Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.
My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinski,
Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go.
Starting with fact number one and that is Anna.
My fact this week is
that there's hardly any fresh water on Easter Island so the indigenous people drank straight from the sea.
That's why they're dead.
They all immediately died, they landed there, a thousand years ago, all died.
No they didn't die, this is the amazing thing about it.
So Europeans first got there in the 1700s, 1722.
They noticed that the indigenous people there, the Pacific Islanders who travelled over their hundreds of years earlier,
seemed to be drinking straight from the sea.
Very confusing,
haven't thought about it again for 400 years and then scientists looked into it and they realized
that actually fresh water kind of emerges on the shore.
So the fact that there's no fresh water or very little fresh water
because the soil is super porous and so it rains and the soil just sucks it in straight away,
no streams or anything but the rainwater goes down into the earth and then travels out to the beach underground and then it re-emerges just at the shoreline so when the tide's out you can kind of go and scoop up some of that water which is in the very shallows of the sea and it's still salty,
don't get me wrong,