Learn about how the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest texts in the world, was first translated not by a scientist, but by an engraver’s apprentice named George Smith; how horses lost their toes; and why sperm swim differently than scientists previously thought.
Learn about how the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest texts in the world, was first translated not by a scientist, but by an engraver’s apprentice named George Smith; how horses lost their toes; and why sperm swim differently than scientists previously thought.
Some Random Guy Stumbled Upon and Translated a Legendary Ancient Text by Reuben Westmaas
Here’s Why Horses Lost Their Toes by Ashley Hamer
We were wrong about the way sperm swim by Cameron Duke
Subscribe to Curiosity Daily to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. You can also listen to our podcast as part of your Alexa Flash Briefing; Amazon smart speakers users, click/tap “enable” here: https://www.amazon.com/Curiosity-com-Curiosity-Daily-from/dp/B07CP17DJY
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/the-rando-who-translated-gilgamesh-why-horses-lost-their-toes-and-a-sperm-swimming-discovery
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn how a kinda random guy translated one of the oldest texts in the world, how horses lost their toes, and why sperm swim differently than scientists previously thought.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest piece of literature in the world. But when it was finally translated in 1872, its plot turned out to be surprisingly familiar. What’s even more surprising was who did the translating: not an archaeologist or a linguist, but an engraver’s apprentice visiting the museum on his lunch break. Get ready to hear the Epic...of George Smith.
In 1860, Smith was 20 years old and working at a printing firm engraving bank notes. The job wasn’t glamorous, but it gave him a knack for recognising visual patterns. The shop happened to be within walking distance of the famous British Museum, so he’d frequently spent his lunch hour in the museum’s Near Eastern collection. He was especially taken with the cuneiform [kyu-NEE-uh-form] tablets. Even though they were in dozens of fragments dispersed among the exhibits, he could figure out which fragments belonged together and could even translate a few lines. Museum scholars took notice of the young man, and soon realized that he could read the tablets better than they could.
Within a year Smith was hired to organize the rest of the museum’s broken collection. Eventually, his attention focused on two 2,500-year-old shattered clay tablets. Virtually every other piece of cuneiform writing translated up to that point consisted of receipts for clothing and livestock. But as Smith began working to translate the shattered lines, it soon became clear that these ancient tablets were not receipts.
The story on the tablets was about a demi-god, Gilgamesh, who searches for a cure for death. Instead he discovers the legend of Utnapishtim [OOT-nah-PISH-tim], the only man who achieved immortality. It was a gift given to him by a god who flooded the world during a temper tantrum. Utnapishtim survived by building a giant boat, taking his family and a menagerie of animals on board, and floating until he released a bird that never came back. Sound familiar? The Epic of Gilgamesh showed that the Biblical story of Noah's Ark was much older than previously thought.
It wasn’t a happy ending for George. He finally had the opportunity to travel to the land with which he had become so well acquainted, but he was a poor traveller and died on his third trip. The tablets mention that Gilgamesh will be remembered longer than any other man. What they don’t mention, however, was that an engraver's apprentice from London would have to help.
Here's something that will never let you look at horses the same way again: A horse hoof is one giant toe. Horses evolved from animals with multiple toes but eventually lost the extras over millions of years of evolution. But why? Research using 3D fossil scanning may have the answer.
One ancestor of the modern horse is Hyracotherium [hy-RACK-oh-THEER-ee-um], a dog-sized animal that lived about 50 million years ago. Importantly, it had toes: four on each front foot and three on each hind foot. During its heyday, the planet was warm, wet, and overgrown with trees and bushes that were great for hiding. But eventually, global temperatures dropped, the landscape got dryer, and forests gave way to grasslands.
That made running more important for survival. A larger body size did too, since grass isn't as energy-dense as leaves are and larger animals can conserve energy better. Over time, all of these evolutionary pressures led to big horses that could run fast. But that doesn't explain why they lost their toes.
For a study published in 2017, evolutionary biologists at Harvard University collected 13 fossilized horse leg bones that spanned 50 million years, reaching all the way back to our friend Hyracotherium and forward to the horses of today. The researchers measured the strength of each bone, then estimated how much each horse would have weighed. That told them how much stress their bones would have been under when running.
They found that as horses got bigger, their center toes also got bigger to make their leg bones more resistant to stress. In the process, the side toes became less useful, so they slowly disappeared. Another study also found that at the same time, the horse foot evolved a sort of spring mechanism — it’s able to flex up to 90 degrees and pull back a series of specialized tendons to store elastic energy like a bow and arrow. This can save up to 40 percent of the horse's locomotor energy with each trot. All of that helped horses evolve for long-distance travel.
But the extra toes of modern horses haven't disappeared completely. You can still spot them on many horses as a rough growth on the back legs — something commonly called a "chestnut" — or hair-covered growths just above the back of the hoof, called "ergots." Evolution is everywhere! You just have to know where to look.
CODY: Today’s episode is sponsored by KiwiCo.
ASHLEY: KiwiCo creates super cool hands-on projects designed to expose kids of all ages to concepts in STEAM — science, technology, engineering, art, and math.
CODY: KiwiCo’s mission is to help kids build confidence, creativity and critical thinking skills -- and have a blast while doing it! Each box is delivered monthly and comes with all the supplies needed for that month's project, so you don’t have to worry about running out for extra supplies.
ASHLEY: Kids are able to play and learn independently thanks to kid-friendly instructions, and the crates are made with high-quality materials. Plus, the projects can be put together with help from loved ones! It’s a great opportunity for quality time with family and friends.
CODY: With KiwiCo’s hands-on art and science projects, kids can engineer a walking robot, blast off a bottle rocket, explore colorful, kid-friendly chemistry, and more!
ASHLEY: They have everything you need to make STEAM seriously fun — delivered to your doorstep. Get your first month FREE on select crates at kiwico-dot-com-slash-CURIOSITY. CODY: That’s K-I-W-I-C-O dot com slash CURIOSITY
Sperm cells are some of the simplest cells in the human body. They have one job, and that’s to swim their way to an egg cell to deliver their DNA. We’ve known this for centuries. But as it turns out, we knew much less than we thought. Recent research suggests that we were wrong about the way that sperm swim.
To understand where we went wrong, let’s take a quick step back in time to the 1600s. Dutch scientist Anton van Leeuwenhoek [LAY-ven-hoke] had learned to grind glass that could be used to make simple microscopes. With his homemade scope, he becomes one of the first people to see individual cells. Almost inevitably, he takes a look at his own sperm under a microscope and describes them as having “snakelike movement, like eels in water.” For the next 300 years, scientists generally agreed with that depiction. But here’s the thing: a microscope only produces a two-dimensional image, and until now, that’s the only way scientists have been able to view sperm cells in action.
We’ve learned a lot since then. One thing we’ve learned is that the molecular machinery that powers the tail, known as the flagellum, should only be capable of beating in one direction. This means that sperm should move in circles instead of taking a straight path, like a rowboat with oars on only one side. That also means that sperm should be mechanically incapable of moving the way Leeuwenhoek described.
Researchers at the University of Bristol shot video of sperm in motion. They didn’t just make any video, though. They used a 3D camera shooting at 55,000 frames per second through a microscope that moves the sample up and down really fast so the whole tail could come into focus. The result is the most detailed three-dimensional image of sperm movement ever made.
It showed that sperm do, in fact, only move their tails to one side. But the real discovery is the way they counterbalance that asymmetry by rotating their whole bodies as they swim. Instead of waving their tails like eels, sperm swim more like otters, using a corkscrew motion that propels them straight ahead.
This is an example of how scientific understanding is like an unfocused picture that becomes clearer over time. Leeuwenhoek and the scientists that came after him weren’t wrong, they just couldn’t see the cell world in all its detail.
Let’s recap the main things we learned today
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s stories were written by Ashley Hamer, Reuben Westmaas, and Cameron Duke and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough, Sonja Hodgen, and Natalia Reagan. Curiosity Daily is produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!