watch it? It was on telly.
He's called Bolt, for God's sake. What more do you want?
The argument for him being one of the fastest is strong.
What, him winning and being the fastest?
- He won that race. - He won that race, yes. You think you're faster, do you?
I think T8 was faster.
- T8? - T8. - Who's that?
A fossilised footprint in Australia, from Aboriginal people.
You can tell from the strides that they ran really fast.
- What were they running from? - The white man. - Possibly. They had good reason to.
Usain Bolt can reach 27mph for a second or two.
Which is very, very impressive, but rabbits run at 35mph and that's much more exciting.
- It is not as fast as a rabbit. - It's not as fast as Jimmy Carr when it's his round.
20,000 years ago
on the Gold Coast they discovered these footprints and one of the males was running at 23mph.
So Usain Bolt can travel 27mph on a running track, with spiked shoes,
whereas T8 was in mud, barefoot and was accelerating.
We don't know how much faster he got. Seems likely he was faster than Bolt.
It's quite likely he wasn't the fastest of his 150,000-strong tribe,
so anthropologists believe he could have gone up to 28mph.
- Usain Bolt wasn't being chased by a lion, was he? - There is also that.
For all we know, he could have been a fat bloke who was about 45
and all the others were REALLY fast...
- Exactly. - ..doing 48mph. How do they tell, is it the stride length?
I think it is, stride length, depth of impress. They can be pretty accurate.
Maybe they had a rock in the shape of a foot and they did it for a laugh.
It's true, it's true.
I'm not saying Usain Bolt isn't fast. Anyway, now,
footprints in Australia suggest some of our ancestors were much faster than the best athletes today.
The fastest one we know of was called T8.
Now, how are saunas good for you?
JIMMY CARR: What's going on over there?!
What's happening on the far right?
I'm not quite sure.
If I'm not very much mistaken...
And his missus is just watching!
He's probably showing her how to do it.
What's happening in the middle? That's even more peculiar.
That woman on her own, she needs to sort out her bikini line big-time.
Yes, it's an unusual sight, that, I grant you.
It's an early sauna of some kind.
JACK: Can I suggest they're just not good for you, it's a trick question?
Well, I'm sure they don't do too much harm but what they're not good at,
one of the major claims that's made for them is that they release toxins from your body,
they don't do that.
People say, "Good for a hangover, go in, all the toxins go out." They don't.
- You need a fry-up. - When you sweat, you lose some salt, which is a good thing to have in your body,
but you don't get rid of toxins.
- Is that a real thing, that you can run off a...when you're drunk? - Here they go again.
It's the fella from the Joy Of Sex.
The point is that people think it's good for a hangover because it gets rid of toxins
but it dehydrates you because you sweat a lot.
- It's uncomfortable and unpleasant. - And who uses it for losing weight?
- Boxers, before the weigh-in. - And jockeys.
And again, you lose weight in a sauna just by dehydrating.
Are those kitchen scales? Is he really tiny?
He's very cheerful, whatever he is.
A sauna won't remove toxins from your body
and if you're hungover, you might end up even more dehydrated.
Which disease could this animal give you?
HIGH-PITCHED BUZZING
- Oh, go on. - Malaria.
Oh! Jack, you were doing so well.
Well, that's how I got it.
It was a mosquito, but you never get malaria from a mosquito that buzzes.
- Silent but deadly. - Sorry? Silent but deadly...
SBD.
It's the females of some species of Anopheles mosquito that don't make a noise
and usually it's the ankle, usually the lower limbs, they're the ones you've got to watch out for.
If you can hear it, it's a nuisance and it can give you yellow fever,
and it can give you dengue fever, which is worse that some forms of light malaria,
so it's not that they're harmless but they won't give you malaria if you can hear them.
Bill Gates has got that foundation with Warren Buffett, he set up this incredible thing
and they think they're going to be able to tackle malaria,
which is extraordinary when you think about some geek in a garage starting a computer company.
It's marvellous. They are the deadliest disease vector in history.
In fact, over half the people who have ever lived on this planet
have been killed by mosquitoes.
Over half the people who have ever lived.
If we could wipe them out, it wouldn't be good either because they are vital pollinators.
A buzzing mosquito cannot give you malaria, though it might give you something equally unpleasant.
Which brings us to the end of the show. And before we go,
let's see who's the winner in this human race.
Well, it's a very exciting outcome, I have to say.
The pinnacle of evolution, with a score of plus four,
- is Jo Brand! - Oh, my Lord! - APPLAUSE
CHEERING
Very good.
I am astonished. The missing link, with a plus score of three
is Alan Davies.
CHEERING, APPLAUSE
Slightly dragging his knuckles along the ground with minus two
- is Jack Dee. - APPLAUSE
But heading, I'm afraid...heading for extinction with minus three,
- Jimmy Carr. - APPLAUSE
So all that's left is for me to thank Jo, Jimmy, Jack and, of course, Alan
and I leave you with this thought about being human and being happy.
If you really want to be happy, all you have to do is say, "I am beautiful."
So I want you all tonight to go and look at the mirror
and say, "Stephen Fry is beautiful." Good night.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
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