Unearthed! in Autumn 2024, Part 1

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. It's time for our latest
installment of Unearthed. If you are very new to the show,
this is where we take a time several times a
year to talk about things that have been literally and
figuratively unearthed over the last few months. We usually start
out with updates in these episodes, and we have so

(00:39):
many updates, like two thirds of today's episode is updates,
and then we're going to talk about weapons and what
I've decided is the opposite of weapons, which is medicine.
Also some books and letters. We will have other stuff
in part two of this on Wednesday. It is October,
and sometimes I wind up in the October Unearthed with

(01:02):
sort of a collection of weirdly creepy fines. I didn't
really have that happen this year, so if folks are
waiting for that, I just want to say at.

Speaker 1 (01:10):
The beginning, Uncreepy Unearthed.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
There might be some things that are a little creepy,
but they're scattered around. There's not really a ghost story section,
so to kick off.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
On July seventeenth, twenty nineteen, we put out an episode
on the nineteen forty four Port Chicago disaster, which was
a massive explosion in the ammunition depot at Port Chicago
near San Francisco, California. So as a recap to contextualize
this update, nearly two thirds of the three hundred and
twenty people who died in the explosion were black men.

(01:43):
The US Navy was segregated and black sailors were disproportionately
assigned to manual labor, including the most dangerous work, but
conditions at Port Chicago went beyond routine dangers. Civilian stevedores
and sailors alike had warned the Navy about the dangers,
and black sailors had sought help from the NAACP and

(02:05):
the National Urban League, but none of those warnings were heated.
So after this explosion, white officers were given hardship leave,
while black sailors were ordered back to work with no
changes made to try to prevent another similar disaster from occurring.
More than two hundred and fifty sailors refused to return

(02:26):
to duty. They were all threatened with court martial and
with punishments up to and even including execution. After that threat,
more than two hundred of them did return to work.
They were charged with disobeying orders, while the fifty men
who had continued to refuse were charged with mutiny. They
were convicted and sentenced to hard labor. Meanwhile, the white

(02:51):
officers who were working at Port Chicago at the time
were cleared of any wrongdoing. Some of the discharges and
sentences that followed these convictions were adjusted later on, and
two men were exonerated, one for lack of evidence and
one on the grounds of mental incompetency. On July seventeenth
of this year, Navy Secretary Carlos del Toro fully exonerated

(03:14):
the remaining two hundred and fifty six sailors. This followed
an investigation del Toro ordered after being sworn in as
Navy Secretary in twenty twenty one, and that found significant
legal errors. We have also had several updates on the
search for victims of the nineteen twenty one Tulsa massacre,

(03:35):
which we covered on the Show on July twenty eighth,
twenty fourteen. The most recent excavation at Oaklawn Cemetery in
Tulsa has concluded after four weeks This included the exhumation
of the bodies of three people, each of them buried
in an adult sized wooden casket, and those bodies are

(03:55):
to be sent for further study. The crews also found
a bullet near one of the bodies. This excavation also
exposed forty additional burial sites. Research is ongoing to determine which,
if any, of these burials might also need to be exhumed.
Some of the graves that have been found during these

(04:15):
excavations were not previously documented, but they also don't match
up with descriptions of the graves where victims of the
massacre would have been buried.

Speaker 2 (04:24):
Yeah, they have specific criteria that they're looking for in
terms of which bodies likely need further analysis. Moving on,
prior hosts of the show, Sarah and Deblina, did an
episode on Kahokia on June eighth, twenty eleven, and Kahokia
has come up on Unearthed at least three times since

(04:46):
we started working on the show.

Speaker 1 (04:48):
Research published in the Journal of the.

Speaker 2 (04:50):
Holocene has looked at the question of whether a drought
was involved in Kahokia being abandoned in the fifteenth century.
This research looked at the levels of carbon twelve and
carbon thirteen isotopes in the soil at Kahokia. Both types
of carbon are involved in photosynthesis, but not all plants
carry out photosynthesis in exactly the same way. Plants like

(05:14):
prairie grasses and maize, which are adapted to drier climates,
can leave different signatures than plants like squash and goosefoot,
which are adapted to wetlands and forests. The people who
lived at Kahokia would have used all of these foods,
so researchers wanted to account for the differences in their
carbon signatures in their research. They did not find evidence

(05:36):
of some kind of massive drought in the period leading
up to when Khokia was abandoned. The levels of both
carbon twelve and carbon thirteen stayed relatively stable over that time,
so there's no evidence that the presence of either of
these categories of plant just suddenly dropped off. So based
on this, they concluded that there was not a massive drought.

(05:58):
This might rule out one of the possible reasons that
has been put forth for people leaving Kahokia, but it
does not offer a conclusive explanation for why they did.
On May twenty fifth, twenty fifteen, we did an episode
on the history of time capsules, and one of the
things that we talked about is that a lot of
time capsules wind up failing at their intended purpose, with

(06:21):
one reason being that people just kind of lose track
of them, so they're never retrieved and reopened. That seems
to be what happened with a metal tube discovered by
archaeologists in Poland in the nineteen nineties. The tube wound
up in a museum and this year specialists from a
Polish cultural foundation called Oscillinium realized there was something inside

(06:42):
of it.

Speaker 1 (06:44):
That something was a newspaper dated to September fifteenth, eighteen
sixty five, along with a note signed by the owners
of the building in Rothlaw, who had placed this tube
along with the cornerstone for a new water tank the
following day. A cornerstone is a pretty commonplace to put
a time capsule. This one seems to have, for whatever reason,

(07:07):
been forgotten about. Prior hosts of the show did an
episode on Pompeii in two thousand and nine, and Pompey
has made many appearances on on Earth since then, most
recently a paper published in the journal Frontiers in Earth
Science in July adds to ongoing research into whether there
was an earthquake during the eruption of Vesuvius in the

(07:28):
year seventy nine, or if seismic activity ended before the
volcano began. It's well established that there was some seismic activity,
but there have been ongoing questions about whether it and
the volcanic eruption were simultaneous, or if one followed the other.
This might sound like a minor point, since we know

(07:49):
that there was seismic activity and a volcanic eruption, but
exactly when each of them occurred would have played a
part in how the residents of Pompeii tried to escape
what was happening.

Speaker 2 (08:01):
This research looked specifically at two skeletons, both of them
believed to have been men about fifty years in age.
They were both inside of a collapsed building, and because
they were on top of the volcanic debris rather than
underneath it, researchers concluded that they had survived the initial eruption,

(08:21):
but then they died when seismic activity caused a wall
to collapse on top of them, so that seismic activity
starting after the volcano eruption had already started.

Speaker 1 (08:34):
Another find at Pompeii was unrelated to the eruption. Work
on a ventilation shaft at a nineteenth century building which
is now home to the library of the Archaeological Park
of Pompeii unearthed the tomb of a military official named
Numerius Agrestinus. He died and was buried decades before the eruption.

(08:54):
The find of this tomb during the shaft work came
as a surprise.

Speaker 2 (09:00):
Next in February of twenty eighteen, we did a two
part episode of the podcast on Sadako Sasaki, who died
of leukemia at the age of twelve after being exposed
to radiation when the United States dropped an atomic bomb
on Hiroshima, Japan. Her effort to fold one thousand origami
cranes before her death became symbolic in a movement for

(09:23):
peace and nuclear disarmament.

Speaker 1 (09:25):
Peace Park in Seattle, Washington was home to a statue
of Sadakosasaki, and we mentioned in the episode that it
had been vandalized a couple of times since it was
originally placed there. In July of this year, someone cut
the statue off at the ankles and stole it from
the park. There have been no updates unfortunately on this

(09:46):
since that happened. Yeah, it's possible there will be updates
between when we record this and when the episode comes out,
and if so, we will update people later. We ran
prior hosts episode on Tico Brahe as a Saturday Classic
on September seventh of this year, along with so many

(10:06):
updates on research that had been done on his estimated remains,
like that is the longest introduction to a Saturday Classic
in recent memory. New research published in July is not
about his remains or the exhumation. It is about his
combined residence and laboratory known as Uraniborg. Specifically, it's the

(10:28):
analysis of some pieces of pottery and glass that were
found at that site. Five of these fragments have been
analyzed to determine what the vessels that they were part
of might have contained. This revealed evidence of enriched nickel, copper, zinc, tin, antimony, tungsten, gold, mercury,
and lead, with the tungsten find being described as the

(10:50):
most surprising. Tungsten had not been isolated or described when
Brahe lived, but it does occur naturally in some other minerals.
We did an episode on Stonehenge in December of twenty fourteen,
and in our July on Earth to last year, we
talked about ongoing controversy over a plan to build a

(11:11):
tunnel to relocate the highway that runs by the site.
That controversy is still ongoing. We mentioned our recommendation that
Stonehenge be placed on UNESCO's list of Endangered Heritage Sites,
and UNESCO ultimately decided not to do that. The committee
has instead asked for an updated report on the conservation

(11:33):
of the site by twenty twenty five. Research at the
site itself has also suggested that the central altarstone may
have been brought there from northeastern Scotland. The team was
not allowed to collect new samples from the alterstone, so
this research involved analyzing pieces of rock that had been
collected in earlier digs, some of them dating back to

(11:55):
the nineteenth century. These samples match sandstone formations of the
Orchan Basin in northeast Scotland. It's not clear how the
altarstone would have been moved such a distance, and whether
that would have happened on land or by water.

Speaker 2 (12:10):
This is something of a follow up to our Year
End Unearth last year, in which we talked about a
paper that had concluded that that same altarstone could not
have come from Wales as was previously believed.

Speaker 1 (12:25):
We talked about Joser and Egypt's first pyramid on March sixteenth,
twenty fifteen. That was very long ago. According to research
published in Plus one on August fifth, this pyramid may
have been built with the help of a hydraulic lift system.
This step pyramid was built around twenty six eighty BCE,

(12:45):
and this paper concludes that the nearby Jisir el Mudir
enclosure may have served as a check dam to collect
water and sediment. The purpose of this enclosure was previously unknown,
but if that is what it was for, it may
have allowed this sediment filled water to flow into chambers
outside the pyramid, where the sediment would settle out of it,

(13:06):
with the water carrying on to fill shafts and help
to raise blocks to higher levels.

Speaker 2 (13:12):
This definitely falls into the category of further research is
still needed because if this whole system really was part
of some kind of hydraulic lift, it is not totally
clear how the water moved through it.

Speaker 1 (13:26):
Or what happened after that in an exact way.

Speaker 2 (13:29):
It's also possible and really even likely that other methods
were also used to move these large stones, things like
ramps that would maybe be more straightforwardly expected. We are
going to take a break here and when we come
back there will be more updates. Okay, we're back with

(13:56):
some more updates. The Alamo and the eighteen thirty six
Battle of the Alamo have come up on several prior
episodes of the show, including on Unearthed. Recently, conservators have
worked to preserve a cannon that was used during this battle,
as well as the earlier Battle of Medina in eighteen
thirteen and the Battle of Concepcion in eighteen thirty five.

(14:20):
Unlike the other cannons at the site, this one had
started to develop a weird, chalky residue on its surface.
The exact composition of this residue was unclear, but it
seemed to be a byproduct of chemicals that had been
used on it during earlier conservation work. The bronze that

(14:41):
was used to make this cannon did not have exactly
the same formulation as the other cannons at the site,
and that is why this one reacted to those chemicals
in a way that the other ones did not.

Speaker 1 (14:54):
First, they made blocks of bronze with a similar chemical
composition to the cannon, and then they applied various preparations
to those blocks to test their effects. The team ultimately
determined that a formic acid solution could remove the residue
without harming the cannon, so they applied it to the
surface charmingly using a tennis ball on a stick.

Speaker 2 (15:16):
Yeah, that was one of the most delightful images of
all of the Unearthed research. This time around, research published
in the journal Antiquity has looked at the identities of
two people buried in Jamestown. Prior hosts of the show
have talked about Jamestown in a couple of different episodes,
including one from twenty thirteen on news reports about whether

(15:40):
cannibalism had taken place there during the period known as
the Starving Time, and one in twenty ten about a
shipwreck that helped save that settlement. This research involved DNA
from two skeletons cross referenced with historical documents. This led
to the conclusion that they were Sir Ferdnando Oneman and
Captain will William West, both of whom were related to

(16:02):
the colony's first governor, Thomas West. What the researchers didn't
expect was the discovery that these two men were also
related through their mothers. The result from the DNA tests
then prompted some additional research through surviving historical documents trying
to figure out what this maternal connection was. One of

(16:23):
those documents was a legal case involving an oral will
that Captain West had given in courts before leaving for
the colony. This will had named Mary West Blunt as
a beneficiary. According to core proceedings. After his death, Mary
had raised William on behalf of her late sister, Elizabeth.

(16:45):
Mary implied but did not directly state that Elizabeth had
been William's mother, although she publicly described him as Elizabeth's cousin.
Elizabeth had never been married, meaning that Mary was raising
a nephew who had been born out of wedlock. Beyond
just the family story here, this research is interesting because

(17:07):
it points to some of the ways that more affluent
families could keep up appearances and avoid stigma if a
baby was born to an unmarried mother, they had enough
money to care for Elizabeth's child, and it probably helped
that Mary also gave birth to at least nine children,
including around the time that William was born, so an
additional child in the mix didn't really raise a lot

(17:30):
of eyebrows. Moving on, prior hosts of the show did
an episode on Alan Turing which came out on September tenth,
twenty twelve. Two of Alan Turing's notebooks have been put
up for sale. They relate to a portable encryption project
known as Delilah. British authorities have placed an export ban

(17:51):
on these notebooks with the hope that a British institution
will acquire them so that they will remain in Britain.
There just are not a lot of unpublished research notes
by Allen Touring remaining today, largely because he didn't actually
keep a lot of working documents or correspondence. The recommended
price for this is three hundred and seventy nine thousand,

(18:13):
six hundred eighty pounds, which is about five hundred and
sixteen thousand dollars, and Britain's export bar on these documents
expires on November fifteenth, so they are hoping some kind
of museum or institute or whatever will step up and
commit to buying it before then. We talked about Easter
Island on a recent Unearthed and Research into rock gardening

(18:35):
techniques on the island that suggested it had not been
through some kind of Echside research published in the journal
Nature in September continues to build on a growing body
of research that supports that same conclusion. The study published
in September involves research into ancient Rapanui genomes and involved
ongoing meetings and feedback from the Rapanui community. This genetic

(19:00):
research was looking for evidence that the population of what
is known as Easter Island had gone through some kind
of catastrophic collapse, and it did not find evidence of
that having happened, but it did find some suggestion of
contact between the people of Rapanui and the indigenous peoples
of South America, with that contact probably happening sometime between

(19:24):
the years twelve fifty and fourteen thirty. There's all whole
progression of episodes and unearthed installments on Easter Island in
our archive. We sort of walked through them all the
last time we discussed research about the island.

Speaker 1 (19:39):
Last time. We have done episodes on the Voynage manuscript
and on Wilfrid Voinage, and we've talked about a number
of attempts to decode that manuscript and included those on Unearthed.
This time, we're not talking about a decoding attempt. Lisa
Fagan Davis, the executive director of the Medieval Academy of America,

(20:00):
published a set of ten multi spectral scans of pages
of the manuscript. These include UV and infrared scans, which
can reveal previously undetected details about the pages themselves. Even
if you don't know anything about how to interpret any
of this, these look really cool, Yes they do. Davis
wrote about the images in her blog in September. Scans

(20:23):
of the ten pages are available in a Google Drive folder.
The scans are actually taken ten years ago, and the
plan at that time had been to make them available
right away or at least pretty quickly, but for various
reasons that didn't happen until now. Davis's blog is at
Manuscript Roadtrip dot WordPress dot com, and the blog post
includes some cautions about jumping to conclusions based on these images,

(20:47):
plus some advice on how to understand this kind of imaging.
There's really so much stuff about all of this in
Davis's blog post, including a look at some Roman alphabet
characters that were at to the manuscript. Later on Davis
concludes that they were made by Johannes Marcus Marcy, who
owned the manuscript in the mid seventeenth century. Davis also

(21:10):
looks at questions like whether there is evidence that this
parchment was reused, which there really isn't. If you're interested
in the Voyage Manuscript at all, like this whole blog
post is well worth a visit and a thoroughread on
your own. Again, it is that manuscript road trip that
is all one word dot WordPress dot com. The Isabella

(21:32):
Stewart Gardner Museum is undergoing a major restoration project which
is moving into its final phase, and this includes work
in the Dutch Room, which was home to six of
the thirteen works that were stolen in a heist in
nineteen ninety. We put on an update to past Hosts
episode on that heist on April thirtieth, twenty fourteen.

Speaker 2 (21:53):
This restoration work is being done without closing the gallery
off to museum visitors, so people will be able to
see the work as it happens. The work that's being
done involves conservation of the artwork as well as restoration
and renovation of the building itself. The lighting is also
going to be updated to make it more energy efficient.

Speaker 1 (22:16):
Next, new photos of the Titanic show ongoing decay at
the REX site, including the collapse of part of the
deck railing. The fifteen foot section of railing basically fell
straight down to the seafloor. A bronze statue of the
goddess Diana has been found on the seafloor as well.
This statue used to be on top of the fireplace

(22:38):
mantle in the first class lounge. Unlike the railing, which
seems to have fallen due to the rex inevitable decay,
this statue was likely dislodged as the ship broke apart
when it sank.

Speaker 2 (22:50):
Kind of tangentially related, The US Coast Guard held hearings
into the disaster aboard the titan submersible that imploded bring
a voyage to the Titanic in twenty twenty three. In
our episode on the wreck of the Andrea Doria, we
talked about one of the efforts to map that wreck
that had been done by Oceangate in twenty sixteen using

(23:14):
one of its earlier submersibles, which was known as Cyclops one.
There were some contradictions and witness testimonies about the details
of this dive and sort of what the tenor of
the conversation was to the people who were on board,
but multiple witnesses stated that Oceangate founder Stockton Rush got

(23:35):
the cyclops one stuck under part of the Andrea Doria
during one of those dives. The Titanic has come up
in a number of past episodes, and we talked about
the Andrea Doria in May of this year, moving on
Sir John Franklin's expedition aboard the HMS Arabis and the
HMS Terror has been the subject of a number of

(23:56):
episodes and updates on Unearthed. The latest researchers have identified
a jawbone that was found on King William Island as
belonging to James Fitzjames, a captain on the HMS Erebus.
This conclusion came from comparison between DNA extracted from the
jawbone to twenty five living descendants of the expedition's crew.

(24:20):
They also noted that this jaw bone showed evidence of
cut marks that could be indicative of cannibalism. In our
last update on May twenty eighth, twenty twenty two, we
released an episode on Thomas Hardy and his relationships with
his first wife, Emma Gifford's and his second wife, Florence Dugdale.

(24:40):
Hardy had a home built in Dorset known as max Gate,
and that's where he lived with Emma and where he
met Florence, and then where he lived with Florence after
he married her. After Emma's death, some burial sites were
discovered while the house was being built, which led Hardy
to believe that the land had once been an ancient burial.

(25:01):
In eighteen ninety one he found a large sarsen stone,
which he called the Druid Stone and had re erected
in his garden. But decades after his death, it was
discovered that a large circular Neolithic enclosure described as a
proto stone hinge, was buried underneath it. This enclosure dated
back to about three thousand BCE. A more recent dig

(25:23):
in twenty twenty two found that there was activity at
the site at least five hundred years before that, meaning
that this is one of the oldest sites in southwestern England.
Part of this enclosure was destroyed during roadwork, which uncovered
another sarsen stone that was also erected in the garden,
but now this site has been protected remains of Neolithic

(25:47):
enclosure and associated features at max Gate was added to
England's National Heritage List in August of this year. Considering
the role that Stonehenge played in Hardy's novel Test of
the Durbervilles, which is probably the novel he's best known for.
It's the one I had to read in high school.

Speaker 1 (26:05):
Uh. I think he might have thought that was cool.
I bet he would. I was a Jude, the obscure girl. Uh.
That is it for our many updates this round, So
we are going to pause here for a sponsor break.

(26:25):
We have a few finds this time that can fall
under the umbrella of weaponry or possibly tools which could
be a weapon in some circumstances. We will start with
some axes, which can be both a weapon and a tool.
At the end of June, someone mailed two axe heads
to the National Museum of Ireland. They mailed them in

(26:48):
a porridge box cushioned in foam that had been cut
to fit. I am delighted by that packaging method. A
letter accompanying the axe heads was not signed, but said
that someone had found them using a metal detector and
wanted them to be conserved. Museum staff analyzed the axe
heads and they determined that they dated back to the

(27:10):
Early Bronze Age, which is about twenty one fifty to
two thousand BCE. But the staff needed to know.

Speaker 2 (27:17):
More about exactly where these axe heads were found to
be able to really study them, so the museum put
out a public appeal for the person who had sent
them to come forward.

Speaker 1 (27:28):
In July, a farmer named Thomas Dunn came forward not
long after. It's illegal in Ireland to use a metal
detector to look for artifacts, but that's not what Done
was doing. A piece of metal had fallen off of
a mower while he was cutting silage, and he was
afraid it would damage the silog harvester if he didn't
find it, so he was looking for this piece of

(27:50):
mower when he just accidentally happened to stumble onto the
axe heads.

Speaker 2 (27:55):
Since coming forward, Done has taken researchers from the museum
to the spot where he found this axe head. In
quotes to reporters, he described the folks from the National
Museum of Ireland as quote horrid happy over this whole discovery.
This is a colloquialism I had not heard before, and

(28:16):
I find horrid happy to be so delightful.

Speaker 1 (28:21):
And perfect for the Halloween season. I'm horrid happy. In
other axe news, a marine archaeologist off the coast of
Erandahl in southern Norway no Anna or Elsa there has
found an axe head, this one dating to the Middle
Bronze Age around eleven hundred BCE. This is the first
known prehistoric Middle artifact to be found in Norwegian waters,

(28:44):
and he made this find during a routine survey in
a pile of much more recent ship ballist It's not
clear whether this axe was part of the ballast or
whether it came from a different shipwreck.

Speaker 2 (28:56):
Our next weapon related find is that archaeologists working at
Minuteman National Historical Park in Conquered, Massachusetts, have found five
musket balls from the Battle of Conquered, which took place
on April nineteen, seventeen seventy five. The musket balls were
unearthed last year. Preliminary work suggested they had been fired

(29:18):
by the colonial militia at British troops. The musket balls
range in size from forty caliber to seventy caliber, and
that's part of the reasoning for identifying them as coming
from militia weapons, because unlike the British forces who had
standardized ammunition. The militia brought their own weapons and ammo,

(29:38):
so it's tended to be an assortment of whatever people
had to work with. Also, these musket balls were intact,
so it does not appear that they actually hit anything
they were being fired at.

Speaker 1 (29:51):
Moving on. In prior episodes of Unearth, we've talked about
research involving projectile points, thrown javelins and ad laddles, and
and how prehistoric peoples might have used these things to hunt.
Research published in the journal Plus One comes to a
different conclusion that Clovis points may have been used on
planted pikes braced against the ground in the face of

(30:14):
charging megafauna. Clovis points are sometimes described as projectile points,
but since the weapons they were attached to have not
survived until today, we don't know for sure exactly how
they were used. The team reviewed historical documents on the
use of pikes and other braced weapons, and then to

(30:35):
test this hypothesis, the team designed a series of experiments
to see things like how much force it took for
the point of one of these, like a replica that
they made to pierce a piece of untanned cowhide, how
much force it took for the lashings holding a point
to a shaft to rupture, and what actually happened when

(30:57):
a point encountered an oak plank, which was to simulate bone.
They found that it was possible for a Clovis point
lash to a braced shaft to seriously injure something like
a large mammal. The proposed next step is to construct
a dynamic experiment with a moving mass, something like a
block of ballistics gel and our last weapon, a sword

(31:21):
has disappeared from the village of Rocamadour in southwestern France.
This is a sword that, according to lore, was Durandahal,
which belonged to Charlemagne's night Roland and was made famous
in the epic poem The Song of Roland. To be clear,
this sword that has disappeared did not date all the

(31:41):
way back to thirteen hundred years ago when Charlemagne was living.
It was a replica that was installed in the rock
as a tourist attraction, but that might have happened as
early ago as the seventeen eighties. So while the town
acknowledges that this was.

Speaker 2 (31:56):
Not really Roland's sword, still sees the sword as part
of the local heritage.

Speaker 1 (32:04):
Moving on now to a few medical finds. Researchers have
used CT scanning to get a closer look at two
thousand year old Roman surgical tools to try to develop
a more thorough understanding of how they might have been used.
These instruments include a bronze scalpel handle, two surgical probes,
a spoon, and two needles.

Speaker 2 (32:26):
This CT scanner created three D models of each of
the tools, as well as using X ray technologies to
give a sense of what the tools looked like underneath
the existing corrosion that's on their surface. Three D printed
versions of these models will also allow some further research
and the creation of physical replicas to be used in classrooms.

(32:49):
This research has already revealed some things about the tools themselves.
For example, the way this scalpel handle was crafted allowed
for easy removal and replacement of scalpel blades. Researchers from
the University of Gottenburg in Sweden and the Globe Institute
have analyzed the bones of one hundred eight people who

(33:09):
died about five thousand years ago, and they found evidence
to suggest that eighteen of them, or seventeen percent, were
infected with plague when they died. Over a period of
about one hundred twenty years, cases of plague struck three
different generations of the same family. This suggests that plague
was common in Scandinavia during this period. None of the

(33:33):
strains involved were the one that caused the Black Death
at the start of the Second Plague pandemic thousands of
years later, but research suggested this strain was capable of
causing an epidemic. This means it's possible that plague may
have played a role in the population loss that happened
around this time, which is known as the Neolithic Decline,

(33:56):
but researchers involved with this project specified that this is
really sir cumstantial. It doesn't conclusively prove that plague was
involved in the Neolithic decline, but it does rule out
theories that argued that plague was not a factor, or
even that plague did not exist in this area at

(34:16):
this point.

Speaker 1 (34:17):
Speaking of illnesses, researchers from Sweden and Spain have been
studying an isolated early medieval community in northern Spain. This
was an interdisciplinary project that looked at this community and
the people who lived there from a lot of different angles,
including evidence of illnesses and conditions that the people experienced.

(34:38):
One turned out to be very olavirus, that is, the
virus that causes smallpox, specifically a strain that was similar
to ones found in Scandinavia, Germany, and Russia. This offers
a possible explanation for how and when smallpox was first
introduced into what's now Spain, but also how widespread different

(34:59):
strains of small p word during the Middle Ages. Lastly,
researchers at the University of Milan have found traces of
components from earth roxalem coca in mummified brain matter. The
tissue dates back to the early sixteen hundreds in Italy,
and cocaine is derived from this plant. Earth roxalem coca

(35:23):
is native to South America, and it was previously thought
to have been introduced to Europe in the eighteenth century,
so later than this. Attempts to send samples across the
Atlantic Ocean earlier than that failed because the samples just
did not survive the journey. This tissue came from a
burial site near a major hospital, but it's not totally

(35:47):
clear whether people might have been using this plant for
medicine or for recreation. People probably would have used it
by chewing on the leaves, and it isn't documented in
hospital records.

Speaker 2 (35:59):
Now we've got some books and letters, and I took
a kind of expansive view of what counts as a book.
Here first, twelve thousand year old markings on a stone
pillar in Turkya may be the world's oldest solar calendar.

Speaker 1 (36:17):
This conclusion comes from counting little V shaped symbols that
were carved into the pillars, finding that they might represent
three hundred and sixty five days. There are also additional
symbols that would line up with the summer solstice, and
markings for the phases of the Sun and the moon.
The carvings at this temple also seem to mark the

(36:38):
date that a swarm of comet fragments collided with the Earth,
roughly thirteen thousand years ago or around ten eight hundred
and fifty BCE. In similar news, newly translated cuneiform tablets
seem to have been used by ancient Babylonians to make
predictions based off of lunar eclipses. These tablets are four

(37:00):
thousand years old and seem to have been a tool
for celestial divination, connecting astronomical events to things like the
deaths of kings or disease epidemics.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
And in another cuneiform fined restoration work following a series
of earthquakes that struck Turkia and Syria in twenty twenty
three has unearthed a tiny cuneiform tablet. Several excavation sites
were damaged or reburied in Turkia during these earthquakes, and

(37:33):
new excavations at one of the damaged sites turns up
what appeared to be a receipt measuring less than two
inches square, dating back to the fifteenth century BCE, describing
the purchase of a large amount of furniture. So it's
a little, tiny cuneiform tablet of someone's little shopping trip
for some furniture.

Speaker 1 (37:54):
I love it. A strip of wood found in Japan
is roughly thirteen hundred years old and appears to be
part of a multiplication table. If it were intact, it
would be a tablet measuring about thirty three centimeters long,
but this is only a fragment of it. It's a
little strip that measures sixteen point two centimeters by one
point two centimeter. It's believed that this was used by

(38:17):
workers in a guard's office in what was then Japan's
capital of Fujuwarakio.

Speaker 2 (38:22):
A transcript of a musical work, probably by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,
from when he was a teenager, has been found in
a German library. This is a twelve minute piece that
was written for a string trio and it may have
been written for his sister. There's some suggestion that his

(38:43):
sister may have been the person who preserved this piece
of music. This piece is just known as Serenade in
c and it was performed publicly for the first time
in centuries in September. A second performance followed that by
the Leipzig Opera and that one is available at YouTube.

Speaker 1 (39:01):
That could have also gone in updates. It could have
since we have talked about his sister before. And lastly,
archaeology students in northern France have found a message in
a bottle one that was left by archaeologist PJ. Ferrey
at the site when he worked there in eighteen twenty five.
It's a very simple note, tied with a string and

(39:22):
placed in a glass vial, noting his name and that
he was a member of various intellectual societies and when
he was there before, noting that he was continuing his
work at the City of Limes or Caesar's camp. And
that's the first chunk of our unearthed stuff. We'll talk
about more on Wednesday. I also have some listener mail. Fantastic,

(39:46):
This is from Julia, I answered Julia, But I thought
other people might have curiosity about the same thing, so
I'm going to read the whole thing, Julia says, Hi,
Holly and Tracy. First and foremost, thank you both for
traveling with me to work, someone who doesn't farewell when
left alone with my thoughts. You to make my commute
infinitely less stressful. Secondly, I'm curious about how you both

(40:08):
decide which form of a name to use. I have
noticed a fascinating trend where you sometimes opt for the
native name of a place, which I've had really intriguing.
For example, in one podcast, I heard you refer to
Turkey as Turkia, but still used Germany and Poland instead
of Deutschland or Pulska. I'm curious what guides your choice

(40:28):
to use the native name in some cases but not others.
I tend to code switch quite a bit myself. Sometimes
it's about the audience, sometimes it's just out of habit,
but I was really interested in how you make these decisions. Ps.
Here's my pet tax meet Ramsey's my hairless sphinx. He's
usually found snuggled under blankets and in the picture he's
giving me side eye because I sat down a bit

(40:49):
too aggressively next to him. The video was quite a surprise.
He actually hates putting his head in tight places, and
the water is flavored sparkling water. I fully expected him
to turn his nose up at it, but to my astonishment,
he actually liked it. Thank you again for all you do.

Speaker 2 (41:05):
We have, yes, a very adorable cat making a very
grumpy face.

Speaker 1 (41:11):
Justice for Ramses. Don't sit down too quickly next to
a kiddy.

Speaker 2 (41:18):
So yeah, that's an incredibly cute thing, so I answered Julia.
But so Turkya actually requested that the United Nations recognize
the nation as Turkia and not as Turkey for various reasons,
including in the fact that in English, turkey is an animal,

(41:39):
an animal that a lot of people don't necessarily have
a high opinion of and can also be used to
insult people by calling them a turkey. So this was
one of many reasons that like Turkya was like, hey,
United nations. We would really like for our name to
be Turkeya and not Turkey. And so if you look
at things like the United Nation's list of member states,

(42:01):
that's how it's spelled now, and so that's like what
is has driven the way that we say Turkya specifically. Similarly,
places in Ukraine have specifically tried to get people to
use pronunciations and sort of anglicized versions that are based

(42:22):
off of Ukrainian pronunciations rather than Russian pronunciations, and so
that has driven those pronunciations as well. Places like Germany
and Poland I have not really had that kind of
a pr effort. And also, like, we have English language
names for these places, and our podcast is in English

(42:44):
to a mostly English speaking audience, So to me, it
would be weird if we started trying to use like
German names for like, if we started trying to call
Germany Deutschland rather than Germany. Sometimes when we're talking about
especially cities and towns that don't exist anymore, or places

(43:08):
that are really remote and there's not like an English
language pronunciation for something like there is foresay Paris or
Barcelona or whatever, we're just gonna do our best, Like
we're probably going to sound more French when we're talking
about a tiny town in a remote area of France

(43:28):
rather than Paris. So yeah, sometimes it's just a judgment call.
But sometimes in places like Turkya and and Kiev in
the Ukraine and things like that, like there has been
a formal effort on the part of that place and
the people living there for people to use a particular pronunciation.
Sometimes we might not have heard about such efforts, and
folks let us know, and then we go, oh, we

(43:50):
should probably say it this way now.

Speaker 1 (43:52):
So yeah, language ever evolving, ever evolving. I mean my
rule of thumb is if this will make you laugh
and laugh because I've done this before. Okay, if duo
lingo uses it in the conversation of the place that
is not translated and then gives you an alternate translation,

(44:16):
that to me is a good guide also sure, right,
Like if you are learning a language and duo lingo
and they call it French, but the right when they're
teaching you the language, they call it false, like well
there you go, or you know, yeah, I'm also thinking
about in my duo lingo, when you're learning the French

(44:38):
terms for other nations and cities and stuff like, yeah,
that kind of stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:47):
Yeah, and like there's also just not an official rule,
so we're kind of doing the thing that seems to
make the most sense. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (44:59):
I feel like going by the un list is a
good policy.

Speaker 2 (45:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (45:02):
Yeah. So anyway, thank you so much for that email,
Julia and super cute picture. If you would like to
write to us about this or any other podcast or
at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can
subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever
else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed

(45:26):
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

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