July 25, 2018 • 35 mins
The July edition of Unearthed! is a two-parter this year. We’re breaking with tradition and starting with a few things that happened at the very end of 2017 but missed the cutoff for our 2017 episodes. We’ve also got some finds that institutions unearthed in their own collections, along with books and letters, beads, and some 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 Fry. It's time
for some Unearthed in July. So, as has been the
(00:21):
case every year since we started doing this podcast, we
have even more pins on our Unearthed pin board on
Pinterest than we did this time last year. So we
have gone from having an Unearthed episode to two of them,
to two and one in July, and now we're going
to have two in July, and we're breaking with tradition
(00:42):
a little bit this time, and since we have the
luxury of doing two episodes, we're starting with a few
things that happened at the very end of seventeen but
for whatever reason, they just missed the cut off for
our seventeen Unearthed episodes. We also have some things that
institutions found in their own collection ends, along with some
fines about books and letters and beads and some other things.
(01:05):
And then in part two, we're going to get into
a lot of other listener favorites, including the shipwrecks, the exhumations,
the repatriations, and the stuff that is in theory at
least edible or potable, along with some other tidbits as well.
So starting off with that bit of un earthing from
the end of Tween, Egyptologists at University College London announced
(01:29):
that they have started working with new scanning techniques to
read what's on waste papyrus that was used to make
mummy cases. These cases were essentially decorative boxes and they
were made from scraps, sort of like when you tore
up newspaper as a kid to do art projects making
paper machee, or maybe you do it as an adult,
but I associate that was a childhood craft. But in
(01:51):
ancient Egypt, instead of old newspaper, it was things like
to do lists and tax information. And since these mummy
cases were part of funeral rituals for wealthy and prestigious people,
they were made out of scraps, but they were made
to last. The papyrus that was used to make these
boxes is under a layer of plaster, so for a
(02:13):
long time, if researchers wanted to try to read the papyrus,
the only way they could do it was to remove
the plaster and that destroyed the box. But now researchers
have built on this earlier discovery that the ink on
the papyrus fluoresces under the right wavelengths of light. So
now they're using all this noninvasive scanning technology and infrared
(02:33):
filters to bring out all that fluorescence and to try
to get a look at what the papyrus says without
damaging the plaster on top of it. They're hopeful that
all this information on the waste paper will help give
them a better idea of what everyday life was like
in ancient Egypt. Doesn't that make you slightly terrified that
someone will unearth and read your random notes at the
(02:56):
point in the future like catlet milk Uh. Yeah, So
moving on. Death registries have always been a great source
of information about ancient plagues, and it's pretty straightforward. When
you have a list of names and other vital information
about people who died, it would be absurd not to
look at it while researching a plague. But one team
(03:19):
has taken this to a new level, analyzing the proteins
in the paper itself to learn more about the environment
in which these death registries were recorded. This research was
published in the journal Proteo Mix in November of It
made more headlines after the first of the year. When
preserving manuscripts, conservators sometimes use these little polymer discs that
(03:42):
pull acids and other damaging substances out of the paper
without damaging the paper itself. This team was using ethel
vinyl acetate discs, and they realized that in addition to
absorbing acids from the paper, they had also absorbed a
lot of proteins. These discs pulled samples of six hundred
(04:02):
different protein families out of a one page notice in
eleven pages of a death registry from Milano, Italy, which
was kept from sixteen twenty nine and sixteen thirty These
included peptide sequences connected to plague bacteria, to the foods
that the scribes were eating as they worked, and to
the animals, including rats and cats, that were around them.
(04:25):
This it's like a slightly different version of what was
the everyday life like of the people who were recording
these death registries. What rodents walked on your papers? Did
they give you the plague? In a previous Unearthed, we
talked about researchers using software to trace the structure of
fairy tales and they discovered connections among these stories that
(04:48):
went way back in history. A lot farther than they
thought they would. Researchers have now done something similar with
traditional folk music. They've used computers to analyze two hundred
f recordings of traditional music from a hundred and thirty
seven countries. Sub Saharan Africa turned out to have exceptionally
unique traditional music, with Botswana in particular having a huge
(05:12):
number of outliers. Outliers are recordings that are unique to
that specific place and not similar to recordings from anywhere
else in the world. In Botswana, of the recordings were outliers.
Every coast and Chad both had more than fifty outliers
as well. To move on yet again. On the Thursday
(05:34):
before Christmas, Sandy Vasco, who's president of the Will County
Historical Society in Illinois, found something unexpected in one of
the many boxes of stuff that has been donated to
the historical Society over the years. This was a box
with a cellophane lid, and it contained a flower that
was reportedly from Abraham Lincoln's casket. Written under the bottom
(05:56):
of the box was this quote, Flowers from the beer
of President Lincoln. While the remains were lying in state
at the Capitol in Washington, d c April sixty five,
presented by General J. S. Todd to General I. AM
Haney and by him presented to Mrs Jazz g Elwood
Nay Pierce. J. S. Todd was Mary Todd Lincoln's cousin.
(06:21):
I AM Haney was a friend of Lincoln's, and James G.
Elwood was a Civil War veteran and mayor of Joliet.
So it makes sense that the flower could have passed
down this chain of people until it was given to
Mrs Elwood. Some of the news reporting of this um
It's particular fine involved you're in your office alone the
(06:42):
Thursday before Christmas. You find this remarkable thing you didn't
even know you had, and there's nobody you can tell
about it because you're the only one working because it's
the Thursday before Christmas. One last one. We have talked
about a lot of coin hordes passed unearthed, and I
finally put a moratorium on coin hords unless there's something
(07:05):
really unique about them, because there is literally always a
coin horde, constantly finding piles of coins in the ground. However,
a couple in China who was trying to build a
house last October instead dug up a coin horde that
weighed five points six tons. That's a lot of coin horde. Uh.
(07:26):
This horde includes about three hundred thousand copper coins from
the Song dynasty, roughly one thousand years ago, and it's
not immediately clear where they came from. There is a
local story about a landlord burying his stash, but it's
just as likely that it belonged to a bank or
a community group. These coins were all turned over to
(07:47):
the government under the Chinese Civil Relic Protection Law, although
apparently the neighbors did start doing some of their own
little excavations in their yards to see if maybe they
got a coin horde. Also, you get a coin hard,
I can't stop um. Now we have some news about
the last known slave ship to make its way to
(08:07):
the United States, which was called the Clotilda. In January,
a shipwreck discovered a few miles north of Mobile, Alabama
made headlines as people speculated that that might be the Clotilda.
The wreck was largely buried in mud, and it was
partially unearthed by abnormally low tides that were brought on
by severe weather. People have been looking for the Clotilda
(08:30):
for years, so when this extremely low tide came along,
teams went out to take advantage of it. The Clotilda
was reportedly burned and sunk in July of eighteen sixty
after bringing a hundred enslaved Africans to the United States,
because the owners wanted to destroy the evidence of their crimes.
At that point, it had not been legal to import
(08:50):
enslaved people to the United States for more than fifty years.
John Sledge, a senior historian with the Mobile Historical Commission,
was quoted as saying, I'm quaking with excitement. This would
be a story of world historical significance if this is
the Clote Tilda. Although the extreme low tide had made
it possible to spot the wreckage, enough of the whole
(09:11):
was still buried in mud that it was hard to
tell exactly how large this ship was a team of organizations,
including the Alabama Historical Commission and the Slave rex Project,
did a more thorough investigation, and once they finished, they
announced that this wreck was just much too big to
be the Clotilda, and that news came out in March. However,
(09:33):
there's another Cloe Tilda story that does pan out. In
seven Zornel Hurston interviewed an enslaved man known as Kujoe Lewis,
whose African name was Cosola. He had been brought to
the United States aboard the Clotilda and was the last
known survivor of the transatlantic slave trade in the United States.
(09:54):
She wrote a book based on these interviews, which was
called Barracoon, but when she tried to get it published,
it was rejected it because publishers said that his dialect
was too hard to understand. But in May of the
book was finally published as Barracoon, The Story of the
Last Black Cargo. And this is one of those times
that some of the coverage framed the book as something
(10:16):
that was newly discovered, But the manuscript had been in
the Howard University Library and it was accessible to academics
before this point. It is widely available to anyone who
wants to read it now. Ye this is this was
not a book that no one knew existed and then
suddenly we discovered that it existed. It was It's a
book that has finally, after much delay, being published, with
(10:39):
a lot of people noting, no, that dialect was not
hard to understand. Publishers in the thirties, Uh, we're going
to take a quick break before we get into some
other categories of unearthed things. Next up, we have a
(10:59):
set of study that confirm things that people already thought.
First up, after examining a set of teeth that have
been kept in Moscow since the end of World War Two,
a team of French pathologists have confirmed that, yes, as
everyone thought, they are the teeth of Adolf Hitler, who
really did die in that bunker on April. The pair
(11:21):
of four thousand year old mummies known as the Two
Brothers was found in nineteen o seven, and since then
there's been some debate about whether they were really brothers
or not. According to the hieroglyphs on the sarcophag Guy
which described them as brothers, their names were connomed, knocked,
and knocked onc But as early twentieth century researchers examined
their remains, some of them had doubts. They thought that
(11:43):
the bodies were just too dissimilar to be related to
one another, regardless of what those hieroglyphics said. Using DNA
extracted from their teeth, researchers determined that yes, they were related.
According to their paper published in the Journal of r
Logical Science, reports in February these two men had the
(12:04):
same mother but probably different fathers, and this basically confirmed
what was right there on the hieroglyphics the whole time.
The name both brothers mother as canoom Ah. Their fathers
are not named, and only a title is given a
Haitia prince. It just didn't say which Haitia prince. This
is one of those times that I was like, it
(12:26):
was right there, Like this reminds me of like when
when things have confirmed what Inuits have been saying forever
and they're like, we we told you over and over,
we're about to have something really similar. You will frequently
here that the indigenous Tino people of the Caribbean were
(12:46):
wiped completely out by disease and violence after the arrival
of Europeans. We have even said this on our podcast,
because it is all over the place. Here are some
of the places I have read this in the now
National Museum of St. Kitts, and a whole bunch of
different textbooks, and in many many articles about Caribbean history. However,
(13:09):
there has been a growing resistance to that idea from
people in the Caribbean who say they are descended from
the Taino people and that they are in fact still
there and now science is confirming this. Researchers were able
to use a tooth found in a cave in the
Bahamas to establish a starting point for Tino DNA. This
(13:29):
tooth age is unclear, but it was from before Christopher
Columbus arrived in the America's and based on this analysis,
there are a lot of people living in the Caribbean
today who have DNA in common with that tooth. This
confirms other studies that suggested that there were people of
Taino ancestry in modern Caribbean populations, but didn't have that
(13:50):
starting point that tooths to confirm it. In the words
of the lead author on the paper, which was published
in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
quote it's a fascinating finding. Many history books will tell
you that the indigenous population of the Caribbean was all
but wiped out, but people who self identify as Tino
have always argued for continuity. Now we know they were
(14:12):
right all along. There has been some form of genetic
continuity in the Caribbean. So we apologized for the non
zero number of times we messed that up on the
podcast before at least two times that I can think
of off the top of my head. Possibly more. Yeah,
but we were going off the best information available at
the time in terms of science, even though there was
(14:36):
some debate. Now we know better yep. Also, this same
study found no evidence that the people of the various
Caribbean islands were genetically isolated. In other words, they were
on islands, but their populations were not in bred. This
suggests that the Tino traveled throughout the Caribbean and established
networks among the islands. This is another case of confirming
(15:00):
what people were already saying. This last one is more
like science confirms question mark because it is the latest
update on Amelia Earhart. But this time contrary to normal.
It's not from the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery
or TIGER. It's from a University of Tennessee researcher who
(15:22):
re examined previous measurements of some bones that were found
on Nicumaruro Island in the South Pacific. They compared these
measurements to some that are extrapolated from a photograph of
Melia Earhart that suggests that the bones are probably hers,
So that contradicts earlier research on these bones. Done back
(15:43):
in the nineteen forties, which concluded that they belonged to
a man, and this research was published in the journal
Forensic Anthropology. But the trick here is that the bones
themselves have disappeared, So this is just a reanalysis of
measurements of those bones, not of the bones themselves, right,
And now we're going to move on to what's become
(16:05):
one of my favorite things in Unearthed, which is things
that institutions have found in their own collections. This always
delights me. First up, the staff at Union College in Schenectady,
New York, announced that they had found what they believe
is a lock of George Washington's hair in their Rare
Books collection. Here's the evidence for why they think it's
(16:28):
George Washington's hair. Number one, it was in an envelope
marked Washington's hair number two. The envelope was in an
almanac that belonged to Philip Skyler, who was Eliza Skyler
Hamilton's brother. Her father was also named Philip, and sometimes
in reporting this is described as her father's almanac. And
there is also a note that says that this is
(16:48):
a lock of hair belonging to George Washington that was
passed down through the Skylar family. But the college doesn't
want to perform DNA testing to confirm this find because
is the likelihood that it would completely destroy the sample. Yeah,
they're like, this seems like enough evidence. It's written there
whole note about it. If there's another technological advancement that
(17:12):
makes it possible to maybe test it without any sort
of damage, I'm sure they would be game. But you
don't want to lose that on a gamble. Yeah. Uh.
Sydney University found a twenty five hundred year old mummy
in its own collection, in a coffin that was believed
to be empty. According to the hieroglyphics on the coffin,
(17:36):
it was made for a priestess called Merne's it is,
but according to the team that's doing the work, coffins
are frequently discovered not to contain the remains of the
person that they were made for. This especially happens when
unscrupulous antiquities dealers are trying to sell an empty coffin
but the customer really wants one that contains a mummy,
and this may have happened with the coffin in question.
(17:59):
The remains in side are described as heavily disturbed. If
you're wondering why that doesn't apply to the two brothers
that we talked about earlier, like are those remains really
the remains that it says on there? Like this is
a coffin that has changed hands sometimes and the remains
inside have clearly been disturbed, which was not the case
(18:20):
for those ones. Moving on, the University of Swansea discovered
that it had a depiction of the pharaoh had ships
it in its own collection. The university has a department
of Egyptology and professors can request specific artifacts for students
to handle during their classes. In this case, Dr Kenneth
(18:41):
Griffin had made the request based on an old photograph
of the artifact, but then he once he got the
actual pieces of limestone into his possession, he realized that
they depicted had chips it, which is one of the
few known female pharaohs. As is the case with a
lot of Egyptian artifacts that have been in an institution's
collection for decades, it is not clear exactly where this
(19:04):
one came from. It was given to the university by
Sir Henry Welcome in nine one, but beyond that it's
life is a mystery. This next one isn't exactly from
a collection, but it's it's on a similar theme. The
remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge have been found under St.
Michael's Highgate, which has long been home to a memorial
(19:27):
plaque containing some text that was written by Colorridge himself.
Colorridge had originally been buried in a crypt under the
home where he died, but he and his family had
been moved the St. Michael's crypt in nineteen sixty one,
in a space that had previously been a wine seller
before becoming part of the church's crypt. But over time
people sort of lost track of exactly where Coleridge had
(19:50):
been moved. His casket was found during an excavation, and
now the church is planning to raise money to restore
and protect the crypt and its contents. Everybody involved with
this was like, whoa, this is literally right underneath the
monument up in the church, Like it's directly under it,
which is not what anybody was really expecting. They all
(20:12):
knew he was down there somewhere, but you know, as
staff in the church moved on or passed away, like
it just it stopped being known exactly where. Uh. In
twenty sixteen, researchers at the Anne Frank House physically checked
in on her diary, something that they do every ten years.
It's kept in storage for preservation for the rest of
(20:33):
the time, so every ten years is like a more
thorough examination of what they've got there, and they realized
that two pages had been covered over with brown paper.
In May, the Anne Frank House and two other Dutch
cultural institutions announced that they had deciphered what was underneath
this brown paper, and it included some kind of risk
(20:55):
a jokes and some discussion of sex education. And this
led to some to discussion about how much work should
really be done to figure out something from a teenager's
diary that she clearly wanted to be hidden, and where
the line should be between the respect for a real
person's privacy and the possibility of something of historical significance
(21:16):
and tangentially related to this whole idea of finding things
in your own collection, several announcements have come out of
Monticello over the past several months as the former home
of Thomas Jefferson tries to be more candid about the
lives of enslaved people on the property. I know when
I went to Monticello, and probably was not something they
(21:38):
talked about at all. They were more like, look at
this amazing clock. In January, news broke about a kitchen
at Monticello that was used by enslaved chef James Hemmings.
When Jefferson was a minister to France, he took Hemmings
with him to be trained as a chef there. A
lot of news reporting framed this as a discovery, something
(22:01):
Monticello was surprised to find right there, but the staff
already knew where this kitchen was. It just wasn't possible
for archaeologists to get to it because visitor restrooms had
been built there. But the bathrooms have since been demolished,
which allowed for a dig that finally revealed the original floor.
This kitchen opened as a new public exhibit on June six.
(22:23):
Also opening that day was a new digital exhibit called
The Life of Sally Hemmings. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation also
announced that from here on out it would drop all
of the qualifiers when discussing whether or not Thomas Jefferson
fathered children with Hemmings, saying quote, while there are some
who disagree, the foundation's scholarly advisors and the larger community
(22:45):
of academic historians who specialize in early American history have
concurred for many years that the evidence is sufficiently strong
to state that Thomas Jefferson fathered at least six children
with Sally Hemmings. That is the end of the quote.
Side note. Last year, Monticello announced that it was excavating
Hemming's living quarters, which had also been turned into a bathroom.
(23:08):
We're gonna take a quick break before we move on
to a different on Oarth topic. We talked about the
Voyage Manuscript not long ago in one of our Saturday
Classic episodes, but we have yet another attempt to decode it.
(23:29):
This time it is the work of computing scientists at
the University of Alberta. Professor Greg Contract and graduate student
Bradley how Aer are using natural language processing to try
to figure it out. They used four hundred languages from
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to try to determine
what language the manuscript is written in. They originally thought Arabic,
(23:51):
but their work suggests the most likely candidate is Hebrew.
Even that, though is not definite, it's just statistically the
most likely language. And this is where it gets a
little less precise. Their hypothesis is that this is a
cipher that uses anagrams. But they did not have a
Hebrew scholar to work with to check their findings, so
(24:13):
they did what they could, and then they ran it
through Google Translate, and they got results that seemed to
be mostly readable sentences based on our own use of
Google Translate, though we can't really call anything solved based
on Google Translate. Well, and I wonder as Google weighted
on this, because we don't know how much their algorithm
(24:33):
tries to make sense of things. I did not find
that they had when I was researching this, so that's
like a whole other potential layer of Like, of course
it made sort of readable sentences, it's trying desperately to
do so. Yes, there were also lots of comments on
on various articles that were about this that were sort
of like, there are a lot of Hebrew scholars, it
(24:57):
seems like there should be one who would work with
you on this. Yeah, a lot of questions on that one.
Researchers have been trying to track down the remains of
the monastery where the Book of Deer was written. In
the Book of Deer is a tenth century copy of
the Gospels with notes about everyday life at the time
written in the margins. It's the oldest known example of
(25:19):
written Scottish Galic, and the monks in the monastery where
the book was written eventually relocated about one thousand years
ago in the location of the original monastery has been lost.
In January they announced to break through a hearth and
a thick layer of charcoal that they found an Aberdeen
sure not far away from Old Deer. This fine has
(25:40):
been dated to between eleven forty seven and twelve sixty,
so it's roughly in the right place, roughly in the
right time. May have been something that lingered around for
a while after the monks had moved on. This is
part of the Book of Deer project, which is trying
to make the text were accessible and has sponsored a
(26:01):
series of excavations in the search for the monastery. Conservators
with the Queen Anne's Revenge Project, which has blessed us
with a lot of unearthed pirates stuff, found something really
interesting in some watting inside of a cannon. It was
a book, or at least part of a book. At first,
it wasn't obvious at all what they were looking at.
(26:23):
The first descriptions were just quote a mass of black textile,
But as they worked with the mystery watting, they started
to pick out words and realized that they were looking
at print material. It took a while to figure out
exactly what kind of print material, though, because they were
only able to pick out a few snippets and isolated
(26:44):
chunks of the text. After a year of looking for clues,
a conservator named Kimberly Kenyon found the word helo, which
was in one of these snippets of text from that watting.
She found it in a book called A Voyage to
the South Sea Around the World. That book was written
in seventeen twelve, and eventually they matched up more words
(27:07):
and phrases from the Cannon watting with words and phrases
from this book, and the book has its own connection
to piracy. A Voyage to the South Sea Around the
World recounts Edward Cook's time aboard the Duchess during a
privateering voyage that lasted from seventeen o eight to seventeen eleven.
This expedition also rescued Alexander Selkirk, who is believed to
(27:30):
be the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe, from an uninhabited island.
It's not totally clear why this book was used as
watting and a cannon. There's some speculation about it though.
The pirates might have just really needed some watting and
they grabbed a book that was handy, or somebody could
have been mad that the voyage recounted in the book
(27:52):
was led by Captain Woods Roger, who went on to
fight piracy in the Caribbean. So it was more like,
i'd will like you and your anti piracy campaign, So
I'm gonna stuff this book about it down a cannon.
But that is just a theory, although it's fun to speculate.
It is a fun speculation. We are moving on to
(28:15):
something that I always love, which is beads. Yep Archaeologists
have assumed that glassmaking was introduced into Africa through trade
with Europe, but according to chemical analysis of a site
in Nigeria, glassmaking their pre dates trade with Europe, and
this particular site is home to the ancestral Yoruba people,
and the find totally contradicts the prevailing idea that glass
(28:39):
was introduced to Africa by traders from the Mediterranean and Europe.
Lots of glass beads and containers have been unearthed at
digs from this area before, but the assumption had been
that all of this glass was imported. Now though it
appears as though there was a glass workshop there. Researchers
found more than in the thousand beads and none of
(29:02):
them had a chemical makeup that matched European glass. This
was all local material, all made by local craftsmen and artisans,
and the oldest samples date back to the eleven hundreds,
before this particular part of West Africa was trading with Europeans.
Archaeologists in India have discovered a bead workshop dating back
to the ancient Indus Valley. We talked a little about
(29:24):
the Indus Valley civilization in our episode on Mahinjo Daro,
and this is a pre Harapan site, meaning that it
dates back before the Indus Valley civilization matured. This is
from an excavation site called Kunal in northern India and
beads from the site date back to three thousand b c.
E to b C. And they demonstrate that the artisans
(29:46):
who were working at the site were highly skilled. But
it's not just the age of the beads and the
skill of the craftsman that's so interesting. There's also evidence
that the bead makers traded with people's as far away
as Mesopotamia. On the note, a common misconception about the
past is that populations before the modern era were isolated,
(30:06):
like Europe was all people we would think of his white,
and Africa was all people we would think of his black,
and so on, until suddenly, around fourteen fifty or so
people started moving around more. But that is just really
not true. And next up we have a bunch of
studies that are examples of that. Here's a really quick
one to start off. Archaeologists in Tongsburg, Norway, have found
(30:29):
an abstract chess piece made of antler and the remains
of a thirteen century house. This piece is a night
and while it's design is abstract, it also seems to
have been inspired by Islamic art. Researchers from the Max
Planck Institute for the Science of Human History have sequenced
the DNA of several fifteen thousand year old modern humans
(30:51):
from Morocco. This is the oldest African DNA ever to
be successfully analyzed. The study looked at DNA from nine people.
They were able to get mitochondrial DNA from seven of them.
And genome wide information from five of them, and they
discovered that these people's DNA was related to populations both
from the Levant and from Sub Saharan Africa. This suggests
(31:15):
that there was a lot of interconnectivity going on in
the world, with these people sharing DNA with populations from
Western Asia and Sub Saharan Africa. It's a lot more
mobility within these populations than researchers had thought was happening
fifteen thousand years ago, and it suggests that travel between
North Africa, Sub Saharan Africa, and Western Asia was happening
(31:37):
much earlier than was previously thought. Researchers from the University
of Helsinki have been trying to solve a mystery about
the Neolithic courted war culture, which spread across what's now Finland, Estonia,
and Sweden around to b c. E. One question has
been whether the pottery that was part of this culture
(31:58):
was carried from place to place trade, or whether the
potters themselves spread out and carried their craft with them.
According to research published in the Journal of Archaeological Science,
it seems to be the latter. The team analyzed pottery
from twenty four sites in three countries, which suggests that
the pots themselves were being crafted in multiple locations. Neolithic
(32:21):
courted where is also heavily associated with women. Women are
more likely to have the pottery among their grave goods.
Women seem to have been the ones who were performing
and teaching the craft of making the pottery. So the
evidence suggests that skilled female potters were moving all around
the Baltic maybe after getting married, and continuing their craft
(32:43):
after moving. So it wasn't a matter of somebody loading
up a pack animal with pottery and carrying it around,
or putting pottery on a boat and carrying it around.
People were moving to a new place where they lived permanently,
and they were making their pottery once they got there.
And we're gonna have a whole lot or unearthed next time,
including favorite topics like edibles and podibles and everybody's most
(33:06):
delightful topic exhumations. Exhumation time coming next. Tracy, do you
have listener mail? I do have a really quick listener mail.
It's from Eleanor, and Eleanor says, dear Tracy and Holly.
I love the show and recently listened to your episode
about evacuating children. It reminded me of a memorial that
I pass every day on my commute at Liverpool Street
(33:28):
station in London. The small memorial is for the children
of the Kinder transport. It's off to the side of
the main hall in the station and is not really
noticed by many people who are rushing past it. I've
attached some pictures. Thank you for your awesome podcast that
makes my commute on a tube so much better. Best wishes, Eleanor.
Eleanor sent three um three pictures of this memorial that
(33:52):
is really moving to look at. It's got sculptures have
two children with a suitcase behind them and the look
on their face is just so moving. These were the
children that were evacuated out of Nazi Germany and Nazi
occupied territories into Britain um leading up to World War Two. Anyway,
(34:13):
I did not know that this existed as a monument.
Thank you so much for sending this and for sending
the pictures. Um. I will see if I can find
uh some pictures online and linked to them from the
show notes for today's episode. If you would like to
send us a note. Where a history podcast at how
Stuff Works dot com and then we're on social media
(34:33):
at missed in History that is our Facebook and our interests,
and our Instagram and our Twitter. You can come to
our website, which is missed in history dot com, where
you will find the show notes for all the episodes
that Holly and I would have worked on together, and
an archive of all of the episodes ever. You can
also subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts or Google
podcast wherever else you get your podcasts. For more on
(35:00):
this and thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff Works
dot com. M
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It's time
for some Unearthed in July. So, as has been the
(00:21):
case every year since we started doing this podcast, we
have even more pins on our Unearthed pin board on
Pinterest than we did this time last year. So we
have gone from having an Unearthed episode to two of them,
to two and one in July, and now we're going
to have two in July, and we're breaking with tradition
(00:42):
a little bit this time, and since we have the
luxury of doing two episodes, we're starting with a few
things that happened at the very end of seventeen but
for whatever reason, they just missed the cut off for
our seventeen Unearthed episodes. We also have some things that
institutions found in their own collection ends, along with some
fines about books and letters and beads and some other things.
(01:05):
And then in part two, we're going to get into
a lot of other listener favorites, including the shipwrecks, the exhumations,
the repatriations, and the stuff that is in theory at
least edible or potable, along with some other tidbits as well.
So starting off with that bit of un earthing from
the end of Tween, Egyptologists at University College London announced
(01:29):
that they have started working with new scanning techniques to
read what's on waste papyrus that was used to make
mummy cases. These cases were essentially decorative boxes and they
were made from scraps, sort of like when you tore
up newspaper as a kid to do art projects making
paper machee, or maybe you do it as an adult,
but I associate that was a childhood craft. But in
(01:51):
ancient Egypt, instead of old newspaper, it was things like
to do lists and tax information. And since these mummy
cases were part of funeral rituals for wealthy and prestigious people,
they were made out of scraps, but they were made
to last. The papyrus that was used to make these
boxes is under a layer of plaster, so for a
(02:13):
long time, if researchers wanted to try to read the papyrus,
the only way they could do it was to remove
the plaster and that destroyed the box. But now researchers
have built on this earlier discovery that the ink on
the papyrus fluoresces under the right wavelengths of light. So
now they're using all this noninvasive scanning technology and infrared
(02:33):
filters to bring out all that fluorescence and to try
to get a look at what the papyrus says without
damaging the plaster on top of it. They're hopeful that
all this information on the waste paper will help give
them a better idea of what everyday life was like
in ancient Egypt. Doesn't that make you slightly terrified that
someone will unearth and read your random notes at the
(02:56):
point in the future like catlet milk Uh. Yeah, So
moving on. Death registries have always been a great source
of information about ancient plagues, and it's pretty straightforward. When
you have a list of names and other vital information
about people who died, it would be absurd not to
look at it while researching a plague. But one team
(03:19):
has taken this to a new level, analyzing the proteins
in the paper itself to learn more about the environment
in which these death registries were recorded. This research was
published in the journal Proteo Mix in November of It
made more headlines after the first of the year. When
preserving manuscripts, conservators sometimes use these little polymer discs that
(03:42):
pull acids and other damaging substances out of the paper
without damaging the paper itself. This team was using ethel
vinyl acetate discs, and they realized that in addition to
absorbing acids from the paper, they had also absorbed a
lot of proteins. These discs pulled samples of six hundred
(04:02):
different protein families out of a one page notice in
eleven pages of a death registry from Milano, Italy, which
was kept from sixteen twenty nine and sixteen thirty These
included peptide sequences connected to plague bacteria, to the foods
that the scribes were eating as they worked, and to
the animals, including rats and cats, that were around them.
(04:25):
This it's like a slightly different version of what was
the everyday life like of the people who were recording
these death registries. What rodents walked on your papers? Did
they give you the plague? In a previous Unearthed, we
talked about researchers using software to trace the structure of
fairy tales and they discovered connections among these stories that
(04:48):
went way back in history. A lot farther than they
thought they would. Researchers have now done something similar with
traditional folk music. They've used computers to analyze two hundred
f recordings of traditional music from a hundred and thirty
seven countries. Sub Saharan Africa turned out to have exceptionally
unique traditional music, with Botswana in particular having a huge
(05:12):
number of outliers. Outliers are recordings that are unique to
that specific place and not similar to recordings from anywhere
else in the world. In Botswana, of the recordings were outliers.
Every coast and Chad both had more than fifty outliers
as well. To move on yet again. On the Thursday
(05:34):
before Christmas, Sandy Vasco, who's president of the Will County
Historical Society in Illinois, found something unexpected in one of
the many boxes of stuff that has been donated to
the historical Society over the years. This was a box
with a cellophane lid, and it contained a flower that
was reportedly from Abraham Lincoln's casket. Written under the bottom
(05:56):
of the box was this quote, Flowers from the beer
of President Lincoln. While the remains were lying in state
at the Capitol in Washington, d c April sixty five,
presented by General J. S. Todd to General I. AM
Haney and by him presented to Mrs Jazz g Elwood
Nay Pierce. J. S. Todd was Mary Todd Lincoln's cousin.
(06:21):
I AM Haney was a friend of Lincoln's, and James G.
Elwood was a Civil War veteran and mayor of Joliet.
So it makes sense that the flower could have passed
down this chain of people until it was given to
Mrs Elwood. Some of the news reporting of this um
It's particular fine involved you're in your office alone the
(06:42):
Thursday before Christmas. You find this remarkable thing you didn't
even know you had, and there's nobody you can tell
about it because you're the only one working because it's
the Thursday before Christmas. One last one. We have talked
about a lot of coin hordes passed unearthed, and I
finally put a moratorium on coin hords unless there's something
(07:05):
really unique about them, because there is literally always a
coin horde, constantly finding piles of coins in the ground. However,
a couple in China who was trying to build a
house last October instead dug up a coin horde that
weighed five points six tons. That's a lot of coin horde. Uh.
(07:26):
This horde includes about three hundred thousand copper coins from
the Song dynasty, roughly one thousand years ago, and it's
not immediately clear where they came from. There is a
local story about a landlord burying his stash, but it's
just as likely that it belonged to a bank or
a community group. These coins were all turned over to
(07:47):
the government under the Chinese Civil Relic Protection Law, although
apparently the neighbors did start doing some of their own
little excavations in their yards to see if maybe they
got a coin horde. Also, you get a coin hard,
I can't stop um. Now we have some news about
the last known slave ship to make its way to
(08:07):
the United States, which was called the Clotilda. In January,
a shipwreck discovered a few miles north of Mobile, Alabama
made headlines as people speculated that that might be the Clotilda.
The wreck was largely buried in mud, and it was
partially unearthed by abnormally low tides that were brought on
by severe weather. People have been looking for the Clotilda
(08:30):
for years, so when this extremely low tide came along,
teams went out to take advantage of it. The Clotilda
was reportedly burned and sunk in July of eighteen sixty
after bringing a hundred enslaved Africans to the United States,
because the owners wanted to destroy the evidence of their crimes.
At that point, it had not been legal to import
(08:50):
enslaved people to the United States for more than fifty years.
John Sledge, a senior historian with the Mobile Historical Commission,
was quoted as saying, I'm quaking with excitement. This would
be a story of world historical significance if this is
the Clote Tilda. Although the extreme low tide had made
it possible to spot the wreckage, enough of the whole
(09:11):
was still buried in mud that it was hard to
tell exactly how large this ship was a team of organizations,
including the Alabama Historical Commission and the Slave rex Project,
did a more thorough investigation, and once they finished, they
announced that this wreck was just much too big to
be the Clotilda, and that news came out in March. However,
(09:33):
there's another Cloe Tilda story that does pan out. In
seven Zornel Hurston interviewed an enslaved man known as Kujoe Lewis,
whose African name was Cosola. He had been brought to
the United States aboard the Clotilda and was the last
known survivor of the transatlantic slave trade in the United States.
(09:54):
She wrote a book based on these interviews, which was
called Barracoon, but when she tried to get it published,
it was rejected it because publishers said that his dialect
was too hard to understand. But in May of the
book was finally published as Barracoon, The Story of the
Last Black Cargo. And this is one of those times
that some of the coverage framed the book as something
(10:16):
that was newly discovered, But the manuscript had been in
the Howard University Library and it was accessible to academics
before this point. It is widely available to anyone who
wants to read it now. Ye this is this was
not a book that no one knew existed and then
suddenly we discovered that it existed. It was It's a
book that has finally, after much delay, being published, with
(10:39):
a lot of people noting, no, that dialect was not
hard to understand. Publishers in the thirties, Uh, we're going
to take a quick break before we get into some
other categories of unearthed things. Next up, we have a
(10:59):
set of study that confirm things that people already thought.
First up, after examining a set of teeth that have
been kept in Moscow since the end of World War Two,
a team of French pathologists have confirmed that, yes, as
everyone thought, they are the teeth of Adolf Hitler, who
really did die in that bunker on April. The pair
(11:21):
of four thousand year old mummies known as the Two
Brothers was found in nineteen o seven, and since then
there's been some debate about whether they were really brothers
or not. According to the hieroglyphs on the sarcophag Guy
which described them as brothers, their names were connomed, knocked,
and knocked onc But as early twentieth century researchers examined
their remains, some of them had doubts. They thought that
(11:43):
the bodies were just too dissimilar to be related to
one another, regardless of what those hieroglyphics said. Using DNA
extracted from their teeth, researchers determined that yes, they were related.
According to their paper published in the Journal of r
Logical Science, reports in February these two men had the
(12:04):
same mother but probably different fathers, and this basically confirmed
what was right there on the hieroglyphics the whole time.
The name both brothers mother as canoom Ah. Their fathers
are not named, and only a title is given a
Haitia prince. It just didn't say which Haitia prince. This
is one of those times that I was like, it
(12:26):
was right there, Like this reminds me of like when
when things have confirmed what Inuits have been saying forever
and they're like, we we told you over and over,
we're about to have something really similar. You will frequently
here that the indigenous Tino people of the Caribbean were
(12:46):
wiped completely out by disease and violence after the arrival
of Europeans. We have even said this on our podcast,
because it is all over the place. Here are some
of the places I have read this in the now
National Museum of St. Kitts, and a whole bunch of
different textbooks, and in many many articles about Caribbean history. However,
(13:09):
there has been a growing resistance to that idea from
people in the Caribbean who say they are descended from
the Taino people and that they are in fact still
there and now science is confirming this. Researchers were able
to use a tooth found in a cave in the
Bahamas to establish a starting point for Tino DNA. This
(13:29):
tooth age is unclear, but it was from before Christopher
Columbus arrived in the America's and based on this analysis,
there are a lot of people living in the Caribbean
today who have DNA in common with that tooth. This
confirms other studies that suggested that there were people of
Taino ancestry in modern Caribbean populations, but didn't have that
(13:50):
starting point that tooths to confirm it. In the words
of the lead author on the paper, which was published
in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
quote it's a fascinating finding. Many history books will tell
you that the indigenous population of the Caribbean was all
but wiped out, but people who self identify as Tino
have always argued for continuity. Now we know they were
(14:12):
right all along. There has been some form of genetic
continuity in the Caribbean. So we apologized for the non
zero number of times we messed that up on the
podcast before at least two times that I can think
of off the top of my head. Possibly more. Yeah,
but we were going off the best information available at
the time in terms of science, even though there was
(14:36):
some debate. Now we know better yep. Also, this same
study found no evidence that the people of the various
Caribbean islands were genetically isolated. In other words, they were
on islands, but their populations were not in bred. This
suggests that the Tino traveled throughout the Caribbean and established
networks among the islands. This is another case of confirming
(15:00):
what people were already saying. This last one is more
like science confirms question mark because it is the latest
update on Amelia Earhart. But this time contrary to normal.
It's not from the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery
or TIGER. It's from a University of Tennessee researcher who
(15:22):
re examined previous measurements of some bones that were found
on Nicumaruro Island in the South Pacific. They compared these
measurements to some that are extrapolated from a photograph of
Melia Earhart that suggests that the bones are probably hers,
So that contradicts earlier research on these bones. Done back
(15:43):
in the nineteen forties, which concluded that they belonged to
a man, and this research was published in the journal
Forensic Anthropology. But the trick here is that the bones
themselves have disappeared, So this is just a reanalysis of
measurements of those bones, not of the bones themselves, right,
And now we're going to move on to what's become
(16:05):
one of my favorite things in Unearthed, which is things
that institutions have found in their own collections. This always
delights me. First up, the staff at Union College in Schenectady,
New York, announced that they had found what they believe
is a lock of George Washington's hair in their Rare
Books collection. Here's the evidence for why they think it's
(16:28):
George Washington's hair. Number one, it was in an envelope
marked Washington's hair number two. The envelope was in an
almanac that belonged to Philip Skyler, who was Eliza Skyler
Hamilton's brother. Her father was also named Philip, and sometimes
in reporting this is described as her father's almanac. And
there is also a note that says that this is
(16:48):
a lock of hair belonging to George Washington that was
passed down through the Skylar family. But the college doesn't
want to perform DNA testing to confirm this find because
is the likelihood that it would completely destroy the sample. Yeah,
they're like, this seems like enough evidence. It's written there
whole note about it. If there's another technological advancement that
(17:12):
makes it possible to maybe test it without any sort
of damage, I'm sure they would be game. But you
don't want to lose that on a gamble. Yeah. Uh.
Sydney University found a twenty five hundred year old mummy
in its own collection, in a coffin that was believed
to be empty. According to the hieroglyphics on the coffin,
(17:36):
it was made for a priestess called Merne's it is,
but according to the team that's doing the work, coffins
are frequently discovered not to contain the remains of the
person that they were made for. This especially happens when
unscrupulous antiquities dealers are trying to sell an empty coffin
but the customer really wants one that contains a mummy,
and this may have happened with the coffin in question.
(17:59):
The remains in side are described as heavily disturbed. If
you're wondering why that doesn't apply to the two brothers
that we talked about earlier, like are those remains really
the remains that it says on there? Like this is
a coffin that has changed hands sometimes and the remains
inside have clearly been disturbed, which was not the case
(18:20):
for those ones. Moving on, the University of Swansea discovered
that it had a depiction of the pharaoh had ships
it in its own collection. The university has a department
of Egyptology and professors can request specific artifacts for students
to handle during their classes. In this case, Dr Kenneth
(18:41):
Griffin had made the request based on an old photograph
of the artifact, but then he once he got the
actual pieces of limestone into his possession, he realized that
they depicted had chips it, which is one of the
few known female pharaohs. As is the case with a
lot of Egyptian artifacts that have been in an institution's
collection for decades, it is not clear exactly where this
(19:04):
one came from. It was given to the university by
Sir Henry Welcome in nine one, but beyond that it's
life is a mystery. This next one isn't exactly from
a collection, but it's it's on a similar theme. The
remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge have been found under St.
Michael's Highgate, which has long been home to a memorial
(19:27):
plaque containing some text that was written by Colorridge himself.
Colorridge had originally been buried in a crypt under the
home where he died, but he and his family had
been moved the St. Michael's crypt in nineteen sixty one,
in a space that had previously been a wine seller
before becoming part of the church's crypt. But over time
people sort of lost track of exactly where Coleridge had
(19:50):
been moved. His casket was found during an excavation, and
now the church is planning to raise money to restore
and protect the crypt and its contents. Everybody involved with
this was like, whoa, this is literally right underneath the
monument up in the church, Like it's directly under it,
which is not what anybody was really expecting. They all
(20:12):
knew he was down there somewhere, but you know, as
staff in the church moved on or passed away, like
it just it stopped being known exactly where. Uh. In
twenty sixteen, researchers at the Anne Frank House physically checked
in on her diary, something that they do every ten years.
It's kept in storage for preservation for the rest of
(20:33):
the time, so every ten years is like a more
thorough examination of what they've got there, and they realized
that two pages had been covered over with brown paper.
In May, the Anne Frank House and two other Dutch
cultural institutions announced that they had deciphered what was underneath
this brown paper, and it included some kind of risk
(20:55):
a jokes and some discussion of sex education. And this
led to some to discussion about how much work should
really be done to figure out something from a teenager's
diary that she clearly wanted to be hidden, and where
the line should be between the respect for a real
person's privacy and the possibility of something of historical significance
(21:16):
and tangentially related to this whole idea of finding things
in your own collection, several announcements have come out of
Monticello over the past several months as the former home
of Thomas Jefferson tries to be more candid about the
lives of enslaved people on the property. I know when
I went to Monticello, and probably was not something they
(21:38):
talked about at all. They were more like, look at
this amazing clock. In January, news broke about a kitchen
at Monticello that was used by enslaved chef James Hemmings.
When Jefferson was a minister to France, he took Hemmings
with him to be trained as a chef there. A
lot of news reporting framed this as a discovery, something
(22:01):
Monticello was surprised to find right there, but the staff
already knew where this kitchen was. It just wasn't possible
for archaeologists to get to it because visitor restrooms had
been built there. But the bathrooms have since been demolished,
which allowed for a dig that finally revealed the original floor.
This kitchen opened as a new public exhibit on June six.
(22:23):
Also opening that day was a new digital exhibit called
The Life of Sally Hemmings. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation also
announced that from here on out it would drop all
of the qualifiers when discussing whether or not Thomas Jefferson
fathered children with Hemmings, saying quote, while there are some
who disagree, the foundation's scholarly advisors and the larger community
(22:45):
of academic historians who specialize in early American history have
concurred for many years that the evidence is sufficiently strong
to state that Thomas Jefferson fathered at least six children
with Sally Hemmings. That is the end of the quote.
Side note. Last year, Monticello announced that it was excavating
Hemming's living quarters, which had also been turned into a bathroom.
(23:08):
We're gonna take a quick break before we move on
to a different on Oarth topic. We talked about the
Voyage Manuscript not long ago in one of our Saturday
Classic episodes, but we have yet another attempt to decode it.
(23:29):
This time it is the work of computing scientists at
the University of Alberta. Professor Greg Contract and graduate student
Bradley how Aer are using natural language processing to try
to figure it out. They used four hundred languages from
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to try to determine
what language the manuscript is written in. They originally thought Arabic,
(23:51):
but their work suggests the most likely candidate is Hebrew.
Even that, though is not definite, it's just statistically the
most likely language. And this is where it gets a
little less precise. Their hypothesis is that this is a
cipher that uses anagrams. But they did not have a
Hebrew scholar to work with to check their findings, so
(24:13):
they did what they could, and then they ran it
through Google Translate, and they got results that seemed to
be mostly readable sentences based on our own use of
Google Translate, though we can't really call anything solved based
on Google Translate. Well, and I wonder as Google weighted
on this, because we don't know how much their algorithm
(24:33):
tries to make sense of things. I did not find
that they had when I was researching this, so that's
like a whole other potential layer of Like, of course
it made sort of readable sentences, it's trying desperately to
do so. Yes, there were also lots of comments on
on various articles that were about this that were sort
of like, there are a lot of Hebrew scholars, it
(24:57):
seems like there should be one who would work with
you on this. Yeah, a lot of questions on that one.
Researchers have been trying to track down the remains of
the monastery where the Book of Deer was written. In
the Book of Deer is a tenth century copy of
the Gospels with notes about everyday life at the time
written in the margins. It's the oldest known example of
(25:19):
written Scottish Galic, and the monks in the monastery where
the book was written eventually relocated about one thousand years
ago in the location of the original monastery has been lost.
In January they announced to break through a hearth and
a thick layer of charcoal that they found an Aberdeen
sure not far away from Old Deer. This fine has
(25:40):
been dated to between eleven forty seven and twelve sixty,
so it's roughly in the right place, roughly in the
right time. May have been something that lingered around for
a while after the monks had moved on. This is
part of the Book of Deer project, which is trying
to make the text were accessible and has sponsored a
(26:01):
series of excavations in the search for the monastery. Conservators
with the Queen Anne's Revenge Project, which has blessed us
with a lot of unearthed pirates stuff, found something really
interesting in some watting inside of a cannon. It was
a book, or at least part of a book. At first,
it wasn't obvious at all what they were looking at.
(26:23):
The first descriptions were just quote a mass of black textile,
But as they worked with the mystery watting, they started
to pick out words and realized that they were looking
at print material. It took a while to figure out
exactly what kind of print material, though, because they were
only able to pick out a few snippets and isolated
(26:44):
chunks of the text. After a year of looking for clues,
a conservator named Kimberly Kenyon found the word helo, which
was in one of these snippets of text from that watting.
She found it in a book called A Voyage to
the South Sea Around the World. That book was written
in seventeen twelve, and eventually they matched up more words
(27:07):
and phrases from the Cannon watting with words and phrases
from this book, and the book has its own connection
to piracy. A Voyage to the South Sea Around the
World recounts Edward Cook's time aboard the Duchess during a
privateering voyage that lasted from seventeen o eight to seventeen eleven.
This expedition also rescued Alexander Selkirk, who is believed to
(27:30):
be the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe, from an uninhabited island.
It's not totally clear why this book was used as
watting and a cannon. There's some speculation about it though.
The pirates might have just really needed some watting and
they grabbed a book that was handy, or somebody could
have been mad that the voyage recounted in the book
(27:52):
was led by Captain Woods Roger, who went on to
fight piracy in the Caribbean. So it was more like,
i'd will like you and your anti piracy campaign, So
I'm gonna stuff this book about it down a cannon.
But that is just a theory, although it's fun to speculate.
It is a fun speculation. We are moving on to
(28:15):
something that I always love, which is beads. Yep Archaeologists
have assumed that glassmaking was introduced into Africa through trade
with Europe, but according to chemical analysis of a site
in Nigeria, glassmaking their pre dates trade with Europe, and
this particular site is home to the ancestral Yoruba people,
and the find totally contradicts the prevailing idea that glass
(28:39):
was introduced to Africa by traders from the Mediterranean and Europe.
Lots of glass beads and containers have been unearthed at
digs from this area before, but the assumption had been
that all of this glass was imported. Now though it
appears as though there was a glass workshop there. Researchers
found more than in the thousand beads and none of
(29:02):
them had a chemical makeup that matched European glass. This
was all local material, all made by local craftsmen and artisans,
and the oldest samples date back to the eleven hundreds,
before this particular part of West Africa was trading with Europeans.
Archaeologists in India have discovered a bead workshop dating back
to the ancient Indus Valley. We talked a little about
(29:24):
the Indus Valley civilization in our episode on Mahinjo Daro,
and this is a pre Harapan site, meaning that it
dates back before the Indus Valley civilization matured. This is
from an excavation site called Kunal in northern India and
beads from the site date back to three thousand b c.
E to b C. And they demonstrate that the artisans
(29:46):
who were working at the site were highly skilled. But
it's not just the age of the beads and the
skill of the craftsman that's so interesting. There's also evidence
that the bead makers traded with people's as far away
as Mesopotamia. On the note, a common misconception about the
past is that populations before the modern era were isolated,
(30:06):
like Europe was all people we would think of his white,
and Africa was all people we would think of his black,
and so on, until suddenly, around fourteen fifty or so
people started moving around more. But that is just really
not true. And next up we have a bunch of
studies that are examples of that. Here's a really quick
one to start off. Archaeologists in Tongsburg, Norway, have found
(30:29):
an abstract chess piece made of antler and the remains
of a thirteen century house. This piece is a night
and while it's design is abstract, it also seems to
have been inspired by Islamic art. Researchers from the Max
Planck Institute for the Science of Human History have sequenced
the DNA of several fifteen thousand year old modern humans
(30:51):
from Morocco. This is the oldest African DNA ever to
be successfully analyzed. The study looked at DNA from nine people.
They were able to get mitochondrial DNA from seven of them.
And genome wide information from five of them, and they
discovered that these people's DNA was related to populations both
from the Levant and from Sub Saharan Africa. This suggests
(31:15):
that there was a lot of interconnectivity going on in
the world, with these people sharing DNA with populations from
Western Asia and Sub Saharan Africa. It's a lot more
mobility within these populations than researchers had thought was happening
fifteen thousand years ago, and it suggests that travel between
North Africa, Sub Saharan Africa, and Western Asia was happening
(31:37):
much earlier than was previously thought. Researchers from the University
of Helsinki have been trying to solve a mystery about
the Neolithic courted war culture, which spread across what's now Finland, Estonia,
and Sweden around to b c. E. One question has
been whether the pottery that was part of this culture
(31:58):
was carried from place to place trade, or whether the
potters themselves spread out and carried their craft with them.
According to research published in the Journal of Archaeological Science,
it seems to be the latter. The team analyzed pottery
from twenty four sites in three countries, which suggests that
the pots themselves were being crafted in multiple locations. Neolithic
(32:21):
courted where is also heavily associated with women. Women are
more likely to have the pottery among their grave goods.
Women seem to have been the ones who were performing
and teaching the craft of making the pottery. So the
evidence suggests that skilled female potters were moving all around
the Baltic maybe after getting married, and continuing their craft
(32:43):
after moving. So it wasn't a matter of somebody loading
up a pack animal with pottery and carrying it around,
or putting pottery on a boat and carrying it around.
People were moving to a new place where they lived permanently,
and they were making their pottery once they got there.
And we're gonna have a whole lot or unearthed next time,
including favorite topics like edibles and podibles and everybody's most
(33:06):
delightful topic exhumations. Exhumation time coming next. Tracy, do you
have listener mail? I do have a really quick listener mail.
It's from Eleanor, and Eleanor says, dear Tracy and Holly.
I love the show and recently listened to your episode
about evacuating children. It reminded me of a memorial that
I pass every day on my commute at Liverpool Street
(33:28):
station in London. The small memorial is for the children
of the Kinder transport. It's off to the side of
the main hall in the station and is not really
noticed by many people who are rushing past it. I've
attached some pictures. Thank you for your awesome podcast that
makes my commute on a tube so much better. Best wishes, Eleanor.
Eleanor sent three um three pictures of this memorial that
(33:52):
is really moving to look at. It's got sculptures have
two children with a suitcase behind them and the look
on their face is just so moving. These were the
children that were evacuated out of Nazi Germany and Nazi
occupied territories into Britain um leading up to World War Two. Anyway,
(34:13):
I did not know that this existed as a monument.
Thank you so much for sending this and for sending
the pictures. Um. I will see if I can find
uh some pictures online and linked to them from the
show notes for today's episode. If you would like to
send us a note. Where a history podcast at how
Stuff Works dot com and then we're on social media
(34:33):
at missed in History that is our Facebook and our interests,
and our Instagram and our Twitter. You can come to
our website, which is missed in history dot com, where
you will find the show notes for all the episodes
that Holly and I would have worked on together, and
an archive of all of the episodes ever. You can
also subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts or Google
podcast wherever else you get your podcasts. For more on
(35:00):
this and thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff Works
dot com. M
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Tracy Wilson
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