January 1, 2014 • 23 mins
The second part of 2013's historical finds includes items unearthed by animals, amateurs and ultra-modern science. Lead coffins, rare torpedoes and mass graves are featured. And of course, there's discussion of everyone's favorite topic: exhumations.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Frae Wilson, and today is part two of our
now traditional year end, although this is happening on the
(00:21):
beginning of a new year. Yeah, uh, you're and look
back at what has been unearthed in the world of
history and history knowledge in the in the last twelve
months or so. We mentioned previously that some of the
biggest farms this year have already had their whole own
entire episodes of the show back in the archive. So
today we're going to look at some of the other
(00:43):
lesser known things. We've grouped them together into themes. Themes
seems to emerge. Yeah, anytime we're doing podcast research, kind
of the groupings will reveal themselves a little bit. There
are some trends here, So we we have these groups
together into like themes. We also have some exhimations this
(01:05):
year which are perennial favorites. Um and at the end
of this episode, we've got some pretty extreme science responsible
for unearthing some pretty cool stuff. So yes, let's start
off with the maybe I don't want to say the
opposite of science because that's not true. But things that
(01:26):
nature unearthed for us, And I love this first one
so much so. Uh, in Germany, a badger unearthed. I
just I love that Germany of badger unearthed for us
a twelfth century burial ground. The badger found a sword,
(01:46):
bronze bowls, and ornate belt buckle, and skeletal remains. And
all of this happened in Stolpe in Brandenburg. It helps
that two people who lived on the farm are also
amateur archaeologists innew a human pelvic bone when they saw it,
So it's not as though the badger went waving it
around and saying, hey, you guys, I found this stuff.
The people recognized that they were They did not mistake
(02:08):
it for maybe an animal or one of the bodies
has been determined to be that of a warrior with
several healed injuries that looked like battle wounds. It's estimated
that he probably died at around age forty. And Uh.
This was found last autumn, so inelve but it wasn't
announced until August. So thank you badger for that great fine. Yes,
(02:30):
I love everything about that story. Now we're gonna thank
some dolphins, some dolphins working for the U. S. Navy
found a late nineteenth century Howld torpedo off the coast
of Coronado. So it doesn't really sound all that exciting
that a torpedo was found in the ocean, except that
only fifty of these torpedoes were ever made before they
(02:51):
were supplanted by other technologically superior torpedoes, and this is
only the second surviving one known to still exist. So
significant fine on the part of those dolphins who were
working for the navy. Uh, this one not so much
an animal helping us. Uh. In Norway, some melting snow
in the wake of global warming has actually unearthed a
(03:14):
number of artifacts that prior to that had been frozen.
They had been trapped in frozen ground. And this included
a bow and arrow that we're used to hunt reindeer
that are estimated to be about thirty hundred years old. Uh.
And again, this melting actually happened in eleven, but the
announcement was made. Yeah, there are lots and lots and
(03:34):
lots of artifacts that are being sort of brought up
to the surface as glaciers recede and snow's melt and
things like that. As the temperature of the Earth rises,
so Uh, it's cool that we're getting Yeah, it's it's
it's unfortunate that that what's bringing a lot of this
(03:55):
up is is the the loss of otherwise frozen animal
have dad in climate. In addition to animals who have
healthily discovered things by accident, sometimes on purpose and sometimes
by accident, a number of amateurs found cool stuff this year.
People stumble across things in their day to day doings, yes,
(04:15):
sometimes in their hobbies. This first, uh, this first unearthing.
Metal detector enthusiasts in Leicestershire, England found a seventeen hundred
year old coffin containing a child's body in October, and
it was about four ft underground, but because it was
made of lead, they found it very easily with their
metal detectors. So, but there's sort of an ongoing uh,
(04:38):
combativeness sometimes between like academic archaeologists and anthropologists and metal
detector enthusiasts with sort of ongoing questions of is this
a help or a hindrance In this case, what the
what the metal detector folks did was they immediately contacted
professional archaeologists as soon as they realized that they had
(05:01):
a potentially important find in front of them and then
they organized a volunteer guard so that it would remain
undisturbed until the pros got there. Perfect. This is sort
of the ideal situation of what when people who want
to get out with their metal detectors um uncover something
that maybe have importance. Also in October, a high school
(05:21):
student unearthed a baby duckbill dinosaur which would be known
as paras rolfus uh this fossil and he was on
a school sponsored fossil hunting trips so success at Utah's
Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument and he basically turned over
a stone and there it was so an easier fine
(05:41):
than many other people have had. It took hours of
work to excavate it from the rock, and the baby
was more than six ft long, so quite large. Yes,
I I had originally characterized it in my notes as tiny,
but it is only tiny compared to an adult. Yeah,
it is not tiny compared to actual small things. So
(06:02):
in shajan Pur, India, a farmer named Naraj Kumar found
fifteen ancient arrows and hunting tools while plowing one of
his fields. And this fine came after his plow got
stuck and the animals that were pulling it couldn't move
it any farther. He found arrows and a number of
metal hunting tools. He's actually made their way kind of
out into the community before people realized that they were
(06:24):
potentially important, and then they were gathered back up again
uh and and handed over to authorities afterward. Our next
one involves an amateur who's a very very young one
uh So cone Ergel, who was only aged seven, found
a twenty ft long dugout canoe while taking a scuba
lesson near Oclawaha, Florida, and it's planned to be displayed
(06:47):
at the Marion County Museum of History and Archaeology. But
as of now, we haven't found out a lot of
detail about how old the canoe is or which tribe
may have made it. And it actually may take up
to two years for to dry out uh in a
way that won't harm it. Yeah, they have to very
very very slowly get the because it's been you know,
underwater and waterlogged for a really long time. You have
(07:09):
to extremely slowly get the water out to try to
do it without damaging it, without causing it to crack
or anything like that. So we may not know much
about that for a little while. Yes, this exciting, Yes,
and then he'll be you know, nine or ten. Well,
speaking of ten year olds, in May, ten year old
Jack Sinclair dug up a cannon ball from a four
board cannon in his home garden in South England. And
(07:32):
it turns out that this cannonball dates to the English
Civil War. And I love this quote from him. He said,
I thought it was a stone or a ball of
some kind. It was really dirty, but when we got
the dirt and mud off, it was a cannonball. I
was like wow, because I had no idea. Jack Sinclair,
aged ten, is charming. Another ten year old found a
(07:55):
mummy in his grandmother's attict in August. As you can imagine,
this caused all inner of excitement, but it was determined
to be a fake by the time September rolled around.
It had a real skull, but the bones were all plastic. Uh.
And the skull looks like it had been a cadaverish
skull that was prepared for medical use or research. Yes,
it was not like a dug up human remain skull.
(08:17):
I mean, it wasn't like his grandmother had a creepy
situation going on in the attic. She had probably acquired
it through some yeah fairly boring means well, and then
it dates back to a time when when sort of
egypt stuff was extremely popular for people to own. That's
one that. Uh. The The initial story of the ten
year old finding mummy and grandma's attic made the rounds
(08:39):
on social and lots and lots of people were saying, hey,
have y'all seen this? Have y'all seen this? And we did,
and sadly, I mean, it is not a real mummy
of historical importance. Uh. Next up, we have several discovered graves,
mass graves and otherwise, starting with in September, archaeologists announced
that they had unearthed a completely sealed tomb in Italy
(09:02):
and the Etruscan necropolis of Tarkinia, and this contained a
prince holding a spear and the charred skeleton of his wife,
which had some jewelry in a box, a bronze plated
box nearby. The thing is this is actually the opposite
of what was really going on. The body holding the
spear was female and the charge skeleton next to it
(09:23):
was male, which led to lots and lots of discussion
about gender assumptions in the world of archaeology. All of
this was about twenty six hundred years old, and the
determination of which sex belonged to which body came after
bone analysis. Uh. It's sort of tangentially related. Italy's art
theft police also announced that they had recovered a troupe
(09:44):
of second and third century BC a trust Etruscan artifacts
in June of this year, so it was kind of
a big year for Etruscan stuff. Researchers at the University
of Bond discovered a fourteen hundred year old mass grave
in Mexico, and this provides evidence that the Maya actually
dismembered their captives. So the team found the skeletons of
(10:07):
twenty four people in what was an artificial cave, and
the skulls were all separated from the bodies, with the
lower jaws also separated from the rest of the head. Uh.
They're still very little known about who these people were,
or their social status or why they may have been killed,
but some of them had jade tooth inserts, which suggests
that they were nobles. It's a big mystery. Yeah. Uh.
(10:31):
This year, archaeologists in Poland reported finding four skeletons from
the Middle Ages, while excavating for a new road. And
the interesting part here was that they appear to have
undergone an anti vampire ritual before being buried. Their heads
were all removed and placed between their legs. This is
another example of ones. We got one. We got lots
and lots of emails about when it happened. Uh, we
(10:53):
just could not find enough primary source information to make
a whole episode about it. Yeah, it was the description
as of the situation, We're pretty brief. We kind of
gave you everything we know just now. In October, a
team that was working in a suburb of Lima, Peru
found an undisturbed wary tomb that contained two mummified corpses
and the bodies were those of an adult in an infant,
(11:16):
with more details to come once those bodies are unwrapped.
The theory though, is that the adult was a master
weaver and the child was killed and buried in the tomb.
The coolest bit of this finding the bodies are at
least a thousand years old, and the find is intact,
even though the dig site is right in a residential neighborhood.
(11:36):
So this thousand year old, perfectly preserved thing was happening
just down the street from people's houses. So these people
are from the Wary civilization, which was around for about
five years before the Inca Empire emerged. So before we
move on to a frequently requested thing of exhumations, let's
(11:56):
take a moment and have a word from our sponsor.
That sounds delightful. Now we will get back to a
frequent subject of listener request, and that is exhumations. So
this year, Chilean poet Pablo Naruta was exhumed in April
in an attempt to discover whether he was poisoned. His
nineteen seventy three death certificate lists his cause of death
(12:17):
as prostate cancer. Naruta was a member of the Communist Party,
and his death came not long after a military coup
brought General Augusto Pinochet into power. Naruta had criticized both
the coup and Pinochet, and he had planned to go
into exile the day after he died. So naturally, this
(12:37):
led to lots and lots of questions about whether his
death was from natural causes. It was also further compounded
because he had told his driver that an unknown doctor
had given him an injection that had made his condition worse.
So six months after this exhamation. So this November, Patricio Bustos,
(12:57):
who's the director of Chilean Forensic Service, announced that a
news conference that no trace of chemical was found. So
it seems unlikely at this point that Pablo Naruta was poisoned. Also,
in the realm of discovering whether or not someone had
been poisoned, Brazilian President Joel Gular was exhumed to determine
whether he had been poisoned or died of a heart
(13:18):
attack as was officially reported he had died in ninety six.
Uh and the tests are ongoing on that one. We
don't have the results yet. Our last exhumation today is yes,
they're ara fat. If you do not recall, he was
the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization or the PLO,
and he was exhumed by French authorities last year to
(13:39):
confirm whether his two thousand and four death was the
result of poisoning. So preliminary tests that came out in
November suggests that yes, he was poisoned with the radioactive
substance polonium to ten. The levels of the substance in
his body were eighteen times higher than normal. They had
taken tissue samples both from him and from the soil
(13:59):
that he was very it in. So, according to the
Swiss report that came out at that point, the results
quote moderately support the proposition that the death was the
consequence of poisoning with polonium to tent But then on
December three, a French report was leaked that claimed that
this elevated level was really from naturally occurring rate on
(14:20):
gas where Arafat was buried, and that he was not
actually poisoned. The Swiss team came back at this point
and called the French findings debatable, saying that they had
actually measured the rate on levels in the tomb before
they opened it, and they had ruled out rate on
as a cause of the elevated levels. It's entirely possible
that this story will continue to develop and that by
(14:40):
the time you were listening to this something else will
have happened. This is the second time we have actually
recorded the piece about about yes or Ara Fat, so
that story is continuing to evolve. And now we're moving
on to I mean, I already think like digging people
up to determine if they were poisoned. It's pretty extreme,
but this is extreme science, super extreme science. Uh. In June,
(15:04):
researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the Croatian Natural
History Museum published a paper in Plos One detatling their
discovery of the world's oldest evidence of a bone tumor.
It came from the left rib of a Neanderthal who
lived about a hundred and twenty thousand years ago, and
this tumor probably came from a disease called fibrous dysplasia,
(15:27):
and before this point, the earliest bone tumors that we
knew about or between one thousand and four thousand years old.
The bone came from an excavation site which contained the
bones of at least eight hundred and seventy six Neanderthals,
and it has has not been matched with any of
the other bones or fragments there. So it's possible that
the remains from the site were the victims of cannibalism
(15:49):
or pre natural predation by carnivorous animals. So we don't know,
but this tumor is so much older than anything we
have ever seen or studied before, and to have had
to be looking through the bones of eight seventy different
Neanderthals and before finding it, I think that one has
a tumor. Yeah. Well, And one of the things about
this particular find is that a lot of times this
(16:12):
disease causes tumors like they're not it's not a malignancy,
but a lot of times it does cause tumors elsewhere
in the body. And unless they find other bones belonging
to the same body, they won't be able to sort
of tell uh just how present the disease was, or
how it was affecting the body physically or anything like that.
(16:34):
So cool, but also it almost leaves more questions answer
raising more questions. In October, a lot of our findings
are from October this year. In October, a team of
researchers published a paper in Science that examines d n
A from three hundred and sixty four prehistoric skeletons, and
these skeletons spanned four thousand years of early human history.
(16:58):
What they were looking at was tiny changes in mitochondrial
DNA from humans who lived between seventy and thirty years ago.
So what they found was that there were huge waves
of prehistoric UH migration among early humans. Previously, the accepted
belief has been pretty much that humans migrated from the
(17:19):
Near East into the rest of Europe. But these findings
suggest that there were actually really big migrations from western
and Eastern Europe as well, that it wasn't just this
one unidirectional spreading of people, that there was a lot
more movement going on between early human groups. UH. The
next one involves airborne leisure technology. So using this UH,
(17:44):
archaeologists found the Cambodian city of Maundra Pravada. They've known
this city existed before, but they could never pinpoint exactly
where because the city's location was unknown until this year
to the scientific community. Researchers were hoping as of the
announcement that they located it, that it had not been looted.
They were just kind of praying that there was nothing
(18:05):
going on there and that they would actually have this
bounty of research to be conducted, and that research is
going to go on for quite sometimes. So they have
located it and the work is sort of just beginning. Now.
We have a robot, a robot called flac to TC
used an infrared camera and a laser scanner to help
archaeologists explore the temple of the Feathered Serpent near Mexico
(18:28):
City this year. The team wound up finding these strange
yellow spears and they don't currently know what they are
about or what they mean. These speares are a yellow
clay that's covered with jarow site and they had to
use the robot to explore because there's just three ft
long tunnel running under the temple that was full of debris,
So a robot helped with that particular unearthing. So cool. Uh,
(18:53):
this one's interesting. An airport security full body scanner, which
are a little bit controversial still for some people, revealed
that an authentic Roman fresco is under a newer nineteenth
century edition which is in the louver. So they used
that same technology to examine art instead of people and
found whole magical thing. The way that this whole discovery
(19:15):
was building, some of the headlines was sort of like, uh,
actual Roman art found under fake nineteenth century art, And
I was like, that's a little harsh on the nineteenth
century art that we're talking about, but yeah, they were
able to prove that definitively that there is and much
older piece underneath this newer piece. That's so cool. That
(19:36):
reminds me of I don't know, if you ever read
the t s A blog, I highly recommend it to anybody. Um,
it's also a little disturbing because you find out how
many people are getting on airplanes, are trying to get
on airplanes and loaded weapons. But they often will be
like we found seventeen cannonballs this week from the Civil War.
We found they often find these little odd artifacts of
(19:57):
history and this kind of makes me think of it.
They used similar technology to find art under art. So
so that concludes our retrospective this year. Well, a lot
of what all has been unearthed. I'm sure that there
are many many other things. Oh yeah, that that we
could have talked about. I was I was telling Holly
(20:17):
this morning that when I sat down to actually wrangle
all of my collected stuff into notes for this episode,
normally what I do is I open all of my
stuff in tabs and and I like scrolled and scrolled
and scrolled down the bookmarks until I got to the bottom.
And then Firefox said, you were about to open nine tabs.
Are you sure you want to do that? So even
(20:40):
with yeah, we did not with exclusions, Yes, we did
not talk about all ninety nine things. And I'm sure
there are many other things besides those nine. So you
were welcome to right in if there are something that
you would like us to either have a whole episode
on or mentioned at some point in the future. And
listener mail, and I again, do you want to thank
the History Blog, which is where I getting up of
(21:00):
a lot of these stories first. Well, in a lot
of times, news sites will eventually pick up a history
story kind of almost the same way they would a
human interest story. They're like, this is a neat thing
that happened, whereas history the History blog is focused on
the historical events that are coming up. Yes, so they
kind of aggregate them more quickly. Well, and also a
lot of times there's much better context and more important
(21:22):
context than what's going around with the headline. So cool resources.
You do not already read that? Um, I have some
listener mail before we sign off from this today. I
hope you will read it. I will do that. Uh,
this is from Brian, and Brian says, I enjoyed your
podcast on smallpox. I'd like to clear up a small detail.
(21:43):
You acted surprised that the cows then are used had horns.
In fact, all cows and bulls have horns. Some beef
breeds don't have horns because of selective breeding. Very cows
typically don't have horns, but this is because they are
removed when they are calves for the safety of other
cows and people that were with them. When we'd be
hord cows on our dairy farm. We administer sedatives and
(22:04):
pay medication to reduce the trauma. I just wanted to
set a little light on a part of your podcast
that I knew something about. Thank you for producing an
enjoyable show. So thank you, Brian. Yeah, that's cool information.
It is cool, and I think I am. I am
more familiar with the with beef cow breads that have
been bred not to have farns, just because they were
(22:24):
more prevalent where I grew up, So it was surprising
to me to see a cow skin still had horns
on it. So thank you so much Brian for writing
in with that clarification. If you would like to write
to us about this or any other episode, you can.
We are at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're
also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash History class
(22:45):
Stuff and on Twitter at Miston History. Are tumbler is
at Miston History dot tumbler dot com. And we are
on Pinterest. If you would like to learn more about
what we've talked about today, come to our website. Put
the word archaeology in the search bar, and you will
find an article called what's the biggest archaeological find in History.
You can do all that and a whole lot more
(23:06):
at our website, which is how stuff works dot com
for more onness and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works dot com. M
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Frae Wilson, and today is part two of our
now traditional year end, although this is happening on the
(00:21):
beginning of a new year. Yeah, uh, you're and look
back at what has been unearthed in the world of
history and history knowledge in the in the last twelve
months or so. We mentioned previously that some of the
biggest farms this year have already had their whole own
entire episodes of the show back in the archive. So
today we're going to look at some of the other
(00:43):
lesser known things. We've grouped them together into themes. Themes
seems to emerge. Yeah, anytime we're doing podcast research, kind
of the groupings will reveal themselves a little bit. There
are some trends here, So we we have these groups
together into like themes. We also have some exhimations this
(01:05):
year which are perennial favorites. Um and at the end
of this episode, we've got some pretty extreme science responsible
for unearthing some pretty cool stuff. So yes, let's start
off with the maybe I don't want to say the
opposite of science because that's not true. But things that
(01:26):
nature unearthed for us, And I love this first one
so much so. Uh, in Germany, a badger unearthed. I
just I love that Germany of badger unearthed for us
a twelfth century burial ground. The badger found a sword,
(01:46):
bronze bowls, and ornate belt buckle, and skeletal remains. And
all of this happened in Stolpe in Brandenburg. It helps
that two people who lived on the farm are also
amateur archaeologists innew a human pelvic bone when they saw it,
So it's not as though the badger went waving it
around and saying, hey, you guys, I found this stuff.
The people recognized that they were They did not mistake
(02:08):
it for maybe an animal or one of the bodies
has been determined to be that of a warrior with
several healed injuries that looked like battle wounds. It's estimated
that he probably died at around age forty. And Uh.
This was found last autumn, so inelve but it wasn't
announced until August. So thank you badger for that great fine. Yes,
(02:30):
I love everything about that story. Now we're gonna thank
some dolphins, some dolphins working for the U. S. Navy
found a late nineteenth century Howld torpedo off the coast
of Coronado. So it doesn't really sound all that exciting
that a torpedo was found in the ocean, except that
only fifty of these torpedoes were ever made before they
(02:51):
were supplanted by other technologically superior torpedoes, and this is
only the second surviving one known to still exist. So
significant fine on the part of those dolphins who were
working for the navy. Uh, this one not so much
an animal helping us. Uh. In Norway, some melting snow
in the wake of global warming has actually unearthed a
(03:14):
number of artifacts that prior to that had been frozen.
They had been trapped in frozen ground. And this included
a bow and arrow that we're used to hunt reindeer
that are estimated to be about thirty hundred years old. Uh.
And again, this melting actually happened in eleven, but the
announcement was made. Yeah, there are lots and lots and
(03:34):
lots of artifacts that are being sort of brought up
to the surface as glaciers recede and snow's melt and
things like that. As the temperature of the Earth rises,
so Uh, it's cool that we're getting Yeah, it's it's
it's unfortunate that that what's bringing a lot of this
(03:55):
up is is the the loss of otherwise frozen animal
have dad in climate. In addition to animals who have
healthily discovered things by accident, sometimes on purpose and sometimes
by accident, a number of amateurs found cool stuff this year.
People stumble across things in their day to day doings, yes,
(04:15):
sometimes in their hobbies. This first, uh, this first unearthing.
Metal detector enthusiasts in Leicestershire, England found a seventeen hundred
year old coffin containing a child's body in October, and
it was about four ft underground, but because it was
made of lead, they found it very easily with their
metal detectors. So, but there's sort of an ongoing uh,
(04:38):
combativeness sometimes between like academic archaeologists and anthropologists and metal
detector enthusiasts with sort of ongoing questions of is this
a help or a hindrance In this case, what the
what the metal detector folks did was they immediately contacted
professional archaeologists as soon as they realized that they had
(05:01):
a potentially important find in front of them and then
they organized a volunteer guard so that it would remain
undisturbed until the pros got there. Perfect. This is sort
of the ideal situation of what when people who want
to get out with their metal detectors um uncover something
that maybe have importance. Also in October, a high school
(05:21):
student unearthed a baby duckbill dinosaur which would be known
as paras rolfus uh this fossil and he was on
a school sponsored fossil hunting trips so success at Utah's
Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument and he basically turned over
a stone and there it was so an easier fine
(05:41):
than many other people have had. It took hours of
work to excavate it from the rock, and the baby
was more than six ft long, so quite large. Yes,
I I had originally characterized it in my notes as tiny,
but it is only tiny compared to an adult. Yeah,
it is not tiny compared to actual small things. So
(06:02):
in shajan Pur, India, a farmer named Naraj Kumar found
fifteen ancient arrows and hunting tools while plowing one of
his fields. And this fine came after his plow got
stuck and the animals that were pulling it couldn't move
it any farther. He found arrows and a number of
metal hunting tools. He's actually made their way kind of
out into the community before people realized that they were
(06:24):
potentially important, and then they were gathered back up again
uh and and handed over to authorities afterward. Our next
one involves an amateur who's a very very young one
uh So cone Ergel, who was only aged seven, found
a twenty ft long dugout canoe while taking a scuba
lesson near Oclawaha, Florida, and it's planned to be displayed
(06:47):
at the Marion County Museum of History and Archaeology. But
as of now, we haven't found out a lot of
detail about how old the canoe is or which tribe
may have made it. And it actually may take up
to two years for to dry out uh in a
way that won't harm it. Yeah, they have to very
very very slowly get the because it's been you know,
underwater and waterlogged for a really long time. You have
(07:09):
to extremely slowly get the water out to try to
do it without damaging it, without causing it to crack
or anything like that. So we may not know much
about that for a little while. Yes, this exciting, Yes,
and then he'll be you know, nine or ten. Well,
speaking of ten year olds, in May, ten year old
Jack Sinclair dug up a cannon ball from a four
board cannon in his home garden in South England. And
(07:32):
it turns out that this cannonball dates to the English
Civil War. And I love this quote from him. He said,
I thought it was a stone or a ball of
some kind. It was really dirty, but when we got
the dirt and mud off, it was a cannonball. I
was like wow, because I had no idea. Jack Sinclair,
aged ten, is charming. Another ten year old found a
(07:55):
mummy in his grandmother's attict in August. As you can imagine,
this caused all inner of excitement, but it was determined
to be a fake by the time September rolled around.
It had a real skull, but the bones were all plastic. Uh.
And the skull looks like it had been a cadaverish
skull that was prepared for medical use or research. Yes,
it was not like a dug up human remain skull.
(08:17):
I mean, it wasn't like his grandmother had a creepy
situation going on in the attic. She had probably acquired
it through some yeah fairly boring means well, and then
it dates back to a time when when sort of
egypt stuff was extremely popular for people to own. That's
one that. Uh. The The initial story of the ten
year old finding mummy and grandma's attic made the rounds
(08:39):
on social and lots and lots of people were saying, hey,
have y'all seen this? Have y'all seen this? And we did,
and sadly, I mean, it is not a real mummy
of historical importance. Uh. Next up, we have several discovered graves,
mass graves and otherwise, starting with in September, archaeologists announced
that they had unearthed a completely sealed tomb in Italy
(09:02):
and the Etruscan necropolis of Tarkinia, and this contained a
prince holding a spear and the charred skeleton of his wife,
which had some jewelry in a box, a bronze plated
box nearby. The thing is this is actually the opposite
of what was really going on. The body holding the
spear was female and the charge skeleton next to it
(09:23):
was male, which led to lots and lots of discussion
about gender assumptions in the world of archaeology. All of
this was about twenty six hundred years old, and the
determination of which sex belonged to which body came after
bone analysis. Uh. It's sort of tangentially related. Italy's art
theft police also announced that they had recovered a troupe
(09:44):
of second and third century BC a trust Etruscan artifacts
in June of this year, so it was kind of
a big year for Etruscan stuff. Researchers at the University
of Bond discovered a fourteen hundred year old mass grave
in Mexico, and this provides evidence that the Maya actually
dismembered their captives. So the team found the skeletons of
(10:07):
twenty four people in what was an artificial cave, and
the skulls were all separated from the bodies, with the
lower jaws also separated from the rest of the head. Uh.
They're still very little known about who these people were,
or their social status or why they may have been killed,
but some of them had jade tooth inserts, which suggests
that they were nobles. It's a big mystery. Yeah. Uh.
(10:31):
This year, archaeologists in Poland reported finding four skeletons from
the Middle Ages, while excavating for a new road. And
the interesting part here was that they appear to have
undergone an anti vampire ritual before being buried. Their heads
were all removed and placed between their legs. This is
another example of ones. We got one. We got lots
and lots of emails about when it happened. Uh, we
(10:53):
just could not find enough primary source information to make
a whole episode about it. Yeah, it was the description
as of the situation, We're pretty brief. We kind of
gave you everything we know just now. In October, a
team that was working in a suburb of Lima, Peru
found an undisturbed wary tomb that contained two mummified corpses
and the bodies were those of an adult in an infant,
(11:16):
with more details to come once those bodies are unwrapped.
The theory though, is that the adult was a master
weaver and the child was killed and buried in the tomb.
The coolest bit of this finding the bodies are at
least a thousand years old, and the find is intact,
even though the dig site is right in a residential neighborhood.
(11:36):
So this thousand year old, perfectly preserved thing was happening
just down the street from people's houses. So these people
are from the Wary civilization, which was around for about
five years before the Inca Empire emerged. So before we
move on to a frequently requested thing of exhumations, let's
(11:56):
take a moment and have a word from our sponsor.
That sounds delightful. Now we will get back to a
frequent subject of listener request, and that is exhumations. So
this year, Chilean poet Pablo Naruta was exhumed in April
in an attempt to discover whether he was poisoned. His
nineteen seventy three death certificate lists his cause of death
(12:17):
as prostate cancer. Naruta was a member of the Communist Party,
and his death came not long after a military coup
brought General Augusto Pinochet into power. Naruta had criticized both
the coup and Pinochet, and he had planned to go
into exile the day after he died. So naturally, this
(12:37):
led to lots and lots of questions about whether his
death was from natural causes. It was also further compounded
because he had told his driver that an unknown doctor
had given him an injection that had made his condition worse.
So six months after this exhamation. So this November, Patricio Bustos,
(12:57):
who's the director of Chilean Forensic Service, announced that a
news conference that no trace of chemical was found. So
it seems unlikely at this point that Pablo Naruta was poisoned. Also,
in the realm of discovering whether or not someone had
been poisoned, Brazilian President Joel Gular was exhumed to determine
whether he had been poisoned or died of a heart
(13:18):
attack as was officially reported he had died in ninety six.
Uh and the tests are ongoing on that one. We
don't have the results yet. Our last exhumation today is yes,
they're ara fat. If you do not recall, he was
the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization or the PLO,
and he was exhumed by French authorities last year to
(13:39):
confirm whether his two thousand and four death was the
result of poisoning. So preliminary tests that came out in
November suggests that yes, he was poisoned with the radioactive
substance polonium to ten. The levels of the substance in
his body were eighteen times higher than normal. They had
taken tissue samples both from him and from the soil
(13:59):
that he was very it in. So, according to the
Swiss report that came out at that point, the results
quote moderately support the proposition that the death was the
consequence of poisoning with polonium to tent But then on
December three, a French report was leaked that claimed that
this elevated level was really from naturally occurring rate on
(14:20):
gas where Arafat was buried, and that he was not
actually poisoned. The Swiss team came back at this point
and called the French findings debatable, saying that they had
actually measured the rate on levels in the tomb before
they opened it, and they had ruled out rate on
as a cause of the elevated levels. It's entirely possible
that this story will continue to develop and that by
(14:40):
the time you were listening to this something else will
have happened. This is the second time we have actually
recorded the piece about about yes or Ara Fat, so
that story is continuing to evolve. And now we're moving
on to I mean, I already think like digging people
up to determine if they were poisoned. It's pretty extreme,
but this is extreme science, super extreme science. Uh. In June,
(15:04):
researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the Croatian Natural
History Museum published a paper in Plos One detatling their
discovery of the world's oldest evidence of a bone tumor.
It came from the left rib of a Neanderthal who
lived about a hundred and twenty thousand years ago, and
this tumor probably came from a disease called fibrous dysplasia,
(15:27):
and before this point, the earliest bone tumors that we
knew about or between one thousand and four thousand years old.
The bone came from an excavation site which contained the
bones of at least eight hundred and seventy six Neanderthals,
and it has has not been matched with any of
the other bones or fragments there. So it's possible that
the remains from the site were the victims of cannibalism
(15:49):
or pre natural predation by carnivorous animals. So we don't know,
but this tumor is so much older than anything we
have ever seen or studied before, and to have had
to be looking through the bones of eight seventy different
Neanderthals and before finding it, I think that one has
a tumor. Yeah. Well, And one of the things about
this particular find is that a lot of times this
(16:12):
disease causes tumors like they're not it's not a malignancy,
but a lot of times it does cause tumors elsewhere
in the body. And unless they find other bones belonging
to the same body, they won't be able to sort
of tell uh just how present the disease was, or
how it was affecting the body physically or anything like that.
(16:34):
So cool, but also it almost leaves more questions answer
raising more questions. In October, a lot of our findings
are from October this year. In October, a team of
researchers published a paper in Science that examines d n
A from three hundred and sixty four prehistoric skeletons, and
these skeletons spanned four thousand years of early human history.
(16:58):
What they were looking at was tiny changes in mitochondrial
DNA from humans who lived between seventy and thirty years ago.
So what they found was that there were huge waves
of prehistoric UH migration among early humans. Previously, the accepted
belief has been pretty much that humans migrated from the
(17:19):
Near East into the rest of Europe. But these findings
suggest that there were actually really big migrations from western
and Eastern Europe as well, that it wasn't just this
one unidirectional spreading of people, that there was a lot
more movement going on between early human groups. UH. The
next one involves airborne leisure technology. So using this UH,
(17:44):
archaeologists found the Cambodian city of Maundra Pravada. They've known
this city existed before, but they could never pinpoint exactly
where because the city's location was unknown until this year
to the scientific community. Researchers were hoping as of the
announcement that they located it, that it had not been looted.
They were just kind of praying that there was nothing
(18:05):
going on there and that they would actually have this
bounty of research to be conducted, and that research is
going to go on for quite sometimes. So they have
located it and the work is sort of just beginning. Now.
We have a robot, a robot called flac to TC
used an infrared camera and a laser scanner to help
archaeologists explore the temple of the Feathered Serpent near Mexico
(18:28):
City this year. The team wound up finding these strange
yellow spears and they don't currently know what they are
about or what they mean. These speares are a yellow
clay that's covered with jarow site and they had to
use the robot to explore because there's just three ft
long tunnel running under the temple that was full of debris,
So a robot helped with that particular unearthing. So cool. Uh,
(18:53):
this one's interesting. An airport security full body scanner, which
are a little bit controversial still for some people, revealed
that an authentic Roman fresco is under a newer nineteenth
century edition which is in the louver. So they used
that same technology to examine art instead of people and
found whole magical thing. The way that this whole discovery
(19:15):
was building, some of the headlines was sort of like, uh,
actual Roman art found under fake nineteenth century art, And
I was like, that's a little harsh on the nineteenth
century art that we're talking about, but yeah, they were
able to prove that definitively that there is and much
older piece underneath this newer piece. That's so cool. That
(19:36):
reminds me of I don't know, if you ever read
the t s A blog, I highly recommend it to anybody. Um,
it's also a little disturbing because you find out how
many people are getting on airplanes, are trying to get
on airplanes and loaded weapons. But they often will be
like we found seventeen cannonballs this week from the Civil War.
We found they often find these little odd artifacts of
(19:57):
history and this kind of makes me think of it.
They used similar technology to find art under art. So
so that concludes our retrospective this year. Well, a lot
of what all has been unearthed. I'm sure that there
are many many other things. Oh yeah, that that we
could have talked about. I was I was telling Holly
(20:17):
this morning that when I sat down to actually wrangle
all of my collected stuff into notes for this episode,
normally what I do is I open all of my
stuff in tabs and and I like scrolled and scrolled
and scrolled down the bookmarks until I got to the bottom.
And then Firefox said, you were about to open nine tabs.
Are you sure you want to do that? So even
(20:40):
with yeah, we did not with exclusions, Yes, we did
not talk about all ninety nine things. And I'm sure
there are many other things besides those nine. So you
were welcome to right in if there are something that
you would like us to either have a whole episode
on or mentioned at some point in the future. And
listener mail, and I again, do you want to thank
the History Blog, which is where I getting up of
(21:00):
a lot of these stories first. Well, in a lot
of times, news sites will eventually pick up a history
story kind of almost the same way they would a
human interest story. They're like, this is a neat thing
that happened, whereas history the History blog is focused on
the historical events that are coming up. Yes, so they
kind of aggregate them more quickly. Well, and also a
lot of times there's much better context and more important
(21:22):
context than what's going around with the headline. So cool resources.
You do not already read that? Um, I have some
listener mail before we sign off from this today. I
hope you will read it. I will do that. Uh,
this is from Brian, and Brian says, I enjoyed your
podcast on smallpox. I'd like to clear up a small detail.
(21:43):
You acted surprised that the cows then are used had horns.
In fact, all cows and bulls have horns. Some beef
breeds don't have horns because of selective breeding. Very cows
typically don't have horns, but this is because they are
removed when they are calves for the safety of other
cows and people that were with them. When we'd be
hord cows on our dairy farm. We administer sedatives and
(22:04):
pay medication to reduce the trauma. I just wanted to
set a little light on a part of your podcast
that I knew something about. Thank you for producing an
enjoyable show. So thank you, Brian. Yeah, that's cool information.
It is cool, and I think I am. I am
more familiar with the with beef cow breads that have
been bred not to have farns, just because they were
(22:24):
more prevalent where I grew up, So it was surprising
to me to see a cow skin still had horns
on it. So thank you so much Brian for writing
in with that clarification. If you would like to write
to us about this or any other episode, you can.
We are at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're
also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash History class
(22:45):
Stuff and on Twitter at Miston History. Are tumbler is
at Miston History dot tumbler dot com. And we are
on Pinterest. If you would like to learn more about
what we've talked about today, come to our website. Put
the word archaeology in the search bar, and you will
find an article called what's the biggest archaeological find in History.
You can do all that and a whole lot more
(23:06):
at our website, which is how stuff works dot com
for more onness and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works dot com. M
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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