Learn about the disturbing original plots of five beloved fairy tales, how the HALT method can help control your impulses, and why our ability to drink milk evolved way faster than we thought!
Learn about the disturbing original plots of five beloved fairy tales, how the HALT method can help control your impulses, and why our ability to drink milk evolved way faster than we thought!
Here Are the Disturbing and Gory Origins of 5 Beloved Fairy Tales by Stephanie Bucklin
Learn the “HALT” Method to Control Your Impulses by Annie Hartman
Our ability to drink milk evolved way faster than we thought by Cameron Duke
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/our-ability-to-drink-milk-evolved-way-faster-than-scientists-thought
[MUSIC PLAYING] ASHLEY HAMER: Hi. You're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity.com. I'm Ashley Hamer.
NATALIA REAGAN: And I'm Natalia Reagan. Today you'll learn about the disturbing original plots of five beloved fairy tales, how the HALT method can help control your impulses, and why our ability to drink milk evolved way faster than we thought.
ASHLEY HAMER: Let's satisfy some curiosity.
NATALIA REAGAN: Whoo. Ready for some Grimm tales, Ashley?
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, I'm ready.
NATALIA REAGAN: Oh, yeah. Let's bring it on. Well, Disney movies are full of cute talking animals, upbeat songs, and happily ever afters. But it's no secret that the fairy tales they're based on are much darker. For a bit of spooky Halloween fun, I'm going to tell you what really happened in the original stories. So sit down, don't get too comfortable because I'm going to make you uncomfortable really quickly.
But here are the disturbing and gruesome origins of five beloved fairy tales. First, Cinderella. Everybody knows the prince found Cinderella by testing the glass slipper on all the women in the kingdom. What's not in the Disney version is that when the stepsisters couldn't fit their feet in the glass slipper, they cut off parts of their feet to make the shoes fit. The bloody slipper gave them away.
Talk about determination. I'm almost impressed. In the Disney version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the evil queen tries to kill Snow White with a poisoned apple. And she's revived by a handsome prince. In the Grimm brothers' version, the queen sends a huntsman to kill Snow White.
He kills a bear instead and brings back its lungs and liver. The evil queen then eats them, believing she is feasting on Snow White's innards. Talk about charming. The Little Mermaid is a story about a mermaid who tries desperately to get a prince to fall in love with her. In the Disney version, her reward is to live as a human.
The stakes are a little bigger in the Hans Christian Andersen version, where the prize is an immortal soul. Sadly, the mermaid fails to win the prince's love, but she's granted a soul anyway. Hey, a happy ending. The original Beauty and the Beast is similar to the Disney version, if a little darker. It includes a couple of ungrateful sisters.
Gaston doesn't exist. And the Beast melodramatically starves himself when he thinks Belle doesn't love him. But like the Disney version, all is well in the end. Finally, Frozen. The Disney movie centers on two sisters, one of whom has magical icy powers.
In the end, love and sisterhood saved the day. It's based on the Hans Christian Andersen story The Snow Queen, where the powers actually belong to an evil queen who kidnaps a boy, leaving it up to his sister to save the day. Well, those original stories really put a new spin on happily ever after.
ASHLEY HAMER: Boy, if you switched out all of the bedtime fairy tales with these ones, you would raise a very interesting generation of children.
NATALIA REAGAN: It builds character, Ashley. [LAUGHS]
ASHLEY HAMER: [LAUGHS]
NATALIA REAGAN: You never know when you might get kidnapped by the Snow Queen.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's right.
NATALIA REAGAN: Or eaten as in Hansel and Gretel.
ASHLEY HAMER: So much cannibalism in these stories. I don't understand.
NATALIA REAGAN: Right. Yeah. Just kids walk around thinking everybody was trying to eat them.
ASHLEY HAMER: I mean, that's a way to make you do your chores, I guess. As longtime listeners know, Cody is out on paternity leave. But before he left, he gave us some suggestions of old stories that we might want to run while he's gone. This one, he specifically chose because he says he uses this method, especially since the time that we ran it on this podcast.
So maybe it'll help you out, too. Check out this story about the HALT method.
CODY GOUGH: Ashley, are you an impulsive person?
ASHLEY HAMER: No. Like not at all. Like the opposite. Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Really?
ASHLEY HAMER: Uh-huh.
CODY GOUGH: Well, in case you are an impulsive person, today we've got a method for helping you control your impulses, and it's called the HALT method as in H-A-L-T, halt. It's easy to remember, and it's easy to use, even you've probably had to use this.
ASHLEY HAMER: I've used it.
CODY GOUGH: Have you?
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, yeah, for sure. All sorts of things. Everyone has times that they do something that's based on emotion rather than like rational thought.
CODY GOUGH: Yes. And this is a way to combat that.
ASHLEY HAMER: Totally.
CODY GOUGH: So just ask yourself if you're one of the four things the acronym stands for. H is for hungry. A is for angry. L is for lonely. And T is for tired.
As in am I hungry? Am I angry? Am I lonely? Or am I tired right now? The HALT method is a really useful tool in the world of addiction and recovery, so you may have heard of it there.
But you can use it no matter who you are. After all, everyone has let their emotions influence their decisions as we just talked about. You can put it in the context of shopping. If you feel like you really need to buy something you don't need, then check in on yourself. HALT will help you stop and think about whether you're about to buy something that'll actually make you feel better.
Every purchase has a purpose, right? So maybe you'll feel more confident in that new outfit, or maybe you'll feel happier when you've got the best new video game. But those are usually temporary pick-me-ups that don't last. So by using the HALT method, you're the one in charge. Try it out and let us know if you find it helpful.
ASHLEY HAMER: You know when I use it the most is in relationships? When you like start to argue and you realize like, oh, we haven't had dinner. Or it's 12 o'clock at night, and we're both really sleepy.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. Usually, hungry and angry is enough.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: 90% of the time when I make a poor choice, it's because I'm hungry or angry.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right.
CODY GOUGH: Or hangry, which is a thing.
ASHLEY HAMER: Hangry is a thing?
CODY GOUGH: It's a thing.
ASHLEY HAMER: Compared to other mammals the human ability to drink milk into adulthood is pretty weird. It's something no nonhuman mammal can do. And I'm pretty sure that other mammals are judging us for it. But this ability is one of the most well studied examples of recent human evolution. And new research suggests that it evolved much faster than we thought.
So all mammals drink milk in infancy. It's packed with calories, nutrients, and microbes, which are what a growing mammal baby needs. But at a certain age, babies move on from milk to solid food. At that point, all mammals, including roughly 2/3 of humans, by the way, stop producing the enzyme lactase. That makes it so they can't digest milk sugar known as lactose. But some humans keep on making lactase into adulthood.
That lactose tolerance or lactose persistence as it's technically known first appeared during the Bronze Age. In a group of people who lived just north of the Black Sea, these people were farmers who at that point had a long history of drinking milk from their animals. They couldn't digest the lactose. But for them, the milk was totally worth the tummy aches. There's evidence these people even made cheese with it.
One day, that genetic switch that turns off lactase production, it broke. And this group of humans gained the ability to digest lactose. This granted access to tons of surplus calories that likely led to longer lives and ultimately more babies. And this change happened very quickly. We know that thanks to evidence from human remains found at the site of a massive Bronze Age battle in present day Germany.
It suggests that as recently as 3,200 years ago, fewer than 1 in 10 Europeans could digest lactose. This means that the mutation was still very rare until 3,000 years ago. Further evidence suggests that just 600 years later, roughly one in two Europeans could digest lactose. That means that the mutation spread throughout the population in just a few thousand years. That's incredibly fast compared to most evolutionary changes in humans.
Scientists still aren't sure why natural selection favored this change so suddenly. Currently, 9 in 10 people from central and northern European descent as well as many from the Middle East and some parts of Africa have this mutation. But if the mutation is so beneficial, why hasn't it spread everywhere? It's because it's only beneficial in places where milk-producing livestock are an important part of agriculture.
Other areas of the world center their diets on other nutritious staples and don't have much of a need for lactase. But in places that had cows, lactose persistence came in handy for the locals. It was an advantage they milked for all it was worth.
NATALIA REAGAN: Hi. That was utterly awesome, Ashley. No, this is something I actually lecture about in class is lactase persistence and just this sort of evolutionary jump and adaptation to being able to digest something that can help lead to more offspring and healthier population over time. But it can have its drawbacks if you partake in maybe too much of the cheeses.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right. I think it's a nice comfort to anybody who's having a stomachache after eating ice cream to just say, it's fine. You're the original model. The original's best, man.
NATALIA REAGAN: Right. Well, yeah. I mean, just the idea of it. If it doesn't help out a population, there's no reason for it to evolve and continue on in future populations, so it makes sense in areas of the world where you're dependent on cattle and cows. But that's a long time to endure stomachaches if you think about it.
ASHLEY HAMER: It is. I'm mostly impressed by that part. Yes, they kept eating cheese even though they couldn't digest it. That's how great cheese is. I mean, I guess I get it.
NATALIA REAGAN: Yeah, people will endure the pain and the suffering, very flatulent society.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right. You got the smelly cheese coming in, and you got the smells coming out. It's all the same.
NATALIA REAGAN: You know what that helps for, Ashley?
ASHLEY HAMER: What?
NATALIA REAGAN: Social distancing.
ASHLEY HAMER: Absolutely.
NATALIA REAGAN: Well, let's do a quick recap of what we learned today.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, we learned that Grimm Fairy Tales were literally grim. Cinderella's sisters cut their feet to fit into those glass slippers. The Snow Queen kidnapped children. I mean, Disney really had to work overtime to make these tales a little more Disney-friendly.
NATALIA REAGAN: Right. Jeez. I mean, again, do they want their kids to have nightmares? I mean, I guess maybe they want their kids to live in fear.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. I mean, that is a form of parenting.
NATALIA REAGAN: Right.
ASHLEY HAMER: I don't know if it's the best form, but it is a form.
NATALIA REAGAN: If you don't do your homework, Snow Queen's kidnapping you. That's the end of the story right there.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yep.
NATALIA REAGAN: We also learn that the HALT method can help you with impulse decisions, which sometimes I'm prone to doing. And if you kind of stop and think, wait a minute. Am I hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, or any combination of those particular feelings? You can deal with that first and then see if you want to go buy a Lamborghini, which I've never had a desire of doing, but it just seemed like a very impulsive thing to do.
ASHLEY HAMER: I know we talked about this a little bit on a previous episode. This is something that has come in handy for me a lot. It's just sometimes when everything feels awful and I'm just frustrated and the person I'm talking to is just not making sense and I don't understand why they're so stupid, sometimes I have to just check in with myself. And I'm either hungry or tired. Those are the two that are the big ones for me.
NATALIA REAGAN: Right. I feel like, especially during quarantine, they all apply. I sometimes work so much that I kind of not forget to eat, but I'll just sort of neglect it to a certain point. And I'm beyond grumpiness. And then that leads to anger. And with quarantine, it gets lonely. I mean, Carol and Jeanette, the chickens, are great, but it's different than having human contact. And we're all I think a little tired of just everything these days, so I feel like we're kind of living in a halt society right now.
ASHLEY HAMER: Just a halt society.
NATALIA REAGAN: Does that mean we get to all just halt, stop, and go on vacation? Can we just-- is that what that means? OK. Cool.
We also learned that the production of lactase, which allows for the ability to digest milk and lactose, evolved faster than previously thought in populations that were dependent on cows and other milk-producing livestock. But it should be noted that in areas where people are not heavily dependent on cows and goats and whatnot, this adaptation wasn't necessarily important. So it's just really interesting how fast it evolved and spread and how flatulent these societies must have been before the spread.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. Bronze Age, more like the--
NATALIA REAGAN: Darn tootin' good time. Yeah. I'm like, if anybody has lived with a lactose-intolerant person after you get ice cream, you know what you're talking about. You understand.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
NATALIA REAGAN: You understand what they had to live through.
ASHLEY HAMER: [LAUGHS]
NATALIA REAGAN: Today's stories were written by Stephanie Bucklin, Annie Hartma, Cameron Duke, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who's the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: Scriptwriting was by Natalia Reagan and Sonja Hodgen. Today's episode is edited by Natalia Reagan and additional editing today by our producer, Cody Gough.
NATALIA REAGAN: For those of you who do not have lactase persistence, be sure to take your Lactaid, and join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY HAMER: And until then, stay curious.
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