December 31, 2018 • 39 mins
It's time for Unearthed 2018, where we talk about the historical things discovered or dug up in the past year. Part one includes a bunch of research into human migration patterns, mummies, mass graves, and human sacrifices, among other things.
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Episode Transcript
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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 Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. It's time
for Unearthed Poray. I know this is a lot of
people's favorite time of the year. If you are new
(00:23):
to the show. This is when we talk about things
that have been unearthed, either literally or figuratively over the
past year. I am not exaggerating. I had one thousand
and twenty pins on the unearthed board for eighteen. People
were very busy with the digging and the discovering. Yeah,
and I mean some of them are repeats. In a
(00:46):
couple of cases the exact same link that got pinned
more than once, but other times different people reporting the
same Fine, because you and I did a lot more
travel away from the office this year, and so what
would happen is I would come back and not remember
whether I had seen that story the week before we
went away. Um, so there were a little more duplicates
(01:08):
than in past years. But just by comparison, seen had
a six five pins and had one thousand twenty. So
we started a new tradition this July and that we
did it a straight up two part Unearthed in July
that covered roughly the six first six months of the year,
and so today we will be talking about the things
(01:28):
that were unearthed and roughly July of this year or later,
or at least that's when we heard about it. And
with a thousand and twenty pins. Obviously, we're not talking
about every single thing that has been unearthed the entire year.
This is a sampling of things that seemed interesting or
particularly relevant. We are not talking about any coin hordes, because,
(01:53):
as I noted last time we did this, there's just
I started making a list of all the coin hordes
just as a separate document, and there were so many
I just stopped. Uh. So this time today's episode, we
have a few big headlines that came out immediately after
we did this in July, and a bunch of things
that are related in some way to human migration patterns.
(02:14):
We also have some mummies and some mass graves and
some human sacrifices. I think this is the first time
we've really talked about human sacrifice on Unearthed. Those human
sacrifices are coming in after the second ad break if
you want an advanced warning of that. And then next time.
In part two, we will have some of everyone's favorite
bits with the Edibles and the Potables and the shipwrecks
(02:35):
and the exhumations and repatriations. So kicking off with the
stuff that popped up right after we recorded our July episodes.
While preparing for new construction. In July, a team from
egypt Ministry of Antiquities found a very large, creepy black
sarcophagus in Alexandria, Egypt. The sarcophagus was mostly encased in mortar,
(02:57):
and the team also found a large alabaster head nearby.
It wasn't immediately clear whose remains the sarcophagus might contain
or who that head might have been meant to represent.
This led to seemingly the entire internet wondering whether some
kind of curse was about to be unleashed on humanity,
because it did seem like something out of a you know,
(03:18):
mummy style horror movie. A more reasonable speculation about it
was that maybe this was the sarcophagus of Alexander the Great,
and the sarcophagus was estimated to be more than two
thousand years old. It was about the right age to
have been buried sometime after Alexander's death and his resting
place is of course an ongoing history mystery. Yeah, everybody
(03:41):
is kind of hoping they'll magically find that piece of
the puzzle, so of course one would maybe be hopeful
that this would be it. The sarcophagus, which is the
largest ever found in Alexandria, was opened later in July.
In the words of Mustafa Waziri, Secretary General the Supreme
Council of Antiquities, quote, we've opened it, and thank god,
(04:02):
the world has not fallen into darkness. I'm glad that
at least he seemed to have a sense of humor
about all the speculation about whether we were all about
to be cursed. And right away they learned that the
sarcophagus and the mortar around it that was not watertight.
It had filled up with some revolting lee stinky liquid
sewage at some point, and it also contained three skeletons.
(04:24):
At this point, at least as of what I was
able to find before recording, it is not clear whose
skeletons they were. One hypothesis is that they were the
bodies of some soldiers, or maybe that it was a
family burial. The whole thing was sent to the Alexandria
National Museum for further study. It was not Alexander the Great.
He he would not have been plunked into a sarcophagus
(04:46):
with two other bodies. I will confess that I have enjoyed,
in the intervening months all of the memes and jokes
online about drinking sarcophagus juice. It's been the best. Oh yeah,
I'm gonna make a sarcophagus jewe cocktail and I will
become immortal. After we recorded our July episodes, another thing
happened right after A team of investigators announced that they
(05:09):
had identified the vanished hijacker known as d B. Cooper.
The man they named is Robert rack Straw, and this
announcement came after the team deciphered a purportedly coated memo
allegedly sent by Cooper several months after the hijacking. I
like that we have a purportedly and an allegedly in
that same sentence. Uh. And this made a bunch of
(05:31):
huge headlines. However, Robert rack Straw is not a new
name in connection to the dB Cooper hijacking at all.
The FBI looked into him and cleared him of suspicion
back in nineteen seventy six, and then in twenties sixteen,
the FBI announced that it had quote redirected resources allocated
to the dB Cooper case to focus on other investigative priorities,
(05:54):
not exactly declaring the case clothes, but basically say we're
not working on this anymore. And this whole announcement that
came out this year did not prompt the FBI to
change that decision, so it made a lot of headlines
didn't really correlate to an actual case closed situation. The
team of investigators is led by Thomas Colbert, who is
(06:16):
an author and a filmmaker, and it includes about forty people,
including former members of the FBI, and the team's contention
is that the FBI is covering the whole thing up.
Our last bit of news that broke in July, right
after we did those episodes was that the US Justice
Department was reopening the case in the nine murder of
(06:36):
Emmett Till. Reportedly, the investigators started asking questions about the
publication of the Blood of Emmett Till we mentioned that
book and our episode on this whole case called The
Motherhood of Mamie Till mobili and one piece of information
that was revealed in that book was that Caroline Dunham
admitted to the author that she had lied when she
(06:58):
described her encounter with a Till in a store in
Mississippi back in In particular, she said at that time
that he had grabbed her and had made advances toward her,
which he did not do, and this lie directly led
to his being murdered. Some of the responses to this
news uh tended to be cynical. The Blood of Emmett
(07:20):
Till had been out for more than a year and
a half when words spread that the case was being reopened.
Members of the Till family had asked the Justice Department
to reopen the case back when the book came out.
So this led to some questions about the timing of
the announcement and whether it was made more for the
sake of appearances or for the sake of actually seeking justice. Yeah,
(07:40):
there was definitely a lot of we really hope any
people who were still alive might be brought to justice
in this, but why why now? In terms of making
this announcement like it, It came off to people as
being more about trying to make the department look good
than actually trying to seek resolution in a case. We
(08:01):
also have several episode updates um based on either prior
full on episodes of the show or prior installments of Unearthed.
Back in March of we did an episode called King
Joseph and Egypt's First Pyramid, and during some ongoing restoration
work at that pyramid cruise this year found a statue
of Osiris was probably hidden there by a priest back
(08:23):
in antiquity. During Unearthed in July earlier this year, we
talked about ongoing efforts to find the monastery where the
Book of Deer was created. A possible development on that front,
archaeologists have found a medieval game board in the area
where they have been looking. It's an etched stone disc
that dates back to the seventh and eighth centuries, and
it's connected to various games that were popular at the time.
(08:46):
That's between two hundred and three hundred years older than
when the monastery was relocated and its original location was lost,
but it does show that there was some human activity
at the site that's being excavated and unearthed and seen.
We talked a lot about the Maya, including research into
the civilizations extensive road networks and what caused the society
(09:07):
to collapse. This year has another big Maya discovery that's
building on some previous research, and basically, this new research
suggests that the Maya civilization was much, much bigger, much
more populous, and much more complex than we previously thought.
This came from a large scale lidar study to look
for evidence of Maya society in dense areas of jungle
(09:29):
that wouldn't otherwise be easy to explore or study, and
this research shows that the Maya civilization was huge and
could have supported as many as eleven million people. During
this work, the team found evidence of more than sixty
thousand previously unknown Maya structures. Way back in two thousand nine,
previous hosts of this podcast, Katie and Sarah, did an
(09:52):
episode called Why did Anchor Fall in which they talked
about all the various hypotheses for why the once thriving
evil city and what's now Cambodia was abandoned. One of
these hypotheses was that there was a problem with the
water system. Anchor Watt's water infrastructure was really complex and
also completely critical to its survival, but by the fourteen hundreds,
(10:15):
it was starting to deteriorate. According to research published in
Science Advances in October, this deterioration may have been a
major contributor in the city's being abandoned. The team used
computer modeling to simulate how weather would have affected what
was happening inside the city's water system. The city experienced
several decades of relatively dry weather followed by intense monsoons.
(10:39):
According to the simulation, this led to a combination of erosion,
accumulating sediment, and water flowing unevenly through the system, and
this probably would have led to the system's total breakdown.
We have talked about the antikitherin mechanism and a previous episode,
and then in subsequent editions of Unearthed, we've talked about
other stuff that was found at or near the same
(11:01):
shipwreck where the mechanism was found. This November, words started
to spread that a missing piece of the device had
been found on the sea floor near that shipwreck, but
Smithsonian magazine raised some doubts about that idea, noting that
the piece wasn't really finally worked enough to be an
actual part of the machine, although it could have been
(11:21):
some kind of a decorative element. I feel like the
anti kisser. A mechanism is the gift that just keeps giving.
It is it comes up everything. Ship wreck, Yeah, the
shipwreck that it came out of too. Yeah. It's a
fascinating thing. So I think a lot of people are
into it, which is part of why it always makes headlines.
We were going to talk about some other stuff that
was on earth this year after we first pause for
(11:43):
a little sponsor break. Next up, we have a few
things that are in one way or another large. So
the first one, a five year excavation of the Roman
fort Bindo Landa started in April, with excavation period ending
(12:06):
in September, and a lot of what's been discovered so
far as what you would expect if you excavate a fort.
There are building foundations and defensive ditches and roads, and
pottery and pipes and animal bones. Some of the less
typical discoveries. A small bronze hand was unearthed in April.
It is very lifelike and the size of a child's hand.
(12:27):
It's about ten centimeters it's not quite four inches long,
and it's very detailed and lifelike, with fingernails and creases
around the joints. The palm side of the hand also
has a hole that was used for some kind of attachment.
It may have been connected to the mystery cult of
the god Jupiter Dola Keynas, who is usually shown with
(12:48):
an upraised arm and a thunderbolt in his hand, and
now that hand is on display in the Vindolanda Museum.
Some other finds from this huge fort are game pieces,
an ink tablet with legible inc a well preserved basket
containing three keys, and four hippo sandals, which are horse
shoes that look almost like boats with a very long
(13:11):
and curved extension on one end. For hippos, they weren't
really shoeing hippos. Uh a cemetery discovered in Kenya is
both the oldest and the largest ever found in Eastern Africa.
An international team published their findings on it in the
(13:31):
proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this year. The
site is home to at least five hundred burials, along
with stones, pillars, cairns, and a lot of ornaments. The
cemetery also includes some very large monuments, and one commonly
held belief about societies that build big monuments is that
these societies are socially stratified but the pastoralists who built
(13:56):
this cemetery about five thousand years ago are believed not
who have had a stratified social structure at all. And
there are also other African monuments that are similarly believed
to have been built by really egalitarian societies. So this
discovery and Kenya is adding to the evidence that there
might not be just a hard and fast connection between
(14:18):
ancient societies building big monuments by nature also being socially
very stratified. Last year, doctor unn shift Deal, which I
hope I'm pronouncing correctly, was conducting a survey of caves
in western Galilee to try to find places that people
had used as shelter at some point in the past.
The survey was also aided by the Israel Nature and
(14:39):
Parks Authority. While he was there, he found a cave
containing pottery vessels very high up on a sheer cliff.
This year, the team went back to that cave to
excavate the find, and what they found was pottery that
was roughly two thousand years old, most of it very
surprisingly intact. This included two very large jars called m foray,
(15:02):
along with other storage jars, cooking pot, a bowl, and
a number of broken pottery pieces. And when I say
that these were large, there are photos of the team
crouching down in the cave and these jars look almost
as big as they are. All of this was, of course,
very fragile, and removing it from the site required the
team to very carefully wrap each vessel lifted up out
(15:23):
of the cave and then lower it down a sheer
thirty meter cliff with ropes. Based on what they found,
it seems likely that roughly two thousand years ago, someone
intended to stay in the cave for quite a while.
Based on how hard the cave was to find and
to get to, they concluded that it was probably someone
who was fleeing violence. We have a few things related
(15:46):
to mummies next, hooray. Yes, Archaeologists and Egypt have found
a mummification workshop at the Sakara and Acropolis of Memphis,
and this contains a lot of what you would expect
from a mummification workshop. There are mummies, coffins, tools, measuring cups, bowls,
and other vessels. But the team is most excited about
(16:07):
two fines in particular. One those vessels have the potential
to provide all kinds of information about the oils that
were used in the embalming process too. They also found
a gilded silver mummy mask. These are very rare, and
this is the first mask like this made of precious
metals that's been discovered since nineteen thirty nine. It likely
(16:29):
belonged to a priest. On a similar note to that
previous fine, there are other researchers who used chemical analysis
of a mummy from a museum and turin to confirm
the basic recipe for Egyptian embalming so plant oil, a
balsam type extract, a plant based gum, and a pine
like resin. They had come to the same conclusion about
(16:50):
the basic recipe before by studying the residues on the
textiles that were used to wrap mummies, but this is
the first time that they had used samples from a
body itself rather than samples of the textiles around it.
So these findings also confirmed that people in what's now
Egypt were embalming bodies at least as far back as
four thousand BC. That's about fifteen hundred years earlier than
(17:14):
previously believed, which outdates are previous episode on Mummification YEP.
This mummy in particular was previously believed to have been
naturally mummified by being left in a hot, dry desert
environment and not intentionally mummified. Now we're going to move
on to some research this year about human migration being
(17:36):
either older or more complex than was typically believed. Starting off,
for about the last century, scientists have disagreed on exactly
how humanity first populated Southeast Asia. Under one theory, hunter
gatherers arrived in the area and later developed agriculture, and
they did this on their own without contact with parts
(17:57):
of East Asia where agriculture had already developed. And then
under the other theory, these hunter gatherers arrived in the area,
but then they were later replaced by rice farmers who
had migrated from the eastern part of Asia, bringing agriculture
with them. So the second scenario was called the two
layer model. Using DNA from eight thousand year old skeletons,
(18:19):
scientists now believe that the answer is neither of those exactly. Instead,
at least four different populations contributed to today's Southeast Asian populations.
In the words of Dr Fernando Rasimo, assistant professor at
the Center for GeoGenetics in the Natural History Museum of
the University of Copenhagen. This is a far more complex
(18:40):
model than previously thought. I love how simple and direct
that statement is, like, yeah, there's a lot more moving
parts here people yet and that that continues to be
the case. And in all of these really ancient tools
that were discovered in China suggests that humans migrated there
from Africa earlier than previously thought. A team found tools
(19:02):
and bone fragments that are about two point twelve million
years old, and that's about two d seventy thousand years
older than the previous oldest evidence of humanity outside of Africa.
That previous evidence is a set of skeletal remains from
what's now Georgia that is not the Georgia in North
America obviously, which are one point eight five million years old.
(19:25):
Other research this year suggests that we might also need
to revise how we understand the evolution of humanity within Africa.
The widely held origin story has been that one population
of humans developed together in Africa before migrating to other
parts of the world, but research at the University of
Oxford and the Max Plank Institute for the Science of
(19:45):
Human History suggests that it was more complicated than that. Instead,
They suggest that there were multiple populations in many parts
of Africa, evolving independently of one another and sometimes making
connections to each other. The three start to combine to archaeology, anthropology,
and human genetics with the added layer of data about
(20:06):
Africa's climate and habitats over the last three hundred thousand years,
and it's that climate and habitat data that has changed
the picture of what may have happened. Basically, parts of
Africa have been hospitable to human habitation at different times,
so these various populations were isolated at some points, but
then they were able to reach and interact with each
(20:27):
other at other points. So it wasn't just one hospitable
place where humanity was evolving as a species. It was several,
sometimes isolated from each other, but sometimes connected places. On
a similar note, several studies came out this year connected
to the idea that migration to North America was more
(20:47):
complicated than people walked across the Bearing land Bridge from Asia.
The studies didn't suggest that humans didn't use that land bridge,
but that there were probably other arrival pathways as well. Yeah,
I I feel like that's sort of the high school
level explanation. Sure, um, and and there's there's increasing evidence
(21:10):
that as as true of all these other things, that
was more complicated in that than that. So as just
one example, a team examining projectile points in Texas found
some examples that appear to predate the Clovis people, suggesting
that there was an earlier migration to North America than
is commonly thought. There's also been research this year into
whether migrations within the America's were more complex than previously thought.
(21:34):
This includes, among other things, DNA analysis of forty nine
individuals who lived in various parts of Central and South America.
This particular research suggested that all forty nine were descended
from people who crossed the Bearing Land Bridge at about
the same time more than fifteen thousand years ago. But
from there the migration into South America came in at
(21:55):
least three different waves. We're going to pause for another
quick sponsor break, but where we get into, uh the
morma cob and kind of gory part of today's episode.
(22:15):
Over the years, Unearthed has covered numerous mass graves, many
of them associated with warfare or other strife, and this
year archaeologists found a bone pit near Manassas, Virginia that's
associated with the US Civil War, but for the most part,
it does not contain the bodies of fallen soldiers. It
(22:36):
contains the bones from amputated limbs. I feel like this
is the start of a great alternate history fiction novel, okay,
and I'm ready for it. Yeah, well, this is as
as I work on this every year. Um, I have
sort of the working document where I am doing the
(22:56):
actual episode outlining, and then I have this other document
where I'm putting stuff that like, Okay, maybe we'll talk
about that, but not quite sure. And this particular story
was one where I started reading the article and was like, WHOA,
we're definitely talking about. So the team believes that this
is from a field hospital established at the First Battle
of bull Run also known as the First Battle of Manassas.
(23:19):
They discovered a pit that contained two sets of complete
remains along with eleven limbs, and they can learn so
much from these limbs, including the types of injuries that
would lead battlefield surgeons to do an amputation and how
that amputation was performed. This also traces back to learning
more about the types of injuries that the firearms and
(23:39):
other weaponry of the time could cause. And then there's
more general information about the soldiers themselves, where they were,
what they ate and things like that. On a kind
of similar note of a whole bunch of remains that
are not whole bodies. Uh, an excavation in Melbourne, Australia
has turned up some opium pipes and a jet eerie
(24:00):
and more than a thousand human teeth, which was another
one that made me go, WHOA. We're definitely talking about that.
Many of these teeth have cavities in them, and it's
not surprising because the area was home to several dentistry
practices around the turn of the twentieth century. A lot
of these teeth were found in the plumbing, suggesting that
when the dentists pulled the teeth, they were washing them
(24:22):
down the drain. I don't know why I love that,
but I do. I'm sorry, I know it's so dark,
so I just picture like a little shop of horror
style dentists who just yankes a tooth and cavalierly tosses
it in the sink or something. Okay, So next were
moving on to another slightly grim but fascinating subject of
(24:45):
human sacrifices. Our unearthed sources this year reported at least
four discoveries of human sacrifices on three different continents. Back
in archaeologists discovered a five thousand year old Mesopotamian tomb
at the bosser Hoyuk archaeological site in what's now Turkey.
In June of this year, a team published a paper
(25:06):
in the journal Antiquity detailing what they found, and here's
a sample quote. Osteological analysis and study of the grave
goods have identified some of the dead as human sacrifices.
This was indeed a retainer burial, reflecting the emergence of
stratified society at a time of instability and crisis. The
(25:26):
tomb itself contained two children about twelve years old, surrounded
by hundreds of bronze spearheads, and then just outside the
tomb itself were the remains of eight other people, which
the team concluded to have been human sacrifices. These were
the retainer sacrifices, or people killed so they could accompany
the deceased into the afterlife. Of the eight sets of remains,
(25:49):
the team determined the ages of six of them, and
they were between eleven and twenty years old when they
were killed. It seems as though the two twelve year
old children had a high social status, but it wasn't
clear to the team whether they were also sacrificed, in
part because the condition of the tomb wasn't all that great. Yeah,
it's not clear whether they were two children who died
(26:11):
of other causes and the retainer sacrifices were to accompany them,
or if it was all part of a much bigger
ritual that involves sacrificing to high status children and their retainers.
Archaeologists sat a Neolithic henge in Germany have found seven
sets of human remains buried with ritual items that suggests
that they also were human sacrifices. The team also found
(26:34):
body parts and the remains of children and adolescence. And
this is another find that was published in the journal
Antiquity and yet another publication in that same journal. A
team of archaeologists in China have been excavating a massive
step pyramid that dates back about four thousand, three hundred years.
The pyramid was at the heart of a city that
(26:54):
existed for about five hundred years, and the team has
found evidence of human sacrifice in new recites around the city.
This includes six pits containing human heads near one rampart gate,
and there were multiple excavations of child sacrifices in Central
and South America. Excavators in Mexico found a child sacrifice
(27:15):
at the foot of an Aztec temple and what's now
Mexico City. This is probably a boy of eight or
ten years old placed in a pit under a floor
of the temple. An excavation in northern Peru has revealed
what maybe the world's largest child sacrifice at a burial
site belonging to the Chimu Empire. Art an archaeology professor
who was involved in this fine described it as quote,
(27:37):
they were possibly offering the gods the most important thing
they had as a society, and the most important thing
is children, because they represent the future, moving on from
human sacrifice to burning things. A forest fire in southern Alberta,
Canada uncovered a massive number of artifacts from the Blackfoot tribe.
(27:58):
In particular, officials at Waterton Lakes National Park said that
without the vegetation that was previously there, they had a
once in a lifetime opportunity to study as many as
two hundred and fifty Blackfoot camps, some of which date
as far back as seventeen hundred, but they had to
do it all very quickly since vegetation covered everything back
up as it regrew. One of the archaeologists on the
(28:20):
team is Kevin black Plume, who has talked about the
project as an opportunity to bring more awareness of indigenous
history and August, a fire outside of Berlin set off
unexploded World War Two ammunition that is still buried all
around the forests in the area. On top of that
being terrifying on its own, it hampered the firefighting effort.
(28:43):
Nobody knows where all of this ammunition is buried, so
firefighters had to just sort of steer clear of areas
where it seemed likely that there might be buried ammunition.
That is a terrifying prospect. The National Museum in Rio
was destroyed by fire in September, and as a consequence,
its collection of more than twenty million artifacts was also destroyed.
(29:06):
The two hundred year old museum had struggled in recent
years and had fallen into disrepair, and in the months
leading up to the fire, museum officials had criticized the
government for failing to allocate enough money to maintain and
improve it. In a tragic irony. The museum had just
secured funding for an improvement project that included fire prevention
not long before the fire fighting. The fire was also
(29:29):
made more difficult because two of the hydrants near the
museum were dry when firefighters tried to use them, so
they had to bring in water from a nearby lake.
The National Museum was Brazil's oldest historical and scientific museum
and is also described as the nation's most important museum.
A lot of the collections that are now destroyed related
(29:50):
to science and the natural world, so things like minerals, fossils,
and meteorites, but many of the collections also related to history.
There was, for example, eight twelve thousand year old skeleton
known as Lucilla, which was the oldest skeleton ever found
in the America's That collection also included art, tools and
other artifacts from Brazil's native people's and a seven hundred
(30:12):
piece Egyptian collection including five mummies. In addition to all
of that, the museum itself was an important part of
Brazil's national identity. So from so many different angles, this
is just a colossal and irreplaceable loss. Okay, moving on
from things to get me very choked up and sad
is something that makes me very happy, and that's uh
(30:33):
textiles and clothing. So the widespread assumption has been that
ancient Arctic people's learned how to spin yarn from the Vikings,
and this was an assumption because the whale and seal
oils used in the yarn made it nearly impossible to
conclusively date the fibers themselves. However, now researchers have figured
out how to basically shampoo the oils out of the
(30:55):
yarn without damaging the fibers themselves, and what they discovered
is that there's a lot of yarn that dates back
to between five hundred and a thousand years before Vikings
ever arrived in the area. So the ancestors to the
Inuit who were living in the area basically knew about
spinning yarn before Vikings ever got there, and might have
(31:15):
actually taught the Vikings something about it. A team from
the University of Cambridge has discovered that in Britain, Europe
and parts of Western Asia, spinning was not the first
method for making thread. Splicing was. In spinning, a fluffy
mass of fibers is drawn out into a thread using
something like a spindle or staff or much later a
(31:36):
spinning wheel lookout sleeping beauty. Splicing, however, takes a lot longer.
Individual fibers of plant material are spliced together end to end,
and splicing usually involves plant materials like flax or nettle.
Archaeologists working along the Thames found a medieval skeleton very
recently with its boots still on. The team speculated that
(32:03):
this person might have fallen in and drowned based on
the position of the remains, and the boots are made
of leather. Probably they were waiters. Logically, this may have
been a person who worked along the river in some
way and sadly drowned, with the boots surviving all this time. Yeah,
a lot of the headlines around it were like skeleton
found wearing thigh high boots, which conjures a different image
(32:27):
than waiters. Yes, but I understand it also probably garnered
far more clicks than waiters would have. Last up, we
have some discoveries about animals. First, the general assumption about
domesticated dogs in North America is that they were domesticated
from wolves, but research published in the journal Science in
July suggests otherwise that about nine thousand years ago, dogs
(32:51):
accompanied humans who migrated to North America from Siberia, and
then the dogs accompanied people all across the continent. However,
it doesn't appear that dogs living in North America today
are descended from these ancient Siberian dogs. Instead, it seems
as though nearly all of those dogs died after European
contact with North America. In the words of University of
(33:14):
Illinois anthropology professor Ripon Mali, who was one of the
authors of the study, quote, it is known how indigenous
peoples of the America's suffered from the genocidal practices of
European colonists after contact. What we found is that the
dogs of indigenous people's experienced and even more devastating history
and a near total loss, possibly as a result of
(33:35):
forced cultural changes and disease. Archaeological excavations in the American
Southwest have previously unearthed bones of scarlet macaus dating back
roughly a thousand years, but scarlet macaus are not native
to this part of North America. They're from Mexico and
Central and South America. That doesn't necessarily seem that far
(33:56):
away by today's travel methods, but in reality, more than
twelve hundred miles or about two thousand kilometers separate the
two regions, which also have completely different ecosystems. So we
do know that people of what's now the American Southwest
traded with the peoples of Mexico and farther south. But
the archaeological studies that have happened in the Chaco Canyon
(34:18):
in particular have uncovered a whole lot of a cause,
leading to questions of whether these were individually brought back
with traders a lot of them over time, or whether
they were bred there. According to research published in August,
the answer maybe that ancestral Puebloans were intentionally breeding the birds.
They examined the bones of fourteen different macaus found it
(34:40):
five different archaeological sites, and they found that all of
them came from the same mitochondrial hapla group one that
is comparatively rare in the wild. So it's still not
clear exactly where the first macause in the area came from,
but it does seem like they were intentionally bred once
they got there. I really love the idea of ancestral
(35:02):
bablow in macab readers. Yes, I'm imagining a very very
noisy society at that point, Yes, with lots of very
beautiful plumage. Yes, speaking of mitochondrial haplo groups. In late November,
a paper was published in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of America that
(35:24):
challenges the idea that mitochondrial DNA is passed down only
through eggs, which is how mitochondrial DNA has long been
understood to work. This paper detailed three unrelated families in
which mitochondria from sperm was also passed down through the generations.
This was previously thought to be completely impossible. This paper
(35:47):
had only been out in the world for a couple
of weeks when we recorded this episode, so it is
early to say what this discovery means for the world
of genetics. But it was also two major an announcement
to just skip over. I saw a lot of scientists
pontificating on Twitter along the lines of what do you
do when part of the underpinning of your entire field
(36:08):
is possibly not accurate? So that seems like a good
place to pause for today. Indeed, do you have a
little bit of listener mail to take us out? I
sure do. This is from Chelsea, and Chelsea says hello,
I absolutely loved your latest episode, six Impossible Episodes, Deja
Vu in the US and Canada. I loved it. I
was so excited when I read the title. I'm happy
(36:29):
to report that I did know all this Canadian history,
which made me a bit smug until we got to
the Laura si Chord section and then realized something. It
wasn't in history class that I learned all about these
stories of Canadian history. It was actually TV, more specifically
Heritage Minutes. As you both spoke about Laura si Cord,
the images of the Heritage minute on her was playing
(36:50):
in my head. Every one of my twenties to thirty
something generation knows certain Canadian history because of these Heritage Minutes.
They've even spawned a gag herod age minutes like how
Canada got its name. It's pretty hilarious and probably apocryphal.
Pierce Brosnan even appeared in one about Gray Owl. I'm
not saying that TV should be the base of education,
(37:10):
but it clearly supplemented mine. It's sort of like a
mini version of your podcast, and you can learn so
much or at the very least spark further interest in
a topic. I wanted to say two things about the
Japanese Internment. First, the book Forgiveness by Mark Sakamoto is
an amazing family history of this time. His paternal grandparents
were part of the Japanese Internment, and his maternal grandfather
was a pw in Asia at the hands of the Japanese. Second,
(37:34):
my mother was born soon after World War Two, and
she never learned about the Japanese Internment in school, perhaps
because we're on the other side of Canada in Montreal,
or for a more racist attempt to rewriting history by Canadians.
In fact, she knew that Americans had done this, but
not Canadians. She was disgusted that she never learned this
in school and only learned it when I was learning
it in high school. I really enjoy your podcast, and
(37:57):
everything you do is always interesting and entertaining. Thank you
so much for reading life into Forgotten History. Here's a
link to the Heritage Minutes to enjoy. Sincerely, Chelsea. Thanks
so much, Chelsea. I watched that Heritage Minutes while I
was working on that particular episode. I think I didn't
listen in the show notes because it was sort of
reiterating information I had already found in other places. Um,
(38:18):
but I definitely enjoyed watching that as I was briefing
myself on the story of Laurasie Cords. So thank you
so much, Chelsea. If you would like to write to
us about this or any other podcast, where History podcast
at how stuff Works dot com. We're also all over
social media at miss in History. That is where you'll
find our Facebook and our Twitter, and our pinterest in
our Instagram. You can come to our website, which is
(38:40):
missed in history dot com, where you will find show
notes for all of the episodes that Holly and I
have worked on together, including the extensively long list of
sources for these unearthed episodes, where you can read the
original articles if you can find them because it's very,
very very long, uh. And you can also find a
searchable archive of every episode ever. And you can subscribe
(39:02):
to our show on Apple podcast, the I Heart Radio app,
and wherever else you get a podcast. For more on
this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works
dot com.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. It's time
for Unearthed Poray. I know this is a lot of
people's favorite time of the year. If you are new
(00:23):
to the show. This is when we talk about things
that have been unearthed, either literally or figuratively over the
past year. I am not exaggerating. I had one thousand
and twenty pins on the unearthed board for eighteen. People
were very busy with the digging and the discovering. Yeah,
and I mean some of them are repeats. In a
(00:46):
couple of cases the exact same link that got pinned
more than once, but other times different people reporting the
same Fine, because you and I did a lot more
travel away from the office this year, and so what
would happen is I would come back and not remember
whether I had seen that story the week before we
went away. Um, so there were a little more duplicates
(01:08):
than in past years. But just by comparison, seen had
a six five pins and had one thousand twenty. So
we started a new tradition this July and that we
did it a straight up two part Unearthed in July
that covered roughly the six first six months of the year,
and so today we will be talking about the things
(01:28):
that were unearthed and roughly July of this year or later,
or at least that's when we heard about it. And
with a thousand and twenty pins. Obviously, we're not talking
about every single thing that has been unearthed the entire year.
This is a sampling of things that seemed interesting or
particularly relevant. We are not talking about any coin hordes, because,
(01:53):
as I noted last time we did this, there's just
I started making a list of all the coin hordes
just as a separate document, and there were so many
I just stopped. Uh. So this time today's episode, we
have a few big headlines that came out immediately after
we did this in July, and a bunch of things
that are related in some way to human migration patterns.
(02:14):
We also have some mummies and some mass graves and
some human sacrifices. I think this is the first time
we've really talked about human sacrifice on Unearthed. Those human
sacrifices are coming in after the second ad break if
you want an advanced warning of that. And then next time.
In part two, we will have some of everyone's favorite
bits with the Edibles and the Potables and the shipwrecks
(02:35):
and the exhumations and repatriations. So kicking off with the
stuff that popped up right after we recorded our July episodes.
While preparing for new construction. In July, a team from
egypt Ministry of Antiquities found a very large, creepy black
sarcophagus in Alexandria, Egypt. The sarcophagus was mostly encased in mortar,
(02:57):
and the team also found a large alabaster head nearby.
It wasn't immediately clear whose remains the sarcophagus might contain
or who that head might have been meant to represent.
This led to seemingly the entire internet wondering whether some
kind of curse was about to be unleashed on humanity,
because it did seem like something out of a you know,
(03:18):
mummy style horror movie. A more reasonable speculation about it
was that maybe this was the sarcophagus of Alexander the Great,
and the sarcophagus was estimated to be more than two
thousand years old. It was about the right age to
have been buried sometime after Alexander's death and his resting
place is of course an ongoing history mystery. Yeah, everybody
(03:41):
is kind of hoping they'll magically find that piece of
the puzzle, so of course one would maybe be hopeful
that this would be it. The sarcophagus, which is the
largest ever found in Alexandria, was opened later in July.
In the words of Mustafa Waziri, Secretary General the Supreme
Council of Antiquities, quote, we've opened it, and thank god,
(04:02):
the world has not fallen into darkness. I'm glad that
at least he seemed to have a sense of humor
about all the speculation about whether we were all about
to be cursed. And right away they learned that the
sarcophagus and the mortar around it that was not watertight.
It had filled up with some revolting lee stinky liquid
sewage at some point, and it also contained three skeletons.
(04:24):
At this point, at least as of what I was
able to find before recording, it is not clear whose
skeletons they were. One hypothesis is that they were the
bodies of some soldiers, or maybe that it was a
family burial. The whole thing was sent to the Alexandria
National Museum for further study. It was not Alexander the Great.
He he would not have been plunked into a sarcophagus
(04:46):
with two other bodies. I will confess that I have enjoyed,
in the intervening months all of the memes and jokes
online about drinking sarcophagus juice. It's been the best. Oh yeah,
I'm gonna make a sarcophagus jewe cocktail and I will
become immortal. After we recorded our July episodes, another thing
happened right after A team of investigators announced that they
(05:09):
had identified the vanished hijacker known as d B. Cooper.
The man they named is Robert rack Straw, and this
announcement came after the team deciphered a purportedly coated memo
allegedly sent by Cooper several months after the hijacking. I
like that we have a purportedly and an allegedly in
that same sentence. Uh. And this made a bunch of
(05:31):
huge headlines. However, Robert rack Straw is not a new
name in connection to the dB Cooper hijacking at all.
The FBI looked into him and cleared him of suspicion
back in nineteen seventy six, and then in twenties sixteen,
the FBI announced that it had quote redirected resources allocated
to the dB Cooper case to focus on other investigative priorities,
(05:54):
not exactly declaring the case clothes, but basically say we're
not working on this anymore. And this whole announcement that
came out this year did not prompt the FBI to
change that decision, so it made a lot of headlines
didn't really correlate to an actual case closed situation. The
team of investigators is led by Thomas Colbert, who is
(06:16):
an author and a filmmaker, and it includes about forty people,
including former members of the FBI, and the team's contention
is that the FBI is covering the whole thing up.
Our last bit of news that broke in July, right
after we did those episodes was that the US Justice
Department was reopening the case in the nine murder of
(06:36):
Emmett Till. Reportedly, the investigators started asking questions about the
publication of the Blood of Emmett Till we mentioned that
book and our episode on this whole case called The
Motherhood of Mamie Till mobili and one piece of information
that was revealed in that book was that Caroline Dunham
admitted to the author that she had lied when she
(06:58):
described her encounter with a Till in a store in
Mississippi back in In particular, she said at that time
that he had grabbed her and had made advances toward her,
which he did not do, and this lie directly led
to his being murdered. Some of the responses to this
news uh tended to be cynical. The Blood of Emmett
(07:20):
Till had been out for more than a year and
a half when words spread that the case was being reopened.
Members of the Till family had asked the Justice Department
to reopen the case back when the book came out.
So this led to some questions about the timing of
the announcement and whether it was made more for the
sake of appearances or for the sake of actually seeking justice. Yeah,
(07:40):
there was definitely a lot of we really hope any
people who were still alive might be brought to justice
in this, but why why now? In terms of making
this announcement like it, It came off to people as
being more about trying to make the department look good
than actually trying to seek resolution in a case. We
(08:01):
also have several episode updates um based on either prior
full on episodes of the show or prior installments of Unearthed.
Back in March of we did an episode called King
Joseph and Egypt's First Pyramid, and during some ongoing restoration
work at that pyramid cruise this year found a statue
of Osiris was probably hidden there by a priest back
(08:23):
in antiquity. During Unearthed in July earlier this year, we
talked about ongoing efforts to find the monastery where the
Book of Deer was created. A possible development on that front,
archaeologists have found a medieval game board in the area
where they have been looking. It's an etched stone disc
that dates back to the seventh and eighth centuries, and
it's connected to various games that were popular at the time.
(08:46):
That's between two hundred and three hundred years older than
when the monastery was relocated and its original location was lost,
but it does show that there was some human activity
at the site that's being excavated and unearthed and seen.
We talked a lot about the Maya, including research into
the civilizations extensive road networks and what caused the society
(09:07):
to collapse. This year has another big Maya discovery that's
building on some previous research, and basically, this new research
suggests that the Maya civilization was much, much bigger, much
more populous, and much more complex than we previously thought.
This came from a large scale lidar study to look
for evidence of Maya society in dense areas of jungle
(09:29):
that wouldn't otherwise be easy to explore or study, and
this research shows that the Maya civilization was huge and
could have supported as many as eleven million people. During
this work, the team found evidence of more than sixty
thousand previously unknown Maya structures. Way back in two thousand nine,
previous hosts of this podcast, Katie and Sarah, did an
(09:52):
episode called Why did Anchor Fall in which they talked
about all the various hypotheses for why the once thriving
evil city and what's now Cambodia was abandoned. One of
these hypotheses was that there was a problem with the
water system. Anchor Watt's water infrastructure was really complex and
also completely critical to its survival, but by the fourteen hundreds,
(10:15):
it was starting to deteriorate. According to research published in
Science Advances in October, this deterioration may have been a
major contributor in the city's being abandoned. The team used
computer modeling to simulate how weather would have affected what
was happening inside the city's water system. The city experienced
several decades of relatively dry weather followed by intense monsoons.
(10:39):
According to the simulation, this led to a combination of erosion,
accumulating sediment, and water flowing unevenly through the system, and
this probably would have led to the system's total breakdown.
We have talked about the antikitherin mechanism and a previous episode,
and then in subsequent editions of Unearthed, we've talked about
other stuff that was found at or near the same
(11:01):
shipwreck where the mechanism was found. This November, words started
to spread that a missing piece of the device had
been found on the sea floor near that shipwreck, but
Smithsonian magazine raised some doubts about that idea, noting that
the piece wasn't really finally worked enough to be an
actual part of the machine, although it could have been
(11:21):
some kind of a decorative element. I feel like the
anti kisser. A mechanism is the gift that just keeps giving.
It is it comes up everything. Ship wreck, Yeah, the
shipwreck that it came out of too. Yeah. It's a
fascinating thing. So I think a lot of people are
into it, which is part of why it always makes headlines.
We were going to talk about some other stuff that
was on earth this year after we first pause for
(11:43):
a little sponsor break. Next up, we have a few
things that are in one way or another large. So
the first one, a five year excavation of the Roman
fort Bindo Landa started in April, with excavation period ending
(12:06):
in September, and a lot of what's been discovered so
far as what you would expect if you excavate a fort.
There are building foundations and defensive ditches and roads, and
pottery and pipes and animal bones. Some of the less
typical discoveries. A small bronze hand was unearthed in April.
It is very lifelike and the size of a child's hand.
(12:27):
It's about ten centimeters it's not quite four inches long,
and it's very detailed and lifelike, with fingernails and creases
around the joints. The palm side of the hand also
has a hole that was used for some kind of attachment.
It may have been connected to the mystery cult of
the god Jupiter Dola Keynas, who is usually shown with
(12:48):
an upraised arm and a thunderbolt in his hand, and
now that hand is on display in the Vindolanda Museum.
Some other finds from this huge fort are game pieces,
an ink tablet with legible inc a well preserved basket
containing three keys, and four hippo sandals, which are horse
shoes that look almost like boats with a very long
(13:11):
and curved extension on one end. For hippos, they weren't
really shoeing hippos. Uh a cemetery discovered in Kenya is
both the oldest and the largest ever found in Eastern Africa.
An international team published their findings on it in the
(13:31):
proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this year. The
site is home to at least five hundred burials, along
with stones, pillars, cairns, and a lot of ornaments. The
cemetery also includes some very large monuments, and one commonly
held belief about societies that build big monuments is that
these societies are socially stratified but the pastoralists who built
(13:56):
this cemetery about five thousand years ago are believed not
who have had a stratified social structure at all. And
there are also other African monuments that are similarly believed
to have been built by really egalitarian societies. So this
discovery and Kenya is adding to the evidence that there
might not be just a hard and fast connection between
(14:18):
ancient societies building big monuments by nature also being socially
very stratified. Last year, doctor unn shift Deal, which I
hope I'm pronouncing correctly, was conducting a survey of caves
in western Galilee to try to find places that people
had used as shelter at some point in the past.
The survey was also aided by the Israel Nature and
(14:39):
Parks Authority. While he was there, he found a cave
containing pottery vessels very high up on a sheer cliff.
This year, the team went back to that cave to
excavate the find, and what they found was pottery that
was roughly two thousand years old, most of it very
surprisingly intact. This included two very large jars called m foray,
(15:02):
along with other storage jars, cooking pot, a bowl, and
a number of broken pottery pieces. And when I say
that these were large, there are photos of the team
crouching down in the cave and these jars look almost
as big as they are. All of this was, of course,
very fragile, and removing it from the site required the
team to very carefully wrap each vessel lifted up out
(15:23):
of the cave and then lower it down a sheer
thirty meter cliff with ropes. Based on what they found,
it seems likely that roughly two thousand years ago, someone
intended to stay in the cave for quite a while.
Based on how hard the cave was to find and
to get to, they concluded that it was probably someone
who was fleeing violence. We have a few things related
(15:46):
to mummies next, hooray. Yes, Archaeologists and Egypt have found
a mummification workshop at the Sakara and Acropolis of Memphis,
and this contains a lot of what you would expect
from a mummification workshop. There are mummies, coffins, tools, measuring cups, bowls,
and other vessels. But the team is most excited about
(16:07):
two fines in particular. One those vessels have the potential
to provide all kinds of information about the oils that
were used in the embalming process too. They also found
a gilded silver mummy mask. These are very rare, and
this is the first mask like this made of precious
metals that's been discovered since nineteen thirty nine. It likely
(16:29):
belonged to a priest. On a similar note to that
previous fine, there are other researchers who used chemical analysis
of a mummy from a museum and turin to confirm
the basic recipe for Egyptian embalming so plant oil, a
balsam type extract, a plant based gum, and a pine
like resin. They had come to the same conclusion about
(16:50):
the basic recipe before by studying the residues on the
textiles that were used to wrap mummies, but this is
the first time that they had used samples from a
body itself rather than samples of the textiles around it.
So these findings also confirmed that people in what's now
Egypt were embalming bodies at least as far back as
four thousand BC. That's about fifteen hundred years earlier than
(17:14):
previously believed, which outdates are previous episode on Mummification YEP.
This mummy in particular was previously believed to have been
naturally mummified by being left in a hot, dry desert
environment and not intentionally mummified. Now we're going to move
on to some research this year about human migration being
(17:36):
either older or more complex than was typically believed. Starting off,
for about the last century, scientists have disagreed on exactly
how humanity first populated Southeast Asia. Under one theory, hunter
gatherers arrived in the area and later developed agriculture, and
they did this on their own without contact with parts
(17:57):
of East Asia where agriculture had already developed. And then
under the other theory, these hunter gatherers arrived in the area,
but then they were later replaced by rice farmers who
had migrated from the eastern part of Asia, bringing agriculture
with them. So the second scenario was called the two
layer model. Using DNA from eight thousand year old skeletons,
(18:19):
scientists now believe that the answer is neither of those exactly. Instead,
at least four different populations contributed to today's Southeast Asian populations.
In the words of Dr Fernando Rasimo, assistant professor at
the Center for GeoGenetics in the Natural History Museum of
the University of Copenhagen. This is a far more complex
(18:40):
model than previously thought. I love how simple and direct
that statement is, like, yeah, there's a lot more moving
parts here people yet and that that continues to be
the case. And in all of these really ancient tools
that were discovered in China suggests that humans migrated there
from Africa earlier than previously thought. A team found tools
(19:02):
and bone fragments that are about two point twelve million
years old, and that's about two d seventy thousand years
older than the previous oldest evidence of humanity outside of Africa.
That previous evidence is a set of skeletal remains from
what's now Georgia that is not the Georgia in North
America obviously, which are one point eight five million years old.
(19:25):
Other research this year suggests that we might also need
to revise how we understand the evolution of humanity within Africa.
The widely held origin story has been that one population
of humans developed together in Africa before migrating to other
parts of the world, but research at the University of
Oxford and the Max Plank Institute for the Science of
(19:45):
Human History suggests that it was more complicated than that. Instead,
They suggest that there were multiple populations in many parts
of Africa, evolving independently of one another and sometimes making
connections to each other. The three start to combine to archaeology, anthropology,
and human genetics with the added layer of data about
(20:06):
Africa's climate and habitats over the last three hundred thousand years,
and it's that climate and habitat data that has changed
the picture of what may have happened. Basically, parts of
Africa have been hospitable to human habitation at different times,
so these various populations were isolated at some points, but
then they were able to reach and interact with each
(20:27):
other at other points. So it wasn't just one hospitable
place where humanity was evolving as a species. It was several,
sometimes isolated from each other, but sometimes connected places. On
a similar note, several studies came out this year connected
to the idea that migration to North America was more
(20:47):
complicated than people walked across the Bearing land Bridge from Asia.
The studies didn't suggest that humans didn't use that land bridge,
but that there were probably other arrival pathways as well. Yeah,
I I feel like that's sort of the high school
level explanation. Sure, um, and and there's there's increasing evidence
(21:10):
that as as true of all these other things, that
was more complicated in that than that. So as just
one example, a team examining projectile points in Texas found
some examples that appear to predate the Clovis people, suggesting
that there was an earlier migration to North America than
is commonly thought. There's also been research this year into
whether migrations within the America's were more complex than previously thought.
(21:34):
This includes, among other things, DNA analysis of forty nine
individuals who lived in various parts of Central and South America.
This particular research suggested that all forty nine were descended
from people who crossed the Bearing Land Bridge at about
the same time more than fifteen thousand years ago. But
from there the migration into South America came in at
(21:55):
least three different waves. We're going to pause for another
quick sponsor break, but where we get into, uh the
morma cob and kind of gory part of today's episode.
(22:15):
Over the years, Unearthed has covered numerous mass graves, many
of them associated with warfare or other strife, and this
year archaeologists found a bone pit near Manassas, Virginia that's
associated with the US Civil War, but for the most part,
it does not contain the bodies of fallen soldiers. It
(22:36):
contains the bones from amputated limbs. I feel like this
is the start of a great alternate history fiction novel, okay,
and I'm ready for it. Yeah, well, this is as
as I work on this every year. Um, I have
sort of the working document where I am doing the
(22:56):
actual episode outlining, and then I have this other document
where I'm putting stuff that like, Okay, maybe we'll talk
about that, but not quite sure. And this particular story
was one where I started reading the article and was like, WHOA,
we're definitely talking about. So the team believes that this
is from a field hospital established at the First Battle
of bull Run also known as the First Battle of Manassas.
(23:19):
They discovered a pit that contained two sets of complete
remains along with eleven limbs, and they can learn so
much from these limbs, including the types of injuries that
would lead battlefield surgeons to do an amputation and how
that amputation was performed. This also traces back to learning
more about the types of injuries that the firearms and
(23:39):
other weaponry of the time could cause. And then there's
more general information about the soldiers themselves, where they were,
what they ate and things like that. On a kind
of similar note of a whole bunch of remains that
are not whole bodies. Uh, an excavation in Melbourne, Australia
has turned up some opium pipes and a jet eerie
(24:00):
and more than a thousand human teeth, which was another
one that made me go, WHOA. We're definitely talking about that.
Many of these teeth have cavities in them, and it's
not surprising because the area was home to several dentistry
practices around the turn of the twentieth century. A lot
of these teeth were found in the plumbing, suggesting that
when the dentists pulled the teeth, they were washing them
(24:22):
down the drain. I don't know why I love that,
but I do. I'm sorry, I know it's so dark,
so I just picture like a little shop of horror
style dentists who just yankes a tooth and cavalierly tosses
it in the sink or something. Okay, So next were
moving on to another slightly grim but fascinating subject of
(24:45):
human sacrifices. Our unearthed sources this year reported at least
four discoveries of human sacrifices on three different continents. Back
in archaeologists discovered a five thousand year old Mesopotamian tomb
at the bosser Hoyuk archaeological site in what's now Turkey.
In June of this year, a team published a paper
(25:06):
in the journal Antiquity detailing what they found, and here's
a sample quote. Osteological analysis and study of the grave
goods have identified some of the dead as human sacrifices.
This was indeed a retainer burial, reflecting the emergence of
stratified society at a time of instability and crisis. The
(25:26):
tomb itself contained two children about twelve years old, surrounded
by hundreds of bronze spearheads, and then just outside the
tomb itself were the remains of eight other people, which
the team concluded to have been human sacrifices. These were
the retainer sacrifices, or people killed so they could accompany
the deceased into the afterlife. Of the eight sets of remains,
(25:49):
the team determined the ages of six of them, and
they were between eleven and twenty years old when they
were killed. It seems as though the two twelve year
old children had a high social status, but it wasn't
clear to the team whether they were also sacrificed, in
part because the condition of the tomb wasn't all that great. Yeah,
it's not clear whether they were two children who died
(26:11):
of other causes and the retainer sacrifices were to accompany them,
or if it was all part of a much bigger
ritual that involves sacrificing to high status children and their retainers.
Archaeologists sat a Neolithic henge in Germany have found seven
sets of human remains buried with ritual items that suggests
that they also were human sacrifices. The team also found
(26:34):
body parts and the remains of children and adolescence. And
this is another find that was published in the journal
Antiquity and yet another publication in that same journal. A
team of archaeologists in China have been excavating a massive
step pyramid that dates back about four thousand, three hundred years.
The pyramid was at the heart of a city that
(26:54):
existed for about five hundred years, and the team has
found evidence of human sacrifice in new recites around the city.
This includes six pits containing human heads near one rampart gate,
and there were multiple excavations of child sacrifices in Central
and South America. Excavators in Mexico found a child sacrifice
(27:15):
at the foot of an Aztec temple and what's now
Mexico City. This is probably a boy of eight or
ten years old placed in a pit under a floor
of the temple. An excavation in northern Peru has revealed
what maybe the world's largest child sacrifice at a burial
site belonging to the Chimu Empire. Art an archaeology professor
who was involved in this fine described it as quote,
(27:37):
they were possibly offering the gods the most important thing
they had as a society, and the most important thing
is children, because they represent the future, moving on from
human sacrifice to burning things. A forest fire in southern Alberta,
Canada uncovered a massive number of artifacts from the Blackfoot tribe.
(27:58):
In particular, officials at Waterton Lakes National Park said that
without the vegetation that was previously there, they had a
once in a lifetime opportunity to study as many as
two hundred and fifty Blackfoot camps, some of which date
as far back as seventeen hundred, but they had to
do it all very quickly since vegetation covered everything back
up as it regrew. One of the archaeologists on the
(28:20):
team is Kevin black Plume, who has talked about the
project as an opportunity to bring more awareness of indigenous
history and August, a fire outside of Berlin set off
unexploded World War Two ammunition that is still buried all
around the forests in the area. On top of that
being terrifying on its own, it hampered the firefighting effort.
(28:43):
Nobody knows where all of this ammunition is buried, so
firefighters had to just sort of steer clear of areas
where it seemed likely that there might be buried ammunition.
That is a terrifying prospect. The National Museum in Rio
was destroyed by fire in September, and as a consequence,
its collection of more than twenty million artifacts was also destroyed.
(29:06):
The two hundred year old museum had struggled in recent
years and had fallen into disrepair, and in the months
leading up to the fire, museum officials had criticized the
government for failing to allocate enough money to maintain and
improve it. In a tragic irony. The museum had just
secured funding for an improvement project that included fire prevention
not long before the fire fighting. The fire was also
(29:29):
made more difficult because two of the hydrants near the
museum were dry when firefighters tried to use them, so
they had to bring in water from a nearby lake.
The National Museum was Brazil's oldest historical and scientific museum
and is also described as the nation's most important museum.
A lot of the collections that are now destroyed related
(29:50):
to science and the natural world, so things like minerals, fossils,
and meteorites, but many of the collections also related to history.
There was, for example, eight twelve thousand year old skeleton
known as Lucilla, which was the oldest skeleton ever found
in the America's That collection also included art, tools and
other artifacts from Brazil's native people's and a seven hundred
(30:12):
piece Egyptian collection including five mummies. In addition to all
of that, the museum itself was an important part of
Brazil's national identity. So from so many different angles, this
is just a colossal and irreplaceable loss. Okay, moving on
from things to get me very choked up and sad
is something that makes me very happy, and that's uh
(30:33):
textiles and clothing. So the widespread assumption has been that
ancient Arctic people's learned how to spin yarn from the Vikings,
and this was an assumption because the whale and seal
oils used in the yarn made it nearly impossible to
conclusively date the fibers themselves. However, now researchers have figured
out how to basically shampoo the oils out of the
(30:55):
yarn without damaging the fibers themselves, and what they discovered
is that there's a lot of yarn that dates back
to between five hundred and a thousand years before Vikings
ever arrived in the area. So the ancestors to the
Inuit who were living in the area basically knew about
spinning yarn before Vikings ever got there, and might have
(31:15):
actually taught the Vikings something about it. A team from
the University of Cambridge has discovered that in Britain, Europe
and parts of Western Asia, spinning was not the first
method for making thread. Splicing was. In spinning, a fluffy
mass of fibers is drawn out into a thread using
something like a spindle or staff or much later a
(31:36):
spinning wheel lookout sleeping beauty. Splicing, however, takes a lot longer.
Individual fibers of plant material are spliced together end to end,
and splicing usually involves plant materials like flax or nettle.
Archaeologists working along the Thames found a medieval skeleton very
recently with its boots still on. The team speculated that
(32:03):
this person might have fallen in and drowned based on
the position of the remains, and the boots are made
of leather. Probably they were waiters. Logically, this may have
been a person who worked along the river in some
way and sadly drowned, with the boots surviving all this time. Yeah,
a lot of the headlines around it were like skeleton
found wearing thigh high boots, which conjures a different image
(32:27):
than waiters. Yes, but I understand it also probably garnered
far more clicks than waiters would have. Last up, we
have some discoveries about animals. First, the general assumption about
domesticated dogs in North America is that they were domesticated
from wolves, but research published in the journal Science in
July suggests otherwise that about nine thousand years ago, dogs
(32:51):
accompanied humans who migrated to North America from Siberia, and
then the dogs accompanied people all across the continent. However,
it doesn't appear that dogs living in North America today
are descended from these ancient Siberian dogs. Instead, it seems
as though nearly all of those dogs died after European
contact with North America. In the words of University of
(33:14):
Illinois anthropology professor Ripon Mali, who was one of the
authors of the study, quote, it is known how indigenous
peoples of the America's suffered from the genocidal practices of
European colonists after contact. What we found is that the
dogs of indigenous people's experienced and even more devastating history
and a near total loss, possibly as a result of
(33:35):
forced cultural changes and disease. Archaeological excavations in the American
Southwest have previously unearthed bones of scarlet macaus dating back
roughly a thousand years, but scarlet macaus are not native
to this part of North America. They're from Mexico and
Central and South America. That doesn't necessarily seem that far
(33:56):
away by today's travel methods, but in reality, more than
twelve hundred miles or about two thousand kilometers separate the
two regions, which also have completely different ecosystems. So we
do know that people of what's now the American Southwest
traded with the peoples of Mexico and farther south. But
the archaeological studies that have happened in the Chaco Canyon
(34:18):
in particular have uncovered a whole lot of a cause,
leading to questions of whether these were individually brought back
with traders a lot of them over time, or whether
they were bred there. According to research published in August,
the answer maybe that ancestral Puebloans were intentionally breeding the birds.
They examined the bones of fourteen different macaus found it
(34:40):
five different archaeological sites, and they found that all of
them came from the same mitochondrial hapla group one that
is comparatively rare in the wild. So it's still not
clear exactly where the first macause in the area came from,
but it does seem like they were intentionally bred once
they got there. I really love the idea of ancestral
(35:02):
bablow in macab readers. Yes, I'm imagining a very very
noisy society at that point, Yes, with lots of very
beautiful plumage. Yes, speaking of mitochondrial haplo groups. In late November,
a paper was published in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of America that
(35:24):
challenges the idea that mitochondrial DNA is passed down only
through eggs, which is how mitochondrial DNA has long been
understood to work. This paper detailed three unrelated families in
which mitochondria from sperm was also passed down through the generations.
This was previously thought to be completely impossible. This paper
(35:47):
had only been out in the world for a couple
of weeks when we recorded this episode, so it is
early to say what this discovery means for the world
of genetics. But it was also two major an announcement
to just skip over. I saw a lot of scientists
pontificating on Twitter along the lines of what do you
do when part of the underpinning of your entire field
(36:08):
is possibly not accurate? So that seems like a good
place to pause for today. Indeed, do you have a
little bit of listener mail to take us out? I
sure do. This is from Chelsea, and Chelsea says hello,
I absolutely loved your latest episode, six Impossible Episodes, Deja
Vu in the US and Canada. I loved it. I
was so excited when I read the title. I'm happy
(36:29):
to report that I did know all this Canadian history,
which made me a bit smug until we got to
the Laura si Chord section and then realized something. It
wasn't in history class that I learned all about these
stories of Canadian history. It was actually TV, more specifically
Heritage Minutes. As you both spoke about Laura si Cord,
the images of the Heritage minute on her was playing
(36:50):
in my head. Every one of my twenties to thirty
something generation knows certain Canadian history because of these Heritage Minutes.
They've even spawned a gag herod age minutes like how
Canada got its name. It's pretty hilarious and probably apocryphal.
Pierce Brosnan even appeared in one about Gray Owl. I'm
not saying that TV should be the base of education,
(37:10):
but it clearly supplemented mine. It's sort of like a
mini version of your podcast, and you can learn so
much or at the very least spark further interest in
a topic. I wanted to say two things about the
Japanese Internment. First, the book Forgiveness by Mark Sakamoto is
an amazing family history of this time. His paternal grandparents
were part of the Japanese Internment, and his maternal grandfather
was a pw in Asia at the hands of the Japanese. Second,
(37:34):
my mother was born soon after World War Two, and
she never learned about the Japanese Internment in school, perhaps
because we're on the other side of Canada in Montreal,
or for a more racist attempt to rewriting history by Canadians.
In fact, she knew that Americans had done this, but
not Canadians. She was disgusted that she never learned this
in school and only learned it when I was learning
it in high school. I really enjoy your podcast, and
(37:57):
everything you do is always interesting and entertaining. Thank you
so much for reading life into Forgotten History. Here's a
link to the Heritage Minutes to enjoy. Sincerely, Chelsea. Thanks
so much, Chelsea. I watched that Heritage Minutes while I
was working on that particular episode. I think I didn't
listen in the show notes because it was sort of
reiterating information I had already found in other places. Um,
(38:18):
but I definitely enjoyed watching that as I was briefing
myself on the story of Laurasie Cords. So thank you
so much, Chelsea. If you would like to write to
us about this or any other podcast, where History podcast
at how stuff Works dot com. We're also all over
social media at miss in History. That is where you'll
find our Facebook and our Twitter, and our pinterest in
our Instagram. You can come to our website, which is
(38:40):
missed in history dot com, where you will find show
notes for all of the episodes that Holly and I
have worked on together, including the extensively long list of
sources for these unearthed episodes, where you can read the
original articles if you can find them because it's very,
very very long, uh. And you can also find a
searchable archive of every episode ever. And you can subscribe
(39:02):
to our show on Apple podcast, the I Heart Radio app,
and wherever else you get a podcast. For more on
this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works
dot com.
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