Behind the Scenes Minis: Unearthed! in December 2019

In discussing this week's episodes, Tracy explains how she tracks news stories on her Unearthed! Pinterest board, and she and Holly theorize about why some topics have a lot of interest clustered in any given year.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class the production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. Here is some behind the scenes about
our Unearthed at the end of of twenty nineteen, which
as I'm sitting here, it just occurred to me. Usually

(00:22):
when I do these episodes, especially as we started doing
them uh more frequently than once a year, what I
have typically done is had the previous outline open, just
to make sure we don't accidentally talk about something we
talked about last time. And I just realized I didn't
do that this time, So hopefully I haven't talked about
something that we talked about in October and then forgot

(00:44):
that we talked about. Because it's a lot. Here's what
I'm saying, If this is your greatest crime, Tracy Willison,
really like nothing to worry about. So I think some
folks have sort of the basics of how this, uh
this works in terms of our Unearthed episodes. But what

(01:05):
happens is I have a Pinterest board where all through
the year, ideally on a regular basis, I look at
all of these RSS feeds that I have in an
RSS reader, and I have various Google alerts like I
have an exhumation Google alert and various other stuff, um,

(01:26):
and so I keep track of that on this Pinterest
board all year long, and then when it's time to
do Unearthed, I used that to go back through all
of the things, like all of the stories that I
that I pinned over that particular time. UM. And the
the Unearthed in twenty nineteen board has eight hundred and

(01:46):
eighty six pins on it, which is actually less than
the twenty eighteen board, which shocked me because earlier in
the year it was pacing to like way out strip
the teen totals. So I'm not or if at the
end of the year, as you and I traveled for
tour or something, if I became more selective about what
I was pinning, or if there was just kind of

(02:06):
a drop off in stories. I don't know, it's mystery.
Maybe everybody hustled to publish earlier in the year, people
had way more findings to report much earlier on Maybe
one of the things that has sort of become clearer.
I mean, this is the first year that we have
done Unearthed four times. Last year we did it twice,

(02:28):
and earlier, Uh, in the history of Holly's in my
time on the show. It was just one two part
episode at the end of the year. But as we've
been working on these, one of one of the things
that has become really interesting to me is the patterns
that will show up in what kind of things that
we have to talk about. Like we pretty much always
have exhumations, shipwrecks, edibles and potables and books and letters

(02:52):
and UTSI, uh, that's pretty much every time. Most times
there's also Amelia Earhart news that may or may not
be completely specious, right, But then some of the other
patterns are just totally different every time. Like I was
surprised to have so many papers that came across my

(03:13):
desk that were related to either the extinction of the
Neanderthals or the historical roots of inequality. Like those aren't
uh categories that I would have immediately thought might be
a thing in this particular unearthed. Yeah, it makes me
wonder about like how different things trend in academia at
different times. Um. And it makes me think almost of

(03:36):
like if you've ever seen video of like a traffic
what's called sometimes a traffic shock wave, where there's not
really a clear reason that like traffic bunches up and
then spreads back out, and it will, you know, kind
of keep happening that way over and over on kind
of an un um, a non repeating pattern. And I
suspect the same thing happens in in academic circles at

(03:57):
various points in time, or some small thing that someone
maybe discovers some years back, kind of the tendrils of
it reach out and they become different things to to
different projects for several different groups at once. But those happened,
I mean the we we talked all the time in
these unearthed ones about the coincidences of us talking about
a thing and it being mentioned later in the news,

(04:21):
like sometimes within hours of us recording. So I don't
know if the universe just likes to group things or what.
There's also one thing that I kind of wish I
had said in the episode, but I definitely want to
take a moment to say now, is that when we're
talking about things like what happened to the Neanderthals, and
we wind up with five or six or however many

(04:42):
different ideas, uh Like, I don't want people to interpret
that as meaning scientists don't know what they're talking about,
Like the way that science works is that people propose
hypotheses for things, and then they go and test those hypotheses,
and there's a whole process of whether their results can
be replicated and whether other people come to the same conclusions,

(05:05):
whether other people interpret their data the same way. Uh.
And none of that means that the first people who
were doing the research didn't know what they were doing. Like,
it's all part of the process of asking questions and
exploring things and eventually coming to a scientific consensus. Yeah,
which can also shift. I mean our understanding of the

(05:25):
world is and the universe is forever evolving because we're
getting better technologies, or some new piece of evidences is
uneartheden comes to light that shifts the way we thought
about previous evidence Like those those are natural progressions of
information for us to believe something is true and for
there to even be scientific consensus, and then down the

(05:47):
road something else comes up and it shifts that and
makes that not not the consensus any longer. But it
doesn't mean that the reasoning of the work getting to
that consensus was unsound, right, Just so we know new
things now, Yeah, we're always learning. I'm also very excited.
We hope we're always learning. Um. I'm also excited that
this particular collection of unearthed stuff not only spawned episodes,

(06:11):
because that has happened before, Like we have had unearthed
episodes that came specifically from a fine that happened, like
when the USS Indianapolis shipwreck was found in that kind
of thing. But just because of the way our production
calendar has shaped up here at the end of the
year um slash beginning of the year when this is
actually coming out, the fact that I have two outlines

(06:33):
in the works based on things that we talked about
in Unearth that will be coming out in the future.
I found that to be fun. It's a fun little
side effect of working on this this time around. Yea, yea.
So I hope folks are still enjoying these little behind
the scenes looks that we have started doing. And I've
said this in the episode and I'll say it again.
Happy New Year everyone, Yes, indeed, I hope whatever you

(06:55):
wish for when it comes to fruition and you have
much joy and peace. Stuff you missed in History Class
is a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows. H