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 Toshinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray and

James Harkin and once again we have gathered around 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 fight 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 need it, they died, they landed there, thousands of 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 realised that actually fresh water kind of emerges on the shore.

So there's no fresh water, very little fresh water because the soil is super porous.

So it rains and the soil just sucks it in straight away, no streams or anything.

But the rain water 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, I think it would

...