Fart Jokes, Handedness, SuperAgers | Robert Sapolsky Father-Offspring Interviews

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]This is Robert Sapolski and you're listening to Father Offspring Interviews.

[00:00:10]>> Greetings. Welcome back to Father Offspring Interviews. Before we get into questions, I do have to just say how proud I am, even though pride is irrational given no free will, but how proud I am that you are now a member of the National Academy of Sciences. I continue to feel so lucky to have the coolest parents one could ask for. So, >> well, as they say, right back at you.

[00:00:34]>> All right, moving on to questions.

[00:00:36]First, Carolyn from Ohio asks, "Do other species exhibit a dominant hand/paw? Any speculation on an evolutionary advantage to developing handedness? And why are the vast majority right-handed?"

[00:00:49]>> Well, we are a very asymmetrical species. Many many episodes ago, we talked about some of the universals of attractiveness and a symmetrical face is one of the things that works across a whole bunch of species. Nonetheless, we got a lot of asymmetry in us. Our hearts are not in the center. We have some of our organs on only one side. And we have all sorts of preferences. Pretty much close to every person has a hand that they favor, a leg that they favor.

[00:01:22]Weirdly, in terms of this handedness, there's an ear that people hear more accurately with. There's earhandedness.

[00:01:30]There's nostrilhandedness.

[00:01:32]So, the question becomes, why do we have this handedness asymmetry as a species?

[00:01:40]Second question, why is it that most humans handedness go in the direction of being right-handed dominant? And third, what are the exceptions about? Now, a little bit of an overview first. Culture after culture, about 90% of humans are right-handed. The remaining 10% are either pure left-handed or mixed dominance, a combination of both. One of the interesting things is there's about a 30% excess of male lefties to female, 1.3 ratio to one. And as we're going to see, that's got something interesting going on. Now, most of being left-handed, as I am, is ripe with the potential for tragedy.

[00:02:28]Left-handed people have more industrial accidents because the machinery is made for right-handed people and not left-handed people. an amazing statistic that I saw, which was infantry men back in whatever war it was, infantry men who were lefties were twice as likely to get shot in battle as infantry men who were righties because guns are designed for the most accuracy if you were right-handed and rightey dominant. Then in addition, most languages that are linear go from left to right, which means that if you're a lefty, you spend your entire school years smudging your hand over whatever you've been writing and being chastised by the teacher. So there's a lot of costs to being left-handed. Now, of course, the question becomes within humans, what's the mechanism that explains that?

[00:03:23]What's the proximal mechanism? What's the nuts and bolts of why we have handedness? So, of course, you immediately say, how heritable is this trait? And it's heritable. It's moderately. It's not through the roof.

[00:03:39]And have any genes been identified? For the most part, just a hodgepodge. What pops up very often though in these studies is a gene coding for something called tubulin. which version of tubulin you have is a significant predictor of whether you're lefty or righty. What is tubulin? You got neurons and they've got their long projections, their axonal projections and running through the projections are these little microtubules where you shuttle stuff up and down from one end of the neuron to the other. And they're made of this protein called tubulin. And it turns out varants of tubulant are predicted of which handedness you have, which makes no sense to me at all because there's no suggestion that one type of tubulant and your axons lean to the left or to the right and that's how you wind up being a lefty or a righty. So that's it for the genetics. Another interesting thing though is a suggestion that lots of prenatal exposure to androgens increases the incidence of left-handedness. that it's an endocrine effect. And suddenly we're back to that factoid that lefties 30% more likely to be male than female.

[00:04:53]And some of you will remember from thousands of episodes ago, there's that utterly bizarre thing of the ratio, the length of your second digit to fourth digit reflects how much androgens you exposed to as a fetus, whether you are male or female. And why that's the case, who knows? That's a whole other story.

[00:05:16]But what you see is lefties of either sex have the second to fourthdigit ratio that is more in line with elevated exposure to androgens like testosterone during fetal life. All right? So those are proximal mechanisms, genes, hormones, whatever. But the question also got at distal mechanisms. Why did we evolve handedness? Why did we involve laterality where one ear, one nostril or one hand is more dextrous, is more accurate than the other. And to get a sense of that, what you have to look at is the evolution of brains. Now, one of the first things to appreciate with the evolution of brains is that most organisms back then didn't have brains.

[00:06:03]They had neurons. They had neurons scattered all over the place, distributed. And slowly as you began to get some neurons that were specialized and doing similar things, what became very useful, very adaptive evolutionarily was instead of having them scattered all over the place, begin to concentrate your neurons in one place. So all the neurons with this function are here. What have you just invented? Brains. And what do you then invent after that is some neurons amid this protobrain thingy have to do with this function and some of them have to do with that function. Have all the ones that have something to do with this function cluster in the same part of the brain. You've got different brain regions with different functions there.

[00:06:53]So you're beginning to get specialization in different brain regions.

[00:06:58]Now, by the time you got brains that have a left hemisphere and a right hemisphere, you got to do one more clumping thing, you've got some function where you got some clustered neurons on this side that are involved and clustered neurons on that side that are involved. And this is hugely inefficient because you have to have these long projections to talk to these two. Let's put all the neurons that are really, really good at throwing softballs, let's put them on the left side of the hemisphere, not the right. And thus, the efficiency of evolving brains, evolving specialized subparts of brains, evolving one side, having further specialization, what's called lateralization.

[00:07:43]Suddenly, that's making a whole lot of sense. So we now progress to the question of well okay we got asymmetry and handedness. This begins to explain is it why is it that most humans are right-handed? Why is it lateralized factoid from way dark in the past the brain's lateralization is such that the left side of your brain controls the right side of your body. the right side of your brain, the left side of your body, there is crossing over in your spinal cord crossing over in all sorts of places. So the main theory that people believe in is it turns out the fanciest parts of language production are in the left hemisphere involving a part of the brain called Broca's area another called Vernick's area language comprehension language production and language in almost all people is centered on the left side of the brain the left hemisphere turns out the right side is doing some pretty interesting stuff in the equivalent ent area how you interpret the meaning of body language procity stuff like that but simple version language is done on the left side of the brain so the theorizing at that point was well language you're doing this really dextrous stuff with your lips and your tongue and the left side of your motor cortex is pretty good at doing fancy stuff let's give it the fancy stuff with your fingers like writing because language is localized to the left side in most people. Handedness gets localized to the left side of the brain as well. In other words, producing right-handedness. And as one measure of how the brain is lateralized to the left for language, that brocas and vernick's area in the left cortex is a little bit thicker than in the right cortex. So, we got lateralized language. And then what the hell? Let's lateralize our hands to go along with that. Left side of the brain does the really subtle dextrous stuff. So that's great. That explains everything except there's three problems. The first one is, you know, we have not explained anything. Ooh, why are most people right-handed dominant?

[00:10:04]It's because most people are dominant in the left side of the brain for language.

[00:10:10]So why are most people dominant on the left side often running? We haven't solved anything. We have just redefined the problem. The second problem with that is even left-handed people for the most part have their language centers on the left side of the brain. So, so much for that explanation. But the third biggest problem is we're talking about language and language dexterity and hand dexterity. And you look at animals that don't have language and like 70 80% of vertebrates out there show handedness.

[00:10:46]Whoa. This is a general trait in all sorts of complicated nervous systems.

[00:10:53]So, the first thing you want to know, how much are we like all the other mammals out there, for example? And about 50% of animal species that have handedness are left-handed, 50% are right-handed, and there's less of a skew within each of those species. It's not 90% 10% it's like I don't know 66% 33% handedness occurs all over the animal kingdom and there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to whether this is a left side of the body preferring or a right side of the body preferring species. Now what does that look like? Chimps turns out about twothirds of chimps are right-handed. Twothirds of gorillas are right-handed. And then, cool. What do you make of this? Most orangutans are left-handed. And when you look, even orangutans without language are beginning to have a thicker language area on the left side of their brain.

[00:11:59]The other apes have all sorts of precursors of language specialization.

[00:12:04]Okay? So chimps are on the right side, gorillas on the right side, orangutans on the left, and in general there's less skewing as you find in humans. Another interesting thing in all sorts of handedness species is lefthandedness is more common in males, male langu, male chimps, male gorillas. That same skew there, the same prenatal environmental stuff potentially going on. Okay, so that's great. But then suddenly the picture gets a whole lot broader because you got animals with flippers and different whale species have dominance on one side or the other. You got crabs with their claws. You got all sorts of species with their wings or their I don't know what other stuff animals have. Parrots. Parrots have left or right dominance as to which claw they reach out to pick up food with. You can be a lefty parrot or a righty and I don't remember which but most of them turn out to be one and not the other reaching for stuff. Whales whales are handed in the sense that whales of different species show a tendency whales of this species when they are turning they tend to bank to the right whereas other ones they tend to bank to the left. frogs. When frogs think there's a predator around, most frogs jump to the left. Others jump to the right. This handedness, this asymmetry stuff is all over the animal kingdom. Here's a weird one. You see handedness in octopi.

[00:13:43]Octopuses. They've got eight tentacles.

[00:13:46]And yet it is typically the case in different octopus species as to which one of the eight tentacles is most favored, most likely to explore an awful place, most likely to reach for something. So whatever it is, we've got a really strong history that when you make complicated nervous systems like brains with specialized localized function, species after species, you come up with some sort of solution. Let's stick this function on the left side. Let's stick this one on the right side. You lateralize like that. And as far as you can tell, you don't see a phoggenetic pattern to handedness, which is to say, it's not that all of the apes are mostly right-handed. That's the case for humans, for chimps or gorillas. But then there's the orangs who are left-handed.

[00:14:42]You don't see every type of, you know, rodent out there tends to be left. It varies by species. So not every left-handed species is a descendant of the inventor, the pioneer of being leftied marmets and things like that.

[00:14:58]It's vile and genetically arbitrary.

[00:15:01]What I think basically happens is pick one side, pick the other, just pick one side because it makes for a more efficient nervous system. So that gives us a sense of handedness in humans and handedness with its claws and flippers and all the versions of it in other animal species. Then you poke around this literature and you suddenly find there's reviews in the literature on handedness in plants. In plants. How bizarre is that? And it turns out there's characteristic vine species where when they latch on to whatever branch thing they're latching on to, they latch in a clockwise direction. And other plant vine species latch on in a counterclockwise direction. Then there's this bizarre thing called circumnutation in plants as they're developing, they rotate ever so slightly in one direction or the other. People spend their lives studying this. And it turns out some plant species are lefties, clockwise rotators, others are counterclockwise.

[00:16:12]So this asymmetry seems to be really deeply embedded in even some unlikely species out there.

[00:16:20]>> Now we have a pair of questions. Nikki from Greece says, "A recent Nature study showed that the secrets of superagers, people over 80 with memory like someone 30 years younger, lies in active hypocample neurogenesis and a unique stress resilient epigenetic signature.

[00:16:36]To what extent can lifestyle factors, exercise, sleep, diet, mental challenge enhance this neural fertility in the general population? And what potential do therapies that reactivate neurogenesis hold for earlystage Alzheimer's? I wish Joseph Alman were still alive to see these findings. And relatedly, Nathaniel from Connecticut asks, "What is your view on the biblical idea of people living 900 years?"

[00:17:01]>> Well, I'm not sure if living to 900 is something we should aspire to, but the notion of being an 80year-old whose memory is as good as 50-year-old certainly is something to aspire to. Uh this paper you noted was in nature during February a mammoth immensely interesting well done paper by an international group centered at the University of Illinois led by Orley Lazerov and what they did in there was try to figure out what's up with what they termed super aagers 80 year olds who not only are still doing just fine cognitively but who are doing better cognitively than 50y olds on the average. And what they explored was what's going on in the neurons in there.

[00:17:49]And this required all these folks donating their brains to be studied afterward. Now, they looked at five different groups. Young adults normal memory. Older adults normal memory.

[00:18:04]Older adults with just the starts of problems what is termed mild cognitive impairment.

[00:18:12]Fourth, older adults with full-blown Alzheimer's disease. And then fifth, the superagers who had the amazing memories.

[00:18:22]All right. So what they did was they got the brains postmortem due to the very generous donations. They looked at two different measures. First a very trendy technique called single cell RNA sequencing which you look at messenger RNA for every gene in the neuron there in the cell that you're looking at asking a question how active is any particular gene and then second looking at chromatin accessibility a measure of how readily the gene is being turned on or off. So, how much a gene is active and what's going on with its regulation. And what they did in it was looked at a mindblowing 350,000 individual cells from the brains of these individuals. What came out of this incredibly complicated process of looking at one cell at a time, these two measures, how active were the genes and which genes were turned on or off. And the main punchline was the superagers were making more neurons than the control groups. Now this is something they were able to piece apart looking mostly at this one part of the brain, the hippocampus. Hippocampus dogma used to be the old brain. The adult brain never made new neurons. Revolution started in the last half century. The adult brain does indeed make new neurons. And what they're showing is the aged hippocampus is making more neurons in these super aged cognitive superstars than in normally healthy aged than the mildly cognitively impaired than with people with Alzheimer's. more markers of what are called immature neurons, neuroblasts, neurons that are on the way to becoming fully functioning that are about to be young strapping neurons in your aged brain and really fancy obsessive techniques to be able to show that this was happening. Now what they then looked at was well just how similar was this RNA pattern related to neurogenesis.

[00:20:47]These superagers to the young aers are we seeing basically a punchline of the brains of these superagers were just like in young normal memory individuals. And what they saw was probably the most interesting finding in the study, which was no, it's not that you still have exactly the same brain, exactly the same hippocampus, exactly the same hippocampus on the level of gene activity, gene regulation.

[00:21:19]These 80-year-old amazing superstars didn't simply have brains that were like 50-year-olds. It was a different profile. Some of what they had was exactly the same as in the younger brains. Some of what they had were exactly the opposite of what you saw with the brains with the mild cognitive impairments, with the Alzheimer's disease. It was what they wound up terming a unique signature of gene expression, a unique activation of certain networks in the hippocampus that resembled those of 50-y olds and certain ones that you didn't see. And this was hugely interesting that this was on the level of networks. What they showed was of the two variables talked about, how much were various genes being expressed, how active were they, and how easily were they being turned on and off. What they showed was the regulation, the ease of turning on and off was the one that was more predictive of who was going to turn out to be one of these superagers.

[00:22:28]So that's great. That's totally exciting. People who have followed this closely though will recall there's a controversy going on which is it is not clear just how much neurogenesis is actually occurring in the adult brain in the adult hippocampus let alone in the age of one. This has been a massive controversy in the last few years. major fights about this and this is a paper that emphatically comes down on the side that says there's still neurogenesis in the aged hippocampus and that is counter to some other excellent work published in nature coming out in the field and this was the work heavily of Sha Sorrels who University of Pittsburgh presumably collaborating with Noah Wy and his view is a lot of these newly born cells are being miscount categorized as neurons.

[00:23:24]Nonetheless, the most striking thing that comes out of this paper is there's something different about these super aers cognitively. My god, they're on the level of 50 year olds. Second, the thing that seems to be most different with them is the production of new cells, neurons or otherwise, in the aged hippocampus. And for me, the most interesting two take-home points from that are it's more about the regulation of the genes than the activity of the genes themselves. And it's not that these 80 year olds simply have gene profiles just like 50 year olds out there. It's a unique profile. So totally interesting landmark paper which brings us to the second question and suddenly we find ourselves moving from neurobiology into the old testament where everybody seemed to live to be 900 years old. What was up with that? Did they actually live to be 900 or did people count differently then? Or were the notions of years different then? or did people exaggerate this for biblical propagandistic reasons? And I think there's actually a different explanation for why these 900 year olds keep popping up in the Bible there. And I sort of sensed this. I got the insights into this some years ago when I made the worst literary decision of my life. And this is when I was traveling through Sudan and mostly hitchhiking. And before I decided I needed a book for this long journey. So I needed a really long book.

[00:25:06]So I went to the best bookstore in Nairobi and I bought the biggest book I could get for the money that I had. And this was a novel by Thomas Mann called Joseph and his brothers which was a retelling of the biblical story of Joseph and winding up in captivity in Egypt and that whole song and dance. And why did this turn out to be the worst literary decision in my life? This was a,200page book such that every time I was going out of my mind, traveling through the desert there and hearing from somebody about techniques for like how you set up the saddle on a camel or eating yet another meal of blocks of tamarind. You could read dozens and dozens of pages in the book about different techniques for putting together camel saddles or about how to prepare your tamarind. I would have done anything for a novel about like some spy ring in World War II something. But this is the book I was stuck with and it was completely maddening except for one section in there that had this remarkable insight.

[00:26:15]And this was talking about Eleazar, the manservant of Joseph's father, Jacob.

[00:26:22]Eleazar, who used to be a slave, but now is a freed man, and he's the faithful manservant. And oh yeah, Eleazar is 900 years old because before he was Jacob's freed, wise manservant since Jacob was a child. He was Isaac's a generation before. And then a generation before that he was Abraham's. And it just goes back further and further. So that Eleazar is 900 years old. What's up with this? And this is where there was this amazing quote in the book which I want to get exact here talking about the aged Eleazar. How is it that he's 900 years old? He's been Eleazar for generations there. And what man wrote was that the old man's ego was not quite clearly demarcated. that it opened at the back, as it were, and overflowed into spheres external to his own individuality, both in space and time. Embodying in his own experience events which remembered and related in the clear light of day, ought actually to have been put into the third person and instead was being attributed to him. What was going on here? We were seeing ego boundaries dissolving. We were seeing the individual being sacrificed to a community's icons to a community's archetypes that are needed. And every community needed a wise ex-slave who was now the faithful manservant. Every community, every generation had an Eleazar. Every generation had to have some hothead Jacob as a young man. Every generation had to have some sort of fratricidal conflict between two brothers over getting their father's blessings. Every generation had to have one of these archetypes. And it was the triumph of the archetype over the individual. With each generation, you needed someone who was not just going to be like Eleazar or Jacob or Adam, but who was going to actually be them to take on that role. So that in every community with each generation somebody became the next Eleazar of the Eleazar that's now 900 years old. This triumph of the archetype over the needs of the individual. So I thought that was a totally wonderful explanation of how the Bible comes up with 900year-old characters. There just always is an Eleazer for example. Just every now and then he needs a new body to continue to be 900year-old Eleazar. Now back to the original question. What does this knowledge about these super aer brains being good at making new cells? Is this opening the way for all sorts of new therapies? Do people know how to jumpstart this process of making new cells? And at this point, a little bit is known and it fits wonderfully with what is known about ways in which you can hold off Alzheimer's. Not genetic Alzheimer's, but non-genetic late onset.

[00:29:36]That's the world where lifestyle risk factors are really important. And the sort of things that stimulate the production of new cells in the age of hippocampus and the sort of things that are found to decrease the likelihood of Alzheimer's disease are exactly the same. Exercise, intellectual stimulation, things that will decrease inflammation, things that will increase energy delivery to the brain. All of these we already know are some of the lifestyle interventions you can do which decrease the odds of you getting Alzheimer's disease in extreme old age. Turns out these are also some of the pathways by which you stimulate the birth of new cells in the aged hippocampus.

[00:30:25]Final point back to that comment. I wish Joseph Alman were around to see it and I agree. Joseph Altman is the Eleazar of adult neurogenesis. Joseph Alman was a scientist who in the 1960s got the first hints that the adult brain could make new neurons. And he basically had his career destroyed because nobody believed him for decades and decades until techniques in the 1990s caught up with his observations from the 1960s and suddenly that was the trendiest finding in all of neuroscience. Whoa. The adult brain makes new neurons. totally revolutionary, completely exciting. And he was validated, he was vindicated, and people would ask him in his old age, "So, how's it feel?" Turns out you were right. Wasn't it upsetting having 30 years of like not getting tenure at MIT and people deciding you had lost your mind? Wasn't this like totally bitter?

[00:31:27]Aren't you just an angry old man now?

[00:31:28]And he said, "Ah, you know, I survived the Nazis. This is nothing in comparison, but nonetheless, it would be nice if he had been around to see this finding, which is really cool.

[00:31:40]>> Finally, Alan and Kirby from Seattle ask, why do we humans typically find flatulence so amusing? Are we the only primates who do?

[00:31:49]>> Well, to come to this, we are talking about farting, flattus. As far as it's known, we are the only species that find farting to be amusing. But first the bigger question is this a universal? Is this a universal of humans? And of course it is so much so that you may remember when you were little we had a book that we used to read to you called the gas we pass by Shinta Cho and it pointed out that this was a universal.

[00:32:20]What is far from universal though is people's attitudes about passing gas.

[00:32:26]There's all sorts of cultures in which this is very negative, frowned upon, viewed as blasphemous.

[00:32:34]In Orthodox Islam, if you fart while you were in the mosque, you are condemned because you have potentially just blinded or killed an angel there. In Talmudic thinking, if you pass gas while you were praying, you got to do it all over again, the prayer, and go purify yourself with some handwashing first.

[00:32:57]Martin Luther Martin Luther was very, very fixated on passing of gas. And on endless number of occasions, in some of his sermons, he urged his followers to fart in the face of Satan to drive him out. and his wonderful bit of psychosmatic medicine interacting with history. He very literally had some major problems with irritable bowel syndrome. Then there's modern versions of people thinking that this is not a good thing. For example, recently the parliament in Malawi considered but then eventually shelved a bill which would have made farting in public illegal.

[00:33:39]Okay, so that's all the ways in which it's viewed negatively. Then there are the rare cultures in which it's viewed positively. Traditionally, China, India, burping after a meal is viewed as complimentary to the host. In a couple of cultures, farting is used as a greeting. One group is indigenous Inuit people, one of the subclans of it.

[00:34:04]Another are the Yanamamo of South America, hunter horiculturalists.

[00:34:10]and big surprise both are mired in controversy as to whether this actually has ever occurred does occur or it's just urban legends. Then of course there's a whole world where passing of gas could be dangerous and two examples come to mind. One is for astronauts. And believe it or not, in 1969, there was a paper entitled intestinal hydrogen and methane in men fed in space. Was this going to wind up being something that would get in the way of people spending years in space? That was an actual concern. Then the other realm of danger is paramount in New Zealand, where, as everyone knows, there's more cows and sheep than there are people. And the amount of gas they pass there actually seems to be contributing to global warming and greenhouse gases. And there's apparently been some attempts to introduce a flatulence tax in New Zealand to try to have carbon offset from that. But then there's just the plain old more familiar world where farting is very context dependent.

[00:35:22]Sometimes it's neutral. Sometimes it's kind of rude without being fully blasphemous. Sometimes it's viewed as mildly amusing. Sometimes it is viewed as a source of great pleasure. For example, traditionally in militaries in the last century, including the American, there would be a virtual requirement that grunts in the barracks at night would have farting competitions. And remarkably, there are 18th century scrolls from Japan, beautiful ones, showing the exact same thing, warriors having farting competitions at each other, and these are worth tracking down. And then, of course, when passing gas was viewed as a source of entertainment, and I suspect the epitome of this was a guy named Joseph Puol, who in the late 19th century in France was a professional farter. What he did was appear before audiences, command performances throughout Europe, where apparently he had spectacular control over his muscles. And I kid you not, an ocarino would be placed in front of his rear end. And he would then fart songs including El Solomio. And he eventually had his own theater where people flocked there. His audiences included the Prince of Wales, King Liupold II of Belgium, and most amazingly of all, Sigman Freud attended one of his performances. And if you go online and look up Joseph Puel, you will find there's even a video of one of his performances. And so sadly, this was before there was sound, so it was only 30 seconds of watching him repeatedly lean over in front of a megaphone and toss up the coattails of his tuxedo and have at it. Now, what this sets us up for is looking at the bridge between flatulence as entertainment to flatulence as simply funny. And I've always thought I had discovered one of the universals of human behavior based on my observation of kids growing up in Brooklyn, me and my peers, and kids growing up in Messiah villages who I got to watch at great length over the years in East Africa because amazingly the same exact behavior would occur, which is you give a kid a balloon and they get the strength to blow it up partially and then discover if you let the air out while manipulating the openings to the balloon, it will make a farting sound.

[00:38:02]And what you then do, whether you were a child in the 1960s in Brooklyn or a Messiah child in East Africa, is you go over and you have the balloon make that sound near the rear end of some other kid and everybody accuses that kid of farting at that point and falls over laughing. This appears to be a universal. Chaucer had jokes about farting. Rablet, Shakespeare, all of these guys made a living off of fart jokes. And then farting met technology in the early 20th century with the invention of the Whoopy Cushion invented in 1930 where it became a bestseller.

[00:38:43]Except there was at that point a bitter fight over whether it was actually invented by some Frenchman in the 1880s.

[00:38:52]And that was some great conflict until you realize this conflict was like the conflict over whether Leaf Ericson or Christopher Columbus discovered America.

[00:39:03]Uh guys, there were people there beforehand because whoopee cushions were invented back in the 10th century in Emir in what is now Algeria. apparently used to have animal bladders inflated and put under the seats of people when they would come to pay homage to him and then that would very excitingly happen.

[00:39:26]There was a 3 century Roman emperor who was famous for doing so as well. So these things go way way back and apparently this is how far back it goes.

[00:39:38]Archaeologists have now documented the first written joke in human history which is from 1900 BC in Sumeriia and it was a fart joke and I give you the exact translation of it. Something that has never occurred since time immemorial is a young woman who did not fart when sitting in her husband's lap.

[00:40:05]This is recorded as the first joke in history. It is unclear though when it was invented for somebody to say, "The one who denied it, supplied it, or the one who smelt it dealt it." And thus, I am feeling freed now to tell my favorite joke about the Crupnik fart. Well, it seems there was Dr. Crupnik who had lived his whole life in his town. He'd grown up there. He went to college there. He went to medical school there.

[00:40:36]He set up a practice there. He had been looking after the health of people in his hometown for decades. And one of the town elders decided, let's hold a banquet honoring Dr. Kupnik. So this big event came off. It was a big deal. All of the town was there. People in their evening gowns, their tuxedos, speaker after speaker coming up to praise Dr. Krepnik. And eventually it was time for him to come up and say a few words. And he went up very proud, very grateful. He had some notes prepared, went up to the microphone and he was nervous about this and he dropped his notes. So he leaned over to pick them up and with his rear end right near the microphone, he let out a mammoth fart. A fart like had never been heard in history. a fart like a thousand trombonists blatting into their instruments at once because it was into the microphone. It was amplified.

[00:41:34]People's teeth shook, chandeliers swayed back and forth. This was like none other. He managed to stumble through his comments, fled out the back, left town, and was never seen again until some decades later. It turned out some friend of his had passed away. And it was appropriate for Dr. Crupnik to return for the funeral. And of course, he was now using an assumed identity. He was now Dr. Smith, but he came back to town, checked into a hotel, and the very eager guy behind the desk there said, "Oh, Dr. Smith, welcome to our town. Is this the first time you're visiting here?" And he says, "No, actually, weirdly, I grew up here. I went to college here. I went to medical school." And the clerk said, "Why did you move away?" and he said, "I did something terrible, terrible, something so embarrassing that I had to flee town." And the clerk said, "Oh, come on. It couldn't have been that bad." And Dr. Smith says, "No, it was terrible. It was terrible." And the clerk says, "You know, in my experience, often the person who did something embarrassing remembers it far longer than everybody else does. Everybody else has probably forgotten this." And Crupnik says, "No, everybody remembers this." And the clerk says, "Was it a long time ago?" And Crupnik says, "A long, long time ago." And the clerk says, "Was it before or after the Crupnik fart?" And with that, we wish everyone a good evening.

[00:43:05]>> And on that note, I'm Offspring Sherupski, and thanks for your continued support of Science and the Beard.