9. The World's Oldest Profession Isn't Prostitution
This one (and so many things on QI) can be put down to nit-picking. In any case, the claim deserves more investigation than just a two minute sound bite from a TV panel show can afford. First of all, the claim of prostitution being "the world's oldest profession" has some Quite Interesting roots. The first reference to it as such comes from Rudyard Kipling in the 1888 story "On the City Wall": not any kind of anthropological, sociological, or archaeological research, but a piece of fiction from the same guy who brought us "The White Man's Burden." Regardless, the euphemism took off and now today there is some kind of "folk wisdom" about how we've had prostitutes forever. If there's one thing QI is about it, it is disproving folk wisdom whenever possible, even when the folk wisdom might have some basis in reality. In this instance, they took a hair-splitting archaeological look at this question and countered that the earliest evidence suggests that the first job which someone did all day, exclusive of anything directly necessary to survival, was to make flint spearheads and arrowheads. In the QI elves' defense, this sort of conservative claim is really how any kind of science ought to be done. But science is also about exploration and investigation, and that's where this segment fell a bit flat. While putting Kipling's quip on prostitution to bed (no pun intended) is certainly good academic research, even if they didn't mention Kipling or "On the City Wall" in particular, no one touched on the fact that animals have been observed trading food or goodies in exchange for sex. This includes our distant relatives, the chimpanzees, as well as Adelie penguins, who trade and barter rocks for their nests. Female penguins have been observed mating with males in exchange for one of these precious rocks. Humans have probably been trading goods for sex for probably a long time and at least as long as we've been making tools if not longer. But who was the bright young girl who decided to survive by selling her body, to the exclusion of anything else? That we don't know, and can maybe never know. It's not a job that lends itself to archaeological artifacts. So while it might not be the oldest profession as such, it's definitely a contender for the oldest goods-acquiring activity.