April 24, 2023 • 34 mins
The first part of our spring 2023 edition of Unearthed! features updates, books and letters, fabric, mummies, and a whole bunch of stuff involving skulls or bones.
Research:
- Agence France-Presse. “New Easter Island moai statue discovered in volcano crater.” The Guardian. 1/3/2023. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/02/new-easter-island-moai-statue-discovered-in-volcano-crater
- Alberge, Dalya. “‘Incredible’ Roman bathers’ gems lost 2,000 years ago found near Hadrian’s Wall.” The Observer. 1/28/2023. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/28/roman-bathers-gems-carved-stones-archaeologists-hadrians-wall
- Amador, Marisela. “Swiss museum returns two artifacts to the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) confederacy.” The Canadian Press. Town and Country Today. 2/22/2023. https://www.townandcountrytoday.com/beyond-local/swiss-museum-returns-two-artifacts-to-the-haudenosaunee-iroquois-confederacy-6589516
- Amundsen, Bard. “World’s oldest rune stone found in Norway, archaeologists believe.” Science Norway. 1/17/2023. https://sciencenorway.no/archaeology-language-runes/worlds-oldest-rune-stone-found-in-norway-archaeologists-believe/2141404
- 1/12/2023. “Archaeology: 4,500-year-old ostrich eggs found in Israel.” https://www.ansa.it/ansamed/en/news/sections/culture/2023/01/12/archaeology-4500-year-old-ostrich-eggs-found-in-israel_899fa202-941d-4520-8be4-28397c1d89fc.html
- ArtNet News. “Art Industry News: The Met Will Repatriate 15 Sculptures Linked to Disgraced Dealer Subhash Kapoor + Other Stories.” 3/31/2023. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/art-industry-news-march-31-2023-2278598
- ArtNet News. “Researchers in Vietnam Discovered That Two Deer Antlers Languishing in Museum Storage Are Actually 2,000-Year-Old Musical Instruments.” 2/27/2023. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/deer-antler-long-an-museum-storage-earliest-known-stringed-instruments-2261298
- Bacon, B., Khatiri, A., Palmer, J., Freeth, T., Pettitt, P., & Kentridge, R. (2023). An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-writing System and Phenological Calendar. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 1-19. doi:10.1017/S0959774322000415
- BBC News. “Londoner solves 20,000-year Ice Age drawings mystery.” 1/5/2023. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-64162799
- BBC News. “Oldest tartan found to date back to 16th Century.” 3/26/2023. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-65081312
- “Comb made from human skull found among A14 artefacts.” 2/28/2023. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-64797376
- “Mary Queen of Scots: Secret letters written during imprisonment decoded.” 2/8/2023. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-64568222
- Begg, Tristin James Alexander et al. “Genomic analyses of hair from Ludwig van Beethoven.” Current Biology. 3/22/2023. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)00181-1
- Berger, Michele W. “At a southern Iraq site, unearthing the archaeological passing of time.” Penn Today. 1/23/2023. https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/lagash-southern-iraq-site-unearthing-archaeological-passing-time
- Bernardi, Dan. “In “an international act of diplomacy,” Syracuse University alumnus Brennen Ferguson ’19 helps repatriate ceremonial Native American items from a museum in Geneva, Switzerland..” Syracuse 3/10/2023. https://thecollege.syr.edu/news-all/news-2023/sacred-indigenous-objects-find-their-way-home/
- Brooks, James. “Oldest reference to Norse god Odin found in Danish treasure.” Associated Press. 3/8/2023. https://apnews.com/article/gold-god-odin-norse-denmark-buried-ca2959e460f7af301a19083b6eec7df4
- Burakoff, Maddie. “What made Beethoven sick? DNA from his hair offers clues.” Associated Press. 3/22/2023. https://apnews.com/article/beethoven-dna-hair-deaf-liver-d2d8c50fdd951eb5f5b9fdae00f795a3
- Cascone, Sarah. “Ancient Stone Tools Once Thought to be Made by Humans Were Actually Crafted by M
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It is time for our
next installment of Unearthed. If you're new to the show,
(00:22):
a few times a year, we look at what has
been literally or figuratively unearthed. If you are a longtime
listener to the show, you have now heard me say
that so many times. This time around on Unearthed, we've
got some updates, some books and letters, fabrics, mummies, and
just a whole bunch of stuff that involves skulls or bones,
(00:43):
and it's not just like a burial of bones. We
will start off with something that we mentioned in the
behind the scenes of our most recent Unearthed episode, that
happened in the window between when twenty twenty two ended
and when those episodes were published, and because it already
got that brief mentioned, we're just going to put it first. So,
(01:05):
according to a bunch of early January news articles, an
amateur researcher in London solved the mystery of twenty thousand
year old cave paintings, specifically the meanings of dots and
other markings in those paintings. The researcher, whose name is
Ben Bacon, concluded that the markings represented a lunar calendar.
(01:27):
So Bacon poured over images of cave paintings at the
British Library and online, and also collaborated with two professors,
one from Durham University and the other from City College London.
They were focused on three specific marks that show up
in a lot of these paintings. There's a vertical line
and a dot, and a symbol that looks kind of
(01:49):
like the letter why. Bacon thought maybe the why might
be a reference to giving births. This looks sort of
like one line is growing out of the other line.
We should note not every piece of figurative European cave
art from this period has these kind of markings. They're
on some images but not others. And these are also
(02:09):
not the only markings that not might appear on this
kind of art. But like, this is what the focus
was here. So their hypothesis was that the lines and
dots represented a number of months in a lunar calendar
beginning in the spring, specifically the time of year described
as the bun Sison when ice and snow start melting
(02:30):
and vegetation begins to turn green again, and if that
WHY symbol appeared in a series of dots, then its
position would denote the months when that animal would usually
give birth. They examined more than six hundred pieces of
cave art, primarily from France and Spain, and they sorted
the animals that were depicted into groups, so there were rox, birds, bison, caprids, servants, fish, horses, mammoths,
(02:57):
and rhinos. And then they noted the number and positions
of these markings that were shown within these groups, and
they compared all of that information to known information about
when all of these animals do things like migrate and
mate and give birth, and they found a strong correlation
between the markings and the expected months. For example, there
(03:20):
were fifteen depictions of URX marked with the Y symbol,
and the vast majority of the time that why was
in a position that would denote the second month of
the year in this lunar calendar, which is roughly when
RX would be expected to give birth. There are also
correlations between the numbers of lines and dots and the
months after the start of spring when the various animals mate, spawn,
(03:43):
or migrate. The paper also noted that while these marks
wouldn't really fit the definition of a written language, they
could be classified as a sort of proto writing. Back
when we briefly mentioned this and the behind the scenes
episode last time, I said, I was really glad I
didn't talk about it yet because there would be a
little bit more time to see whether this holds up.
(04:06):
Unlike a lot of these sort of amateur cracks the
case headlines that we've talked about before on the show,
this actually involves published research. It was published in the
Cambridge Archaeological Journal, which is a peer reviewed academic journal,
So this is not just someone's personal announcement of I
solved it, like some of these stories often are. But
(04:30):
there have been some criticisms. There's earlier published work that
came to similar conclusions and was not cited in this paper,
including a paper called Lunar Timekeeping and Upper Paleolithic Cave
Art that was published in twenty twenty one in the
journal Prehistoria News series. We don't currently know if the
authors were aware of that earlier work or not. There
(04:53):
are also other people who have been tweeting and blogging
about this basic idea for years. Again, we don't know
whether the authors had ever seen those tweets or blog posts. Also,
a lot of animals give birth in what would be
the second or third month of a lunar calendar, starting
in the bun Sizon, so people have question whether this
(05:14):
is really something people would need to keep up with
on a calendar. Also, just in general, this paper presents
a hypothesis and the support for that hypothesis, which is
usually how these kinds of papers go, which means that,
like conclusively solved, the case is pretty much always going
(05:34):
to be an over cell. But that's what makes clickable
things on the internet. Sure does. Now that that's out
of the way, we will move on to updates. A
poem copied into an eighteenth century commonplace book may be
a previously unknown work by past podcast subject Phyllis Wheatley
(05:55):
Mary Powell Potts later Mary Powell Potts Jones copied On
the Day of Love Rotch into a commonplace book about
fifteen years after it was written. It was attributed only
to quote a Negro girl about fifteen years of age.
English professor Wendy Raphael Roberts believes that this was Wheatley,
(06:16):
largely because no one else fitting that description was publishing
poetry at that time. So this poem commemorates the death
of Love macy Rotch. And one of the details that
calls Robert's conclusion into some question is that the copyist
who put this into the Commonplace book wrote that Love
macy Rotch was, in the language of the time, the
(06:38):
poet's mistress, or in other words, her enslaver. But Philips
Wheatley was enslaved by John and Susannah Wheatley, and that
is something that people who knew about her and knew
her poetry would have known. There's some speculation that maybe
Wheatley was hired out to the Roch family while Love
macy Rotch was ill, and that would have been during
(06:59):
some years of Wheatley's life that were not very well documented.
Our episode on Phyllis Wheatly came out on March fifth,
twenty eighteen. Researchers may have answered a lingering question about
the ancient city of Great Zimbabwe, which we covered on
the show on January eighteenth, twenty seventeen. That question is
how the city could have maintained a steady water supply
(07:22):
that was large enough to support its population through both
remote sensing and excavations, archaeologists have found intentionally created depressions
in the landscape, which are locally known as daca pits,
which would have collected water during rainy seasons and stored
it for later use. Some of these pits were already
(07:42):
known about, but this research has found evidence of a
lot more of them, including ones that were in the
paths of streams or other places where water can sort
of seep up from the ground during periods of rain.
So basically this was a water management system that incorporated
a va variety of holistic methods all across the area,
(08:03):
so it was what's described today as a landscape scale
approach to conservation. Next, a collection of fifty seven letters
from the National Library of France were recently decoded, something
that was challenging since the people working on it didn't
initially know who wrote them or when, and because there
were multiple possible options for what each character might represent.
(08:27):
Plus the team was initially thinking in terms of the
wrong language, since the letters had been found in a
collection of Italian papers. Turns out they were not in Italian,
though they were in French, and as they started to
get some of it readable based on that content, they
figured out the person writing them was imprisoned. It became
(08:49):
clear that the author of these letters was Mary, Queen
of Scott's, and that this was a collection of secret
letters written to her supporters that were believed to have
been lost had been miscataloged at the library, something that
nobody really realized until they were able to decode the
contents and figure out what they said. Most of the
(09:09):
letters were written to Michelle de Castelnain de Movsier, French
ambassador to England between fifteen seventy eight and fifteen eighty four,
and while this international interdisciplinary team of codebreakers has broken
the cipher Mary used to write them, their contents are
still in the process of being analyzed. This has been
(09:30):
described as the most important Mary Queen of Scott's discovery
in the last century. Mary Queen of Scott's has come
up several times on the show, including our episode on
her trial and execution that came out on December seventeenth,
twenty eighteen. Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania has been
working on construction at an area known as Little Roundtop
(09:53):
to address issues with things like accessibility, erosion, and parking. Needs.
A metal detector sweep head of that work revealed an
unexploded artillery shell from the US Civil War. It's not
all that unusual to find weaponry or ammunition at the park,
but usually those are much smaller, less dangerous items, like
(10:14):
percussion caps. Speaking to CNN, park spokesman Jason Martz said,
the archaeologist who detected and unearthed this artillery shell quote
laid it gently on the ground, took a picture of it,
and ran for the Hills. Park staff contacted the Army's
fifty fifth Ordnance Company, which moved the shell to a
more isolated part of the park and safely detonated it
(10:36):
after clearing the area and closing off the roads. We
did a live show at Gettysburg in twenty nineteen, and
we released a studio version of that live episode on
July tenth of that year. We had a couple of
technical and environmental and just noise issues during the show
that made the recording of that, as it was live,
(10:59):
not really work to distribute as an episode. Otherwise, though,
we had a great time at Gettysburg. Let's take a
sponsor break and then we'll do a couple more updates.
In twenty twenty one, archaeologists found the likely site of
(11:23):
the home of Ben Ross, father of Harriet Tubman, who
we covered on a two parter in twenty sixteen. This
was on land that was once a farm belonging to
Anthony Thompson, who enslaved at least forty people there. Tubman
was born on Thompson's farm, and we talked about the
discovery of Ben Ross's cabin on a previous installment of unearthed.
(11:45):
Archaeological work in this area has been ongoing, and in February,
archaeologists announced that they had found African religious objects in
the ruins of an enslaved overseer's house not far away
from Ross's cabin. Are believed to have been a cash
that would have been kept in front of the fireplace
to protect the people living in the home from negative spirits.
(12:07):
They included a glass perfume bottle stopper shaped like a heart,
a copper button, and a ceramic dish. Yeah, some of
the headlines about this kind of shorthanded it down to
like African religious items found at Harriet Tubman's birthplace, and
that's just kind of shrinking that whole farm down to
(12:30):
her birthplace. Moving on back in twenty twenty, Congress voted
to start renaming things like military bases and ships that
had been given names that commemorated the Confederacy from the
US Civil War. That naming process is ongoing, and one
of the more recent announcements is that a guided missile
cruiser previously called the USS Chancellorsville will be renamed as
(12:54):
the USS Robert Smalls. The Battle of Chancellorsville was a
major battle during the US Civil War and is sometimes
described as Confederate General Roberty Lee's greatest victory. We did
a two parter on Robert Small's back in February of
twenty sixteen. He liberated himself and others from slavery by
commandeering a ship called the Planter and then just sailing
(13:15):
it past Confederate checkpoints and then went on to, among
other things, serve in the US House of Representatives. Okay,
so maybe this last thing is kind of a stretch
in terms of an update. But back in February of
twenty twenty, we did an episode on Paul Cuffey which
was researched in part through a visit that Tracy made
to the new Bedford Whaling Museum, and that museum trip
(13:38):
also inspired the episode on Joshua Slocum, which came out
in September of twenty twenty, and in January, news broke
that a former employee of the new Bedford Whaling Museum
had been arrested and was facing charges after allegedly stealing
at least seventy five thousand dollars worth of objects from
the museum's collection. More recent reporting has put that number
(14:02):
closer to like one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. So
this former employee, who was fired when the thefts were discovered,
had repeatedly faced criminal charges previously related to things like
theft that had happened over the last several years, and
had also faced other civil and criminal charges. Some of
these charges had led to guilty verdicts, including some charges
(14:26):
for stealing. It's not totally clear whether the museum was
aware of this history. In Massachusetts, it's illegal to ask
about a person's criminal record on a job application, but
it is legal to conduct criminal background checks during the
hiring process. It's also legal for an employer to refuse
to hire someone based on their criminal record if that
(14:48):
record is related to the work that's being performed. In
this case, this was someone who had keys for all
of the museum's stores and access codes for all the
alarms the museum, at least at my last check of
all of the reporting on it. The museum has declined
to comment on this due to the ongoing criminal proceedings.
(15:09):
It also appears that the museum did not realize that
items were being stolen until one of the dealers who
was buying them started to become suspicious. Basically, the items
that were being sold were increasingly interesting and unique. The
dealer googled the seller, realized his connection to the museum,
and then contacted the police. Other antiques dealers and pawnbrokers
(15:33):
in the area had also contacted police after buying items
that just seemed like they were too rare and too
high quality to be in a random person's possession, but
those other calls don't seem to have led to any investigation.
At this point, most of the pieces have been recovered
and returned to the museum. A lot of the dealers
who bought them did not sell them because they realized
(15:56):
there was just something off about the whole thing. I
was fascinated by the whole story, yes, both because it
was local to me and just because of the particulars
of it. Now moving on to books and letters, two
of which involves something inscribed into stone. First, a runestone
found in Norway at a site northwest of Oslo, maybe
(16:19):
the oldest runestone ever found. This runestone was found during
archaeological work at a burial ground near the municipality of
Hula in the fall of twenty twenty one, but it
wasn't announced until this year, after researchers had had some
time to study it and date it. It's believed that
this was created sometime between the year zero and the
(16:41):
year two fifty CE, making it Scandinavia's oldest example of writing.
It's possible that some of the runes spell out the
name of a person who was buried at the site
where this was found. And for the other stone. The
Rosetta stone is a stile with an inscription in two languages,
Egyptian and Greece, and three scripts Egyptian hieroglyphics, Egyptian Demotic script,
(17:04):
and ancient Greek. Folks may be the most familiar with
the Rosetta stone because that combination of languages and scripts
made it possible for modern researchers to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics,
but the content of that inscription may not be as familiar.
It's a decree passed by Egyptian priests in one ninety
six BCE, celebrating the anniversary of the coronation of Ptolemy
(17:29):
fifth Epiphanes. A big focus is the king's accomplishments, and
one of those accomplishments is described as restoring peace following
a rebellion. Excavations in northern Egypt have been looking for
evidence of this rebellion, which is referenced in other inscriptions
and texts besides the Rosetta Stone, but it has not
(17:50):
been connected to many archaeological finds. Now Though, at a
site north of Cairo, archaeologists have found evidence of things
like burned buildings, weapons, and human remains. Coins and pottery
at the site have made it possible to date this
site to the time of the rebellion. This research was
published in the Journal of Field Archaeology. Next, a landscaper
(18:14):
who was clearing brush on Cape cod found a bottle
containing messages believed to have been written by prisoners of
war during World War II. The landscaper, named Shane Adams,
donated the bottle to the historical society of sand to
it and couldtuit. It's believed that the messages were written
by prisoners of war who were held at Camp Edwards
and who worked at another camp. Camp can do it
(18:37):
to clean up damage from a hurricane. But it's not
clear whether the bottle was meant to be thrown into
the sea with the hope that someone would find it,
or if it was more like a time capsule. The
bottle was found upside down, sticking straight down in the sand,
which may mean the latter. Yeah, it could have worked
its way that way if someone threw it into the water,
(18:57):
but it seems more likely that they mentionally put it
that way. Next. Back in twenty twenty one, a video
of a whale feeding on fish went viral on Instagram.
This whale was sort of treading water at the surface
of the ocean with their mouth wide wide open, like
the upper jaws sticking out of the water at about
(19:18):
a ninety degree angle to the lower jaw, and that
lower jaw is like just above the water's surface, with
the corners of their mouth far enough underwater for the
fish to like swim in there and get trapped. Some
of the fish also just kind of jump in there.
It is very fascinating to watch. When the whale has
a big mouthful of food, mouth closes back under the water.
(19:39):
This behavior was first documented in scientific literature in twenty seventeen,
and there's been some speculation that whales have only started
doing this recently because of pollution, that the fish that
the whales can feed on only live up near the
surface now, so the whales have had to adapt to
this floaty, wide open mouth style of feeding to compensate.
(20:00):
But researchers in Australia have found what they believe are
written accounts of whales doing this exact same thing two
thousand years ago, specifically in Norse descriptions of sea monsters
called hagufa and animals described in medieval beast series that
may have inspired those accounts. So here's a description from
a text called the konungs Skuzia. I'm really sorry for
(20:24):
my pronunciation of that. After saying this fish is so
big that the writer is afraid to mention it at
all because it will just seem incredible, the writer describes
the way it feeds this way. Quote. It is said
that when these fishes want something to eat. They are
in the habit of giving forth a violent belch, which
brings up so much food that all sorts of fish
(20:45):
in the neighborhood, both large and small, will rush up
in the hope of getting nourishment and good fair. Meanwhile,
the monster keeps its mouth opened, and inasmuch as its
opening is about as wide as a sound or furd,
the fishes cannot help routing in in great numbers. But
as soon as its mouth and belly are full, the
monster closes its mouth and thus catches and shuts in
(21:09):
all the fishes that just previously had rushed in eagerly
to seek food. And lastly, scientists in Denmark have found
what they believed to be the oldest written reference to
the Norse god Odin. It's on a gold disc that
was found in western Denmark, and it's at least one
hundred and fifty years older than the previous earliest known
(21:30):
mention of Odin. The Runic inscription says in part he
is Odin's man. This disc was found in twenty twenty,
but the inscriptions significant in date were renounced this march.
Let's do another quick sponsor break. Now we have some
(21:54):
mummies most of them animal mummies. According to research published
in the journal Plus one in January, researchers studied ten
crocodile mummies dating back to the fifth century BCE, five
of them mostly complete crocodile bodies and five of them heads,
and they determined that the mummification of these crocodiles used
(22:16):
methods that have not been found anywhere else. In this case,
researchers were able to examine the actual remains of some
of the mummies very closely because most of their linen
wraps had already been destroyed by insects. They found that
the crocodiles had been mummified without using any kind of resin,
and they had not been eviscerated, so unlike what may
(22:39):
come to mind when you think about Egyptian mummification methods.
Uh We also talked about that on an episode quite
a while back. So the mummies also represented two different
species of crocodile, West African and Nile crocodiles. Moving on,
the excavations that the tomb of Ramses the second have
(22:59):
unnerr a lot of mummified animals, including two thousand mummified
rams heads. The rams heads may have been placed there
as votive offerings, and they might have been connected to
a cult dedicated to Ramseys who had died roughly one
thousand years before. These mummified heads seem to have been
(23:22):
placed there and our one human mummy this time around.
Egyptian scientists have used computerized tomography or CT scanning to
digitally unwrap and intact twenty three hundred year old mummy,
whose remains have never been unwrapped before. This mummy is
nicknamed the Golden Boy and was a teenage boy of
(23:44):
presumably high socioeconomic status. Among their findings were at least
forty nine amulets of twenty one different types, meant to
protect him as he moved into the afterlife. Some were
made of gold or semi precious stones, and others were
made of clay or they were ceramic. These amulets were
arranged in three columns, folded in among the cloth wrappings,
(24:07):
so that talk of cloth wrappings seems like a good
segue into some fines related to fabrics. First, a scrap
of tartan found in glen Affric Pete Bog more than
forty years ago, is now believed to be the oldest
known piece of true Tartan material, and it's only a
little bit younger than the first written reference to tartan.
(24:30):
That first reference is documentation of a purchase of a
piece of tartan by James the third and fourteen seventy one.
According to radiocarbon dating, this piece of the fabric dates
back to some time between fifteen hundred and sixteen hundred.
This piece of fabric is sort of a yellow tan
with green, brown, and red stripes, and those intersecting stripes
(24:53):
are what makes the fabric a true Tartan. People found
this while cutting pete from the bog in the nineteen
eighty next, an international team of archaeologists led by the
University of Haifa has found cotton and silk fabrics dating
back to about thirteen hundred years ago in the desert
(25:13):
area known as the Arava south of the Dead Sea.
These fabrics date back to the region's early Islamic period,
and they were found alongside other items that would have
been imported from what's now China and India. Researchers believe
that the cotton fabric came from what's now India and Sudan,
and that the silk likely came from China. And this
(25:36):
all suggested that this could provide some evidence of a
large trade of silk and other fabrics that was following
the same general route through the area that had been
previously used to carry spices. And lastly, an Inca tunic
or unku was found in a cemetery in Chile. These
were formal garments that were made according to standards set
(25:58):
by the Inca Empire. Those standards applied to the garment
and the fabric used to make it. This particular garment,
known as the Kaleta vittor unku, was made by someone
who lived hundreds of miles away from the imperial capital
of Cuzco, and they followed those standards, but they also
incorporated techniques in imagery representing their own local culture as
(26:22):
it had been before it had become part of the
Inca Empire in the late fifteenth century. This was published
in the Journal Plus one under the title Inca Unku
Imperial or Provincial State Local Relations. It's an interesting look
at how with an empire as large as it was,
people could both sort of tow the imperial line of
(26:46):
how things needed to be done and also incorporate parts
of their own cultures. We will close out today's episode
with some fines that involve skulls and bones, starting with
two different skull surgeries. The first was on a woman
who seems to have undergone trepanation twice. I fear not
familiar with that term. Trepanation or tripanning is one of
(27:08):
the oldest known surgical procedures, and it involved drilling, scraping,
or cutting a hole through a person's skull. While there
are real medical reasons to need to do this, like
to relieve pressure on someone's brain after a head injury,
in earlier eras, this was often a treatment for things
like mental illness or epilepsy, or the belief that someone
(27:31):
was possessed by spirits, not so grounded in evidence based medicine.
This person lived sometime between the sixth and eighth centuries,
and we don't know why she underwent trepanation two different times.
Her skull also showed evidence of two large abscesses near
her jaw, which could have caused an infection to spread
(27:53):
to her brain, but we can't conclusively say that the
absess and the trepanation were in any way related based
on how the bone had healed. She seems to have
lived at least three months after the first procedure, but
it appears that she did not survive the second procedure.
Part of her forehead bone had been scraped away, but
(28:13):
without going all the way through it. The other skull
surgery took place much longer ago, about fifteen hundred BCE.
The skull was found in a tomb in Israel in
which two brothers had been buried together. The remains of
both brothers show signs of chronic illnesses and some congenital differences.
(28:34):
It appears that one brother died in his late teens
or early twenties, and that a few years later the
surviving brother underwent trepanation. There's no evidence of healing from
that surgery, so it does not appear that he survived it.
And then at that point the other brother's body was
exhumed and both of the brothers were buried together. Researchers
(28:56):
who have studied this burial have found it notable for
reasons beyond this skull surgery. It appears that both of
these brothers needed and received lifelong care and were given
the same respect and recognition in their burial as other
members of the community would have been. Next Researchers led
by a professor from Texas A and M University have found
(29:17):
what they believe is the oldest bone projectile point in
the Americas. It's at least thirteen thousand, nine hundred years old,
but it is not the whole projectile point. It is
just the little fragment of it embedded in the bone
of a Masdon and it's made from the leg bone
of a different Macedon. This find is from a site
(29:39):
in the state of Washington known as the Manis Mastodon Site,
and that thirteen thousand, nine hundred year age of the
projectile point is connected to something that's going to come
up again in Part two on Wednesday, and that is
whether the Clovis people were the first human inhabitants of
North America. The projectile point is from about nine hundred
(29:59):
years before the Clovis people are believed to have arrived
in North America, and so far this is the only
bone tool that dates back to before the arrival of
the Clovist people. Most other tools believed to be pre
Clovis are made of stone. Next, archaeologists are studying a
huge number of artifacts that were found during highway work
(30:21):
in the UK between twenty sixteen and twenty eighteen. This
work was known as the A fourteen Cambridge to Huntington
Improvement Scheme. The side note I love the different use
of the word scheme in the UK versus how we
use it here in the US. One object they have
found is a comb made from a piece of human
(30:43):
skull dating back to the Iron Age. It is believed
this comb was made for ritual purposes and not for grooming,
and only two other similar combs to this one have
been found by British archaeologists. Both of them were found
within fifteen miles or twenty four bilometers of where this
one was discovered. Next, archaeologists excavating a tomb in western
(31:06):
China have found a pair of ice skate blades made
from animal bone. These are roughly thirty five hundred years
old and were made to be strapped onto a person's footwear.
These skates are almost identical to ones found in Europe,
which could potentially suggest some kind of trade connection between
the two regions. And lastly, a chess set known as
(31:29):
the Sandomir Chessmen were believed to have been made from
polished deer antlers, or possibly from bone from an exotic
large animal and carved by hand, but DNA testing on
them has revealed that the pieces for one side of
the board were made from horsebone and the pieces for
the other side were made from cowbone, except for one pawn.
(31:51):
That one pawn was made from the bone of a
red deer. To believe that this red deer piece was
made later on, possibly as a replacement. I don't know why.
I love the idea of both sides of the board
being made from bone, but the bone of two different
types of animals. It's kind of a cool convention if
that's how they did it. Yeah, I have some listener
(32:15):
mail before we close out this part of On Earth.
It is from Kim. Kim wrote, Hi, Holly and Tracy,
longtime listener occasional writer. Here. I'm catching up on episodes
and just listen to the two parter on Irving Berlin.
White Christmas was always a holiday staple in my house
growing up. But I get what you said in the
(32:35):
episode and behind the scenes about it aging both horribly
and beautifully. Another song from it that I take issue
with now that I'm older is the g I Wish
I was back in the Army number performed by bing crosby,
Danny k Rosemary Clooney, and Vera Ellen. It's a horrible
representation of why women joined the service during that time,
(32:56):
looking for a husband and only thinking about finding one
while serving. It does such a disservice to all the
brave women who broke barriers and served honorably. Unfortunately, it's
still a stereotype that exists today. I do appreciate that
it talks about missing the service and all the benefits
once you leave. It's still something that's often lamented by veterans. Anyways,
(33:17):
thank you for a wonderfully researched and informative podcast. I've
cited you all on school papers before and used your
sources as jumping off points for research. You keep me
company on my long commute to and from work. Please
see the attached pet tax of our four month old
chocolate lab puppy Brew and He's a ball of energy
attached to clumsy paws and floppy ears. Sincerely, Kim, This
(33:39):
dog is so cute. My reaction when I opened this
email was to say a loud give me the dog.
I had not really thought about that aspect of the song.
I think I mostly was like yay. Reference to the
wax and I just did not thank farther into it.
(34:03):
So yeah, thank you for noting that as well, Kim,
and for sending such a cute dog picture. If you
would like to send us a note about this or
any other podcast or at History Podcast from iHeartRadio dot com.
We're also all over social media ad missed than History.
That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram,
(34:25):
and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio
app or wherever else you'd like to get your podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It is time for our
next installment of Unearthed. If you're new to the show,
(00:22):
a few times a year, we look at what has
been literally or figuratively unearthed. If you are a longtime
listener to the show, you have now heard me say
that so many times. This time around on Unearthed, we've
got some updates, some books and letters, fabrics, mummies, and
just a whole bunch of stuff that involves skulls or bones,
(00:43):
and it's not just like a burial of bones. We
will start off with something that we mentioned in the
behind the scenes of our most recent Unearthed episode, that
happened in the window between when twenty twenty two ended
and when those episodes were published, and because it already
got that brief mentioned, we're just going to put it first. So,
(01:05):
according to a bunch of early January news articles, an
amateur researcher in London solved the mystery of twenty thousand
year old cave paintings, specifically the meanings of dots and
other markings in those paintings. The researcher, whose name is
Ben Bacon, concluded that the markings represented a lunar calendar.
(01:27):
So Bacon poured over images of cave paintings at the
British Library and online, and also collaborated with two professors,
one from Durham University and the other from City College London.
They were focused on three specific marks that show up
in a lot of these paintings. There's a vertical line
and a dot, and a symbol that looks kind of
(01:49):
like the letter why. Bacon thought maybe the why might
be a reference to giving births. This looks sort of
like one line is growing out of the other line.
We should note not every piece of figurative European cave
art from this period has these kind of markings. They're
on some images but not others. And these are also
(02:09):
not the only markings that not might appear on this
kind of art. But like, this is what the focus
was here. So their hypothesis was that the lines and
dots represented a number of months in a lunar calendar
beginning in the spring, specifically the time of year described
as the bun Sison when ice and snow start melting
(02:30):
and vegetation begins to turn green again, and if that
WHY symbol appeared in a series of dots, then its
position would denote the months when that animal would usually
give birth. They examined more than six hundred pieces of
cave art, primarily from France and Spain, and they sorted
the animals that were depicted into groups, so there were rox, birds, bison, caprids, servants, fish, horses, mammoths,
(02:57):
and rhinos. And then they noted the number and positions
of these markings that were shown within these groups, and
they compared all of that information to known information about
when all of these animals do things like migrate and
mate and give birth, and they found a strong correlation
between the markings and the expected months. For example, there
(03:20):
were fifteen depictions of URX marked with the Y symbol,
and the vast majority of the time that why was
in a position that would denote the second month of
the year in this lunar calendar, which is roughly when
RX would be expected to give birth. There are also
correlations between the numbers of lines and dots and the
months after the start of spring when the various animals mate, spawn,
(03:43):
or migrate. The paper also noted that while these marks
wouldn't really fit the definition of a written language, they
could be classified as a sort of proto writing. Back
when we briefly mentioned this and the behind the scenes
episode last time, I said, I was really glad I
didn't talk about it yet because there would be a
little bit more time to see whether this holds up.
(04:06):
Unlike a lot of these sort of amateur cracks the
case headlines that we've talked about before on the show,
this actually involves published research. It was published in the
Cambridge Archaeological Journal, which is a peer reviewed academic journal,
So this is not just someone's personal announcement of I
solved it, like some of these stories often are. But
(04:30):
there have been some criticisms. There's earlier published work that
came to similar conclusions and was not cited in this paper,
including a paper called Lunar Timekeeping and Upper Paleolithic Cave
Art that was published in twenty twenty one in the
journal Prehistoria News series. We don't currently know if the
authors were aware of that earlier work or not. There
(04:53):
are also other people who have been tweeting and blogging
about this basic idea for years. Again, we don't know
whether the authors had ever seen those tweets or blog posts. Also,
a lot of animals give birth in what would be
the second or third month of a lunar calendar, starting
in the bun Sizon, so people have question whether this
(05:14):
is really something people would need to keep up with
on a calendar. Also, just in general, this paper presents
a hypothesis and the support for that hypothesis, which is
usually how these kinds of papers go, which means that,
like conclusively solved, the case is pretty much always going
(05:34):
to be an over cell. But that's what makes clickable
things on the internet. Sure does. Now that that's out
of the way, we will move on to updates. A
poem copied into an eighteenth century commonplace book may be
a previously unknown work by past podcast subject Phyllis Wheatley
(05:55):
Mary Powell Potts later Mary Powell Potts Jones copied On
the Day of Love Rotch into a commonplace book about
fifteen years after it was written. It was attributed only
to quote a Negro girl about fifteen years of age.
English professor Wendy Raphael Roberts believes that this was Wheatley,
(06:16):
largely because no one else fitting that description was publishing
poetry at that time. So this poem commemorates the death
of Love macy Rotch. And one of the details that
calls Robert's conclusion into some question is that the copyist
who put this into the Commonplace book wrote that Love
macy Rotch was, in the language of the time, the
(06:38):
poet's mistress, or in other words, her enslaver. But Philips
Wheatley was enslaved by John and Susannah Wheatley, and that
is something that people who knew about her and knew
her poetry would have known. There's some speculation that maybe
Wheatley was hired out to the Roch family while Love
macy Rotch was ill, and that would have been during
(06:59):
some years of Wheatley's life that were not very well documented.
Our episode on Phyllis Wheatly came out on March fifth,
twenty eighteen. Researchers may have answered a lingering question about
the ancient city of Great Zimbabwe, which we covered on
the show on January eighteenth, twenty seventeen. That question is
how the city could have maintained a steady water supply
(07:22):
that was large enough to support its population through both
remote sensing and excavations, archaeologists have found intentionally created depressions
in the landscape, which are locally known as daca pits,
which would have collected water during rainy seasons and stored
it for later use. Some of these pits were already
(07:42):
known about, but this research has found evidence of a
lot more of them, including ones that were in the
paths of streams or other places where water can sort
of seep up from the ground during periods of rain.
So basically this was a water management system that incorporated
a va variety of holistic methods all across the area,
(08:03):
so it was what's described today as a landscape scale
approach to conservation. Next, a collection of fifty seven letters
from the National Library of France were recently decoded, something
that was challenging since the people working on it didn't
initially know who wrote them or when, and because there
were multiple possible options for what each character might represent.
(08:27):
Plus the team was initially thinking in terms of the
wrong language, since the letters had been found in a
collection of Italian papers. Turns out they were not in Italian,
though they were in French, and as they started to
get some of it readable based on that content, they
figured out the person writing them was imprisoned. It became
(08:49):
clear that the author of these letters was Mary, Queen
of Scott's, and that this was a collection of secret
letters written to her supporters that were believed to have
been lost had been miscataloged at the library, something that
nobody really realized until they were able to decode the
contents and figure out what they said. Most of the
(09:09):
letters were written to Michelle de Castelnain de Movsier, French
ambassador to England between fifteen seventy eight and fifteen eighty four,
and while this international interdisciplinary team of codebreakers has broken
the cipher Mary used to write them, their contents are
still in the process of being analyzed. This has been
(09:30):
described as the most important Mary Queen of Scott's discovery
in the last century. Mary Queen of Scott's has come
up several times on the show, including our episode on
her trial and execution that came out on December seventeenth,
twenty eighteen. Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania has been
working on construction at an area known as Little Roundtop
(09:53):
to address issues with things like accessibility, erosion, and parking. Needs.
A metal detector sweep head of that work revealed an
unexploded artillery shell from the US Civil War. It's not
all that unusual to find weaponry or ammunition at the park,
but usually those are much smaller, less dangerous items, like
(10:14):
percussion caps. Speaking to CNN, park spokesman Jason Martz said,
the archaeologist who detected and unearthed this artillery shell quote
laid it gently on the ground, took a picture of it,
and ran for the Hills. Park staff contacted the Army's
fifty fifth Ordnance Company, which moved the shell to a
more isolated part of the park and safely detonated it
(10:36):
after clearing the area and closing off the roads. We
did a live show at Gettysburg in twenty nineteen, and
we released a studio version of that live episode on
July tenth of that year. We had a couple of
technical and environmental and just noise issues during the show
that made the recording of that, as it was live,
(10:59):
not really work to distribute as an episode. Otherwise, though,
we had a great time at Gettysburg. Let's take a
sponsor break and then we'll do a couple more updates.
In twenty twenty one, archaeologists found the likely site of
(11:23):
the home of Ben Ross, father of Harriet Tubman, who
we covered on a two parter in twenty sixteen. This
was on land that was once a farm belonging to
Anthony Thompson, who enslaved at least forty people there. Tubman
was born on Thompson's farm, and we talked about the
discovery of Ben Ross's cabin on a previous installment of unearthed.
(11:45):
Archaeological work in this area has been ongoing, and in February,
archaeologists announced that they had found African religious objects in
the ruins of an enslaved overseer's house not far away
from Ross's cabin. Are believed to have been a cash
that would have been kept in front of the fireplace
to protect the people living in the home from negative spirits.
(12:07):
They included a glass perfume bottle stopper shaped like a heart,
a copper button, and a ceramic dish. Yeah, some of
the headlines about this kind of shorthanded it down to
like African religious items found at Harriet Tubman's birthplace, and
that's just kind of shrinking that whole farm down to
(12:30):
her birthplace. Moving on back in twenty twenty, Congress voted
to start renaming things like military bases and ships that
had been given names that commemorated the Confederacy from the
US Civil War. That naming process is ongoing, and one
of the more recent announcements is that a guided missile
cruiser previously called the USS Chancellorsville will be renamed as
(12:54):
the USS Robert Smalls. The Battle of Chancellorsville was a
major battle during the US Civil War and is sometimes
described as Confederate General Roberty Lee's greatest victory. We did
a two parter on Robert Small's back in February of
twenty sixteen. He liberated himself and others from slavery by
commandeering a ship called the Planter and then just sailing
(13:15):
it past Confederate checkpoints and then went on to, among
other things, serve in the US House of Representatives. Okay,
so maybe this last thing is kind of a stretch
in terms of an update. But back in February of
twenty twenty, we did an episode on Paul Cuffey which
was researched in part through a visit that Tracy made
to the new Bedford Whaling Museum, and that museum trip
(13:38):
also inspired the episode on Joshua Slocum, which came out
in September of twenty twenty, and in January, news broke
that a former employee of the new Bedford Whaling Museum
had been arrested and was facing charges after allegedly stealing
at least seventy five thousand dollars worth of objects from
the museum's collection. More recent reporting has put that number
(14:02):
closer to like one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. So
this former employee, who was fired when the thefts were discovered,
had repeatedly faced criminal charges previously related to things like
theft that had happened over the last several years, and
had also faced other civil and criminal charges. Some of
these charges had led to guilty verdicts, including some charges
(14:26):
for stealing. It's not totally clear whether the museum was
aware of this history. In Massachusetts, it's illegal to ask
about a person's criminal record on a job application, but
it is legal to conduct criminal background checks during the
hiring process. It's also legal for an employer to refuse
to hire someone based on their criminal record if that
(14:48):
record is related to the work that's being performed. In
this case, this was someone who had keys for all
of the museum's stores and access codes for all the
alarms the museum, at least at my last check of
all of the reporting on it. The museum has declined
to comment on this due to the ongoing criminal proceedings.
(15:09):
It also appears that the museum did not realize that
items were being stolen until one of the dealers who
was buying them started to become suspicious. Basically, the items
that were being sold were increasingly interesting and unique. The
dealer googled the seller, realized his connection to the museum,
and then contacted the police. Other antiques dealers and pawnbrokers
(15:33):
in the area had also contacted police after buying items
that just seemed like they were too rare and too
high quality to be in a random person's possession, but
those other calls don't seem to have led to any investigation.
At this point, most of the pieces have been recovered
and returned to the museum. A lot of the dealers
who bought them did not sell them because they realized
(15:56):
there was just something off about the whole thing. I
was fascinated by the whole story, yes, both because it
was local to me and just because of the particulars
of it. Now moving on to books and letters, two
of which involves something inscribed into stone. First, a runestone
found in Norway at a site northwest of Oslo, maybe
(16:19):
the oldest runestone ever found. This runestone was found during
archaeological work at a burial ground near the municipality of
Hula in the fall of twenty twenty one, but it
wasn't announced until this year, after researchers had had some
time to study it and date it. It's believed that
this was created sometime between the year zero and the
(16:41):
year two fifty CE, making it Scandinavia's oldest example of writing.
It's possible that some of the runes spell out the
name of a person who was buried at the site
where this was found. And for the other stone. The
Rosetta stone is a stile with an inscription in two languages,
Egyptian and Greece, and three scripts Egyptian hieroglyphics, Egyptian Demotic script,
(17:04):
and ancient Greek. Folks may be the most familiar with
the Rosetta stone because that combination of languages and scripts
made it possible for modern researchers to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics,
but the content of that inscription may not be as familiar.
It's a decree passed by Egyptian priests in one ninety
six BCE, celebrating the anniversary of the coronation of Ptolemy
(17:29):
fifth Epiphanes. A big focus is the king's accomplishments, and
one of those accomplishments is described as restoring peace following
a rebellion. Excavations in northern Egypt have been looking for
evidence of this rebellion, which is referenced in other inscriptions
and texts besides the Rosetta Stone, but it has not
(17:50):
been connected to many archaeological finds. Now Though, at a
site north of Cairo, archaeologists have found evidence of things
like burned buildings, weapons, and human remains. Coins and pottery
at the site have made it possible to date this
site to the time of the rebellion. This research was
published in the Journal of Field Archaeology. Next, a landscaper
(18:14):
who was clearing brush on Cape cod found a bottle
containing messages believed to have been written by prisoners of
war during World War II. The landscaper, named Shane Adams,
donated the bottle to the historical society of sand to
it and couldtuit. It's believed that the messages were written
by prisoners of war who were held at Camp Edwards
and who worked at another camp. Camp can do it
(18:37):
to clean up damage from a hurricane. But it's not
clear whether the bottle was meant to be thrown into
the sea with the hope that someone would find it,
or if it was more like a time capsule. The
bottle was found upside down, sticking straight down in the sand,
which may mean the latter. Yeah, it could have worked
its way that way if someone threw it into the water,
(18:57):
but it seems more likely that they mentionally put it
that way. Next. Back in twenty twenty one, a video
of a whale feeding on fish went viral on Instagram.
This whale was sort of treading water at the surface
of the ocean with their mouth wide wide open, like
the upper jaws sticking out of the water at about
(19:18):
a ninety degree angle to the lower jaw, and that
lower jaw is like just above the water's surface, with
the corners of their mouth far enough underwater for the
fish to like swim in there and get trapped. Some
of the fish also just kind of jump in there.
It is very fascinating to watch. When the whale has
a big mouthful of food, mouth closes back under the water.
(19:39):
This behavior was first documented in scientific literature in twenty seventeen,
and there's been some speculation that whales have only started
doing this recently because of pollution, that the fish that
the whales can feed on only live up near the
surface now, so the whales have had to adapt to
this floaty, wide open mouth style of feeding to compensate.
(20:00):
But researchers in Australia have found what they believe are
written accounts of whales doing this exact same thing two
thousand years ago, specifically in Norse descriptions of sea monsters
called hagufa and animals described in medieval beast series that
may have inspired those accounts. So here's a description from
a text called the konungs Skuzia. I'm really sorry for
(20:24):
my pronunciation of that. After saying this fish is so
big that the writer is afraid to mention it at
all because it will just seem incredible, the writer describes
the way it feeds this way. Quote. It is said
that when these fishes want something to eat. They are
in the habit of giving forth a violent belch, which
brings up so much food that all sorts of fish
(20:45):
in the neighborhood, both large and small, will rush up
in the hope of getting nourishment and good fair. Meanwhile,
the monster keeps its mouth opened, and inasmuch as its
opening is about as wide as a sound or furd,
the fishes cannot help routing in in great numbers. But
as soon as its mouth and belly are full, the
monster closes its mouth and thus catches and shuts in
(21:09):
all the fishes that just previously had rushed in eagerly
to seek food. And lastly, scientists in Denmark have found
what they believed to be the oldest written reference to
the Norse god Odin. It's on a gold disc that
was found in western Denmark, and it's at least one
hundred and fifty years older than the previous earliest known
(21:30):
mention of Odin. The Runic inscription says in part he
is Odin's man. This disc was found in twenty twenty,
but the inscriptions significant in date were renounced this march.
Let's do another quick sponsor break. Now we have some
(21:54):
mummies most of them animal mummies. According to research published
in the journal Plus one in January, researchers studied ten
crocodile mummies dating back to the fifth century BCE, five
of them mostly complete crocodile bodies and five of them heads,
and they determined that the mummification of these crocodiles used
(22:16):
methods that have not been found anywhere else. In this case,
researchers were able to examine the actual remains of some
of the mummies very closely because most of their linen
wraps had already been destroyed by insects. They found that
the crocodiles had been mummified without using any kind of resin,
and they had not been eviscerated, so unlike what may
(22:39):
come to mind when you think about Egyptian mummification methods.
Uh We also talked about that on an episode quite
a while back. So the mummies also represented two different
species of crocodile, West African and Nile crocodiles. Moving on,
the excavations that the tomb of Ramses the second have
(22:59):
unnerr a lot of mummified animals, including two thousand mummified
rams heads. The rams heads may have been placed there
as votive offerings, and they might have been connected to
a cult dedicated to Ramseys who had died roughly one
thousand years before. These mummified heads seem to have been
(23:22):
placed there and our one human mummy this time around.
Egyptian scientists have used computerized tomography or CT scanning to
digitally unwrap and intact twenty three hundred year old mummy,
whose remains have never been unwrapped before. This mummy is
nicknamed the Golden Boy and was a teenage boy of
(23:44):
presumably high socioeconomic status. Among their findings were at least
forty nine amulets of twenty one different types, meant to
protect him as he moved into the afterlife. Some were
made of gold or semi precious stones, and others were
made of clay or they were ceramic. These amulets were
arranged in three columns, folded in among the cloth wrappings,
(24:07):
so that talk of cloth wrappings seems like a good
segue into some fines related to fabrics. First, a scrap
of tartan found in glen Affric Pete Bog more than
forty years ago, is now believed to be the oldest
known piece of true Tartan material, and it's only a
little bit younger than the first written reference to tartan.
(24:30):
That first reference is documentation of a purchase of a
piece of tartan by James the third and fourteen seventy one.
According to radiocarbon dating, this piece of the fabric dates
back to some time between fifteen hundred and sixteen hundred.
This piece of fabric is sort of a yellow tan
with green, brown, and red stripes, and those intersecting stripes
(24:53):
are what makes the fabric a true Tartan. People found
this while cutting pete from the bog in the nineteen
eighty next, an international team of archaeologists led by the
University of Haifa has found cotton and silk fabrics dating
back to about thirteen hundred years ago in the desert
(25:13):
area known as the Arava south of the Dead Sea.
These fabrics date back to the region's early Islamic period,
and they were found alongside other items that would have
been imported from what's now China and India. Researchers believe
that the cotton fabric came from what's now India and Sudan,
and that the silk likely came from China. And this
(25:36):
all suggested that this could provide some evidence of a
large trade of silk and other fabrics that was following
the same general route through the area that had been
previously used to carry spices. And lastly, an Inca tunic
or unku was found in a cemetery in Chile. These
were formal garments that were made according to standards set
(25:58):
by the Inca Empire. Those standards applied to the garment
and the fabric used to make it. This particular garment,
known as the Kaleta vittor unku, was made by someone
who lived hundreds of miles away from the imperial capital
of Cuzco, and they followed those standards, but they also
incorporated techniques in imagery representing their own local culture as
(26:22):
it had been before it had become part of the
Inca Empire in the late fifteenth century. This was published
in the Journal Plus one under the title Inca Unku
Imperial or Provincial State Local Relations. It's an interesting look
at how with an empire as large as it was,
people could both sort of tow the imperial line of
(26:46):
how things needed to be done and also incorporate parts
of their own cultures. We will close out today's episode
with some fines that involve skulls and bones, starting with
two different skull surgeries. The first was on a woman
who seems to have undergone trepanation twice. I fear not
familiar with that term. Trepanation or tripanning is one of
(27:08):
the oldest known surgical procedures, and it involved drilling, scraping,
or cutting a hole through a person's skull. While there
are real medical reasons to need to do this, like
to relieve pressure on someone's brain after a head injury,
in earlier eras, this was often a treatment for things
like mental illness or epilepsy, or the belief that someone
(27:31):
was possessed by spirits, not so grounded in evidence based medicine.
This person lived sometime between the sixth and eighth centuries,
and we don't know why she underwent trepanation two different times.
Her skull also showed evidence of two large abscesses near
her jaw, which could have caused an infection to spread
(27:53):
to her brain, but we can't conclusively say that the
absess and the trepanation were in any way related based
on how the bone had healed. She seems to have
lived at least three months after the first procedure, but
it appears that she did not survive the second procedure.
Part of her forehead bone had been scraped away, but
(28:13):
without going all the way through it. The other skull
surgery took place much longer ago, about fifteen hundred BCE.
The skull was found in a tomb in Israel in
which two brothers had been buried together. The remains of
both brothers show signs of chronic illnesses and some congenital differences.
(28:34):
It appears that one brother died in his late teens
or early twenties, and that a few years later the
surviving brother underwent trepanation. There's no evidence of healing from
that surgery, so it does not appear that he survived it.
And then at that point the other brother's body was
exhumed and both of the brothers were buried together. Researchers
(28:56):
who have studied this burial have found it notable for
reasons beyond this skull surgery. It appears that both of
these brothers needed and received lifelong care and were given
the same respect and recognition in their burial as other
members of the community would have been. Next Researchers led
by a professor from Texas A and M University have found
(29:17):
what they believe is the oldest bone projectile point in
the Americas. It's at least thirteen thousand, nine hundred years old,
but it is not the whole projectile point. It is
just the little fragment of it embedded in the bone
of a Masdon and it's made from the leg bone
of a different Macedon. This find is from a site
(29:39):
in the state of Washington known as the Manis Mastodon Site,
and that thirteen thousand, nine hundred year age of the
projectile point is connected to something that's going to come
up again in Part two on Wednesday, and that is
whether the Clovis people were the first human inhabitants of
North America. The projectile point is from about nine hundred
(29:59):
years before the Clovis people are believed to have arrived
in North America, and so far this is the only
bone tool that dates back to before the arrival of
the Clovist people. Most other tools believed to be pre
Clovis are made of stone. Next, archaeologists are studying a
huge number of artifacts that were found during highway work
(30:21):
in the UK between twenty sixteen and twenty eighteen. This
work was known as the A fourteen Cambridge to Huntington
Improvement Scheme. The side note I love the different use
of the word scheme in the UK versus how we
use it here in the US. One object they have
found is a comb made from a piece of human
(30:43):
skull dating back to the Iron Age. It is believed
this comb was made for ritual purposes and not for grooming,
and only two other similar combs to this one have
been found by British archaeologists. Both of them were found
within fifteen miles or twenty four bilometers of where this
one was discovered. Next, archaeologists excavating a tomb in western
(31:06):
China have found a pair of ice skate blades made
from animal bone. These are roughly thirty five hundred years
old and were made to be strapped onto a person's footwear.
These skates are almost identical to ones found in Europe,
which could potentially suggest some kind of trade connection between
the two regions. And lastly, a chess set known as
(31:29):
the Sandomir Chessmen were believed to have been made from
polished deer antlers, or possibly from bone from an exotic
large animal and carved by hand, but DNA testing on
them has revealed that the pieces for one side of
the board were made from horsebone and the pieces for
the other side were made from cowbone, except for one pawn.
(31:51):
That one pawn was made from the bone of a
red deer. To believe that this red deer piece was
made later on, possibly as a replacement. I don't know why.
I love the idea of both sides of the board
being made from bone, but the bone of two different
types of animals. It's kind of a cool convention if
that's how they did it. Yeah, I have some listener
(32:15):
mail before we close out this part of On Earth.
It is from Kim. Kim wrote, Hi, Holly and Tracy,
longtime listener occasional writer. Here. I'm catching up on episodes
and just listen to the two parter on Irving Berlin.
White Christmas was always a holiday staple in my house
growing up. But I get what you said in the
(32:35):
episode and behind the scenes about it aging both horribly
and beautifully. Another song from it that I take issue
with now that I'm older is the g I Wish
I was back in the Army number performed by bing crosby,
Danny k Rosemary Clooney, and Vera Ellen. It's a horrible
representation of why women joined the service during that time,
(32:56):
looking for a husband and only thinking about finding one
while serving. It does such a disservice to all the
brave women who broke barriers and served honorably. Unfortunately, it's
still a stereotype that exists today. I do appreciate that
it talks about missing the service and all the benefits
once you leave. It's still something that's often lamented by veterans. Anyways,
(33:17):
thank you for a wonderfully researched and informative podcast. I've
cited you all on school papers before and used your
sources as jumping off points for research. You keep me
company on my long commute to and from work. Please
see the attached pet tax of our four month old
chocolate lab puppy Brew and He's a ball of energy
attached to clumsy paws and floppy ears. Sincerely, Kim, This
(33:39):
dog is so cute. My reaction when I opened this
email was to say a loud give me the dog.
I had not really thought about that aspect of the song.
I think I mostly was like yay. Reference to the
wax and I just did not thank farther into it.
(34:03):
So yeah, thank you for noting that as well, Kim,
and for sending such a cute dog picture. If you
would like to send us a note about this or
any other podcast or at History Podcast from iHeartRadio dot com.
We're also all over social media ad missed than History.
That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram,
(34:25):
and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio
app or wherever else you'd like to get your podcasts.
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Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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