[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JIM DICKSON: Hello there. This is Jim Dickson speaking.

SOREN WHEELER: Hello, Dr. Dickson. My name is Soren.

JIM DICKSON: Soren?

SOREN: Yes. I'm the producer for today. You'll actually be talking to our host Jad. He's on his way over to the studios right now. So ...

JIM DICKSON: That's good.

JAD ABUMRAD: All right. So let's just start the story here. This is a bit of tape we've had for a while. It's just kind of fun. It'll lead into the story in a second.

JAD: Hello, Dr. Dickson.

JIM DICKSON: Hello there, Jad.

JAD: Hi. How are you?

JIM DICKSON: I'm very well, thank you. I'm always pleased to talk about my delightful obsession.

JAD: [laughs]

JIM DICKSON: I've had for more than 10 years, which led to my marriage to a French lady. I'm not joking.

JAD: How does the marriage to the French lady factor in?

JIM DICKSON: Ah! Well, we met on email.

JAD: Huh!

JIM DICKSON: A bit like You've Got Mail, you know, the Hollywood film. Well, my wife is sitting beside me and she's making signals. Well, what is it that you're saying, dear?

JAD: Could I ask you, is there any chance we could talk to your wife? Is she sitting right there next to you?

JIM DICKSON: Yes, they want to talk to you, dear.

WIFE: Oh, yes.

JIM DICKSON: Come on.

WIFE: Hello?

JAD: Hi.

WIFE: Hi. Sorry, I am French and my English is not very excellent.

JAD: No, you're fantastic. Bonjour?

WIFE: Bonjour.

JAD: He mentioned that Ötzi was what brought you together.

WIFE: Yes, it's true. I was a teacher, a primary school teacher.

JIM DICKSON: She emailed me some questions about Ötzi.

WIFE: Yes.

JIM DICKSON: And I answered them to the best of my ability, and shortly after we were married.

WIFE: Yes!

JAD: No kidding.

JIM DICKSON: Ötzi is my benefactor, my friend.

JAD: [laughs]

JAD: Okay, so we should introduce ourselves real fast. I'm Jad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert.

JAD: This is Radiolab. So that guy, Jim Dickson, he's a botanist. Called him four years ago to talk about this fellow, Ötzi. We're gonna tell Ötzi's story completely in just a second, but there's something in the whole interaction between him and his wife there that just kind of captures how everybody gets when they get into Ötzi. They either get married or they get obsessed.

ROBERT: Yeah, but it wasn't until very recently our producer, Andy Mills, and I happened to talk to this graphic artist named Aaron Birk, who is also totally obsessed with this guy Ötzi.

AARON BIRK: Yes. I think there's this hunger on the part of the ...

ROBERT: That's when we really understood what this story is all about.

AARON BIRK: Yeah. I mean, at least for me, that's where it all started.

ROBERT: And since Andy has been reporting this piece, why don't Andy, you just take the ball from here?

ANDY: Okay.

JAD: Do it, Andy.

ANDY: So story starts 1991, way up in the Alps.

JIM DICKSON: At 3,210 meters above sea level. I know you Americans don't think in meters, that's roughly 10.5 thousand feet.

AARON BIRK: This is a frozen glacial spot.

ANDY: And up there walking around ...

JIM DICKSON: Were two hill-walkers.

JAD: Two hill-walkers. Hikers.

JIM DICKSON: Hikers. It was a German couple, a man and a wife.

ANDY: It was early in the afternoon. And at some point ...

AARON BIRK: They take a notion to the head-off trail.

JIM DICKSON: And they were only a hundred yards off the beaten track.

ANDY: And after just a few minutes, they round a little rock and that's when they were stopped dead in their tracks.

ROBERT: By what?

ANDY: By a corpse.

JIM DICKSON: This corpse sticking out of the ice. He was lying on his stomach.

ANDY: Face-down in the ice.

JIM DICKSON: He was kind of draped over a big boulder.

AARON BIRK: His legs are buried under the ice up to his hips, and his top half is just sticking out.

ANDY: His left arm is under his forehead, almost like a schoolboy falling asleep in class on his arm.

AARON BIRK: So these two hikers, they see this and they run off for help.

JIM DICKSON: They hot footed it into the nearby mountain hut, thinking it was a mountaineering accident.

ANDY: A recent one.

JIM DICKSON: And they called the police.

ANDY: They said, "Hey. Somebody, a tourist or a climber, had some sort of accident." And so the cops showed up with drills and ice picks and started to chip away at the ice, trying to get the body out. But then they started noticing some things. Like this guy had all these tattoos.

JIM DICKSON: On his back and behind his knees.

ANDY: Then they start noticing all this stuff buried with him. He's got some kind of moccasin, looks like ox skin.

JIM DICKSON: He had a bearskin cap.

ANDY: Unusual stuff.

JIM DICKSON: He had a copper headed u-hafted ax.

JAD: A what?

ANDY: A small pouch filled with medicinal tree fungus

ROBERT: Really?

JIM DICKSON: A quiver full of arrows. A longbow.

ANDY: He had grass socks.

ROBERT: Grass socks?

ANDY: Mm-hmm. Woven grass.

AARON BIRK: A dagger that has been chipped out of stone.

ANDY: And so these cops realize ...

AARON BIRK: This is not a 20th-century tourist who wandered off-trail.

JIM DICKSON: This was something extraordinary.

ANDY: This is old.

ROBERT: Like renaissance or old middle ages? Or old?

JIM DICKSON: Well, wouldn't we like to know?

JAD: And what did the police do?

JIM DICKSON: Well, the police reported it to the forensic authorities in the University of Innsbruck.

ANDY: Basically, they took it to a team of local scientists who sent samples out to a bunch of labs and eventually confirmed that yeah, this is old. But not just old, this was really old. This body is 5,300 years old.

ROBERT: Wow!

JAD: Wow!

JIM DICKSON: Yes.

ANDY: That's way before Jesus, way before Moses.

AARON BIRK: If you had to use it as a historic mark point, let's say the pyramids of Egypt. This would be 700 years prior to the construction of the pyramid in Giza.

JIM DICKSON: It was beyond archeologists' wildest dreams. A 5,200-year-old perfectly preserved corpse.

ANDY: We're talking about a man with all his skin, with his eyeballs, his teeth, his tongue, his groin, his organs, his guts. Everything's in there. Everything is almost perfectly freeze-dried.

JIM DICKSON: There he is!

JAD: So what does he look like?

JIM DICKSON: Oh. Well, he was bearded.

ANDY: He's 45 years old, which I think for 3,000 BC is pretty darn old.

ROBERT: Huh.

JIM DICKSON: And he was a small guy. He was only about 5'2" in height.

AARON BIRK: But his calf muscles, his thigh muscles are incredibly developed. So this would suggest that he's a hunter or a shepherd of some kind who walks these mountains.

JIM DICKSON: His physique is comparable to the modern Olympian wrestler. He's very obviously a human being. Very very obviously. And he would have all the hopes and the fears of you and I.

ANDY: They even gave him a name.

JIM DICKSON: Ötzi.

AARON BIRK: Ötzi.

ANDY: Ertsy.

JIM DICKSON: Ötzi.

AARON BIRK: Even though some of us can't really pronounce that name.

ANDY: Ötzi.

JAD: Spell it.

ANDY: O with two dots on top.

[SIRI: Scientists call him Ötzi.]

AARON BIRK: There's all kinds of drama. There's Austria competing with Italy. "He's our mummy." "No, he's our mummy." "He's on the border." "Whose mummy is he?"

ANDY: Eventually the Italians got him.

JIM DICKSON: Because he's said to be 92 meters inside Italy.

ROBERT: [laughs]

ANDY: A whole museum is built around him. An entire facility is built to freeze him. There's teams of researchers, there's competing universities. You have documentaries, you have books and articles about this incredible mummy who was walking in the ice, he fell. Isn't that fascinating?

JAD: You know Brad Pitt?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: He got a tattoo of Ötzi on his arm.

ROBERT: Really?

ANDY: What everyone really wanted to know was ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Who was this prehistoric person?

ANDY: ... who was this guy?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Where'd he come from?

ANDY: Was he a scout? Was he a traveler?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Where was he going?

ANDY: How did he fall?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: How had he died?

ANDY: Was it a storm that took him?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: And what was he doing so high in the mountains?]

ROBERT: [laughs]

ANDY: Yeah. But when we found him there really wasn't any way to answer these kinds of questions, all you got was wild speculation. But this is where it becomes more than a story about an ancient dead guy. Over the past, what, 22 years since he's been found, all these researchers keep coming back to Ötzi. And they've gathered just enough little pieces of evidence that when you put it all together, what you get is this surprisingly intimate look at this one real person—like this one real dude who lived 5,300 years ago. And for our purposes, the first piece of that puzzle falls into place on a summer's day in 2001, when a radiologist named Dr. Paul Gossner is staring at a CT scan. Basically a 3D X-ray of Ötzi chest. Maybe for the umpteenth time, for the thousandth time. When suddenly he notices something unusual. Right up by Ötzi's shoulder blade, in the left scapula.

ROBERT: What does he notice?

ANDY: He finds an arrowhead lodged in the shoulder blade. And I think it was hard to see because it's stone, not metal. If it was metal, they would've picked it up right away.

ROBERT: So wait, does this mean that this is a possible murder?

ANDY: That's right. The whole thing blows up to a full-scale murder mystery.

ALBERT ZINC: From that moment on, we knew that he was shot with an arrow. And then it all started the research about ...

ANDY: That's Albert Zinc. He's actually the top scientist in charge of Ötzi these days.

ALBERT: ZINC: What we do is like doing a crime scene investigation. We try to put together ...

ANDY: Not too long after Gossner spotted that arrowhead, Zinc and his team, they take Ötzi, they actually put him into an ambulance, rush him as fast they can to a hospital, trying to make sure that he doesn't thaw. And they put him into a higher resolution full-body CT scan.

AARON BIRK: And the plot thickens further. We find severe abdominal wounds and rib fractures.

ANDY: Things that before may have come across as 5,000-year-old wear and tear ...

AARON BIRK: There's an orbital fracture of the cranium.

ANDY: ... now it's like we're seeing them with new eyes.

AARON BIRK: His head is busted.

ANDY: And not only that ...

JIM DICKSON: His right palm is very badly cut. It's very deep.

ANDY: How deep?

AARON BIRK: It's so deep that there's cuts in the underlying bones.

ANDY: Oh.

JIM DICKSON: And some pathologists say it's a defensive wound.

ALBERT ZINC: A wound that comes from a fight.

JIM DICKSON: He held his right hand up, and he got slashed on his right palm.

ANDY: In trying to piece together what happened, one of the questions that scientists like Albert Zinc asked was, like, "This cut on his hand was it a ...

ALBERT ZINC: Fresh wound, or this was already a healing wound?

ANDY: How much time had passed between when he got the cut and when he died?

ALBERT ZINC: Well, w took a little tissue piece out of the wound.

ANDY: They rehydrated it. They sliced it up with lasers.

ALBERT ZINC: We made little slices, and we have a look at them in the microscope.

ANDY: And they could see evidence that when he died, the blood from this wound was just starting to clot, but that it had not yet formed a scab when he died, which told them that this attack ...

ALBERT ZINC: This must be a wound that happened already three or four days before he died.

ANDY: Which added another question to the list: what happened in those last three or four days between the time he got cut and the time he died?

JIM DICKSON: Well I mean, I think this is the most fascinating thing of all about Ötzi.

ANDY: Jim told us, luckily for scientists ...

JIM DICKSON: His intestines are all there.

ANDY: And to the trained eye, your intestines ...

JIM DICKSON: It's like a map and a diary.

JAD: A diary?

JIM DICKSON: Yeah, a diary.

JAD: In what way?

JIM DICKSON: If there's any food in your stomach, it's less than four hours old.

ANDY: Which would probably be your last meal.

JIM DICKSON: And the stuff in an intermediate position like the colon is between a few hours old and a few days old.

ANDY: Your last few meals.

JIM DICKSON: So if you can get samples from all these and look at the content, you can deduce all sorts of things.

ANDY: But one small problem. If you've got a 5,000-year-old mummy on your hands, you can't exactly just cut them open. So Jim and his team, what they did is they snaked some fancy equipment up his butt and started rooting around.

JIM DICKSON: I mean, I didn't do that, you appreciate. I'm a botanist, I'm not a medic.

ANDY: Someone else from his team did that. In any case, they got up in there. And first of all, they couldn't find the stomach, but they did pull out samples from the rest of his guts, and they found ...

JIM DICKSON: Pollen.

ANDY: Pollen.

AARON BIRK: Pollen.

ANDY: Actually, two kinds of pollen, one from ...

AARON BIRK: From the fresh flowers of the hop-hornbeam.

JIM DICKSON: Yes.

ANDY: A tree that blooms down in the valley. And ...

AARON BIRK: Conifer pollen.

ANDY: A second pollen from high-altitude evergreen trees. So you've got the high mountain firs.

ROBERT: Yes?

ANDY: And the deciduous trees of the valley, of the low places. You've got the hornbeam. Both of these kinds of pollen were found in Ötzi's gut, probably because he drank some water, which contained the pollen. But here's the key: the pollen from the valley, it's sandwiched in between these two layers of mountain pollen, and that implies an order. Ötzi must have first ingested the pine pollen, then the hornbeam, and then the pine pollen again, and that suggests ...

JIM DICKSON: About two days or so before he died, he was high up in hills.

ANDY: Drinking pollen-laded water, high above.

JIM DICKSON: And then he was very low down below the tree line.

ANDY: Drinking pollen-laded water down below.

JIM DICKSON: And then he came back up again to meet his end.

ANDY: And so taking all that and a couple other pieces of research, here is what we think happened to Ötzi in his last days. We know that it would have been summertime.

JIM DICKSON: Probably June.

ANDY: Because that hornbeam pollen in his gut ...

AARON BIRK: Only blooms in the early summertime, in June.

JIM DICKSON: And for whatever reason ...

ANDY: Maybe he's hunting, maybe he's looking for copper, we don't know. But we do know ...

JIM DICKSON: He's high up in the mountains, right?

ANDY: Well above the tree line.

JIM DICKSON: And then he goes back down to his village.

ANDY: Which we believe was south of the mountain because certain chemicals in the local water were also found in Ötzi's teeth and bones. Anyway, it was not a short walk home.

JIM DICKSON: It's a long way down, it's 5,000, 6,000 feet we're talking about.

ANDY: Then we know that within the span of about 24 hours ...

JIM DICKSON: Something happens in his village.

ANDY: Something violent.

ALBERT ZINC: Maybe his people were fighting with other people when he got there.

ANDY: The details are a little blurry, but it is clear that he was attacked, that he put his right hand up to defend himself, and that he gets that cut.

JIM DICKSON: It's very deep, it's very bloody, it's very painful. And shortly after that event, he bends down and picks up a clump of bog moss.

ANDY: Jim actually found that bog moss on Ötzi, and he says that it's ...

JIM DICKSON: It's mildly antiseptic.

ANDY: Anyway, Ötzi, he heads back up the mountain.

JIM DICKSON: He goes back up again, perhaps pursued by somebody or people, plural.

ANDY: We think that maybe he was in a hurry because ...

JIM DICKSON: Of 14 arrows ...

ANDY: That he was carrying ...

JIM DICKSON: Only two had flint tips and feathers, and the other 12 were useless.

AARON BIRK: Which suggests a frantic state. You've got a guy who's running, bleeding and he's busily carving his arrows.

ANDY: Curving as he runs. And for about a day ...

JIM DICKSON: Or maybe a day and a half ...

ANDY: He's running a lot. We know that he runs over 12 miles, that he gets up above 10,000 feet above sea level, managing to evade whoever it is that's coming after him. But then ...

JIM DICKSON: The fatal arrow shot.

AARON BIRK: This is the official report from the South Tyrol Museum of Archeology. We can see that the point of the arrow tore a hole in the artery beneath his left collarbone, which led to a massive hematoma, which bled into the thorax cavity, which in turn caused cardiac arrest and sudden death.

ANDY: He bled to death.

JIM DICKSON: He would have died in less than half an hour.

JAD: Really?

JIM DICKSON: He would have died in 20 minutes, perhaps.

ANDY: According to a lot of researchers, whoever killed Ötzi, came over, pulled the arrow shaft out of Ötzi's back, picked up a big stone and bashed his head in. And then within about an hour, maybe two, his body would have been completely covered in snow. Then within a month or so, that snow would have become ice. And then when the next summer came around, that ice would have thawed out just enough to allow a little sunlight to come through. The next winter, he would have froze again, following summer thawed a little bit, and then froze again and then thawed. And here's why that's important: bodies that are completely frozen deteriorate. Those periods of thaw kept him from deteriorating. So you had this perfect mixture throughout all these years: a season of snow, a season of ice, and then a thaw, and then a snow and then an ice, and then a thaw. I mean, just think about it: year in and year out, throughout the building of the pyramids, the rise and fall of Rome, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, all of this time, Ötzi was there in that spot, just a few feet away from where he was murdered, until 1991, when a couple of German hikers decided to head off trail.

AARON BIRK: We have forensic proof of his suffering. We have forensic proof of his hunger. We have forensic evidence that he was cold. We have all of this undeniable, irrefutable forensic evidence that this man was a living human being who was tormented and was enduring with incredible tenacity.

ANDY: And in the last few years, scientists have still been at it. They've still been poking at Ötzi, trying to figure out who was this guy? Not just who might have been, but who was he really?

AARON BIRK: I think there's a hope that something will be found, which will say yes, he was a hero. Yes, he was a king. Yes, he was a father. I think there's this hunger on the part of the researchers to find something beyond the biology, beyond the molecular chemistry, to find some sense of the humanity.

ANDY: And in the years since we spoke with Jim Dickson, scientists did find something which, for Aaron, at least does give him that sense.

AARON BIRK: In 2010 ...

ANDY: They found Ötzi's stomach. Which Jim and his team, they couldn't find because it was ...

AARON BIRK: Tucked deep up under his rib cage, pressed up against his heart. They find the stomach.

ANDY: And inside ...

AARON BIRK: One and a half pounds of undigested goat meat and bread in his belly.

ANDY: ... his last meal.

AARON BIRK: This was eaten on the day of his death.

ANDY: Maybe just an hour before he died.

AARON BIRK: It was a huge feast.

ANDY: And for Aaron, imagining Ötzi's sitting at that fire right before he died, that's what did it.

AARON BIRK: Oh, I can see it! He's eating. He cooked his food. We have proof. He cooked the meat and he sat down and it must've taken time, it took at least an hour or two. Like, I can feel it. I'm in the cave. I'm by the fire.

ANDY: That's what brought him back.

ROBERT: So you're saying then that some hours before he had somehow the time to build a fire, catch or acquire or carry a fairly substantial meal and sit and eat it somewhat at rest. He must not have known what was coming was coming.

ANDY: Well, maybe he knew. Maybe he had found some kind of resolution around it, but we have forensic proof that for this brief moment in time, the Alpine ice man felt safe enough to stew his meat and his bread and sit by the fire and eat his dinner.

ANDY: A friend of the show, a novelist named Stefan Block, he heard about this guy Ötzi, got obsessed. But unlike Brad Pitt, instead of getting a tattoo he wrote a fictional piece that tries to answer some of those remaining questions like: why was Ötzi pursued? Who was after him? Why did they kill him?

STEFAN BLOCK: "All I could remember were the fear and running that were mine alone, the blood in my hand that no other hand came to nurse. And at last, three weeks of spilling myself back into the snow and stone of our forever mountain."

ANDY: This story, it's this beautiful imagining of what it would be like if Ötzi were to just wake up today. What he might remember about his life and his death, what the world—our world—might look like and feel like to him.

STEFAN BLOCK: "The place they called 'streets' were great edged canyons. A person in every tiny cave. 'These are called buildings,' they told me. 'We make them for people to live and work.' Our new valley called 'city' was so big the scientist people explained that we were not just this valley city, we were thousands of cities big. Thousands of cities on a great blue stone called 'Earth,' which was only like a little bead in a place called 'the universe,' where the stars threaded millions of these globes like bracelets. But I could not think a pride as big as this universe and I asked them to stop their stories."

ANDY: You can find that piece, along with a look at some of Ötzi's tattoos and a lot of other really great stuff on our website, Radiolab.org. And of course, thanks for listening.

[LISTENER: This is Bonnie, calling from Boston, Massachusetts. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today we're talking about ...

ROBERT: Really, really, really old things.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Mysteries. Old—stories that start a long, long time ago.

JAD: And now a story about a thing.

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: It's in this vault.

JAD: It lives inside a steel vault inside this huge laboratory at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa. We asked a professor there, Dr. Bernhard Zipfel, to pull it out and show it to our reporter, Patricia Hume.

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: And this is the original specimen. This is it. We have it right in front of us here. I mean, I handle this a lot, but I get gooseflesh every time I take this out.

JAD: And the reason it gives him gooseflesh, or goosebumps, is because this object seems to completely upend two basic questions about, you know, human history.

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: Amazing.

JAD: Where did we begin? And when we began, who was trying to take us out?

ROBERT: Producer Andy Mills takes the story from here.

ANDY: Right.

JAD: With thunder and vigor.

ROBERT: And gusto.

JAD: With gusto.

ANDY: Ooh, yes. I'd like to with gusto please.

JAD: All right.

LEE BERGER: Well, it's one of those discoveries that almost didn't happen.

ANDY: And here to help me tell you the story ...

LEE BERGER: Okay. I'm professor Lee Berger.

ANDY: ... is Lee.

LEE BERGER: I am a research professor at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and an explorer in residence at the National Geographic Society.

ROBERT: An explorer in residence. That's a weird title. It seems like you should be one or the other.

LEE BERGER: [laughs] It's almost an oxymoron, isn't it?

ROBERT: Yeah!

ANDY: Lee says that our story begins back in the 1920s in South Africa at a place called ...

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: Taung.

ANDY: ... Taung.

LEE BERGER: It's T-A-U-N-G. Taung is the proper name.

ROBERT: Taung.

LEE BERGER: In Tswana. The western way of saying it is Taung. It's a desert area on the southern edge of the Kalahari escarpment.

ANDY: Kind of like your stereotypical picture of Africa: rocks, baobab trees, roaming gazelles.

LEE BERGER: And back in the 1920s ...

ANDY: The place was crawling with Europeans digging mines.

LEE BERGER: As they were blasting away with dynamite, drilling with big steam drills, and huge explosions would take place.

ANDY: And one day these miners, they're blowing their way through a bit of this hillside, and as the rock falls away and the smoke clears, they realized that they've opened up this cave.

LEE BERGER: An ancient cave. And inside of that cave ...

ANDY: They found dozens of these strange looking rocks, almost like animal bones. One of the miners, he takes those bones and gives them to a geologist.

LEE BERGER: Geologists box them up ...

ANDY: And sent them to this Australian guy who is living in Johannesburg named Raymond Dart.

LEE BERGER: And that's probably the first miracle in this story. Raymond Dart was a neuroanatomist, a comparative neuroanatomist, one of the only ones in the world.

ANDY: This was a guy who knew his fossils. And when this box arrived, he was actually wearing a three-piece suit.

LEE BERGER: He's going to be best man at a wedding, in fact, later that afternoon.

ANDY: But he's like, "That can wait." So he reached into the box, shuffled through some antelope skulls ...

LEE BERGER: It was full of baboon skulls.

ANDY: ... monkey skulls. Until he got to this one rock. Now to you or me, this would have just looked like a big chunk of limestone.

LEE BERGER: But Raymond Dart immediately realized that he had something special. And he started—he actually went and got his wife's knitting needles and started scratching away at this rock, much to his wife's disgust. He then spent the next several months ...

ANDY: Delicately chipping away at the limestone until ...

LEE BERGER: The rock literally popped free. And there, he stared into a perfect little face.

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: You can see here, the face is quite flat and humanlike.

ANDY: A lot like the face ...

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: Of a child.

ANDY: A human child.

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: But humans have a larger brain.

ANDY: According to Dr. Zipfel, this child's brain was smaller than a human child. It was closer to the size ...

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: Of a chimpanzee.

ANDY: So it had features of a human, it had a brain more like a chimpanzee's. Stranger still, Dart, who remember studied this sort of thing, he looked at the foramen magnum.

LEE BERGER: That's the hole in the base of your skull where your spine goes in.

ANDY: He knew that for creatures that walk on four legs, that hole ...

LEE BERGER: Is generally towards the back of the skull, so they can look forward.

ANDY: But here, the hole's on the bottom. Which suggested to him that this creature walked upright.

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: It was not a monkey. It wasn't an ape as we know apes today. It was certainly not a modern human being.

ANDY: This was something in between.

LEE BERGER: If you were walking across a broken woodland, where little Taung Child might have lived, you would have seen a person off in the distance. As you approached though, you'd begin to see that something was wrong with the proportions. Arms were probably a little longer, legs a little bit shorter. The head was too small.

ANDY: And as you stepped closer, you'd see ...

LEE BERGER: The little Taung Child's body would have been covered in ...

ANDY: This thick hair.

LEE BERGER: Potentially even fur, more like an ape than we have. But it'd be like no ape you've ever seen, because it would be standing there in very much the way you would be standing staring at it: on two legs.

JAD: So if this is a little bit human and a little bit ape, sort of kind of in the middle it seems, did he feel like this was the quote, "missing link?"

LEE BERGER: [laughs] Well, we don't use that term because evolution doesn't happen that way.

JAD: Sure.

LEE BERGER: But certainly Dart did. He, in fact, wrote a book called Adventures With the Missing Link.

ANDY: And right after he discovered the skull ...

LEE BERGER: He sent a paper off in amazing speed to the journal, Nature. It was published in February of 1925.

ANDY: He thought that this was gonna revolutionize everything.

LEE BERGER: But he was wholeheartedly rejected by the great scientific community of Europe for two reasons.

ANDY: First ...

LEE BERGER: We already knew that humans didn't evolve in Africa.

CHRIS STRINGER: Yeah. Africa was backward.

ANDY: That was the belief, says Chris Stringer.

CHRIS STRINGER: I'm a research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London.

ANDY: And he explained that back in the early 20th century ...

CHRIS STRINGER: People of the time felt that if you look in Europe, you can see all this wonderful cave art painted many thousands of years ago. They preferred to think that Europe or Asia were more likely centers of our origins than Africa was.

ANDY: Second, scientists already found a skull that they believed belonged to the quote-unquote "missing link."

CHRIS STRINGER: It was something called Piltdown Man.

ANDY: It was this ancient man-fossil thing that they found in a golf course in England. So in their minds it was the right place. And also ...

CHRIS STRINGER: In Piltdown Man, you've got this very large brain, and a brain case that looks really quite like a modern human one.

ANDY: Which made sense to them. You know, clearly European ancestors would have had big brains because they're European.

CHRIS STRINGER: Yeah. I mean, the Taung individual had a small brain.

ANDY: Way too small.

LEE BERGER: This thing was too primitive. It didn't look right.

ANDY: So Dart ...

LEE BERGER: He spent the next 20 plus years ...

ANDY: Arguing, "Look, people. This is our ancestor." And getting nowhere.

LEE BERGER: Until ...

CHRIS STRINGER: In the late 1920s ...

ANDY: Other fossils started showing up.

CHRIS STRINGER: In China, South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia.

ANDY: And these other fossils, they were from roughly the same era as the Piltdown Man, but their brains, their teeth, their bone structures, they were all totally different.

CHRIS STRINGER: So this was very weird. I mean, you know, how do you explain that?

ANDY: For decades ...

CHRIS STRINGER: Nothing else like Piltdown Man turns up from anywhere in the world.

ANDY: So some forensic experts at the London Museum of Natural History, they decide maybe we ought to go take a closer look at Piltdown Man.

CHRIS STRINGER: They started looking at the material under microscopes.

ANDY: And right off the bat ...

CHRIS STRINGER: They found that one of the teeth clearly showed the marks of a metal file, that it had been filed down to look flat.

ANDY: No!

LEE BERGER: Piltdown was a fraud. It was a fake.

CHRIS STRINGER: A forgery, a hoax.

ANDY: And the hoaxers were never caught.

CHRIS STRINGER: There were questions in the Houses of Parliament about the competence of the Natural History Museum, that its experts had been fooled for all this time.

ANDY: Because this wasn't even a very good fake.

CHRIS STRINGER: They had taken the jawbone of an orangutan, they took some modern human skull pieces. They then stained that material dark brown so it looked the same color.

ANDY: No!

CHRIS STRINGER: They even faked stone tools.

ANDY: And all of this time, right there in front of them was the Taung Child.

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: It is estimated—and it's purely an estimate—of being around 2 million, 2.2 million years old.

ANDY: Which still today is the oldest not-quite-yet-human fossil that we have.

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: This would be probably the greatest, or one of the greatest discoveries ever.

ANDY: Been argued to be the most important single fossil ever discovered in the history of humankind's search for ancestry because ...

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: It brought to the fore that humanity originated in Africa, that every human on earth is an African. We are all of African origin.

ANDY: But—but more than just where we came from, which I think is totally cool.

JAD: Uh-huh. Super interesting.

ANDY: Mm-hmm. We can look at the skull, and we can see things about what life was like for this, like, little version of us that lived so long ago. We can look at the teeth, we can see what it was eating.

ROBERT: Was it eating like what we eat?

ANDY: Yeah. Its teeth are, like, surprisingly similar to our teeth. So yeah.

ROBERT: Wow.

ANDY: It wasn't, like, hugely different from what we eat. But I think the most exciting thing that it can tell us is, you know, not just about what our life was like, but what was lurking in the shadows waiting to take us out.

ROBERT: You can tell that from the skull?

ANDY: Yeah. I mean, this skull is—it's kind of at the center of this murder mystery.

LEE BERGER: Ie. Who killed the Taung Child? At the time when Raymond Dart made that discovery ...

ANDY: He had this sort of gut feeling that this Taung Child was killed by one of its own, you know, because this is, like, 1924.

LEE BERGER: We were between two wars. World War I had occurred with the horrible destruction.

ANDY: Dart was actually a medic in that war, and he walked away convinced ...

LEE BERGER: That humans were—were inherently evil creatures.

ANDY: That were inherently violent, and that we were probably a lot worse in the past.

LEE BERGER: And in fact, the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey ...

ANDY: Where you see the monkeys kind of like beating each other with the bones.

LEE BERGER: It was based on Raymond Dart's theories of the violent origins on the continent of Africa.

ANDY: So that was Dart's, like, pet theory, that maybe Taung got clubbed down by his brother or his neighbor. But that ignores one big thing: in that limestone mine where the Taung skull was found, there were also all these other skulls, baboon skulls, monkey skulls. There was this little, like, collection of bones. More like what you would expect to find in a predator's den. So not a Taung-like creature, but maybe a cat, big cat.

LEE BERGER: At least a large mammalian predator then, because that's perfectly acceptable. If we're tough, they're tough, it's okay to be killed by something mean and vicious.

ANDY: So that became the new theory.

LEE BERGER: Because what else do humans have to fear, right?

ROBERT: Well, what—now here's where, I think, maybe you come into this story. For some reason, when you arrive many, many, many years later, this idea that the cat did it seems to disturb you.

LEE BERGER: Well, I was addicted to that story as anyone else. I'd been brought up on it through my anthropology classes. Every book I ever read said that.

ANDY: But, one day ...

LEE BERGER: In 1994 ...

ANDY: ... he bumps into a completely new idea.

LEE BERGER: In an almost eureka moment. Because there I was at Gladysvale.

ANDY: An excavation site in South Africa. Lee and his team were doing what they do, digging for fossils.

LEE BERGER: I'd just finished excavation. All my team had left, and I was sitting there watching the sunset. And I looked up on the hillside, and there was a troupe of vervet monkeys. They're a small gray monkey, and they were coming down to forage down the hill. And all of a sudden, I heard an alarm call. And I looked up in the sky and there came a huge eagle. The monkeys scattered as this eagle swooped around the edge of the hill, and as it came down around the edge of the hill, I realized it was a trap because coming around the other edge of the hill was that eagle's mate. And it zoomed in and whacked one of those large monkeys right in front of me. And everything went silent. The other eagle landed, this eagle's sitting on top of a now-dead monkey. And the eagle's staring at me. I'm staring at it, probably with my mouth open.

ANDY: [laughs]

LEE BERGER: It looks at me for a moment, and then it leaps off the edge of this cliff with this dead monkey, and flies away with it down the valley. And I had an idea.

LEE BERGER: So I got into my car, I chased the direction it went. I knew where it was going, I knew where these black eagle nests were, they were up on a cliff face. I crawled up under—crossing a river, crawled up under the nest, and there was this pile of bones, huge pile of bones. Hyraxes, little antelopes, a baboon skull, a baby baboon skull. And almost every one of the bones there had these amazing marks on them. Keyhole-shaped cuts.

ANDY: Where the eagles have driven their talons into the skulls.

LEE BERGER: These big eagles can have killing talons that are five, six, seven inches long, if you can imagine that. I got in my car, back to the lab in Jo'burg.

ANDY: He whips open the drawer that contains those skulls and bones that were found with the Taung Child skull, and ...

LEE BERGER: The exact same marks. Couldn't believe it.

ANDY: There's even, like, a little mark on the Taung Child's skull itself. A year later, 1995, he and a colleague, they publish a paper ...

LEE BERGER: That blamed eagles for the death of the Taung Child. And it was received like a smelly, wet blanket by the field.

ROBERT: [laughs] Why? Why would they not say, "Oh, of course!"

LEE BERGER: Because it was an entrenched idea.

ANDY: You know, Lee says maybe subconsciously, they felt like our ancestors are being demoted again.

LEE BERGER: That is that, you know, we were not the masters of our universe.

ANDY: Because cats just feel tougher than birds? I don't know, but according to Lee, the big cat scientists were like ...

LEE BERGER: You know, it's been published. It's been published the leopard did it.

ANDY: For 40 years.

LEE BERGER: We even got into a debate in the hallowed pages of the journal Nature on the load-lifting capacity of birds of prey, on whether or not birds of prey could lift something as large as the Taung Child.

ANDY: And these debates, they went on for years. He couldn't convince people.

LEE BERGER: We needed something more.

ANDY: Until one night ...

LEE BERGER: It was about nine o'clock at night.

ANDY: ... years later ...

LEE BERGER: I was at home sitting in my little study.

ANDY: ... he was reading an academic paper about eagles, and how eagles sometimes when they kill little mammals, they'll reach into their eye sockets and pluck out their eyes.

LEE BERGER: To get at the nice juicy brain on the inside.

ANDY: And in the paper ...

LEE BERGER: There was this really beautiful image. Well, it's beautiful to people who study dead things, but a beautiful image of a skull of a primate with the interior sockets of its eyes with these jagged marks in it.

ANDY: These very particular scratch marks on the underside of the eye sockets.

LEE BERGER: And I was staring at these images and I went, "Oh my goodness!" Or something to that effect.

ROBERT: [laughs]

LEE BERGER: I got into my car, drove down to the lab, opened up the safe, pulled out the Taung Child, turned the face over and there they were. On the base of the inside of the eye socket were these jagged, rigid marks that you had to have done by reaching into the orbit. The exact same marks.

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: You can see little squiggle marks, almost like little exclamation marks, little commas. No one had noticed that before.

LEE BERGER: And imagine, I'm sitting in the middle of this anatomy department in the middle of the night, in a vault containing million-year-old fossils. It was a magic moment, it was fantastic.

JAD: All right. So now you know a little bit about how this creature lived and how it died. I mean, beyond solving the murder mystery, what does that tell you?

LEE BERGER: Well first to say solving the murder mystery is kind of cool. That's always a neat thing.

JAD: Totally.

LEE BERGER: And there's nothing wrong with just doing that. But have you ever thought why when you're standing out on a playground or standing out in an open field and a shadow passes over you, do you know that feeling that occurred, whether it be from an airplane or whatever? First, you get that tingly feel on the back of your neck, and then you yank your head up. You ever wondered why you do that?

JAD: Yeah.

LEE BERGER: You do that because the little Taung Child died two and a half million years ago because he didn't look up quick enough when that happened.

JAD: Producer Andy Mills. One thing we should say, one very important thing we should say is that actually we did an experiment with this story.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: We hooked up with some people at MakerBot, and some very nice folks at the Field Museum.

ROBERT: In Chicago.

JAD: And we had 3D scans made of the Taung Child's skull. I'm actually holding one right now.

ROBERT: Me too, yeah. Mine's purple.

JAD: Mine's pink.

ROBERT: [laughs] Why is yours pink?

JAD: I don't know. That was the color of the plastic they used.

ROBERT: Oh, okay.

JAD: But these are amazing replicas of the Taung Child's skull. I mean, you can see all the ridges, you can feel the scratches in the eyes.

ROBERT: Imagine if you could listen to the story you just heard while holding the Taung Child in your hand.

JAD: Well, that's exactly the reason we did this.

ROBERT: Ah.

JAD: We have partnered with a museum called Mmuseumm. That's spelled with four Ms, two in the front, two in the back, Mmuseumm. It's this tiny little elevator shaft-sized place here in Manhattan where they display all these sort of like oddities. You know, like little objects from Saddam Hussein's palace.

ANDY: They have pool toys that were banned from Saudi Arabia.

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: And they will also be displaying our 3D replica of the Taung skull. So if you go there you can actually hold the skull. You dial in a little number and you can hear part of the piece.

ROBERT: While you're standing there.

JAD: Yeah. And I gotta tell you, it's a very different experience to listen to the story while holding this thing. Not only that, if you have a 3D printer of your own and you go to Radiolab.org, you can download a scan, a 3D scan of the Taung skull, and you can print your own. Thanks again to MakerBot and to shootdigital for helping to make that happen. Props to Lynn Levy for conceiving of the whole idea. Go to our website, Radiolab.org.

ROBERT: Hmm. By the way, Lee Berger, who just helped us with that piece has just come up with a monster new discovery in a cave in South Africa. It seems to have been a kind of ceremonial—it's not a burial ground, but it had a little crack seven-and-a-half inches wide, six scientists slip through, working for Lee Berger, discovered all kinds of bones. Those creatures are about three million years old. They're five foot tall, hundred-pound kind of charming looking hominids. You want to check them out? We've got one waiting for you at Radiolab.org.

JAD: And we're gonna go to break now, but stay tuned because when we get back we're gonna take a deep—and I mean, deep dive into ...

ROBERT: Really into the history of everything, everything that was, is, has ever been, all the way back.

JAD: Exactly. This is the history of everything coming up next. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Stay with us.

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Lauren from Atlanta, Georgia. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert.

JAD: And this is Radiolab. And today ...

ROBERT: We're looking back. Back in time.

JAD: Yeah, we started with the mystery of Ötzi the Iceman.

ROBERT: That's a 5,000-year-old story, right?
JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: With murder, frozen mummy, arrowhead.

JAD: Et cetera. And then we went two-and-a-half-million years back, so farther back still, to the mystery of the Taung child and the little skull.

ROBERT: Now, a huge leap. We go from 2.5 million years ago to something like 14 billion years ago.

JAD: Yeah, this is the very oldest thing in the universe.

ROBERT: It is really probably the oldest story we can tell. It is a history ...

JAD: Of everything.

ROBERT: Yeah. And we're gonna start with ...

JAD: Uh, hello, hello, hello.

JENNY HOLLOWELL: Hi!

JAD: Hi. Is this Jenny, by any chance?

JENNY HOLLOWELL: It sure is.

JAD: Her name's Jenny Hollowell. She's a writer, an author. And here's the set-up: so we were recently asked by the show Selected Shorts to curate an evening of stories. Just to select a couple for people to read. Well, that turned out to be really hard for us. Like, we—we could not agree. We argued, it got kinda ugly internally—I'm not gonna go there, but the one story that we all agreed on instantly ...

ROBERT: And it—and we never really looked back.

JAD: Yeah. Was a story from Jenny Hollowell called "A History of Everything, Including You." So we called her up, and we asked her to ...

ROBERT: Well, I kinda gushed a little first.

JAD: Oh, yeah. [laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: There was the fawning.

ROBERT: There was the fawning.

ROBERT: I mean, I know that people are gonna hear this, so they're not gonna read it so they won't be able to dwell on just the incredible tensions in these very short and specific sentences that you've written, but I'm just wondering: how long did this—it's about five pages to hold in your hand, how many decades did it take for you to write this?

JENNY HOLLOWELL: Well, it's—it's one of those stories that defies most of my experiences with writing stories, which is that it came out very quickly. And I always hate hearing other writers say how quickly something came about, because it's a rare occurrence and you're always kind of full of—of envy for those moments. This is the, you know, one story that I think I've ever written in a day.

JAD: Really? Wow!

JENNY HOLLOWELL: But then, you know ...

ROBERT: Oh, that's just not fair!

JENNY HOLLOWELL: [laughs]

JAD: Would you mind reading it for us? And we can talk more on the back end?

JENNY HOLLOWELL: Okay, sure. A History of Everything, Including You.

JENNY HOLLOWELL: First there was god, or gods or nothing. Then synthesis, space, the expanse, explosions, implosions, particles, objects, combustion and fusion. Out of the chaos came order, stars were born and shone and died. Planets rolled across their galaxies on invisible ellipses and the elements combined and became.

JENNY HOLLOWELL: Life evolved or was created. Cells trembled and divided and gasped and found dry land. Soon they grew legs and fins and hands and antennae and mouths and ears and wings and eyes. Eyes that opened wide to take all of it in, the creeping, growing, soaring, swimming, crawling, stampeding universe.

JENNY HOLLOWELL: Eyes opened and closed and opened again, we called it blinking. Above us shone a star that we called the sun. And we called the ground the earth. So we named everything—including ourselves. We were man and woman and when we got lonely we figured out a way to make more of us. We called it sex, and most people enjoyed it. We fell in love. We talked about god and banged stones together, made sparks and called them fire, we got warmer and the food got better.

JENNY HOLLOWELL: We got married, we had some children, they cried, and crawled, and grew. One dissected flowers, sometimes eating the petals. Another liked to chase squirrels. We fought wars over money, and honor, and women. We starved ourselves, we hired prostitutes, we purified our water. We compromised, decorated, and became esoteric. One of us stopped breathing and turned blue. Then others. First we covered them with leaves, and then we buried them in the ground. We remembered them. We forgot them. We aged.

JENNY HOLLOWELL: Our buildings kept getting taller. We hired lawyers and formed councils and left paper trails, we negotiated, we admitted, we got sick and searched for cures. We invented lipstick, vaccines, Pilates, solar panels, interventions, table manners, firearms, window treatments, therapy, birth control, tailgating, status symbols, palimony, sportsmanship, focus groups, Zoloft, sunscreen, landscaping, Cessnas, fortune cookies, chemotherapy, convenience foods and computers. We angered militants, and our mothers.

JENNY HOLLOWELL: You were born. You learned to walk, and went to school, and played sports, and lost your virginity, and got into a decent college, and majored in psychology, and went to rock shows, and became political, and got drunk, and changed your major to marketing, and wore turtleneck sweaters, and read novels, and volunteered, and went to movies, and developed a taste for blue cheese dressing.

JENNY HOLLOWELL: I met you through friends, and didn’t like you at first. The feeling was mutual, but we got used to each other. We had sex for the first time behind an art gallery, standing up and slightly drunk. You held my face in your hands and said that I was beautiful. And you were too. Tall with a streetlight behind you. We went back to your place and listened to the White Album. We ordered in. We fought and made up and got good jobs and got married and bought an apartment and worked out and ate more and talked less. I got depressed. You ignored me. I was sick of you. You drank too much and got careless with money. I slept with my boss. We went into counseling and got a dog. I bought a book of sex positions and we tried the least degrading one, the wheelbarrow. You took flight lessons and subscribed to Rolling Stone. I learned Spanish and started gardening.

JENNY HOLLOWELL: We had some children who more or less disappointed us but it might have been our fault. You were too indulgent and I was too critical. We loved them anyway. One of them died before we did, stabbed on the subway. We grieved. We moved. We adopted a cat. The world seemed uncertain, we lived beyond our means. I got judgmental and belligerent, you got confused and easily tired. You ignored me, I was sick of you. We forgave. We remembered. We made cocktails. We got tender. There was that time on the porch when you said, "Can you believe it?"

JENNY HOLLOWELL: This was near the end and your hands were trembling. I think you were talking about everything, including us. Did you want me to say it, so it would not be lost? It was too much for me to think about. I could not go back to the beginning. I said, "Not really." And we watched the sun go down. A dog kept barking in the distance, and you were tired but you smiled and you said, "Hear that? It's rough, rough." And we laughed. You were like that.

JENNY HOLLOWELL: Now your question is my project and our house is full of clues. I'm reading old letters and turning over rocks. I bury my face in your sweaters. I study a photograph taken at the beach, the sun in our eyes, and the water behind us. It's a victory to remember the forgotten picnic basket and your striped beach blanket. It's a victory to remember how the jellyfish stung you and you ran screaming from the water. It's a victory to remember dressing the wound with meat tenderizer, and you saying I made it better. I will tell you this: standing on our hill this morning, I looked at the land we chose for ourselves, I saw a few green patches, and our sweet little shed. That same dog was barking, a storm was moving in. I did not think of heaven, but I saw that the clouds were beautiful and I watched them cover the sun.

ROBERT: A History of Everything, Including You by Jenny Hollowell.

JAD: Jenny, can you talk a little bit about, like, where—what you were thinking when you were writing this? Like, where'd this come from?

JENNY HOLLOWELL: Oh, I—well, I—the story kind of came from that—that impulse to kind of trace—trace back. I think maybe I was in therapy at the time. [laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs]

JENNY HOLLOWELL: And, you know, they always ask you about your parents or their parents, and I found myself a little frustrated by the idea that it's—it's traceable. Like, whatever sort of position you find yourself in life, that you can trace back to the origin. You know, if you follow that logic, then you're eventually gonna end up in a, you know, a protoplasmic sort of situation.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JENNY HOLLOWELL: And I think that ...

ROBERT: 'Cause on the couch the guy said, "So tell me about your parents. Tell me about their parents. Tell me about their parents. Tell me about their parents." It's one of those kind of things?

JAD: [laughs]

JENNY HOLLOWELL: Kind of. At some point you're talking about some caveman's emotionally-unavailable parents.

JAD: Hmm. And to imagine one of the conversations you might have had with your therapist, I know you were once very religious and then you've kind of lost your faith. I mean, was that part of this? Did that happen near or in the neighborhood of writing this story?

JENNY HOLLOWELL: It was probably about two years before the writing of the story, but it was very—it was still a very fresh experience. I was sort of in the thick of it at the time.

JAD: And was there something of that struggle or fall from faith that kind of got infused into the storytelling?

JENNY HOLLOWELL: I think so, too. I mean, I think that definitely is a part of, you know, the searching that I was going through at the time, just that desire to grasp what might be the grand, you know, heart of it all. So the story was a little about that wrestling experience, trying to explain how I'm here, how we got here, how we ended up in this moment.

ROBERT: And the logic of that is having lost a narr—a given-to-you narrative of how things began, you were thinking, "Okay, so let me see if I can work my own narrative from the ground up?"

JENNY HOLLOWELL: That's—that's definitely where I was, just sort of maybe mourning the loss of that narrative a little bit.

JAD: Huh.

JENNY HOLLOWELL: And making one of my own to just give something to—to think about. I definitely don't feel like I stumbled across any solutions, but I felt the comfort of narrative is definitely something I believe in, and the story sort of is an extension of my process about thinking about the beginning of everything.

ROBERT: Well, as creation stories go, it's really, really nice.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: I have to say. You're gonna—you know, you're gonna be hearing from Talmudic rabbis and Koranic scholars and Christian saints.

JAD: Have you ever thought about getting a church? Starting one up?

ROBERT: Yeah, a church. Start one of your own.

JENNY HOLLOWELL: [laughs] Wow. That's—that feels like a can of worms that ... [laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs]

JENNY HOLLOWELL: But thank you!

[LISTENER: Hi. This is Amanda calling from Syracuse, New York. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Brenna Farrell, Ellen Horne, David Gebel, Dylan Keefe, Matt Kielty, Lynn Levy, Andy Mills, Latif Nasser, Malissa O'Donnell, Kelsey Padgett, Arianne Wack, Molly Webster, Soren Wheeler and Jamie York. With help from Damiano Marchetti, Molly McBridge-Jacobson and Alexandra Leigh Young.]

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Garrett Ward from Los Angeles. Our fact-checkers are Eva Dasher and Michelle Harris. Thank you!]

[LISTENER: Thanks so much! Bye!]

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