Unearthed! in 2017, Part 1

In our annual recap, we walk through what's been literally and figuratively unearthed in 2017, including anticlimactic headlines, shipwrecks, medical finds, and a collection we've nicknamed "We told you so."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to step you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Happy
New Year, everybody happy Here. It is Unearthed time. We
are taking our annual look back at things that were

(00:23):
literally or figuratively unearthed in we know these are technically
coming out, we wait until the very end, so all
of twenty seventeen could happen. That's actually false because cover um,
we're recording these on December twelve, but my review of
the unearthed Pinterest board where we keep jack of all

(00:44):
this took place on December sixth and seventh, So there's
always this little gap, but this is a bigger gap
than normal. So I'm just gonna hope that nothing huge
happens between now and the end of the year. Also,
there are six hundred and twenty five pins on that
Pinterest board as of December seven, compared to four d
forty three on the board, So we're not going to

(01:06):
talk about all six hundred twenty five things. I feel
like if we did that, we could have a whole
other podcast that's just unearthed thing we that is a
thing that could happen, but like like it would have
to be retrospective the year before, play out over the
course of a year, and then we start again. But
we're really difficult and talk about other stuff we do. Uh.
And then also this is uh, this is a part

(01:28):
of our year end review because it's it's it's basically
part of how we keep ourselves on schedule through the holidays.
So that's why that is um. So But if you
do want to go look at all all pins there
at pinterest dot com slash mist in History and they're
on the unearthed in seventeen board and you can also
see the past few years of boards if you would
like to. One other little caveat at the top of

(01:51):
this there were whole collections of documents related to Mata
Hari and to the assassin, the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
This year that we're declassified, we are not really getting
into either of those. Uh. Maybe in the new year
we will have time to actually look at those documents
in a thorough way, but we have not yet, so
that's why we're not talking about them. In today's episode.

(02:12):
We have anticlimactic headlines shipwrecks, medical finds, and some collections
that we are calling how that get there and we
told you so, along with a couple of past episode updates,
and the next time we will have some thefts, repatriations,
stuff people found in their own collections, exclamations, and some
edibles and potables, along with a few other assorted tidbits. First,

(02:36):
anticlimactic headlines, which are stories that really had people buzzing
this year, but then they didn't turn out to be
all that earth shaking. We're gonna start with an update
from Unearthed in July, which was the exhimation of H. H. Holmes,
A k Herman mudget whose murder Castle became an infamous
part of the World's Fair and is also covered by

(02:57):
an episode in the archive. Holmes was to have been
hanged and buried in Pennsylvania in eighteen six, but this
year his remains were exhumed to settle long standing speculation
about whether that body was really his. And that's what
we talked about back in July. In spite of a
court order specifying quote, no commercial spectacle or carnival atmosphere

(03:18):
shall be created, either by this event or any other
incident pertaining to the remains. All this played out on
a History Channel series called American Ripper. Uh. And that's
a series Mudget's great great grandson, Jeff offered up his
own DNA for comparison. Also part of the show was
Jeff Mudget's hypothesis that his great great grandfather had in

(03:39):
the years before turning his own home into a murder castle,
lived in London and carried out the Jack the Ripper murders.
Mudget has detailed this hypothesis in a ted X talk
and a book called Bloodstains as well. It's based on
a couple of journals that he says he inherited from
his great great grandfather, which described murders that were committed
in London. So after the dramatic exhumation through a layer

(04:02):
of concrete that Herman Mudget had requested before his death
to try to deter body thieves, DNA and skeletal evidence
confirmed that the remains were his. In other words, j.
Tolmes did not escape execution and fake his own death.
His great great grandson still maintains that he was Jack
the Ripper though. UH. People also got really excited about

(04:23):
a colossal statue of Pharaoh Ramsey's the second A k
Ramsey's the Great, who died in twelve b C. The
twenty six ft court site statue was found submerged in
groundwater in a Cairo neighborhood, so that on his zone
is pretty dramatic, but further examination success that it is
definitely not Ramsey's the Second. It's the way less famous

(04:44):
and more recent king sam Tech the First, who ruled
from six to six sam Tech is known for bringing
stability to Egypt after decades of turmoil, but he is
not nearly as famous as Ramsey's the Second. It's still
a really large statue though, and it might be notable
as a late period fine because of its size, but
it is not the headline making Ramsey's the Great, And

(05:07):
as happens just about every single year, a new headline
about Amelia Earhart made the rounds. This time it was
photographic proof where air quoting proof, the air Heart and
her navigator Fred Noonan's survived a crash landing and were
then taken captive by the Japanese. Although this photo got
a whole lot of headlines calling it quote conclusive proof,

(05:30):
it was really not a lot to go on at all.
The figure that was supposed to be air Heart was
not even facing the camera, and the face that was
supposedly Noonan's was deeply shadowed, and speculation that this shape
in the background was her plane boiled basically down to well,
it's about the same size as the plane without trying
to make light of Amelia Earhart's death. When I first

(05:52):
saw the photo, it made me think of Bigfoot because
it looked so much like the grainy photos you see
the proof that there is a Sasquatch. It definitely felt
like grainy conspiracy theorist footage. Yeah, so things got even
more doubtful a couple of days after History Channel aired
It's Amelia Earhart the Lost Evidence, when a Japanese military

(06:13):
history buff published a blog post saying he'd found a
copy of that photo published in a book. And that
book came out in five, two years before Amelia Earhart
vanished in seven, So even before this blog post came out,
a number of news outlets started updating their conclusive proof
stories and air quotes with some skeptical rebuttals. And these rebuttals,

(06:35):
a lot of them had their own problems. They were
mainly coming from Richard Gillespie at the International Group for
Historic Aircraft Recovery or Tiger, which has been the mounting
expeditions to look for signs of air hearts, since Tiger
is the source for most of the new in quotation
marks air heart theories that don't pan out, which seemed
like they come out every every year. Really often, they're

(07:00):
out artifacts that we already know about and have already
talked about a lot of times, they're like, now we
think the makeup makeup pot means this, uh much to
my chagrin. And article that I shared on our Facebook
that was a pretty conservative, skeptical read on this whole
photo after the fact was updated with extensive quotes from

(07:21):
Richard Gillespie, and I was like, wait a minute, Well,
well maybe they're just trying to make sure they feed
this end of year material. Maybe, so that's really there
a land We've gotten a couple of emails from people
over the years that are angry that we even talk
about anything that that they're doing with the makeup pots
and the couple of boone and all that. In an

(07:43):
event that we talked about so much on social media
that we thought we'd already covered it on the show,
Salvador Dolly's body was exhumed for a paternity test. On July,
Maria pillar A Belle Martinez reported that her mother told
her she had had an affair with Dolly in ninety
fifty five, the year before Martinez was born. Martinez has

(08:04):
been publicly claiming that she was Salvador Dali's daughter since
two thousand seven. So the first big news to come
from this exhumation was that when they opened the coffin,
Delli's trademark mustache was still excellently groomed and in pristine condition.
So that made a lot of news. And then on
September six, the Gala Salvador Deli Foundation announced that the

(08:24):
results were in. Deli was not Martinez's father. Madrid Court
confirmed the announcement on the eight. So after all that,
now that would make me sad if I thought I
was Salvador Deli's child and then found out I wasn't.
But this, this whole cycle of stories made people a
lot of people angry in a number of ways. On
our Facebook, one of the ways was that another publication

(08:47):
used the word painter in the headline and people got
really mad. And then people got really mad at her
and called her all kinds of names, and I was
like man. Just like if I grew up with my
mother having told me that this famous artist was my father,
I probably would want to know if that was true
or not. Yeah, it's conscated right, Uh, to move on.

(09:13):
Seven year old Matilda Jones pulled a sword from a
lake in Cornwall, the same lake where, according to legend,
King Arthur threw ex caliber to return it to the
lady of the lake before he died. People ran with
the idea that we should make this little girl queen.
But the sword is definitely not King Arthur's. It's only
twenty or thirty years old, and it is probably a

(09:34):
film prop. And similar news, a sphinx head was on
earth in the California Desert in December, but it was
not evidence of some kind of ancient Egyptian presence in California.
I similarly saw a lot of headlines that we're like
Egyptian sphinx on earth in California, and they were not
from you know, tabloids. This is a plaster of Paris

(09:54):
set piece that was used in the nineteen fifty six
film The Ten Commandments, and according to Hollywood, lowre cec
will Be the Mill had the Exodus set from the
movie buried in the desert because it was too expensive
to remove it. But it was also of such excellent
quality that leaving it there would invite rival filmmakers to
use it for their own movies. So it's part of
film history, but it's not evidence that there was another

(10:18):
group of people in ancient time. Now, now, before we
move on, which is going to be to shipwrecks, we're
gonna pause for a sponsor break. Shipwrecks are always a
listener favorite, so we're going to talk about a few.

(10:38):
An incredibly well preserved eighteen hundred year old shipwreck was
found off the coast of Spain's Belliaric Islands. This is
then part of the Western Mediterranean that only has a
few intact shipwrecks. We we talk a lot of times
about huge collections of hundreds or even thousands of shipwrecks
found in other parts of the Mediterranean, but this is
a part where it's not not nearly as frequent. This

(11:00):
particular ship contained between a thousand and two thousand ancient
Roman jars, still basically where they were when the ship
went down. These clay jars probably contain fish sauce that
had been mass produced in Spain and Portugal thousands of
years old fish, so it might be delicious. I don't know.
These jars are a variety known as mph A, and

(11:23):
the wreck was discovered after fishers in the area started
finding pieces of m for a in their nets. I
think that might excite me if I were fishing, it
would me I cut fish and something really cool underwater.
Teams working at the wreck of the Dutch East India's
ship Roostwick, which I'm I'm just gonna say, that's probably

(11:45):
how that's pronounced, they found a mysterious chest. The ship
sank off of Kent in seventeen forty and as of
late August, the chest had not been opened yet, and
this is leading to a lot of speculation about whether
it is a bona fide treasure chest or something really
boring like ledgers, like a pile of dresses, duty rosters. Unfortunately,

(12:09):
we weren't able to find the answer to that just yet,
so it still remains a magical zone of speculation. But
the rest of the ship has its own wealth of treasures,
including cannons, fine glassware, and a bunch of Mexican silver dollars.
A bronze arm was brought up from the Anti Cithers
ship wreck this year, where there are at least seven
more statues still submerged. This arm was actually outside of

(12:32):
the wreck itself. It was under sediment on the slope
where the ship came to rest on the seafloor. I
feel like you can't have an unearthed without a little
antikither talk. I know there's gonna be stuff coming up
from that shipwreck as as people are able to get
to it because's kind of treacherous. Next year maybe we'll
have a big, fat update on it. Uh And Britain
also announced that it would give Canada the wrecks of

(12:52):
Franklin's expedition, which we've talked about Unearthed previously. The UK
Ministry of Defense officially transferred ownership to Parks Canada, although
Britain did hang on to a few of the artifacts.
That announcement cracked me up a little bit, because, I mean,
I understand it. I understand what's happening here, but the
like the their shipwrecks in the water in Canada, how

(13:16):
you're gonna send them back? Yeah, you can have that
thing that's on your property and unmovable. You can have
that that's fine UH To move on to medical finds,
A multidisciplinary team investigated a strain of leprosy now known
as Hanson's disease, that was found in a hospital cemetery
in Winchester, United Kingdom. This study used radiocarbon dating, biomolecular analysis, genotyping,

(13:39):
and other methods to examine remains from the eleventh and
twelve centuries. One set of remains in the cemetery is
from somebody outside of Britain, and so the team concluded
that it probably belonged to a religious pilgrim, and then
the majority of remains in the cemetery, more than eighty
percent of them, showed signs of advanced Hanson's disease. These

(14:00):
remains all tie into multiple questions about Hanson's disease. How
do the strains of the disease that were common in
the past relate to the strains that exist today, and
how did religious pilgrimage affect the spread of the disease
in the medieval world. The second question is still being examined,
but when it comes to the first, the m leprey
genome hasn't changed very much since the prevalence of Hanson's

(14:22):
disease peaked in Europe, so it's possible that its eventual
decline was thanks in part to increasing genetic resistance. The
oldest known prostate stones were unearthed a cemetery in Sudan
this year. The twelve thousand year old stones were discovered
in The findings weren't published in Plus one until this year.

(14:43):
Prostate stones are fairly common, but typically they tend to
be small and asymptomatic, apart from potentially contributing to urinary
tract infections. But the specimens found in the Sudanese grave
were the size of walnuts, which would have been incredibly painful.
They're so large that you might wonder if they were
literally anything else, but analysis confirmed that they formed in

(15:05):
a prostate gland. So a little bit gross, a whole
lot of yikes. Yeah, it was one of those you
look at them and kind of go, maybe that's maybe
it's a rock. Maybe it's a rock that happens to
be where this body. No, it's not a rock. Researchers
uncovered what maybe the world's first ever example of dental fillings.
These teeth, there were two of them, were found at

(15:26):
the Raparo Free Dan Fight in Italy and they're about
thirteen thousand years old. Both teeth have holes drilled into
them that extend into the pulp, and then these holes
are filled with tar like bitumen. The researchers speculated that
the holes may have been for some purpose other than dentistry,
perhaps to attach jewelry to the teeth or for some

(15:47):
of their cosmetic reason, but the fact that the holes
are filled with bitumen suggests that it was an attempt
to treat tooth decay, and there are other examples of
tooth modifications that suggests some kind of dental work dating
even early here. But this is the first known filling,
which also would have been done without effective anesthesia and
probably with a rock. So once again, a lot of

(16:10):
our medical unearthings are Yike's territory. Researchers at the University
of Exeter are challenging the widely held assumption that made evil.
Europe assumed infertility only affected women, although religious writings on
infertility generally focused on women. Historian Dr Katherine Rider found
references to infertility in men in medical texts from the

(16:32):
thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries. Now, this did not mean
that they otherwise had any sort of clue what they
were talking about, though. One test for diagnosing which partner
was infertile involved a man and a woman each urinating
into a separate pot of brand and then the one
that grew worms in it belonged to the infertil partner.
You feel like every paragraph I get to read is

(16:54):
the yikes paragraph You did wind up on Yike's rotation.
We're going to move on to our next category of fines,
which we are calling how that get there? A work
crew in old Quebec found a live cannonball. Uh. It
dates back to the Battle of the Planes of Abraham
in seventeen fifty nine. But before anybody knew that this

(17:17):
thing was live, they took it out of the ground.
They gathered around it for a photograph. Then they contacted
archaeologist Surge Rouleau, who, still not knowing that it was
a live cannonball, took it home. Once he realized what
he had Uh, he contacted a team of army munitions
experts who came to neutralize it. Uh. Do you ever
read the t s a blog? This will sound like

(17:38):
I'm going on a tangent, but it's Germaine. Sure, so
they often they do like a weekly report of everything
they had to confiscate. I highly recommend it because well,
it's unsettling, but you would be shocked at how many
times people dig something out of the ground and then
they're like, I'm gonna take this hope as a souvenir
and the t s A is like, that's a live grenade. Similarly,

(17:58):
they have been cannonballs that have shown up where they're
like the people just had in like their carry on
luggage there. That's terrifying. It is. Indeed, a four hundred
year old embellishment bearing a tutor rose was found near
the Kremlin. It's five centimeters in diameter and made of
tin and lead, and based on the positions of four holes,

(18:19):
it was probably used as an adornmentt for clothing. It
may seem odd for a four hundred year old tutor
rose complete with engraved motto for the British monarch in
one doir to be in Moscow, but the location where
it was found used to be home to the first
English trading and Ambassadorial office there. I like how most

(18:39):
of these things that I filed under how that get
there have a logical reason why they're there, But it's
still surprising at first glance. A large marble container brought
to Blendom Palace by the fifth Duke of Marlborough has
turned out to be a Roman coffin. The Duke brought
the coffin not knowing it was a coffin to the
palace and the ninety century and in the years since

(19:02):
then it was used both as a water feature and
as a planter. It's also a pretty eye catching one.
It's carved with a drunken Dionysus at a party with
mostly naked revelers, which makes me wonder whose confidant was.
Somebody's probably pretty fun by total coincidence, and antiquities dealer
visiting the palace identified it as a sarcophagus, at which

(19:23):
point they brought it inside to protect it from the elements.
From there it was sent for a more detailed restoration,
and last up, probably the most surprising of all of
these crews restoring a church in Spain, discovered that an
eighteenth century priest had found an interesting place to leave
his letter to the future inside Jesus's buddocks. Chaplain Joaquin

(19:45):
Minguez wrote the letter in seventeen seventies seven, basically making
a little time capsule for what life was like at
the time, and then he put it into the buttocks
of a statue of Jesus, which is odd because you
would think he would not enter pay that people would
ever find it there. I don't know. I mean, I'm
sure unless he just predicted, like the people of the

(20:06):
future are just going to be horrible and completely disrespectful,
while we waxed repsolic on the complete disrespect of the
future that he may or may not have believed people
would have. We're gonna pause and have a little break
for a sponsor. We are moving on to the category

(20:30):
I made up called we told you so. We here
does not mean Holly and I told you so. It
means whoever was telling historians and archaeologists things, someone had
knowledge because maybe wasn't being considered. Yes, so these are
all things that have confirmed something that people had already
been saying for anywhere from decades to centuries. First up,

(20:51):
after being given a homework assignment on World War two,
fourteen year old Daniel rom Kristensen's father made a wild suggestion,
which is that he should find the German plane that had,
according to family lore, crashed on the family's land in
northern Denmark during World War Two. Daniel's grandfather was known
for telling tall tales, and since no one had found

(21:13):
this plane during the decades of plowing their farmland that
had happened, everybody had basically come to believe that his
story of a World War two plane crash was really
just a joke. But Daniel and his father went out
with a metal detector and they found not only the
plane but also likely the remains of the pilot. They
contacted local authorities and soon a local and soon a

(21:33):
forensic specialist and a bomb disposal unit were on the
property to secure the wreckage. They also had a visit
from the German embassy. So Grandad was telling the truth.
I like that he got vindicated. A British expatriate living
in Japan has at least tentatively confirmed a long dismissed
story about British Australian's first contact with Japan. The story

(21:58):
goes that in eighteen twenty nine, convicted men aboard the
Cypress mutinyed off the coast of Tasmania, with former sailor
WILLIAMS Swallow leading the uprising and taking command of the ship.
From there, they sailed onto New Zealand, Japan, and southern China.
The men were eventually captured, taken back to England, tried
and hanged, and even though they were consistent in their

(22:20):
story that they'd been in Japan, nobody believed them. Japan's
borders were closed off to most foreign visitors at this point,
and later examinations of Japanese records didn't mention the Cyprus.
But then English teacher Nick Russell stumbled onto a watercolor
of a ship sailing under a British flag in an
online archive, and this led him to a story about

(22:40):
a ship anchoring off Hikoku Island in eighteen thirty and
a record of samurai Mikita Hamaguchi visiting the ship to
check it for weapons. So some of this is definitely preliminary,
but so far they're experts in Japan and Australia who
have weighed in and agreed that Russell might have finally
proved that these mutineers were not making the whole thing up.
DNA ealysis has confirmed that indigenous Australians have lived in

(23:03):
the same parts of Australia for as long as those
areas have been populated. In other words, Aboriginal Australians have
continued to live in the same parts of the continent
that their ancestors originally settled. This research was part of
the Aboriginal Heritage Project, which hopes to help Australia's Indigenous
population trace their regional ancestry and their family genealogy, essentially

(23:24):
documenting what's already been part of Aboriginal oral history and culture.
But this tenure project also has some possible future implications
as well. It might help authorities repatriate artifacts to the
correct Aboriginal people's and help survivors of Australia's stolen generations
reconnect with their families. As a side note, other studies

(23:45):
released this year suggests that Australia was actually settled before
the commonly cited forty seven thousand years ago. One team
found evidence of human habitation in Booty Cave on Barrow Island,
sixty kilometers off the coast of Western austra Alia, dating
back to about fifty thousand years Another team, publishing findings
in the journal Nature, concluded that a sandstone rock shelter

(24:08):
in Northern Territory was inhabited sixty five thousand years ago.
This work with the Aboriginal Heritage Project has basically confirmed
what Aboriginal Australians were already saying, which is like, our
people have been living in this place for times of
thousands of years. A genetic study of northwest North America
reached incredibly similar conclusions about the indigenous residents of southern

(24:30):
Alaska and the western coast of British Columbia. Mitochondrial DNA
analysis revealed that Indigenous people living in these areas today
are descended from the region's first inhabitants about ten thousand
years ago, and also in British Columbia, archaeologists have confirmed
with the Hiltsuck Nation's oral history has maintained that the
Hiltsuck Nation moved to a small area of land that

(24:52):
never froze during the Ice Age and survived there for
the duration. Archaelogists carefully excavated the area and found that
yet there were artifacts dating back fourteen thousand years, at
which point glaciers were covering much of the surrounding land mass,
but not that particular area. The HILTech Nation is hopeful
that the findings will support the nation's claims in any

(25:13):
future negotiations about land rights and other legal issues in
the area. So now we're moving on to a category,
like a subcategory of that one called we probably told
you these are things that may pan out to be
and I told you so. Uh so, like you said,
there's some ongoing research that might once it's done, move

(25:33):
these two that we told you so Pile the Bayatuck.
We're an indigenous people in Newfoundland, with the last known
member dying in a hospital in eight nine. A strand
of that person's hair has been passed down through the
family of the doctor who treated her for tuberculosis, so
it's not actually possible to extract DNA from that hair,
which is missing its route. But researchers were able to

(25:57):
extract some DNA from the remains of several b a
Tech people along with some of the Maritime Archaic people,
which were a prehistoric Newfoundland culture, and they did this
after seeking permission from the First Nations and Inuit people's
in this area. Currently, this work is trying to trace
the origins of these peoples and their family tree, both
in and outside of Newfoundland, but it could potentially confirm

(26:20):
whether people living today have some Baetuck ancestry. That's one
of the things where the people living there today have
said we are descended from the people who are of
this culture. It's not a culture that completely disappeared, and
so this is research that might confirm that. Following a
similar theme, North America's Ancestral Puebloans are often described as
an ancient people that no longer exists, but some modern

(26:42):
Pebloans maintained the ancestral Puebloans didn't die out, they just moved.
Archaeologists and anthropologists have been trying to verify this idea
while also respecting tribes reluctance to have DNA analysis performed
on ancient human remains. So what they've done turned to
the bones of animals that the ancient Puebloans domesticated, specifically turkeys,

(27:05):
using mitochondrial DNA and analysis. They studied turkey bones from
Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado, which was the ancestral Pebloans homeland,
and they compared it to the turkeys near the Rio
Grand region, where modern Pebloans say that their ancestors eventually relocated.
Until about the year twelve eighty, the two groups of
turkeys did not have anything in common, but then after

(27:29):
twelve eighty turkeys, and the Rio Grand had haplo haplow
groups that had previously been found only in the masa
Verde turkeys. I just have to say, I think this
is the most ingenious way I agree approached this problem.
That's somebody is very smart to have come up with
this uh and it is obviously preliminary, but a reasonable

(27:50):
explanation would be that the ancestral Puebloans moved from masa
Verde to the Rio Grand area around twelve eighty, bringing
their domesticated turkeys with them. Separate studies not strictly related
to where whether anyone will ever get to say we
told you so, looked at the pueblo in building methods
and may severy date, specifically at the Sun Temple, which
day backs dates back to about the year twelve hundred.

(28:13):
Research led by Dr Sherry Towers at the Arizona State
University Simon eleven Mathematical, Computational and Modeling Sciences Center has
shown that there's a lot of mathematical complexity that went
into building the structure, especially considering that the Pabloans who
built it didn't at the time have a written language
or a number system. So the team is now hoping

(28:33):
to figure out whether a standard unit of measure that
they pieced together from this evidence was also used in
other Pabloan sights as well. And we're going to close
out this part of our Unearthed with a few assorted
tidbits that are relevant to past episodes of the show.
In we talked about an unearthed photo believed to be

(28:54):
of Billy the Kid playing croquet, which was purchased at
a junk shop, making headlines this year. Was enough. They're
purported Billy the Kid pick, this time seated next to
Pat Garrett, who was the man who would eventually kill him.
The picture is a tintype bought by North Carolina lawyer
Frank Abrams in Tleven, and it made headlines this year
because of estimates that it might be worth millions of dollars.

(29:18):
A mass grave connected to the wreck of the Batavia
was found on Beacon Island in November. The grave contains
the remains of ten people, but the site itself suggests
that they were buried respectfully and thoughtfully, so if you
don't recall from our past episodes on the Batavia, this
eventually turned into a horrifying massacre, so researchers believe that

(29:38):
these were people who died in the immediate aftermath of
the wreck before things got so bad, rather than later
after the massacre happened. And this year we did a
two part podcast on Executive Order in nineties sixty six
and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War two,
and one of the things that we discussed in that
and other podcast was at the JAP Thea's population of

(30:00):
Hawaii was much too large to incarceerate everyone, so in Hawaii,
Japanese Americans were subject to restrictions on fishing, curfews, and
other efforts to restrict their movement. Some of the Japanese
population of Hawaii were incarcerated, though many were people who
were influential in the community, people like business leaders, clergy
and other prominent citizens. Hanuliluli Internment Center on Oahu was

(30:25):
one of seventeen such incarceration sites. Was the largest incarceration
camp in Hawaii, and it was used for Japanese Americans
as well as for prisoners of war from other countries.
Honolululi was designated as a National Historic Monument in and
excavation work began in It has continued on through this

(30:45):
year with students participating in the research through coursework at
University of Hawaii West Oahu. I remind me a little
bit of the ongoing archaeology classes at Harvard to folks
from that on the show before last up. In today's
part of our Unearthed two parter, a cold case team
led by filmmaker Tom Colbert got its hands on a

(31:07):
letter purportedly from dB Cooper that they say confirms an
FBI cover up, but the FBI has not reopened the case,
which it closed last year. This letter was allegedly sent
to newspapers after the hijacking, which would confirm that dB
Cooper did survive, and it was obtained through the Freedom
of Information Act. So we'll have more Unearthed on our

(31:29):
next episode. We sure will. But in the meantime, Tracy,
do you have a little bit of a listener mail
to top this one off? I do. It's another one
about our recent episode on the aber Van disaster, and
it is from Christina. Christina says, Dear Tracy and Holly,
I just finished listening to your recent podcast on the
aber Van disaster and was struck by the similarities to
an American tragedy in nineteen seventy two, Just six short

(31:49):
years later. It occurred in Logan County, West Virginia, and
had a similar story to what happened in Wales. The
Pittston Coal Company had a cold slurry, the mixture of
solid and liquid coal ace impoundment damp that burst, sending
a hundred and thirty two million gallons of black wastewater
into the Buffalo Creek Hollow. The waves reached over thirty
feet high as they descended on sixteen cold towns. Of

(32:12):
a population of five thousand, a hundred and twenty five
people were killed, one thousand, one hundred twenty one injured,
and over four thousand left homeless. Following this, the company
claimed the damn failing was an act of God, though
a commission determined the company was at fault and gets
guilty of murder. The state and hundreds of survivors sued
and received millions and damages. I visited Logan County in

(32:33):
two thousand eight on a service trip. It's an old county,
rich and Appalachian culture, and struggling with poverty and substance abuse.
Though physical remnants of the disaster are gone, every resident
vividly knows or remembers the flood. There have been studies
into the psychological toll the disaster placed on the survivors.
I highly recommend the book Everything in Its Path Destruction
of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood by sociologist Katie Ericsson.

(32:57):
As always, thank you for your work educating people and
sharing your pa actions for history. Best Christina. Thank you
so much for this email, Christina, um I wanted to
share it. We've gotten a couple of emails about similar
mining disasters to the one that happened in Aberan that
we're mostly about landslides or burst damns, et cetera that
had a similarly tragic effect, so I'm not going to

(33:20):
read all of them, but i did want to read
this one, so thank you so much, Christina. If you
would like to try to us about this or any
other podcast or history podcasts at how stuffworks dot com.
We're also all over social media under the name missed
in History, so that's where you will find our Facebook,
our Pinterest, our Instagram, our Twitter. Our pinterest is where
we keep an unearthed board every year, which is where

(33:40):
I keep up with this stuff all year long, so
we can talk about it at the end. Of the year.
You can come to our website, which is missed in
history dot com and you will find show notes of
all the episodes Holly and I haven't done together and
that you will also find uh an archive of every
episode we have ever done. And you could find our
podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, anywhere else who listen

(34:01):
to podcasts. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
visit how stop works dot com. M