Humans QI

APPLAUSE

CHEERING AND 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...

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..the ho-ho-homo erectus Jimmy Carr...

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..the creature from the black gloom, Jack Dee...

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..and the HOME OWNER Alan Davies.

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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.

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. 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.

Definitely.

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.

Nice(!)

-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.

-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,

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.

So, 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.

0.4 of a milligram. Worth about 8 pence.

It's something.

It's a trace element.

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, 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.

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