Unearthed! In July 2026, Part 2

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 tra
CV Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. This is Part two
of the latest installment of Unearthed. We have in this

(00:23):
second part this week so many books and letters. I
don't think we've ever had this many things to file
under books and letters in one episode before. There are
so many we have to take a break in the middle.
We've also got some shipwrecks and some Neanderthals, and we're starting,
as always with the things, the random things that I

(00:44):
call potpoury, and we're gonna jump right in with toilets.
We have talked about Roman latrines carrying evidence of pathogens
on other installments of Unearthed, especially parasites like tapeworm. There's
a lot of interesting finds that happen in these places.
A team in Poland has examined human waste remains from

(01:05):
Roman toilets dating back to the second through the fourth
century CE and found the expected parasites, but they also
found the Protozoan parasite cryptos Paridium, which until now has
been believed to have originated in Central America. It's being
described as the earliest reliable evidence of cryptosparritium in the region,

(01:28):
and of course evidence that it was in Europe prior
to contact with the Americas. When I first saw the
headline that was something like researchers find parasites and Roman toilets,
I was like, no, can't, we are aware the Romans
were full of parasites. But then I said, Okay, this
one's actually interesting and new. Next, researchers have identified a

(01:54):
glass bottle found in York, England in nineteen eighty three
or nineteen eighty four, which dates back to the second century,
as a coal bottle kohl, the substance used to line
the eyes in Egyptian culture. This is the first and
only one of these ever found in Roman Britain. The

(02:18):
style matches bottles that were made in Egypt, and coal
was used almost exclusively in Egypt and Sudan in this era.
It also was not really traded far beyond that region.
The bottle shape and size make it really impractical for
most other uses, so conclusion it is a coal bottle.
How did it get there? The area where this was

(02:40):
found was a rubbish dump in the second century, but
it is as Tracy said, unclear exactly how it would
have ended up there. It is possible that it belonged
to a Roman soldier, either one from Egypt or one
who had spent a significant amount of time there before
arriving in Britain. Kind of a good reminder that while

(03:01):
this we don't know for sure how it got there,
the Roman Empire was a multicultural, multi ethnic empire and
that included Roman Britain. Next, researchers examining Ming Dynasty surgical
tools dating back about six hundred years have discovered that
they were treated with a numbing agent. This was a

(03:23):
topical anesthetic that was likely made from plant secretions. That
residue on the tool contained trace amounts of aconatine, which
is found in plants like monkshood and wolf Spain. Creating
this anesthetic would have required people to figure out how
to extract these toxic compounds from the plants without harming themselves,

(03:45):
and then how to reduce their toxicity so that they
created a numbing substance without that substance causing other issues
like poisoning the patient. According to this research, this weakening
process was done by soaking the plants in urine black
soybean soup or vinegar. And lastly, according to research published

(04:08):
in the Journal I Science, Cardinal Giovanni de Medici and
Grand Duke Francesco de Medici both died of malaria. This
was already believed to be their cause of death, but
there were also persistent arguments that the two men had
really been poisoned, because the mediciese are just associated with poison.
Researchers came to this conclusion by analyzing the brothers skeletons,

(04:32):
finding evidence of two different species of malaria parasite. One
was a novel strain of Plasmodium falcaparum, which causes the
deadliest form of human malaria today. I guess it's within
the realm of possibility that they had malaria and were poisoned.
The malaria was actually poisoned, and Brom just making it.

(04:54):
People love to like they love the cloud of mystery
and drama around the medicies, and I think that feeds it. Yeah.
Now we're going to move on to so many books
and letters that, as I said at the top of
the show, we're going to have to take a break.
Part way through a papyrus fragment from the archives of
the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo have been

(05:16):
found to contain thirty previously unpublished verses by Empedocles. Empedocles
was a pre Socratic philosopher who lived around the fifth
century BCE. These verses have now been published in a book.
Its title is in French but means Empedocles of Cairo,
along with the translation and a commentary. This previously unknown

(05:40):
fragment is the first original text that we have from
edpedocles work, rather than a summary or a quotation from
a later philosopher like Plato or Aristotle. Analysis of the
original text suggests that it's the source of a passage
Plutarch wrote in the second century CE, and that it
also influences other philosophers, again including Plato and Aristotle. A

(06:04):
press release from the University of the Edge characterized the
importance of this find in this way that I really
love quote. Imagine that in a few centuries time all
that remains of Victor Hugo are excerpts from lemisrob in
school textbooks, the musical Notre Dame de Perie and the
program for a performance of the play. Or Noting the

(06:28):
discovery of a few pages from an original edition of
Hugo's work would then be a momentous event. And speaking
of previously unpublished writings, Professor Christiente Orno of the University
of Wurtzburg discovered two previously unknown sermons by Augustine of
Hippo while deciphering a twelfth century manuscript housed in a

(06:51):
monastery in Poland. The manuscript was known to contain works
by Saint Augustine, but not that two of the six
works were previously undiscovered. An edition of these texts is
expected to be published sometime this year next. Two fragments
of a steely were found at the Wilsong Palace in

(07:11):
what's now yung Ju, South Korea. One of them was
found at the palace site in nineteen thirty seven, and
the other was found during excavations of a moat surrounding
the palace in twenty twenty. In twenty twenty four, researchers
noted that there were some similarities between those two pieces,
and further research revealed that they were made of similar stone,

(07:34):
and ultimately a three D scan of each of the
two fragments showed that they had a broken edge and
they would fit back together like puzzle pieces. This steely
dates back to the Scilly Kingdom around the fourth or
fifth century, and fitting these two pieces together has allowed
researchers to read a character that was previously illegible because

(07:54):
it was broken in two. It is not enough, though,
for a full interpretation of the steel. It is a
small bit of a larger inscription, with only a few
characters visible. The ones that are included are words like tribute, white, heaven,
and call, which was the character that had been broken

(08:15):
through the middle. These fragments are on display at the
Gyanju National Museum until August. Archaeologists in Egypt have found
a fragment of Homer's Iliad under the wrappings of a
mummy that was found during excavations in late twenty twenty five.
This piece of Homer's Iliad appears to have been intentionally

(08:36):
included in the mummification process, making it the first known
Greek literary text to be used in such a way.
This particular passage is from book two of the Iliad,
in a section known as the Catalog of Ships. Right now,
the reason for its use in the mummification process is unclear.
The team leading the work gave a statement to Smithsonian

(08:59):
Magazine saying they were studying and proposing various hypotheses. I
personally hope it just turns out he loved it. Yeah.
My hypothesis is this person really really loved either Homer
or boats Uh huh. Next. Three historians have worked together
to decipher a secret diplomatic letter dating back to the

(09:21):
end of the fifteenth century. This letter was written by
Toledo nobleman Pedro de Ayala, who was a diplomat in
service to fernand the second of Aragon and Isabella the
First of Castile, and he wrote this letter from Scotland
in fourteen ninety six after being sent there to try
to negotiate a peace agreement between Scotland and England. This

(09:45):
letter is eleven pages long. Now that it's been deciphered,
we know it contains all kinds of information about the
court of Henry the seventh of England and James the
fourth of Scotland, and the voyages of John Cabot to
North America, as well as other subject This text, when
it was written was partially encrypted using symbols, and the

(10:06):
same letters were sometimes represented by multiple different symbols, which
made the deciphering process challenging. This research has been published
as an open access paper in the Journal of Renaissance Studies.
Speaking of Letters, eight letters from John Keats to Fanny
Brawn were discovered to be missing back in nineteen eighty nine,

(10:29):
and they have now been found and returned to the
Whitney family. The letters had been previously in a volume
owned by John Hay Whitney, who died in nineteen eighty two,
and they were part of a set of letters that
had been broken up and auctioned off to multiple people
back in eighteen eighty five. These letters were rediscovered after

(10:50):
someone tried to sell a book at B and B
Rare Books in New York in twenty twenty five. The
store owners were suspicious and looked up the book in
a stolen art database called the Art Loss Register, and
also got in touch with Susan J. Wolfson, a literature
professor at Princeton, New York's Antiquities Trafficking Unit also started

(11:12):
an investigation, leading to the discovery and return of not
just the John Keats volume, but also sixteen other books
that had been part of the Whitney collection. While the
investigation is ongoing, the man who tried to sell the book,
said he inherited them from his grandfather, so the circumstances
of the book's original disappearance are still unclear. Multiple people

(11:37):
involved with this find have described it as very meaningful,
including Wolfson, who called it the find of a lifetime,
and various members of the Whitney family. The Keats letters
were auctioned off in June, and according to reporting in
Smithsonian Magazine, the proceeds were to be donated to the
Whitney Family Foundation. Lucy Monroe of King's College, London had

(12:00):
found documents confirming the location of the house William Shakespeare
purchased in London in sixteen thirteen, three years before he died.
These documents include a plan of the Blackfriars Precinct created
in the aftermath of the sixteen sixty six Great Fire
of London. This plan shows the layout and size of

(12:20):
the house, as well as the building surrounding it. Monroe
also found documents relating to the sale of the property
by Shakespeare's granddaughter later on, showing that it remained in
the family until sixteen sixty five. According to this plan,
part of the Blackfriar's House is now the site of
five Saint Andrew's Hill, and that's the nineteenth century building

(12:43):
that now has a historical blue plaque that says that
in sixteen thirteen Shakespeare purchase lodgings near the site. Now
we know that it was actually on the site right there.
We are going to take a quick sponsor break and
then we're going to have more books in Letters. Our

(13:10):
next Book in Letter find is that scholars from Trinity College,
Dublin who were working at the National Central Library of Rome,
found a previously unknown copy of the oldest known poem
in the English language, that is Cadman's Hymn. It was
found in a rediscovered copy of Historia Ecclesiastica, which was

(13:31):
written by the Venerable Beade. The Venerable Bead was a
monk who lived in the eighth century. This rediscovered manuscript
is a fairly early copy of Beade's work, and it
was transcribed in the early ninth century. It is the
third oldest copy of Cadman's Hymn in existence. And this
is a short poem. It's only nine lines long and

(13:53):
it's attributed to a cowharder known as Cadman. According to
the lore around this poem, Cadman was ill literate, and
this poem was divinely inspired. While it was written in
Old English, many of the surviving copies of it are
in Latin, sometimes with the Old English text included as
a margin note or at the end. Older copies of

(14:15):
the Venerable Bead's Historia Ecclesiastica include a Latin version of
the poem, but it appears that the transcriber of this
copy replaced the Latin version with the original Old English one,
or was copying from a version of the manuscript that
had already done that. This suggests that people who were
copying this text roughly one hundred years after Bed finished

(14:38):
his history, thought the Old English version was important enough
to include, rather than the religious and scholarly default of Latin.
Next to, the Danish National Museum has embarked on an
effort to digitize and analyze its collection of cuneiform tablets
in a project called Hidden Treasures the National Museum's cuneiform collection.

(15:01):
These tablets come from what's now Iraq and Syria, and
some of them are at least four thousand years old.
Until now, the museum's focus has been largely on preserving
these clay tablets, not on deciphering them, so knowledge of
what's actually written on a lot of them is very recent.
Some of the ones that have been analyzed so far

(15:23):
include three thousand year old tablets from the city of Hama,
which include a lot of medical treatments, magical incantations, and
an anti witchcraft ritual. There is a copy of a
list of rulers that includes a reference to the legendary
king Gilgamesh from the Epic of Gilgamesh, and there's also
a receipt for beer. Researchers at North Carolina State University

(15:48):
have developed a non destructive method for analyzing parchment manuscripts.
Parchment is made from animal skins, so cellular material can
provide a lot of information about what kind of animal
the skin came from, and when and where the animal
lived over time. This can also contribute to knowledge of
animal husbandry practices in the places where the parchment was prepared.

(16:13):
This technique involves swabbing parchment with the same sort of
brush that's used to collect cellular material from humans during
PAP tests. If you've had a PAP test and you're
in disbelief that this is a non destructive method, I
know it does not feel good. A lot of the time,
but it is collecting the cellular material without harming the parchment,

(16:35):
so the fears about causing damage to manuscripts has really
been a barrier to this kind of research into their
materials before now, so researchers are hopeful that this project,
which involved non destructive sampling from ninety one different parchment manuscripts,
will help gain some trust in this method. It's more

(16:55):
bathroom talk for me. Archaeologists in Germany have found a
note book in a medieval latrine. So unlike today's paper notebooks,
which would probably be ruined if you drop them in
a latrine, don't do that. This one was made from
leather and wood, very tightly bound, and eight of its
ten pages were coded in wax. This wax would have

(17:18):
made the pages erasable, so the person using them could
mark their notes with the stylus and then refresh the
wax to reuse the page, and they also, as a consequence,
helped preserve the notebook while it was in that latrine.
This notebook is small, It's about the size of the
palm of the hand. The pages are largely still legible,

(17:38):
and the notebook seems to have belonged to a merchant
in what's now Paderborn roughly seven hundred years ago. The
pages are written in Latin in a cursive style that
was popular from about the late thirteenth to early fourteenth centuries.
Researchers are hoping to analyze the visible text and to
see whether earlier layers of wax might still be legible

(18:00):
if they use the right imaging technologies. They are also
going to research the leather binding, which is decorated with
embossed Lili's. Researchers from Heidelberg University have deciphered a Roman
cursed tablet made of lead, dating back to about the
second century and found in what is now the Netherlands.

(18:20):
Its text is not in Latin, like most of the
cursed tablets that have been found in Northern Europe. It's
in Ancient Greek written in an Egyptian style. The text
was deciphered with the help of reflectance transformation imaging, which
involves taking multiple pictures of something through different lighting conditions,

(18:41):
and then those images can be combined into one that
can be adjusted with different variations in the lighting to
see different parts of the surface and variations in the surface.
So that includes things like the etchings on this tablet,
which are incredibly hard to see with the unaided eye.
Looking at pictures of this thing, I almost mistook it

(19:02):
for leather because it is so worn. This cursed tablet
includes magical symbols along with the names of two women
and two men who are referred to as fellow slaves.
It's not clear whether the four enslaved people were working
together to curse someone, or if this is an account

(19:23):
of the curse being against the four of them. The
plan for this tablet is for it to be displayed
at the Herelin Museum and for the text to be
made part of a scholarly publication so that it's available
for other people to study. The idea of virtually unrolling
scrolls has come up on several installments of on Earth.

(19:44):
That's using CT scanning, X rays and other imaging techniques,
along with other technologies to read what is written on
scrolls that are too delicate or damage to physically unroll
without destroying them. One that made the news in June
was just scroll that was badly damaged in the eruption
of Mount Vesuvius in the year seventy nine. This is

(20:06):
the first time that researchers have fully unwrapped a whole
scroll and recovered all the text from it, although analysis
of that text is still in progress. We talked about
the partial unrolling of this scroll back in twenty twenty three.
The virtually unrolled scroll has text covering about one point
five meters or four point nine feet written across twenty columns.

(20:31):
It is being described and a lot of reporting as
having been deciphered with AI, and this is a great
example of how blanket use of the term AI is
kind of muddying the distinctions between all the different kinds
of technology that are described with this label. This is
not in any way a case of researchers putting an

(20:53):
inscription through a chatbot and having it spit out a translation.
Researchers trained the AI to recognize ink that the unaided
I cannot easily differentiate from the charred surface of the scroll,
and then once the AI had figured out which parts
of it were inc eight qualified paparologists, all of them

(21:16):
being actual human beings, analyzed those renderings. Computer science professor
Brent Seals, who's been a big part of the Vesuvius
challenge that this work is part of, put it this
way quote. This is no longer just about imaging or
machine learning. Now we need experts who can read, edit,
and understand what they are saying. Our last bit of

(21:39):
books and letters is also a music find. The National
Library of France has found a previously unknown manuscript by
volfgang Amadeus Mozart, written in collaboration with a student in
a stack of anonymous manuscripts. This discovery came about thanks
to curator Francois Pierre Goy examined the manuscript and thinking

(22:01):
something seemed familiar about it. Goy had been recently examining
manuscripts that were known to be Mozart's work, get started
to look a little familiar. This manuscript likely dates back
to when Mozart was tutoring Marie Luise Philippine de Bonnier
de Guin, whose father thought that she could be trained

(22:22):
to be a composer. She played the harp and her
father played the flute, and he wanted pieces that the
two of them could play together. The National Library of
France announced this find on June nineteenth, and the compositions
made their debut three days later in a performance that
was broadcast on Radio France. Harpis Nicolatuliez and floutist Mattild

(22:45):
Carderini had to rehearse in secret to prepare for this performance.
Armann Brenzing, the director of the Mozart Library at the
International MOZARTIAM Foundation in Salzburg, Austria, told The New York
Times that this is the most important Mozart discovery in decades.
I really love the idea of the musicians having to

(23:05):
secretly rehearse this before it was announced so no one
can hear it. But then now we're moving on from
the books and letters to the shipwrecks. Marine archaeologists have
found the Danibrog, which was sunk in the Battle of
Copenhagen in eighteen oh one. As was the case with
some of the fines off of Copenhagen that we talked

(23:27):
about in our last installment of Unearthed, this was at
the site of new housing which is going to be
built on an island that will be made in Copenhagen Harbor.
So divers are working to recover as many artifacts from
this ship as possible before the whole area becomes a
construction site. Next, the University of Cadiz has embarked on

(23:49):
a project called Project Heracles to identify shipwrecks in a
bay near the north end of the Strait of Gibraltar.
This area is home to the Pillars of Hercules, thus
the project's name. As of April, the project had identified
one hundred and fifty one archaeological sites in the bay
and one hundred thirty four of them were shipwrecks. So far,

(24:12):
thirty four of the shipwrecks have been documented. Twenty three
of those are Roman ships, twenty four are from the
early Modern period, and others are kind of scattered across history.
The oldest dates to the Punic era in the fifth
century BCE. The researchers are making virtual models and three
hundred and sixty degree videos of the sites to make

(24:34):
them more accessible to the public, and of course this
is an ongoing project. Next divers off the coast of Cornwall, England,
may have discovered the US Coast Guard cutter Tampa, which
sank in nineteen eighteen after being torpedoed by a German submarine.
The Tampa had been escorting other ships back and forth

(24:55):
between Gibraltar and the UK when it was sunk one
hundred and thirty one, when sailors were on board the Tampa,
making this the largest loss of life for the US
Navy due to marine combat during World War One. Divers
had been looking for the ship and had gone on
nine unsuccessful dives before finding it in April. The ship

(25:17):
is in deep water, so they were not able to
stay very long before needing to return to the surface,
probably less than fifteen minutes. It is hoped that future
dives will be able to collect more evidence and conclusively
determine the ship's identity. Yeah, it basically took them so
long to acclimate to the depths that they were getting
to that once they were down there, they did not

(25:39):
have a lot of time left. The USS Herring was
sunk by a Japanese shore battery in nineteen forty four
after attacking and sinking two Japanese merchant ships. The Herring
was a submarine and all eighty three of its crew
members were killed when it sank. A Russian expedition found
a vessel that was believed to be the Herring in

(26:01):
twenty seventeen, and the US Naval History and Heritage Command
confirmed the ship's identity this year and in slightly different
and very cool shipwreck news, Scientists at Alto University in
Finland have used surplus pieces of a seventeenth century shipwreck
to make dresses. The wreck was found in twenty nineteen

(26:24):
under the parking lot of a hotel that was being renovated.
Wood from the wreck was expected to be discarded, so
researchers salvage that would, processed it into a silky fiber
using a process called ion cell, and then spun that
fiber into yarn. The dresses were machine knit as one intact,

(26:45):
seamless piece, with the pattern made with the help of
an evolutionary algorithm software tool. Another thing in this installment
of on Earth that's under the label of AI but
similarly not a large language bottle chatbot. So yeah, these
are like two identical Maxi dresses. One was sent to

(27:05):
the Ulu Art Museum for an exhibition called Tomorrow's Wardrobe,
which I looked at briefly and is full of a
number of very cool and funky dresses. The other was
sent to Alto University for a forthcoming exhibit called Designs
for a Cooler Planet. Otherwood from the wreck has also

(27:26):
been used to create a hand shaped art exhibit called
Atti's Palm. We are gonna pause here for one more
sponsor break before we wrap up on Earth for the quarter.

(27:46):
There was so much research about Neanderthals over the last
few months. Of all the extinct species of humans, Neanderthals
are our closest relative, and they come up almost every
episode of On Earth, but I don't think we have
ever had this many different papers and articles in one session. First,

(28:07):
researchers in Germany have re examined findings from an amateur
archaeological dig that was carried out in nineteen forty eight.
One of the things that was found was an eight
foot long wooden sphere between the ribs of the skeleton
of a straight tusked elephant. This find dated back one
hundred and twenty five thousand years, at which point only

(28:29):
Neanderthals were known to live in the area, so of
course it had to be a Neanderthal spear. The spine
was kind of controversial, though, especially since an amateur carried
it out. An obvious interpretation was that Neanderthals had hunted
the elephant and had used that spear to kill it,
But at that time researchers also thought of Neanderthals's primitive

(28:52):
scavengers not capable of hunting, so some argued that the
spear was really a digging tool and that its discovery
with the bones was just a coincidence. This new research,
published in the journal's Scientific Reports, has found cut marks
on the elephant's ribs and spines, suggesting that it was

(29:13):
butchered while it was fresh. Analysis of the teeth suggests
that the elephant died at the age of about thirty,
meaning it was an adult in its prime. We have
also talked about other research suggesting that Neanderthal's eight elephant meat.
All of this adds up to suggest the interpretation that

(29:33):
Neanderthals intentionally hunted this elephant, meaning the spear was probably
a hunting weapon, not a digging tool that just happened
to wind up near some elephant bones. In addition to
the outdated idea that Neanderthals were primitive scavengers, there's been
a general perception that they were less intelligent than Homo sapiens.

(29:54):
A couple of recent studies challenged this idea as well.
One study published in side Ice Advances builds on earlier
work about human genetics and language abilities. This led to
research into the human genome and genetic regulatory elements known
as human ancestor quickly evolved regions that have an outsized

(30:16):
influence on language ability. It turns out that the Neanderthal
genome includes some of these same genetic elements, the same
ones that are in human beings today, so they were
present before Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens diverged from a common ancestor.
That means the capability for language might also be a

(30:36):
lot older that was previously thought. Other research published in
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that
while Homo sapiens and Neanderthals had differently shaped skulls, that
doesn't mean Neanderthals had significantly different brains or cognitive abilities
than the Homo sapiens that existed at the same time.

(30:58):
The researchers point out that there's a lot of variation
in today's brain anatomy. They compared the brains of ethnic Han,
Chinese people, and Americans with European ancestry, finding that in
most regions of the brain there is a bigger difference
between people of Chinese and European ancestry than there would
have been between Neanderthals and early modern humans. And another

(31:22):
study published in Royal Society Open Science examined ancient baby
teeth and bones and concluded that Neanderthals grew and developed
in their very early years similarly to the way modern
humans do, suggesting there might also be other similarities. Next,
another paper published in Scientific Reports concludes that Neanderthals hunted

(31:46):
European pond turtles primarily not for their meat, but for
their shells, which they used to make tools. The shells
that were analyzed had scrape and cut marks on the insides,
suggesting that the meat and organs were thoroughly removed and
the insides of the shells were cleaned. But these turtles
are very small, so this process wouldn't have yielded much

(32:09):
edible meat, leading to the idea that they probably were
not a major food source. The resulting shells could have
been useful as containers or scoops, and turtle shells have
been found in locations that Neanderthals probably used for rendering Greece.
This paper also documents the hunting of turtles much farther
north than was previously known. The idea that a particular

(32:32):
food source wouldn't have yielded much food comes up relatively
often in these kinds of articles, so it's like, Oh,
these clams would have been really small, it would have
been really inefficient to be trying to get the meat
from them. And I don't know if I fully believed
that argument, because maybe the turtles were really delicious, maybe
it was in fashion sort of to have turtle. We

(32:54):
don't really know, but that's sort of the general conclusion here.
Something else Neanderthals may have used as tools was rhinoceros teeth.
This conclusion comes from the study of fossil rhinoceros teeth
that had unusual marks and fractures. This research involved analyzing
those fossilized teeth as well as experiments done with modern

(33:18):
rhinoceros teeth, including using the modern teeth to retouched stone
tools and for things like napping and for other tasks.
Researchers concluded that Neanderthals probably used rhinoceros teeth primarily as
percussion tools, and that they preferred using the teeth of
older animals, possibly because those older teeth were flatter due

(33:41):
to wear and that made them easier to handle. Research
published in the journal Plus one suggests that Neanderthals had
the understanding and the manual dexterity to treat tooth infections
by drilling into a tooth and removing diseased pulp. This
conclusion comes from examining of one nearly sixty thousand year

(34:02):
old molar. A hole drilled into the center of the
tooth goes into the pulp cavity, and the microscopic grooves
in the hole are similar to ones made by stone
point tools found in the same cave as the tooth.
The tooth also has wear patterns that would have been
made after the tooth was drilled while the person was

(34:23):
still alive, suggesting they lived for some time after going
through this procedure or enduring this procedure since it would
have been very, very painful. If this interpretation is correct,
this is the world's oldest successful dental treatment that we
know of. An ongoing topic of research into Neanderthals is

(34:44):
what exactly caused them to become extinct. A modeling study
published in Quaternary Science Reviews suggests that neither changes in
the climate nor increased competition with Homo sapiens can fully
account for neanders Tall's extinction. Instead, it concludes that increased

(35:04):
networks among groups of Homo Sapiens might have given them
an advantage that the Neanderthals did not have. With greater
networks of allies and relatives, groups of Homo sapiens who
started to struggle due to something like climate or natural disasters,
or demographic changes or some other reason would have had

(35:24):
more options for places they could go, communities they could
join and find support. That kind of thing. Arianne Burke,
a professor in the Department of Anthropology at universi de
de Montreal and head of the Quebec based Hominin Dispersal's
research group, led this study. In Burke's words, quote, these
networks act as a safety net. They allow for the

(35:47):
exchange of information on resources and animal migrations, the forming
of partnerships, and temporary access to other territories in the
event of a crisis. Research published in the PC of
the National Academy of Sciences comes to a slightly different
conclusion about the Neanderthal extinction, and that's the declining genetic

(36:09):
diversity may have played a role. This lack of genetic
diversity could have made different groups of Neanderthals more susceptible
to those same kinds of changes in climate or natural disasters.
That were referenced in the earlier study. This conclusion comes
from analysis of mitochondrial DNA among Neanderthals at six sites

(36:29):
in Belgium, France, Germany, and Serbia. On the other hand,
other research published in the journal Nature examined genetic data
from twenty seven Neanderthals from what's now Belgium and France
from shortly before they became extinct and concluded that they
were more diverse than was previously thought. Yeah, I did

(36:49):
not try to compare those two studies line by line,
but came to slightly different conclusions. We have one final
thing before we wrap up. On the fourth of July,
the United States Domestic Policy Council issued one hundred and
sixty two page report called Saving America's Story. How ideological
capture at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History

(37:12):
erases our heritage. Since this happened in July, it is
normally something that we would talk about in our next
installment of Unearthed, But given the scope of this and
the connections to things that we have already been talking
about on Unearthed, it seemed weird to just not mention
it at all. I have not read this report in

(37:32):
its entirety, because again it was issued on July fourth,
and I heard about it on July fifth, and we
are recording this installment of Unearthed on July seventh. I
spent the entirety of July sixth writing about all of
the things that I had already flagged to talk about.
There was no time left for AE hundred and sixty

(37:54):
two page Smithsonian Report rabbit Hole. It was a long,
long day just with the work that already needed to
be done. Besides that, But here is the crux to
quote from the report. Quote, as this report shows, the
Museum purportedly presents America as a problematic country, irredeemably conceived,

(38:16):
founded by deeply flawed men, and still operating today as
an instrument of systemic racism and oppression. In the museum's
currents telling, the country is above all defined by white supremacy, slavery, conquest, exclusion, hierarchy, racism, xenophobia, misogyny,
and systemic injustice. The report identifies a broad pattern. The

(38:36):
founders are minimized, if not entirely excluded, Traditional patriotic narratives
are treated with suspicion, if not outright contempt, and the
basic symbols and stories that once helped unify Americans are
presented not as reasons for gratitude and inspiration, but as
objects to be inherently questioned, dismantled, problematized, and reinterpreted to

(38:57):
achieve ideological ends. So, to reiterate something that we said
more than a year ago when we started talking about
the restoring truth and sanity to American History Executive Order,
this idea that the purpose of history is patriotism and
national pride, as suggested by that passage, that is an ideology.

(39:22):
The kinds of changes that are being promoted through these
kinds of publications and government orders are attempts to erase
our heritage. There is only one heritage that is of
interest to the people who wrote this paper. What's being
erased with the kinds of changes that are made to
these museums and other sites is largely the heritage of

(39:44):
anybody who is not white, or Christian, or probably male.
As I said, I've not read this entire thing, but
the bits that I did look at in order to
write this paragraph are full of bad faith readings and
cherry picked out of context examples. So I just want
to say straightforwar. We stand with the Smithsonian, and we
stand with all of the historians and archivists and librarians

(40:06):
and researchers and teachers who are out there trying to
do accurate and nuanced and non whitewashed history in the
face of all of this nonsense. Amen, I also feel like,
I know I invoke William Blake all the time, but
his whole thing of like you cannot be truly good
unless you have known evil. Like if you are just

(40:28):
a good and innocent thing that is never tempted and
never faces you know dark things or does anything bad,
that's really meaningless. What makes people great is rising above
all of that and like living through it and knowing
they want to be better. So essentially this is like

(40:48):
would you like the most bland, pap version of this
that offers no ideological growth in terms of like how
we could be better than our forbear and learn from
their mistakes and overall the country gets better and better. Yeah,
it's just like this is for four year olds. Come on. Yeah.

(41:08):
One of the things that this report explicitly takes objection
to is somebody saying that loving America is complicated, And
I'm like, if loving America is not complicated for you.
I don't understand what you're doing like I just don't.
I just don't I have. I didn't pick this on

(41:30):
purpose to go along with that final statement. It just
happens to be the next unread listener mail that I
have in the in the stack, and it is from Kiki,
and it is about Shenandoah National Park and black Work.
We discussed the many complexities of the establishment of Shenandoah
National Park in that episode. I love our national parks

(41:53):
so much, there are also complexities in their history that
make loving them complicated. So Kiki wrote, hello to you both.
I'm writing today because I finally have some pictures of
fun of the memorials for those displaced by the park.
This one is in Augusta County outside Grand Caverns. I
took my six and four year old to see the

(42:15):
caverns and then we headed back home via the Blue
Ridge Parkway. They loved the whole trip, even the mountain road.
They were not as interested in the history as I hoped,
and due to a problem with my backup battery, I
was not able to play your shows during the trip.
This time, they both want to see more caverns, so
I'm sure I'll get another chance to play them the
episodes soon. When I was an elementary school late nineteen nineties,

(42:38):
we had a day camp with another school system and
we're busted out to Madison County in Virginia, where we
learned about science, music, history, and art within whatever theme
they picked. One year, I was lucky enough to be
in the history class, and we learned about the Shenandoah
Valley and spent time learning about the creation of the
Shenandoah National Park. We spoke with rangers and visited one

(43:00):
of the few houses not torn down inside the park.
It was extremely interesting, and I'm glad to say it
was not something I missed in history class. Finally, I'm
doing a catchup right now, and I just listened to
your embroidery episodes. I was amazed to hear about blackwork
because I just watched a video of someone hand embroidering it.
Here's a link to Bernadette Banner recreating Renaissance underwear complete

(43:22):
with blackwork collar. I don't know if you to are fans,
but she makes such lovely recreations for pat tax have
this meme of our new cat Yari who literally ran
into our house in May demanding hugs and is now
the best kiddie we could hope for. He's named for
a cat like cryptid beast from New Zealand. Hope that
heat is not getting you down this summer, your faithful listener, Kiki.

(43:44):
Thank you so much, Kiki for this email. Thank you
for adorable kitty cat pictures. The cat distribution system really
went hard on that one. Yeah, I like the cat
just running inside the house. The cat that I had
for many, many years is starting from my childhood, is
a cat who just arrived in our backyard one day

(44:06):
for whatever reason. Outlook is really just not wanting to
open the pictures at full size. They're right there, but oh,
here we go. So it is a plaque that is
the Augusta Memorial. It's in memory of Augusta County families
who were displaced in the creation of Shenandoah National Park,

(44:29):
and then a couple of other sites that have other
interpretive information. In an adorable kitty cat making, I'm going
to say a kind of goofy face. I love it best.
So thank you, thank you so much, Kiki. If you
would like to send us a note, we're at History
podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find the very

(44:51):
long source list of these unearthed episodes at our website
which is Missed Inhistory dot com, and you can subscribe
to our show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else
too to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,

(45:12):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.

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