The Reality of Being Santa

Summary

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The Rest Is Science

Episode: The Reality of Being Santa
Date: December 23, 2025
Hosts: Professor Hannah Fry & Michael Stevens (Vsauce)

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Main Theme

This festive episode explores the classic scientific problem: Could Santa really deliver presents to every child on Earth in a single night—without magic? Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens dig into the physics, biology, and anthropology behind the Santa myth, tracing the history of St. Nicholas, examining human population bottlenecks, and considering the logistics of prehistoric gift-giving. The tone is witty, good-natured, and full of fun speculation, blending scientific rigor with holiday cheer.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Santa, Physics, and the Alcubierre Drive

[02:57—04:29]

• Michael introduces the perennial question: how could Santa deliver gifts to all children in one night?
  • “How could Santa visit every single child who celebrates Christmas across the world in one night only and without magic or without some kind of fancy alien technology? It's not possible.” — Michael Stevens [02:57]
• Hannah proposes Santa is using an Alcubierre drive (a hypothetical warp drive, bending spacetime), humorously concluding that's the only way it's feasible.
  • “He's using an Alcubierre drive, is expanding spacetime behind him... Classic Santa physics. Easy.” — Hannah Fry [03:27]
• Michael explains the physics of the Alcubierre drive—how it could theoretically protect Santa from extreme G-forces experienced during impossible sleigh rides.
  • “[The Alcubierre Drive] must exist because Santa somehow manages to do it.” — Michael Stevens [04:16]

2. The Real St. Nicholas & Origins of Santa

[05:11—09:55]

• Delving into the history of Santa, they recount the story of St. Nicholas, a 4th-century Greek bishop renowned for secret gift-giving.
  • Hannah details legends: gold coins tossed into stockings, saving people from execution—laying foundations for both Christmas stockings and Santa’s reputation for miracles.
    • “One version has him throwing the gold in through the window and it landing in their stockings that are drying by the fire.” — Hannah Fry [05:42]
  • Another story involves St. Nicholas miraculously saving three innocent men from execution by “teleporting” and grabbing the executioner’s sword.
    • “Apparently St. Nicholas appeared out of nowhere, teleported, in my opinion... grabbed the sword of the executioner, saving these innocent men.” — Hannah Fry [06:44]
• The legend of St. Nicholas' bones secreting mysterious “manna” leads to playful skepticism about religious relics and commercialization.
  • “They call it manna. And they dilute it with holy water and sell it.” — Hannah Fry [09:01]
  • “It's probably condensation, I’ve got to be honest with you.” — Hannah Fry [09:07]

3. Santa as a Secular vs. Religious Figure

[09:28—10:40]

• Michael and Hannah discuss how Santa evolved from a religious figure into a more secular character, reflecting on their differing childhoods.
  • Michael jokes: “Santa is essentially an arm of Satan because it distracts from the true message of Christmas and the grace of the Lord.” — Michael Stevens [10:00]
  • Hannah, raised Catholic, notes most Catholics are fine with Santa blending into Christmas traditions.

4. The Logistics: Was Santa Ever Possible Without Magic?

Human Population Bottlenecks

[11:03—19:22]

• The hosts analyze times in history when the human population was so low, a “mortal” Santa might have pulled off the one-night feat:
  • Toba Bottleneck (~74,000 years ago): Possibly only 1,000 humans survived a supervolcanic eruption.
    • “If you could ride around on like a reindeer... you could visit a lot of people in a night.” — Michael Stevens [12:59]
• They calculate using the Earth's night/day cycle (following the terminator line) might grant Santa nearly 40 hours to deliver gifts, given the right starting point.
  • “You have 24 hours to get back to that same point... then you can wait there, not cross the date line... you have 40 hours.” — Hannah Fry [14:12]
• Genetic and archaeological evidence about ancient population bottlenecks—leopards faced a population of just seven, while humans often numbered in the tens of thousands, but perhaps never were truly centralized.

Defining "a Person" in Prehistory

[17:23—19:22]

• They debate at what point in human evolution “people” were few enough and close enough together for such a mission, given Homo sapiens dispersed rapidly and never clustered in one place, even at their earliest known existence.

Challenges to Prehistoric Gift-Giving

[23:47—26:38]

• Even with low numbers, early humans were nomadic and spread out.
  • “You couldn't even have like a map of where they were and be able to go and find them... they were moving around all of the time.” — Hannah Fry [24:17]
• Discussion of Neanderthal DNA highlights prehistoric mingling and further complicates the trip.
  • “Every human has about 2% of Neanderthal DNA, but only if you have non-African ancestry.” — Hannah Fry [25:03]
  • African genetic diversity is far greater than non-African, due to a small founder population leaving Africa.

5. What Were Prehistoric Gifts Like?

[26:56—34:10]

• Beads as Gifts: Evidence from Moroccan caves dated to 140,000+ years ago shows that sea snail shells (with holes for stringing) were traded and given, signifying status or group membership.
  • “So that would have made quite a good gift, a beaded necklace.” — Hannah Fry [28:32]
• Miniature Hand Axes: “Sexy hand axe theory”—tiny, useless but beautifully made axes, dated to 300,000+ years ago, possibly given as tokens of skill or affection.
  • “They're perfectly symmetrical... And they're also totally useless.” — Hannah Fry [29:32]
  • “Isn't that really what gift giving is all about? Showing how good you are as a gift giver?” — Michael Stevens [29:55]
• Alcohol as a Gift: Prehistoric humans (and animals!) enjoyed fermented fruit, and brewing may have spurred early agriculture (“beer before bread” theory).
  • “We are amazingly good at detecting it [alcohol]... that beer radar came from somewhere.” — Hannah Fry [32:09]

6. Final Verdicts: Could Santa Ever Have Been Realistic?

[34:26—35:43]

• Both concede there is no strong evidence humans were ever tightly clustered enough for a “non-magical Santa” to succeed.
  • “I'm going with. No, I'm going with it's not possible.” — Hannah Fry [34:46]
  • “If they were, it would have been like 2 to 300,000 years ago... without needing any kind of magic or any kind of cheats. But gosh, that's kind of what makes the whole story of Santa so special.” — Michael Stevens [34:51]
• Conceiving an ultra-modern solution: emails or digital vouchers, but still not as special as the “real” Santa.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments (w/ Timestamps)

• On Santa using physics:

  • “He's using an Alcubierre drive... Classic Santa physics. Easy.” — Hannah Fry [03:27]
  • “It must exist because Santa somehow manages to do it.” — Michael Stevens [04:16]

• On liquid from Santa’s bones:

  • “They call it manna... and sell it. It's probably condensation.” — Hannah Fry [09:01]

• On prehistoric logistics:

  • “If you could ride around on like a reindeer... you could visit a lot of people in a night.” — Michael Stevens [12:59]
  • “Animals love getting drunk. It's a thing.” — Hannah Fry [32:00]

• On the mythic nature of the challenge:

  • “I just think that we don't have enough evidence to know if Homo sapiens were ever concentrated in a small enough place to all be visited in one night.” — Michael Stevens [34:26]
  • “Sit back and let the big man himself take over. Yeah, he's the one with the leaky bones. He's the one with all the millennia of experience.” — Hannah Fry [35:37]

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:57] — Setting up the Santa physics problem
• [05:11] — St. Nicholas's life and gift-giving origin stories
• [09:01] — The "weeping bones" phenomenon in Bari
• [12:59] — Human population decline scenarios (Toba bottleneck)
• [14:12] — Using Earth's rotation/night day cycles for extended Santa time
• [23:47] — Problems with prehistoric humans’ spread/distribution
• [28:32] — Prehistoric bead gifts
• [29:32] — Miniature hand axes and the “sexy hand axe” theory
• [32:00] — Prehistoric alcohol consumption and its social value
• [34:46] — Concluding that non-magical Santa delivery is probably impossible

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Conclusion

This episode is an entertaining, brainy holiday romp that answers the “Santa problem” with science: No, a real, non-magical Santa almost certainly could never have visited everyone in one night—our species spread out and multiplied far too fast. But sorting through deep time, anthropology, and physics, Fry and Stevens illuminate how the story of Santa reminds us of humanity’s need for myth, generosity, and wonder.

“That's kind of what makes the whole story of Santa so special.” — Michael Stevens [34:51]

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Transcript

[Professor Hannah Fry]

This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

[Michael Stevens]

Dinosaurs walked the Earth 180 million years ago. But did you know cancer was part of their story too? Scientists have found tumors in ancient fossils.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Well, that is part of the reason why cancer is a big, big part of our story, right? It's the other side of evolution. It's the most complex disease that we face. There are more than 200 types of cancer in total, each with distinct characteristics, challenges and mysteries.

[Michael Stevens]

And that complexity demands scale. Cancer Research UK is the world's largest charitable funder of cancer research, with more than 4,000 scientists, doctors and nurses working across more than 20 countries in the search for answers and then sharing their discoveries beyond borders.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

And the impact of this collaboration is clear because over the last 50 years, the charity's pioneering work has helped to double cancer survival in the uk. That is more. More people who are living longer, better lives.

[Michael Stevens]

Fossils can show us the past, but research is shaping the future. And for more information about Cancer Research uk, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org restiscience this.

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[Michael Stevens]

Hello and welcome to the Rest is Science. I'm Michael Stevens, creator of the Vsauce YouTube channel.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

And I'm Professor Hannah Fry. Welcome to. Welcome to our Christmas edition.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah, look at us. We're wearing our Christmas jumpers.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

My actual tinsel.

[Michael Stevens]

You know you have actual tinsel on yours. This isn't very Christmas themed. It's like a cat in a potted plant. But my wife bought matching jumpers for me, her and my daughter for my daughter's first Christmas and It's what we wore. And so for me, it's very, very Christmassy.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Yeah, it's the real, true heart of Christmas, right? The fact that you get to be connected with family.

[Michael Stevens]

That's right. And today we're going to get to the heart of Christmas. I'm talking physics. I'm talking Santa Claus. Okay? Now there's an old chestnut, an old roasted chestnut where physicists talk about, could Santa really do it? Okay. How could Santa visit every single child who celebrates Christmas across the world in one night only and without magic or without some kind of fancy alien technology? It's not possible.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Obviously, what Santa is doing is compressing spacetime right in front of the sleigh. He's using an Alcubierre drive, is expanding spacetime behind him. He's, like, surfing the resulting bubble fast and the speed of light. Classic Santa physics. Easy.

[Michael Stevens]

True. And I think the Alcubierre drive would also protect Santa from G forces. Because just for those who aren't familiar now, Cubieri Drive is a hypothetical method of transportation where instead of propelling yourself through space, you change space itself. You can compress space ahead of you and travel light years at a time in a blink of an eye. And you're not violating physics because you aren't moving faster than light. You aren't moving anything faster than light. You're just changing the shape of space.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Exactly. Except that it's not hypothetical, because we know that that is the only way that Santa could be.

[Michael Stevens]

It must exist because Santa somehow manages to do it. That's correct. Without such a drive, Santa would be experiencing 17,000 times Earth gravity forces as he twisted and turned.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

I guess the thing is, Santa hasn't had much competition over the years, right? Probably because he's mastered how to warp space time. But if you. If you sort of take that away. Was there a point in history where Santa could have existed using only the powers of physics that are available to us mere mortals?

[Michael Stevens]

Today, Hannah and I are asking, when could a regular person have competed with Santa? When could you also have visited every living human in one night and given them a gift?

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Because right now you've got 8 billion people on the Earth, right? This is too many. We're all spread out. We're all over the place.

[Michael Stevens]

Too spread out.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

If we rewind the clock a little bit, I think we. I think we might be able to give Santa a run for his money.

[Michael Stevens]

All right, so first things first. Let's understand who Santa is. Like, let's rewind the clock. Where does it all begin?

[Professor Hannah Fry]

The story of St Nicholas, I think everyone sort of knows that that's roughly the lineage of Father Christmas, but he is quite the historical figure. This is a Greek bishop in the fourth century, a real person. He was. He was kind of famous for defending Christianity, also for giving gifts, but specifically he. There are stories about him giving gifts to a poor father who had three daughters, didn't have any money for a dowry. So Sir Nicholas decides to drop off bags of gold just to make all their lives much better. But one version has him throwing the gold in through the window and it landing in their stockings that are drying by the fire.

[Michael Stevens]

Oh, so that's where the stockings come from.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

That's where the stockings come from. This kind of real person, I mean, I think some of it is slightly embellished over time, I'll be honest with you.

[Michael Stevens]

When did this happen? When was St Nicholas supposedly alive?

[Professor Hannah Fry]

This is 4th century, around about. He also was present at the First Council of Nicaea, and there was this big heated theological argument between him and one of the priests, and St. Nicholas lost his temper, punched him in the face. Which means that that tradition of Christmas arguments also stems directly from.

[Michael Stevens]

Oh, I love that.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Stems directly.

[Michael Stevens]

I love that.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

One of the other stories about him, by the way, is that he. There was a. Some innocent men. Three innocent men, sailors, I think, who were about to be punished, beheaded in a town square. And there's a story that apparently St. Nicholas appeared out of nowhere, teleported, in my opinion, and appeared at the moment of beheading and grabbed the sword of the executioner, saving these innocent men from. From being execut.

[Michael Stevens]

Kiss it, Hannah. Is anyone really innocent?

[Professor Hannah Fry]

No.

[Michael Stevens]

Thank you. That. We can. We can investigate that more in a future episode. So this is all happening, you said, in like the fourth century. That means the five hundreds.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Okay, so this is St. Nicholas. We're talking 300. We're talking the three hundreds. That's.

[Michael Stevens]

That's where we are, the three hundreds, which is the fourth century. Since time zero.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Yeah.

[Michael Stevens]

And golly, that's a long time ago.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Yeah. So here is the thing, okay? Imagine being like a famous person now, right? Like, you know, Taylor Swift. Right. The biggest star in the entire world every day. Now imagine it being 2000 years later, 1700 years later, and her still being so famous. That is recognized around the world. Her sort of. Her. The kind of metaphorical version of her is still recognized around the world. That is. That is phenomenal work. I mean, what a guy. There's. There's one more thing, actually, about St. Nicholas. That, that remains a great mystery to this day. So his, his bones are in Bari in Italy. They're in this tomb. And actually there was this really big dramatic event where people went in and stole his skeleton seven years under. After his death, as it came under the. The control of the. Of the Turks and then took it to Italy. Anyway, his. His bones were put in this tomb in the year 1087. And ever since then, every year it secretes a liquid from the inside of the tomb. And every year they go in and they collect the liquid. It's about 50 mils of liquid. And the Catholic Church say this is a supernatural event. The secretion of the bones of St. Nicholas.

[Michael Stevens]

I have never heard of that before.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

They call it manna. And they dilute it with holy water and sell it.

[Michael Stevens]

And they sell it.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

It's probably condensation, I've got to be honest with you. But don't worry about that. Don't let that stand.

[Michael Stevens]

It might contain some traces of human remains. Not just human remains. Santa remains.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Santa remains. I also think that it could just be that he wants everyone to know that his bones are magical before he sort of left his earthly body and became the Santa that we know today.

[Michael Stevens]

This is really deep. I mean, I really love how immortality can be achieved if you're willing to allow your ghost to like completely change into something different. You know, I think St. Nicholas was probably like, yeah, Christmas is about Christ and the birth of our Savior. And now he's like the counter choice. It's like, well, you know, cause Santa doesn't do any religious stuff. It's not like he, he brings happiness.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

To all men and women and children. This, that's. That's a pretty religious thing, isn't it?

[Michael Stevens]

I mean, I grew up in like the kind of church that was very much like, Santa is essentially an arm of Satan because it distracts from the true message of Christmas and the grace of the Lord. Wow. And instead we all go, ooh, let's buy things, let's give gifts. Right. And the gift came from Santa, not Jesus. Like, he's kind of like the boring part of Christmas.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

What church was that?

[Michael Stevens]

Well, it would have been like non denominational Protestant, bordering on evangelical.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

I was brought up Catholic. And we were fine with it.

[Michael Stevens]

You guys were fine with it.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

I went my Irish mom less so. But the, the, the church in general was okay with it.

[Michael Stevens]

Right.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

This is the guy we're up against. Right. He's got a long old history. He's been famous for millennia. He's got magical Bones, he. He throws coins into stockings through windows. He teleports executions and saves innocent people from. From death. You know, you. You're up against a lot before we've even started with the Presence. Yeah, I think we just have to accept that we can't compete with any of that stuff.

[Michael Stevens]

But actually, no, Hannah, Hannah, Hannah. I plan to compete with that. I. I plan on also having weeping bones. There are services that you can pay for that will make sure your bones create liquid for millennia.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Okay.

[Michael Stevens]

But anyway, the bones aren't really what we're after. We're after delivering gifts to every human.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Exactly.

[Michael Stevens]

In one night. We're gonna have to find a time in history when there were fewer people. The first thing we talked about, Hannah, was population bottlenecks. These are moments where, for various reasons, the human population, like, shrunk or. Or couldn't grow and it stayed somewhere really low. Like, the first thing I thought of was the Toba bottleneck, which is hypothetical.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Big volcano in Indonesia, right?

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah. What, like 74,000 years ago? It affected the climate massively. The main theory is that the ash cloud would have changed the weather, the amount of sunlight getting to Earth, the temperatures on Earth, and it would have been very hard for early Homo sapiens to live and to thrive. So the population of humans on the entire planet may have dropped as low as, like, 70,000.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Because when you say that there was a lot of ash from this volcano, I mean, we're talking. We're talking. This is the apocalypse, basically.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

I mean, this is like 2,800 cubic kilometers of material, basically enough ash to cover the entire UK in a layer that's. That's taller than Big Ben.

[Michael Stevens]

I mean, wow.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

It's phenomenal, the amount of ash that this thing spat out. But there are some people that think there was, like, 10 years of volcanic winter, that, you know, plants would have suffered, that, you know, access to food more generally would have been really difficult. And there was a theory in the 90s and early 2000s that actually almost all of humanity was wiped out Right. By this event.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah, we almost didn't make it. In fact, the original theory was that at some point, maybe 74,000 years ago, there were only, like, a thousand humans on Earth. And we are all the descendants of those thousand who survived the Toba super eruption. Now, that's a sad story, but we're bringing it up because as tragic as that moment could have been, it would have been wonderful for us trying to compete with Santa, because there's only a thousand people and, you know, if you could ride around on like a reindeer. All right, just. Or have them pull a sleigh, they can sprint at like 80 km an hour. All right. You could visit a lot of people in a night because you've got how many hours of night? Like 30. More than 30 hours?

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Well, yeah, I mean, it depends on how far north you are.

[Michael Stevens]

I guess it does depend on how far north you are. That's how long the night is going to be. Luckily, you can do this in the winter.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Hmm.

[Michael Stevens]

So, okay, if you're in the Northern hemisphere, you're gonna have a much longer night. You can follow that terminator line of night and day as it goes around Earth. And once you go get back to where you began, guess what? You've still got a whole night ahead of you.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Yes. Because as long as you don't cross the date line. So if you start like, you know, right on the dateline, but ever so slightly to the west of it, and you only travel west, you have 24 hours to get back to that same point and it still be the turn between night and day. But then you can wait there, not cross the date line all of night time. So if you've got, if you're, you know, far north enough where you have sort of 16 hours of night time, then you've got 24 hours plus 16 when you have 40 hours.

[Michael Stevens]

Wow.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

As long as you start at sort of 4:00pm, I mean, you're gonna, you're gonna struggle to sneak down people's chimneys without being spotted if you're doing it at 4pm but in theory, you know, you can, you can use the night to your advantage. One of the big counterarguments about the, the Toba super eruption, the kind of catastrophe that, that supposedly shrunk the, the human population, is that when you look back in the gen people, you don't see this population collapse quite at the same moment as we know that the, the volcanic eruption happened because that ash, it left a mark in the geological record. You can see exactly how far. And we see dust all the way over to East Africa.

[Michael Stevens]

Right.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

So kind of enormous spread from Indonesia to East Africa. But what you can do is you can take people from around the world and you can look in their, in their genes and you can basically ask yourself the question, if I walk backwards in time, how far do I have to go before two random selected people have a common ancestor before their genes demonstrate that they have a common ancestor? And by doing that and doing that repeatedly with people all across the Earth and then looking Backwards and backwards and backwards. Further in time, you can see that there were definitely moments where the population of humans really shrunk. Not as much as leopards, by the way. Do you know this about leopards?

[Michael Stevens]

No. What happened to leopards and wind like.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

The best example of population bottlenecks. Leopards are so genetically similar to one another that you can take a skin GR from any leopard you like and pop it onto another, another leopard and it will not be rejected.

[Michael Stevens]

Do we know when this bottleneck happened?

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Yes, we do. And we know. We know how small the population got as well. Just, just on that point, though, that idea that a leopard can't change its spots turns out not to be true. You can just borrow them from another leopard. The. We know it was about 10,000 years ago, you can tell this in the genes, and they reckon that something happened that meant the population of leopards went down to about seven. Seven. Right. There are seven common ancestors around about that among all leopards. And it's only 10,000 years ago that that happened. Now in humans, you can do the same thing. You can see there's these moments of decline, but there isn't one that directly lines up with the moment that the Toba super explosion. Super super eruption.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah. And that's disappointing for our quest today. It is also winning. Did these human bottlenecks potentially happen?

[Professor Hannah Fry]

There are plenty. There are plenty over, I mean, hundreds of thousands of years. Right. So if you're going back 300,000, half a million years ago, you know, then you might be looking at populations that are much more manageable in terms of. As far as Santa is concerned.

[Michael Stevens]

Great. However, I think we're now entering the territory where we need to define what we mean by person. Because if you go back 500,000 years, I don't think there are any Homo sapiens. There are. There's Homo erectus.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Yeah.

[Michael Stevens]

But as far as we know, and we're getting into really speculative territory here, Homo sapiens, with the anatomical features that we have today, you and I and everyone listening, that didn't emerge until like 300 to 200,000 years ago.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

And this specifically is big brain, small jaw, upright.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah. The brain is like above the eyes, not just right behind it, like a very. A very small skeleton. In fact, I love this theory that human intellectual abilities came about because we evolved such slight, dainty skeletons, that cooperating together was our best bet, that we needed to plan ahead and assign roles and invent rules and morality because we couldn't just go out there, grab an animal and kill it on Our own, we didn't have claws, we didn't have big teeth. So we had to design tools and work together because these are the two.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Things that set us apart from, from any other species, is that we're cognitive and we're social. That's right, yeah. Okay, so 300,000 years ago we're talking, but even then I think that the population of Homo sapiens then was like, we're still talking pretty small. Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands.

[Michael Stevens]

I know. And here's another problem. When we look at the evidence, we have like the oldest Homo sapien fossils ever found. That's not like, oh, guess what, guys? All the humans alive on Earth used to live in this like one cave. They spread like spreading out was just like their thing. We've got ancient, ancient oldest Homo sapien fossils found in Ethiopia and Morocco. And you cannot travel that distance on a reindeer in a night.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

I've got a few, few options. There's of course there's elephant birds. These, you would find these in, in Madagascar, not far away from the, the cradle of humanity.

[Michael Stevens]

Are they extinct now?

[Professor Hannah Fry]

They are extinct now. They, they were 10ft tall, they 200 kilograms. They, they're around until about a thousand years ago or so couldn't fly technically, but, but still, they're elephant birds. I mean, what more do you want?

[Michael Stevens]

And they were big enough, you could ride them and I guess they were probably pretty fast. Okay, so you had means of transportation to like go quite a distance.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

You could, I mean there's also, there's the, the giant ground sloth. That's a, that's another option. That was around 225,000 years ago.

[Michael Stevens]

Where do they live?

[Professor Hannah Fry]

You find them in north and South America, so quite far away, but I.

[Michael Stevens]

Think we should allow this prehistoric non magical human to like travel. Bring a giant sloth over to where the actual Homo sapiens are, like, they can prepare.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

We're bending the rules ever so slightly here.

[Michael Stevens]

Yes.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Well, on that note, should we go for a break? This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research uk. In the uk, nearly one in two people will face cancer in their lifetime.

[Michael Stevens]

Wow.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Tell you what though, I've already had it. So between us, we're fine now.

[Michael Stevens]

I'm safe.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

That's not how statistics works.

[Michael Stevens]

Shoot.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

The question is, could science stop cancer before it begins?

[Michael Stevens]

And over the past 50 years, Cancer Research UK has helped double cancer survival in the UK and that's proof of what research can achieve. Like take cervical cancer. Almost every case is caused by hpv. The human papillomavirus. And when scientists uncovered that link, prevention became possible.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Indeed it did by vaccine. And it's protection that works way before the cancer itself can actually grow. After the vaccine was introduced, cervical cancer rates in England were nearly 90% lower than expected in women in their 20s.

[Michael Stevens]

And knowing about HPV improves screening and that's, you know, vital for diagnosing cervical cancer early.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

I mean we're now genuinely at a point where this is a disease that is disappearing in younger women in the uk. This is something that I really hope my daughters will never, never have to deal with.

[Michael Stevens]

For more information about Cancer Research uk, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org REST ISScience.

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[Michael Stevens]

All right, welcome back. I just went on the record saying that in the year 275,000 BCE, a person could have done what Santa does by themselves. That humans may have been close enough together and small enough in number that you could have visited every single one of them in one night. However, that's like so speculative. I mean, we don't know enough about human evolution to say that there weren't some, I don't know, some human ancestors that had already migrated into Asia and then they like evolved cognitively and anatomically in the same way thousands of miles away from those in Africa. We just don't know.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

But look, don't caveat this. What are you saying?

[Michael Stevens]

I'm caveating because there are so many theories and there's so many unknowns and I think it's actually really exciting that we, we still have these questions to answer. Ultimately, I just love knowing that, like, it may have never been possible to visit everyone in one night.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

I'm still, I'm still stuck on how Geographically spread out they were. Because I think if you're talking hunter gatherer situations here, you're probably talking about sort of family pods of 10 to 20 that will probably have their own territory, sort of geographically distinct from one another. So I think even if you are on an elephant, bird or a giant sloth or whatever it might be, I think getting around all of them also, actually, you know, early humans, Homo sapiens, Homo erectus, whatever it might be, were nomadic. So you couldn't even have like a map of where they were and be able to go and find them in the same place. You know, these people were moving around all of the time. So I think you would have found people even in the earliest days spread out across the entire continent of Africa.

[Michael Stevens]

I think. I think you're probably right. I don't think that. Again, it's not like a couple chimpanzees gave birth to a Homo sapien and they were like, what? And then you were like, oh, cool. I've only got one gift to give out tonight. We're talking about, like ape species like Homo heidelbergensis and Homo rhodesiensis, who slowly became more anatomically like modern humans. And they didn't necessarily do it all in the same city, all in the same camp.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

There's also Neanderthals that feed into this. I mean, Neanderthals are sort of in the Middle east at this point, while the Homo sapiens are in Africa. Every human has about 2% of Neanderthal DNA, but only if you have non African ancestry. And it's because the Neanderthals were in Europe, they were in the Middle East. And as Homo sapiens came up through Africa and then sort of went off to the rest of the world, that's where they interacted with Neanderthals. Neanderthals didn't go down into Africa for this to work.

[Michael Stevens]

For a person to visit every Homo sapien, they've got to do it before Homo sapiens leave, leave before they're in Eurasia or beyond, because you just can't cover that distance in a night.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

They reckon it wasn't very many who left. You know, in fact, if you take somebody, if you take someone from China, from modern China, and you take someone from, I don't know, Europe, South America, basically anywhere else in the world. Take two people from around the world, not Africa, and compare their genetic codes, they will be more similar than if you take two random people from Africa and do the same thing.

[Michael Stevens]

Wow, really?

[Professor Hannah Fry]

A small number of Homo sapiens left and all the rest of Us are descended from that small number. Whereas in Africa, where humanity started, where Homo sapiens came to be, there are so many distinct pockets of genetic groups that there is so much more variation within Africa than without it.

[Michael Stevens]

That's incredible.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

So maybe, maybe you could just be Santa standing at the sort of edge of Africa through the Middle east, being like, handing people out their Lego as they go past.

[Michael Stevens]

Maybe that's what happened. Maybe that's why they all left. They were like, guys, someone's giving out free pinches of red ochre. We just gotta go up north.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Free beads. Should we talk about the types of gifts that actually would have been handed out in 275,000 BC?

[Michael Stevens]

Well, yeah, I mean, I've said, like, I kept thinking that it's gonna be like a bead. It needs to be something because you got to carry around a lot of them.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Yeah. I think there is quite a lot of evidence that beads were given as gifts, like a very long time ago, Maybe not quite 275, 000 years ago, but definitely far back in time, because for a really long, long time, we sort of thought that symbolic art started in Europe with sort of 40, 000 years ago is the earliest evidence of. Of kind of cave paintings, that sort of thing. But actually there is a discovery that was made in Bismoon Cave in Morocco. This is maybe 140,000, 150,000 years ago. And are these tiny little sea snail shells that have got little holes through them as though they. They were. Were strung through something. So sort of like as a necklace, basically, they were used as beads. And you can be certain that the shells didn't just wash up there because they were found way too far inland, sort of hundreds of kilometers. And they also show these microscopic wear patterns around this hole, kind of proving that they've been then strung on this chord, been. They've been jangled together. And the idea is that these were sort of given as status symbols, so. So they must have been traded because they carry. They. They just had traveled too far a distance. Must have been traded and gifted and. Yeah, the idea is that they would signify who you were, whether you were married, whether you were not, you know, your. Your status within the hierarchy, that kind of thing. So that would have made quite a good gift, a beaded necklace.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah. And it wouldn't have weighed a lot. So even if there were hundreds of people that you wanted to give them to, you could carry them all on your cheetah or giant ground sloth.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Yeah, one of them, I think another Good thing that you could give that would make prehistoric man woman extremely happy would be a miniature hand axe. Do you know about the archaeologists that found these? These are absolutely amazing. So in particular in Wolvercote, this is in the uk, archaeologists have found these axes and they are absolutely tiny. They're like, they're like this big, right? 5-7 cm. Basically the size of a matchbox. And they are like perfectly made. They're perfectly symmetrical. It's not like they're sort of, you know, were big axes that got, got shrunk down. They were deliberately made to be that size. And you know, they've been naturally like this absolute perfect level of precision. They're also totally useless. Right, I was gonna ask.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah, completely.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

I mean if you're thinking about sort of butchering mammoths and chopping wood, I mean this thing is not, it's not doing anything at all. So in 1999, there's the, these archaeologists, Marit Cohen and Stephen Mithin, and they proposed the sexy hand axe theory.

[Michael Stevens]

Is this the idea that it was done to show your skill and your ability as a craftsman?

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Sexy hands? Exactly right. Yeah, exactly right.

[Michael Stevens]

And isn't that really what gift giving is all about? Showing how good you are as a gift giver? Aren't I thoughtful? Aren't I skilled? I didn't buy you a cake, I made you a cake because I'm skilled. It shows your worth and your value. So when are these miniature hand axes from?

[Professor Hannah Fry]

We're talking a long time ago, like 300,000 years ago, maybe even older.

[Michael Stevens]

Wow. Okay, so that shows that appreciating gifts is very old appreciating skill.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

What's the best gift that you've ever given Michael?

[Michael Stevens]

The gift of life to my daughter.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Ah, great answer, great answer.

[Michael Stevens]

I've given a lot of bad gifts. When I was just dating my now wife. I thought she really liked mechanical pencils. She talked about how she liked them a lot. So I got her like really nice mechanical pencils, right? Like fancy ones. And she was not amused.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

I think that's because you and I are stationary pervs. And clearly, clearly she is not.

[Michael Stevens]

Well, yeah, I think she just needed a mechanical pencil to do drawings on patterns. And then I'm sitting here like, oh yeah, well what if I got you this special two stage pencil sharpener and da, da, da. And she's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, I don't like them in that way.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Tell you what you could do for your, for your special prehistoric Santa. Maybe you can't leave out some Mince pies, there's little metal trays that they come in. That's not a thing yet. But alcohol is. Alcohol, absolutely still is a thing, even as far back as 275,000 years ago. And we know this because. Well, for one thing, fruit, if it is left to ripen for too long, becomes alcoholic, essentially.

[Michael Stevens]

It just happens, right?

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Just happens, right? 1 to 4% ethanol you can find in fruits just as they are left to ripen. And other apes, other monkeys, will happily consume fermented fruit in order to get very drunk. You also get elephants sometimes doing this, breaking into breweries. That's something that occasionally happens, basically. Animals love getting drunk. It's a thing. Also, humans, the clue that we have prized alcohol for a very long time is that we are amazingly good at detecting it. We can detect even the slightest little whiff of something being alcoholic, which, I mean, frankly, that beer radar came from somewhere. There's also the theory, do you know about this? The theory that actually we. We ended up going through the agricultural revolution not because of bread, but actually.

[Michael Stevens]

Because of beer, because of beer. The beer before bread theory, I'll buy that. I mean, it didn't. It didn't affect all humans, obviously, but those that decided, yeah, you know what, let's be agriculturalists, maybe they did it for the beer.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Because here's the idea is that actually bread, to make bread, it's a lot of faff to make bread, right? You've got to grow the grain, you've got to grind it down, you've got to, you know, bake them, find yeast, whatever you gotta. There's a lot of effort and then what you're left with is not even that calorie dense sense, sort of actually something that you could replace quite easily with something that you. You foraged or something that you killed. Whereas beer, on the other hand, I mean, that sort of feels like it's worth it. It's sort of more, you know, you've got your. Your social cohesion that comes with it. You've got. It's a safe form of hydration. You. Right. It sort of kills all the bacteria in the. In the liquid. There's also one of the clues is that when you look in the archaeology of. When domesticated grains, so to speak, when clearly been bred in order to be used for agriculture, when they start to appear, they. They start to appear in places like temples rather than in. In kind of ancient households. So this is. This. I mean, it's not completely like you said, right? Everything under the sun here is is very much got lots of question marks all over the place. But it's quite possible that, that people knew how to make beer or beer of some form that you could then give out to your prehistoric Santa.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah, great, great. Merry Christmas.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Merry Christmas indeed.

[Michael Stevens]

And they're drinking my little prehistoric beer, being like, who's Christ? And I'm like, ah, you guys just wait 275,000 years. This will all make sense.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Yeah. And you would not believe the conversation we have about you in 277,000 years time.

[Michael Stevens]

Yeah, Anna, this was a lot more difficult than I thought and a lot less clear. I just think that we don't have enough evidence to know if Homo sapiens were ever concentrated in a small enough place to all be visited in one night.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

I just don't think they were. I just don't think they were. I'm going with. No, I'm going with it's not possible.

[Michael Stevens]

I know. I mean, if they were, it would have been like 2 to 300,000 years ago and then you could have played out your little Santa fantasy for real without needing any kind of magic or any kind of cheats. But gosh, that's kind of what makes the whole story of Santa so special.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Yeah, I mean, you've basically got two options. Option one is don't worry about geography at all. Just deliver a gift voucher by email to all 8 billion people simultaneously. That's. That is available to you. You can do it now. Just get everyone's email address. Not sure how you do that. Not sure everyone has an email address, whatever details. But you could do it right now or sit back and let the big man himself take over. Yeah, he's the one with the leaky bones. He's the one with all the millennia of experience. And I think we'll leave it to him, shall we?

[Michael Stevens]

Cheers.

[Professor Hannah Fry]

Well, that is all we have time for today on the rest of science. As ever, you can email us the.

[Michael Stevens]

Rest is [e-mail] or join our [e-mail] Science.

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