April 26, 2023 • 42 mins
To wrap up Unearthed! for spring 2023, we've got potpourri, jewelry and adornments, edibles and potables, mistaken identity stories, repatriations, and the always popular shipwrecks.
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
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.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hello and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
It is part two of our Unearthed episode for this spring.
As usual, we're starting off with some things that did
not really fit into a category, which I always call
potpourri because I have watched Jeopardy.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Ever, so jumping into potpourri, we only have one historically
relevant exhumation to talk about this time. In January, a
body believed to belong to Marenus Vanderliba was exhumed from
an unmarked grave in Leipzig's South Cemetery. Marenus Vanderliba is
the person who has tried and executed for starting the
(00:57):
Reichstag fire in nineteen thirty three. That fire became a
pretext for Adolf Hitler to call for a decree suspending
civil liberties, which was then issued by German President Paul
von Hindenberg.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
So there are two main reasons for the sexhimation. One
is to confirm that these remains really do belong to
vander Luba. The other is to run taxicology tests to
try to determine whether he had been drugged. Although there
are people who believe he really was the sole perpetrator
of the Reichstag fire, there are others who believed that
(01:34):
he was drugged in order to secure a false confession
from him for starting that fire.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
And there are.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Still others who agree that he started the fire, but
think that he was drugged so that he would not
be able to name any of his co conspirators.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
This was reported in late February, and at that time
articles about it described the pathology report as do next month,
which would have been less last month as were recording this.
But as of this moment that report does not appear
to have come out. Yeah, if it has, I sure
cannot find it next and are kind of random assortment.
(02:11):
Archaeologists working ahead of some upcoming construction have found at
least seventy wells near Gammering, west of Munich. These date
back to a span of time stretching from the Bronze
Age to the early Middle Ages, and.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
One of them is unique. It's being described in reports
as a wishing well because it contains a lot of objects.
There are more than seventy pieces of ceramics twenty bronze clothing, pins,
and a lot of other assorted items. This well was
dug to a depth of sixteen feet about three thousand
years ago. That's much deeper than many of the other wells,
(02:49):
suggesting that groundwater levels had dropped and the area may
have been experiencing a severe or prolonged drought, and that
may also have contributed to people placing ritual offerings in
the well. People might have been wishing or praying for rain,
or may have been making an offering with.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
The hope that rain would return. The walls of the
well are also still in very good conditions, so these
objects have been preserved fairly well considering their age.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Next, a lake in the crater of the Rano Iraku
volcano on Rapanui, also called Easter Island, started drying up
in twenty eighteen, and as water levels have dropped, a
moi has become visible. Those are the statues that the
island is known for. Volunteers from three Chilean universities were
working on a wetland restoration project in the volcano when
(03:42):
they found it.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
This is somewhat smaller than many of the other statues
on the island, and according to a spokesperson from the
indigenous organization that oversees the site. It's one that they
had not previously known about, and since the lake was
at least three meters deep before it started drying up,
previous generations of the island's indigenous residents may not have
(04:03):
known about it either. Currently, the plan is to just
leave the statue where it.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Is moving on. There was a lot of news coverage
in March about DNA research using Ludwig von Beethoven's hair,
but the results of that research might seem a little
bit underwhelming. This research examined eight locks of hair purported
to have belonged to Beethoven, and it concluded that five
(04:29):
of them were likely authentic. All five of them had
conclusively come from the same person, so if all five
of them were not Beethoven, someone was like passing off
a lot of false hair from the same person. Two
of the locks of hair had come from someone else,
and tests on the third were inconclusive.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
The team looked for genetic factors that may have explained
some of Beethoven's most widely known physical traits, roughness and
his stomach problems, and they didn't find genetic markers to
explain either of those, but they did find that Beethoven
had a genetic risk for liver disease, as well as
evidence that he had contracted hepatitis B. Liver disease. Hepatitis
(05:16):
B and chronic alcohol consumption were probably enough to cause
his liver to fail, and liver failure has been believed
to have been the cause of Beethoven's death. This research
also raised some questions about the Beethoven family tree. Basically,
Beethoven may not be related to three living descendants of
(05:36):
his nephew Karl. That suggests that Beethoven and Karl's father,
which was Beethoven's brother Caspar Anton Carlvon Beethoven, might really
have been half siblings rather than full siblings. Other DNA
research has confirmed the oral history of the Swahili people
who live along the eastern coast of Africa. This research
(05:56):
involved a team of forty four scholars, seventeen of whom
are African, who worked with local people to secure their
permission to gather DNA from burial sites along the Swahili coast.
These people's remains were returned to the cemetery plots afterward.
Through this process, the team collected DNA from eighty people
(06:16):
who lived between the years twelve fifty and eighteen hundred.
Then they compared that DNA to modern Swahili speaking people
and to people living in the Middle East, Africa and
other parts of the world.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
So they found that about half of the DNA they
analyzed came mainly from African women and the other half
mainly came from Asian men, particularly Persian men, and this
aligns with what's recorded in a Swahili oral history known
as the Kilwa Chronicle, that reported that the Swahili civilization
(06:52):
grew from marriages between African and Asian ancestors, leading to
a society that was multi racial, especially among its more
elite class. But until now, this oral history had largely
been dismissed by mainstream archaeologists and historians, who instead favored
the idea that ports along the Swahili coast had been
(07:15):
built by colonists without the contributions or involvement of the
African peoples who were already living there.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
The researchers did note one limitation to this work. The
DNA samples that were collected were from cemeteries where Muslims
from the more elite social classes were buried, so they
may not be reflective of patterns that would be found
within the more general population. Chapruka Kusimba, a professor at
the University of South Florida who was born in Kenya
(07:45):
and was one of the authors on this paper, has
described this as his life's work.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Now we're going to move on to some pieces of
jewelry and other adornments. Back in twenty nineteen, a metal
detectorist named Charlie Clark had found a gold pendant in Warwickshire, England,
which has now been unveiled by the British Museum. It
is a heart shaped pendant on a gold chain, decorated
in enameled red and white, with the initials H and
(08:14):
K and a pomegranate bush and a tutor rose and
tests dated it to sometime prior to fifteen thirty, probably
around fifteen twenty one, meaning that it was made during
the time that Henry the eighth was married to Catherine
of Aragon. According to Rachel King, curator of Renaissance Europe
(08:34):
at the British Museum, nothing of this size and importance
dating back to this period has been found in Britain
in more than two decades.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
It's not clear who made this piece or why. The
materials are very high quality, but the craftsmanship really isn't.
It looks like it might have been made in a
rush without a lot of attention to detail. Some speculations
or that it might have been made as a tournament prize,
or it may have been commissioned by someone to wear.
It's something like a tournament where other people wouldn't really
(09:06):
be seeing it close up.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Next, archaeologists investigating a Roman bathhouse in Carlisle near Hadrian's
Wall have found a bunch of two thousand year old
engraved semi precious gemstones known as Intalio's in the bathhouse drains.
These would have been worn as rings and used to
stamp documents, so the design that was carved in the
(09:31):
stone would leave a shape behind when it was pressed
into clay or wax. These were probably lost when the
warmth and the moisture of the bathhouse weakened the glue
that was holding them in place in their settings, and
then the metal in the settings also expanded in the heat,
so people came out of the bath with their ring
on but not the stone in it anymore.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
This seems like the set up plot to such a
good heist movie. These pieces are very beautiful and well made,
so the people who wore them would have been wealthy.
A lot of them are really really lovely circular or
oval with carvings of people, birds, animals, deities, etc. And
they're small enough that the person who carved them would
(10:14):
have to be really skilled to get all that detail.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
It is not unusual at all for objects like these
to be found in the drains of the bathhouses. People
lost all kinds of stuff in there, which then wound
up being flushed into the drain when the pools were cleaned.
Other finds in these drains have included a whole lot
of hairpins and beads that were probably part of a necklace.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Back in two thousand and seven, archaeologists found a small
gold plated copper pendant in the Old City section of
Mez in Germany, and the size was about six centimeters
across in one centimeter deep. And this pendant has a
locking mechanism and is adorned with religious imagery such as
Jesus Christ and his mother Mary, primarily in blue and green.
(11:01):
Archaeologists thought that this might be a philactory or something
to hold religious relics, but it was so tiny and
delicate that there was no way to open it without
the risk of badly damaging or destroying it. An attempt
to X ray the pendant also didn't really show anything discernible.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Now, using neutron tomography, they've discovered that there are indeed
five tiny silk and linen packets inside of their connected
by a thread, with fragments of bone inside each of them.
Researchers believe that the pendant was made in a workshop
in Hildesheim in northern Germany, which also made three other
(11:41):
known filactories that have still survived until today. We do
not know who these bones may have belonged to, or
have been believed to have belonged to. Some philactories like
this have a small piece of parchment inside with the
name of the saint they were connected to, but if
there's one inside this pendant, it was not visible in
this imaging work. And the last thing before we take
(12:04):
a quick break back in twenty twenty one, a treasure
hunter working with a metal detector north of Amsterdam found
a cash of silver coins, gold leaf and four gold
ear rings. This spine was announced in March after the
Dutch National Museum of Antiquities had studied it. These items
were probably buried sometime between the years twelve hundred and
(12:25):
twelve fifty, and the ear rings were already about two
hundred years old when they were buried, So it seems
like this may have been family heirlooms or otherwise treasured
possessions that someone had maybe passed down in their family
that they were burying for some reason. These may have
been worn hanging from straps on a hood rather than
worn directly from a person's ears.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
One of the pairs of earrings is engraved with decorations
that include a representation of Jesus Christ with his arms outstretched,
and this one is actually pretty charming. It looks almost
like a child's drawing of someone offering to give you
a hug.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
Yeah, I would not have known it was supposed to
represent Jesus without that being explained in the article, because
it really just does look like an almost childlike arms
outstretched kind of image. We will take a quick sponsor
break and we'll come back and talk about some food
and beverage. Now we have some edibles and potables. Researchers
(13:35):
from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pisa
have been working at the site of a settlement called
Lagash in southern Iraq, and they have found a five
thousand year old public eatery that still contains remnants of food.
Most sources have described this as a tavern or a pub.
It had an open air dining area with tables and benches,
(13:58):
as well as a kitchen. Found evidence of an oven,
a clay cooling device known as a zeir, and a
lot of storage vessels, as well as more than one
hundred and fifty serving bowls, some of them still containing
a residue of a fish stew. There's also evidence of
beer drinking.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
This tavern is part of a much larger settlement and
excavations have been going on there for decades, with interruptions
due to wars and other unrests, and of course due
to the COVID nineteen pandemic. This most recent work has
incorporated things like drone photography, thermal imaging, and microstratigraphic sampling,
which is a way of examining the layers of the
(14:38):
site at a very very small scale.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
Next, we have a trio of dairy finds. First researchers
studying a Mongol Era cemetery have found evidence that in
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, elite people in the Mongol
Empire were consuming the milk of various ruminants, including yax.
This discovery was made through examining the proteins on dental
(15:03):
calculus from remains in the cemetery. Although researchers already knew
that people in this area had been drinking milk for
at least five thousand years, it has not been as
clear exactly when people started drinking yack milk or when
people started domesticating yaks. Researchers in Poland have found evidence
(15:24):
that late Neolithic peoples were making cheese from the milk
of several different animals, including cows, sheep, and goats, as
long ago as the sixth millennium BCE. As is the
case with so many prehistoric food discoveries, this came from
examining pottery residues. This may help explain why there's so
(15:44):
much evidence of people consuming milk during a time when
virtually all adults were lactose intolerant. The genetic mutation that
allows people to digest lactose into adulthood didn't become common
in Europe until the Late Bronze Age. Assessing milk into
cheese would have helped to reduce its lactose content in
addition to giving it a longer shelf life and making
(16:07):
it delicious. Yes, we are both fans of cheese. In
our last little bit of dairy news, Chinese scientists have
found evidence of milk being consumed and stored in Tibet
as long as three thousand years ago. This research also
involved analyzing lipid residues from pottery. This pottery was found
(16:28):
in settlements very high up on the Tibetan Plateau, roughly
four thousand meters or thirteen thousand feet above sea level.
People in this area have historically consumed a really high protein,
high fat diet, and for a long time it has
mainly come from red meat, including beef and mutton, and
researchers noted that the addition to milk happened about the
(16:50):
same time as animals were first being domesticated for their meat.
We have another food find from Tibet, this one dating
back thirteen hundred years. Researchers found charred grains of rice
along with pieces of broken pottery. Genetic study confirmed that
it was Indica rice. Indica rice is one of the
(17:11):
two main species of domesticated rice grown in Asia. For reference,
basmadi and jasmine rice are both types of indicca rice.
The climate and elevation of this area are not suitable
for growing rice, so this rice would have been brought
in from somewhere else. So this find offers a clue
(17:31):
into trade networks in Asia and into how and when
consumption of this type of rice spread across Asia after
it was domesticated.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
We also have multiple studies into what neanderthals eight. Based
on shells found in a cave in Portugal, they probably
cooked and ate crabs. This is based on the discovery
of shell fragments from at least thirty three different brown crabs,
which showed evidence of being exposed to high heat and
of being intentionally broken apart with tools. The size of
(18:04):
the shells also suggests that people were intentionally harvesting the
biggest ones that they could find.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
One of the reasons researchers were surprised at the possibility
of Neanderthals eating crabs is that even if they were
going after the biggest ones of this type of crab,
the crabs are still just not very big. A common
assumption has been that the effort required to gather and
prepare crabs would not be worth it compared to what
(18:31):
Neanderthals might be able to get from a bigger animal,
like say, elephants. Researchers studying bones from a site in
central Germany have concluded that one hundred and twenty five
thousand years ago, Neanderthals were killing and butchering straight tusked elephants.
These elephants are now extinct, but at the time they
were the world's largest land animal. The meat from one
(18:55):
of them would likely have been enough to feed hundreds
of people. This is the earliest evidence found so far
of early humans killing elephants for food.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
And in our last food find researchers in Israel have
found eight ostrich eggs that are at least forty five
hundred years old, but maybe as old as seventy five
hundred years old. These were found at a camping site
used by nomadic peoples, along with tools, burned stones, and
pottery fragments. The number and position of the eggs suggest
(19:27):
that they were intentionally gathered to be eaten as food,
especially since one of them was directly in the fire pits.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
Next up, we have a few things that we are
calling cases of mistaken identity. First, there were some dueling
headlines in February and March about exactly what a two
thousand year old Roman object found at Vendolanda was used for.
This object is oblong, slightly tapered, and a little more
(19:58):
than six inches long, and it has a roughly horizontal
groove carved just below the smaller end.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
When this item was found in nineteen ninety two, archaeologists
described it as a darning tool. Then a paper published
in the journal Antiquity earlier this year concluded that it
was a quote large disembodied fallis. Three main ideas were
put forth for what this fallus may have been used for.
For sexual purposes, or as a pestle, perhaps with the
(20:28):
idea that its shape would give the ingredients being ground
a special potency, or for decorative purposes, maybe just as
part of a statue.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
But then, not long after this article came out, a
counter argument started making the rounds that it wasn't a
darning tool or a fallus, that it was a drop spindle,
and that notch at the end was used to secure
the fiber that was being spun. This explanation was offered
up by a spinner named Lindsey duncan Pitt, who saw
similarities between the design of this object in two different
(21:01):
types of Scottish drop spindles, and a letter to the
newspaper The Guardian, duncan Pitt also argued that a drop
spindle would make a lot of sense given the other
items that this object was found with, which included shoes,
dress accessories, crafting tools and scraps like pieces of leather
and worked antler, which just made my brain go this
(21:23):
was from an ancient costume shop.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
And speaking of antler, curators in Vietnam thought a pair
of deer antlers excavated in the nineteen nineties were simply
well preserved pieces of antler placed them in storage, but
researchers examined those antlers in the twenty teens and concluded
that they were really single stringed instruments. Their research was
(21:49):
published in the journal Antiquity in February. These items are
at least two thousand years old, making them the earliest
known string instruments ever found in Asia.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
Researchers in Brazil believe fifty thousand year old stone tools
long believed to have been made by early humans may
really have been made by capuchin monkeys. Basically, the monkeys
intentionally gather and use rocks for a number of different purposes,
and one of them is to crack nuts. So they
put a nut on a big flat rock and use
(22:21):
another smaller rock to smash the nut open. I watched
a monkey do this on a YouTube video for a
solid two minutes. In the process, little pieces of the
stone can flake away, and that results in the exact
same kinds of patterns that are found in rocks that
humans have modified intentionally to turn them into tools.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
This is not the first research to come to this conclusion.
Several papers have been published since twenty seventeen that have
suggested that objects that look like they were made by
humans may really have been made by monkeys. So this
research is adding to a greater body of work that
I find charming.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Yeah. This is also connected to ongoing research into when
humans first arrived in the America's, something that we briefly
mentioned in part one of this episode. For a while,
the most widely held idea within the field of archaeology
has been that the first people in the Americas were
what's known as the Clovis people, who crossed a land
(23:24):
bridge across the Bearing Straight roughly thirteen thousand years ago.
That idea contradicted the oral histories of a number of
indigenous nations, which described those nations' ancestors as being on
the continent earlier than that or as arriving by some
other route.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
A number of more recent studies have suggested that there
may have been humans in the Americas as many as
twenty thousand years before the Clovis people arrived, but some
of that research has focused on the kinds of tools
that were analyzed in this study. Now that doesn't mean
there weren't humans in the area years ago, but it
does mean that these tools may not be the evidence
(24:03):
that they were. This research was published in the February
twenty twenty three issue of the journal The Holocene.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
In somewhat similar tool news, one type of tool that
early humans used to do things like butcher animals and
pound plant material into food is known as Oldowan tools
or the old one industry. These were used as far
back as two point nine million years ago in parts
of eastern Africa, but a recent discovery at one site
(24:33):
in Kenya has raised questions about whether early humans were
the only ones using these tools. Specifically, some of these
tools were found near molars that came from not an
early human, but a hominin known as parenthropis. There are
two recognized species of Parenthropis who existed alongside several early
(24:56):
human species, but Parenthropis are not considered to be early humans,
more like early humans distant cousins.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Prior to this, many researchers have believed that other non
human hominids may have also used tools, but that Oldowan
tools were more sophisticated and were only used by hominids
in the genus Homo, or species that can be classified
as human. This has raised questions about whether parenthropists may
have been capable of making more sophisticated tools, but there
(25:28):
are also alternate explanations, including that the parenthropists these molars
came from was the victim of violence at the hands
of early humans.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
Back in the nineteen thirties, the Field Museum acquired a
sword that had been pulled out of the Danube River
in Budapest, Hungary, which was believed to be a replica,
but it turns out it really does date back to
sometime between ten eighty and nine hundred BCE, the field
had acquired a whole group of objects and that grew
(26:00):
included both authentic items and replicas, and this one was
misidentified as one of the replicas until the museum started
preparing for a new exhibition called First Kings of Europe. Apparently,
Hungarian archaeologists who were working on this exhibition recognized the
sword as authentic as soon as they saw it, and
(26:20):
further testing confirmed that its chemical makeup was a match
for other Bronze Age swords.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
Since the museum staff had not previously known that this
sword was authentic, it wasn't included in the Bronze Age
era of the exhibit. Instead, it was placed in the
main hall as a preview for the exhibit, and that
opened on March thirty.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
First, I'm going to take a quick sponsor break. Next up,
we are talking about some repatriations, some of which also
could have been classified under updates, and we're actually starting
(27:01):
with something that isn't exactly a repatriation, but it has
a lot of themes in common with a lot of
the repatriations that we talk about on the show. Charles
Byrne was nicknamed the Irish giant. He lived in the
eighteenth century and reached a height of about seven feet
seven inches tall, and became famous for that height. While
(27:24):
he earned a living by exhibiting himself as a curiosity,
he was also really afraid that somebody would try to
dissect his body after his death or put it on display.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
When Burn was twenty two, he became very ill. The
cause of that illness is not conclusively known, and researchers
have drawn different conclusions over the years as medical science
has advanced. In June of seventeen eighty three, he asked
friends to make sure that after his death, his body
would be buried at sea in a lead coffin to
(27:56):
prevent anyone from dissecting or displaying it.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
But after Burn died, surgeons swarmed his home with the
hope of claiming his body for their own purposes. One
of them, John Hunter, reportedly bribed one of Burn's friends
to steal his body from the coffin and replace it
with weights. Four years later, Hunter put Burns prepared skeleton
(28:20):
on display, and then after Hunter's death, his collection was
given to what's now the Royal College of Surgeons of
England under legal terms requiring that collection to be kept intact.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
The Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of
England has been closed for about five years while undergoing
a redevelopment process, and in January it was announced that
when the museum reopens in May, Burn's skeleton will no
longer be on display there at this point, however, it
is going to remain part of the museum's collection.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
Next moving away from things that our human remains. In
January the reports that the British Museum and the Nation
of Greece were nearing an agreement on the return of
the Parthenon marbles, which we have covered on the show
before and have talked about in a number of Unearthed
updates since then. This proposed agreement involved the British Museum
(29:17):
treating this return as a long term loan, but Greek
officials apparently rejected this deal under the argument that the
British Museum does not own these works and therefore has
no authority to lend them to anyone. In our year
End Unearthed for twenty twenty two, we mentioned that Pope
Francis had announced that Parthenon sculptures in the collections of
(29:40):
the Vatican City Museums would be returned to Greece. In March,
three fragments were returned, the head of a boy, the
head of a bearded man, and the head of a horse.
These fragments will be placed in the Acropolis Museum. This
was framed as a donation from the Vatican to the
Greek Orthodox Church and as a quote gesture of friendship.
(30:03):
We have also previously discussed French President Emmanuel Macran's announcement
that France would be returning looted artifacts to countries in Africa.
He first made that announcement in twenty seventeen, and it's
come up on the show a couple of times since then.
One of the items that was returned earlier this year
was a ten foot long, nine one hundred and forty
(30:27):
pound wooden drum which colonists seized in nineteen sixteen.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
Ivory Coast had requested the return of this drum, which
is known as the Talking Drum, in twenty eighteen, along
with one hundred and forty seven other objects. One reason
it's taken a few years to return the drum is
that conservators were working to restore it first. It had
been kept outside the home of the colonial governor in
Ivory Coast from nineteen sixteen to nineteen thirty, and during
(30:57):
that it had been damaged by weather and insects.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Next, one of the arguments that people sometimes make against
the idea of repatriating objects to their nation of origin
involves what will happen if that nation is facing some
kind of war or other unrest. There are whole nuances
to that argument that we're really not going to dive into.
(31:21):
But our next repatriation is an example of one approach
to dealing with that kind of situation. In February, the
United States started the process of repatriating seventy seven objects
to Yemen, but the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art
and the government of the Republic of Yemen have entered
into an agreement for the Smithsonian to store these objects
(31:44):
for up to two years in the wake of ongoing unrest.
The Embassy of the Republic of Yemen government hosted a
repatriation ceremony in Washington, d C. In February, and the
Yemeni government has the option to request an extension of
this agreement at the end of the two years if
it seems like it's necessary.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
We have mentioned Subash Kapoor a couple of times on
the show. That is the antiquities dealer who was convicted
of running an international smuggling ring. The items he smuggled
wound up in the collections of some major museums, and
one of these is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which
has recently announced a plan to return fifteen sculptures to India.
(32:29):
This came after the Supreme Court of the State of
New York issued a search warrant related to those fifteen items.
This is an ongoing process. The met has been communicating
with the Department of Homeland Security about works that may
be connected to Kapor since twenty fifteen.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
A couple of the pieces that were announced as being
returned over the last few months are items that had
been looted from their countries of origin during wars or
other periods of unrest just within the last couple of decades.
The US is returning a nearly three thousand year old
piece known as Furniture fitting with Sphinx trampling a youth
(33:07):
to Iraq. This was looted from the Iraq Museum during
the two thousand and three invasion of Iraq. A wooden
sarcophagus with a green face that's been in the collection
of the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences as being returned
to Egypt. It had been taken out of Egypt after
Egyptian President Hosni Murrak was overthrown in twenty eleven. To
(33:30):
circle back to the met for a second in twenty nineteen,
it returned a gilded coffin that had also been smuggled
out of Egypt by that same group of traffickers that
took this one with the green face.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
And for our last repatriation in twenty twenty two, Tuscarora
citizen Brennan Ferguson was at the Geneva Museum of Ethnography
in Switzerland and saw two Hadenashani sacred items on display there,
a mask and a turtle rattle. Ferguson met with the
mum director, who took the mask off of public display
(34:03):
at Ferguson's request, and then the museum began working with
the Hoddanashani Confederacy to return the items to them. The
Tuscarora are one of the six nations of the Hodanashani.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
The item was a return in February, and this whole
process took about seven months. Which is much faster than
a lot of the repatriations we have talked about on
the show, and interviews Ferguson and other tribal citizens who
were involved with this repatriation have mentioned that the museum
was quick to act and respectful through this whole process.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Now it is time to move on to shipwrecks, which
is how we're going to wrap up this edition of Unearthed,
starting with one that's also an update. So back in
twenty twenty, we talked about the wreck of the warship Grimshunden,
which belonged to King Hans of Denmark. This ship had
been loaded up with fine goods in preparation for negotiations
with Sweden. Sweden wanted to break away from the Kalamar Union,
(35:00):
which included Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and Hans wanted to
encourage Sweden to stay through the combination of extravagant gifts
and the presence of a great, big warship. But that
ship caught fire and it sank before arriving. Archaeologists with
Lund University in Sweden have found what's being described as
(35:21):
a trove of spices on board, including nutmeg cloves, mustard, dill,
Saffron and Ginger, suggesting that Hans had access to trade
goods from as far away as Indonesia.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
Next to fifteenth century shipwreck was found in Newport, Wales
during work on the city's riverfront theater in two thousand
and two. That wreck was sent to Portsmouth to be
dried and preserve, which was handled by some of the
same people who worked to preserve the wreck of the
Mary Rose. Now the ship is being sent back to
Newport as approximately twenty five hundred shipwreck pieces that are
(35:58):
going to need to be reassembled. The plan is to
eventually make it a public attraction. As I understand it,
they're having to find an appropriate place to put it
because of how big it is, and it also how
a big enough place to reassemble all twenty five hundred piece.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
I know, I'm picturing like the world's biggest lego table.
A shipwreck off the coast of Eastbourn, England, was found
in twenty nineteen, and for whatever reason, it did not
wind up on an episode of Unearthed at that time.
We don't think anyway, we don't. Neither of us recalls it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
I looked and I was like, I don't see anything
that sounds like the same thing. It may have been
on your list in one of the things that just
didn't make it that happens that has now been identified
as the seventeenth century Dutch warship klein Holandia, which was
involved in numerous battles during the Second Anglo Dutch War.
It sank after being attacked and boarded by an English
(36:53):
naval force in sixteen seventy two. Divers have found a
lot of material at the reck site, including parts of
the hull, some of the ship's cannons, and pieces of
Italian pottery. And finally, in twenty nineteen, a schooner barge
called the iron Ton was spotted on the floor of
Lake Huron using sonar imagery. This discovery was not announced
(37:15):
until March of this year to give researchers some time
to study it before the news was made public. The
iron Ton sank in what sounds like really a terrifying ordeal.
The iron Ton and another vessel called the Moonlight were
both being towed by a steamer and the steamer broke down,
and then a storm started and driving winds started, threatening
(37:39):
all three of these vessels, which led the crew of
the Moonlight to cut through the iron Ton's toe line
with the hope of preventing a collision with them.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
Not long after that, the iron Ton did collide, not
with the Moonlight, but with a totally different ship, the Ohio,
which was laden with grain. The iron Ton's crew tried
to deploy a lot lifeboat, but no one untied the
lifeboat from the iron Ton. It's not clear whether this
was someone's oversight or if it just wasn't possible to do.
(38:09):
In the middle of all of this, all but two
of the iron Ton's crew drowned. The Ohio also sank,
but all of its crew survived.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Divers have been to the wreck site and found the
iron Ton to be in such good condition that they
described it as not even seeming like a wreck, more
like just an intact ship sitting on the bottom of
the lake, and that lifeboat is still attached to it.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
Dundundi. Yeah, that is kind of a creepy note to
end on, which is fine by me. We're halfway to Halloween,
so this seems right. Sure, but we will be back
with more unearthed than three months or so, which may
or may not also have haunting imagery.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
Maybe so I have listener mail from Jennifer to take
us out. I loved the subject line of this email.
It says old vocabulary, and Jennifer wrote, Hi, Holly and Tracy,
I just wanted to send a brief note for me.
I tend to be wordy after today's episode. That episode
was the one about the autobiographies of Jenny June, so
(39:13):
Jennifer wrote, you mentioned that the word bisexual used to
mean people with characteristics of both sexes rather than how
we define it today. You can find a real world
example of that well into the nineteen sixties. In The
Star Trek, the original series episode the Trouble with Tribles,
doctor McCoy describes Tribles as bisexual reproducing at will. This
(39:34):
episode has a special place in my heart because it's
the very first episode I ever saw. Around nineteen eighty three,
when my dad, who was collecting the show on the
two episodes per tape release, got that episode and set
five year old meet in front of it, and I
was hooked. Star Trek became our thing. So of course
I immediately thought of that quote when you were discussing
(39:55):
vocabulary in this episode. I think I've sent pics in
my casts before, just in case here is Pumpkin, big
and round in orange, hopefully making the name self explanatory.
And Jamie, who my brother named after the boy on
the eighties show Small Wonder on a cross country RV
trip a few years ago. Don't worry, I took the
pics while we were stopped for the day. The bottom
(40:17):
one is Jamie and his baby girl, Joxer, who got
her name as a kitten before her mostly feral mama
Zena led us close enough to find out that she
was a girl. How mostly feral Zena had a litter
of kiddies after she'd come inside as a whole separate
story about my overly optimistic mom. But she kept all
three babies. I love that story. I love these names
(40:39):
for these cats. I love these cats pictures. These are great.
I also love the trouble with Tribbles. And I want
to note that you do still sometimes see the word bisexual,
meaning like having elements of two sexes, in things like
biology texts or botany texts and that kind of thing.
(41:00):
But it like it. We don't really use it that
way to describe people in everyday conversation anymore. So I
also now am vividly thinking about that like animated version
of Star Trek the original series. There was an ant
like just it was just like animated translations of episodes
(41:22):
as I remember it, and I remember seeing an animated
one on Nickelodeon or something. So anyway, and the live
action one. And now I'm just gonna think about triples
all day and cats. So thanks Jennifer for this email.
If you would like to send us a note about
this or any other podcast, we're at History Podcast atiheartradio
dot com and we're all over social media. Miss in History.
(41:44):
That's ree you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram,
and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio
app or wherever you like to get your podcasts. Stuff
you Missed in His Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
(42:07):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hello and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
It is part two of our Unearthed episode for this spring.
As usual, we're starting off with some things that did
not really fit into a category, which I always call
potpourri because I have watched Jeopardy.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Ever, so jumping into potpourri, we only have one historically
relevant exhumation to talk about this time. In January, a
body believed to belong to Marenus Vanderliba was exhumed from
an unmarked grave in Leipzig's South Cemetery. Marenus Vanderliba is
the person who has tried and executed for starting the
(00:57):
Reichstag fire in nineteen thirty three. That fire became a
pretext for Adolf Hitler to call for a decree suspending
civil liberties, which was then issued by German President Paul
von Hindenberg.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
So there are two main reasons for the sexhimation. One
is to confirm that these remains really do belong to
vander Luba. The other is to run taxicology tests to
try to determine whether he had been drugged. Although there
are people who believe he really was the sole perpetrator
of the Reichstag fire, there are others who believed that
(01:34):
he was drugged in order to secure a false confession
from him for starting that fire.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
And there are.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Still others who agree that he started the fire, but
think that he was drugged so that he would not
be able to name any of his co conspirators.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
This was reported in late February, and at that time
articles about it described the pathology report as do next month,
which would have been less last month as were recording this.
But as of this moment that report does not appear
to have come out. Yeah, if it has, I sure
cannot find it next and are kind of random assortment.
(02:11):
Archaeologists working ahead of some upcoming construction have found at
least seventy wells near Gammering, west of Munich. These date
back to a span of time stretching from the Bronze
Age to the early Middle Ages, and.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
One of them is unique. It's being described in reports
as a wishing well because it contains a lot of objects.
There are more than seventy pieces of ceramics twenty bronze clothing, pins,
and a lot of other assorted items. This well was
dug to a depth of sixteen feet about three thousand
years ago. That's much deeper than many of the other wells,
(02:49):
suggesting that groundwater levels had dropped and the area may
have been experiencing a severe or prolonged drought, and that
may also have contributed to people placing ritual offerings in
the well. People might have been wishing or praying for rain,
or may have been making an offering with.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
The hope that rain would return. The walls of the
well are also still in very good conditions, so these
objects have been preserved fairly well considering their age.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Next, a lake in the crater of the Rano Iraku
volcano on Rapanui, also called Easter Island, started drying up
in twenty eighteen, and as water levels have dropped, a
moi has become visible. Those are the statues that the
island is known for. Volunteers from three Chilean universities were
working on a wetland restoration project in the volcano when
(03:42):
they found it.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
This is somewhat smaller than many of the other statues
on the island, and according to a spokesperson from the
indigenous organization that oversees the site. It's one that they
had not previously known about, and since the lake was
at least three meters deep before it started drying up,
previous generations of the island's indigenous residents may not have
(04:03):
known about it either. Currently, the plan is to just
leave the statue where it.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Is moving on. There was a lot of news coverage
in March about DNA research using Ludwig von Beethoven's hair,
but the results of that research might seem a little
bit underwhelming. This research examined eight locks of hair purported
to have belonged to Beethoven, and it concluded that five
(04:29):
of them were likely authentic. All five of them had
conclusively come from the same person, so if all five
of them were not Beethoven, someone was like passing off
a lot of false hair from the same person. Two
of the locks of hair had come from someone else,
and tests on the third were inconclusive.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
The team looked for genetic factors that may have explained
some of Beethoven's most widely known physical traits, roughness and
his stomach problems, and they didn't find genetic markers to
explain either of those, but they did find that Beethoven
had a genetic risk for liver disease, as well as
evidence that he had contracted hepatitis B. Liver disease. Hepatitis
(05:16):
B and chronic alcohol consumption were probably enough to cause
his liver to fail, and liver failure has been believed
to have been the cause of Beethoven's death. This research
also raised some questions about the Beethoven family tree. Basically,
Beethoven may not be related to three living descendants of
(05:36):
his nephew Karl. That suggests that Beethoven and Karl's father,
which was Beethoven's brother Caspar Anton Carlvon Beethoven, might really
have been half siblings rather than full siblings. Other DNA
research has confirmed the oral history of the Swahili people
who live along the eastern coast of Africa. This research
(05:56):
involved a team of forty four scholars, seventeen of whom
are African, who worked with local people to secure their
permission to gather DNA from burial sites along the Swahili coast.
These people's remains were returned to the cemetery plots afterward.
Through this process, the team collected DNA from eighty people
(06:16):
who lived between the years twelve fifty and eighteen hundred.
Then they compared that DNA to modern Swahili speaking people
and to people living in the Middle East, Africa and
other parts of the world.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
So they found that about half of the DNA they
analyzed came mainly from African women and the other half
mainly came from Asian men, particularly Persian men, and this
aligns with what's recorded in a Swahili oral history known
as the Kilwa Chronicle, that reported that the Swahili civilization
(06:52):
grew from marriages between African and Asian ancestors, leading to
a society that was multi racial, especially among its more
elite class. But until now, this oral history had largely
been dismissed by mainstream archaeologists and historians, who instead favored
the idea that ports along the Swahili coast had been
(07:15):
built by colonists without the contributions or involvement of the
African peoples who were already living there.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
The researchers did note one limitation to this work. The
DNA samples that were collected were from cemeteries where Muslims
from the more elite social classes were buried, so they
may not be reflective of patterns that would be found
within the more general population. Chapruka Kusimba, a professor at
the University of South Florida who was born in Kenya
(07:45):
and was one of the authors on this paper, has
described this as his life's work.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Now we're going to move on to some pieces of
jewelry and other adornments. Back in twenty nineteen, a metal
detectorist named Charlie Clark had found a gold pendant in Warwickshire, England,
which has now been unveiled by the British Museum. It
is a heart shaped pendant on a gold chain, decorated
in enameled red and white, with the initials H and
(08:14):
K and a pomegranate bush and a tutor rose and
tests dated it to sometime prior to fifteen thirty, probably
around fifteen twenty one, meaning that it was made during
the time that Henry the eighth was married to Catherine
of Aragon. According to Rachel King, curator of Renaissance Europe
(08:34):
at the British Museum, nothing of this size and importance
dating back to this period has been found in Britain
in more than two decades.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
It's not clear who made this piece or why. The
materials are very high quality, but the craftsmanship really isn't.
It looks like it might have been made in a
rush without a lot of attention to detail. Some speculations
or that it might have been made as a tournament prize,
or it may have been commissioned by someone to wear.
It's something like a tournament where other people wouldn't really
(09:06):
be seeing it close up.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Next, archaeologists investigating a Roman bathhouse in Carlisle near Hadrian's
Wall have found a bunch of two thousand year old
engraved semi precious gemstones known as Intalio's in the bathhouse drains.
These would have been worn as rings and used to
stamp documents, so the design that was carved in the
(09:31):
stone would leave a shape behind when it was pressed
into clay or wax. These were probably lost when the
warmth and the moisture of the bathhouse weakened the glue
that was holding them in place in their settings, and
then the metal in the settings also expanded in the heat,
so people came out of the bath with their ring
on but not the stone in it anymore.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
This seems like the set up plot to such a
good heist movie. These pieces are very beautiful and well made,
so the people who wore them would have been wealthy.
A lot of them are really really lovely circular or
oval with carvings of people, birds, animals, deities, etc. And
they're small enough that the person who carved them would
(10:14):
have to be really skilled to get all that detail.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
It is not unusual at all for objects like these
to be found in the drains of the bathhouses. People
lost all kinds of stuff in there, which then wound
up being flushed into the drain when the pools were cleaned.
Other finds in these drains have included a whole lot
of hairpins and beads that were probably part of a necklace.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Back in two thousand and seven, archaeologists found a small
gold plated copper pendant in the Old City section of
Mez in Germany, and the size was about six centimeters
across in one centimeter deep. And this pendant has a
locking mechanism and is adorned with religious imagery such as
Jesus Christ and his mother Mary, primarily in blue and green.
(11:01):
Archaeologists thought that this might be a philactory or something
to hold religious relics, but it was so tiny and
delicate that there was no way to open it without
the risk of badly damaging or destroying it. An attempt
to X ray the pendant also didn't really show anything discernible.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Now, using neutron tomography, they've discovered that there are indeed
five tiny silk and linen packets inside of their connected
by a thread, with fragments of bone inside each of them.
Researchers believe that the pendant was made in a workshop
in Hildesheim in northern Germany, which also made three other
(11:41):
known filactories that have still survived until today. We do
not know who these bones may have belonged to, or
have been believed to have belonged to. Some philactories like
this have a small piece of parchment inside with the
name of the saint they were connected to, but if
there's one inside this pendant, it was not visible in
this imaging work. And the last thing before we take
(12:04):
a quick break back in twenty twenty one, a treasure
hunter working with a metal detector north of Amsterdam found
a cash of silver coins, gold leaf and four gold
ear rings. This spine was announced in March after the
Dutch National Museum of Antiquities had studied it. These items
were probably buried sometime between the years twelve hundred and
(12:25):
twelve fifty, and the ear rings were already about two
hundred years old when they were buried, So it seems
like this may have been family heirlooms or otherwise treasured
possessions that someone had maybe passed down in their family
that they were burying for some reason. These may have
been worn hanging from straps on a hood rather than
worn directly from a person's ears.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
One of the pairs of earrings is engraved with decorations
that include a representation of Jesus Christ with his arms outstretched,
and this one is actually pretty charming. It looks almost
like a child's drawing of someone offering to give you
a hug.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
Yeah, I would not have known it was supposed to
represent Jesus without that being explained in the article, because
it really just does look like an almost childlike arms
outstretched kind of image. We will take a quick sponsor
break and we'll come back and talk about some food
and beverage. Now we have some edibles and potables. Researchers
(13:35):
from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pisa
have been working at the site of a settlement called
Lagash in southern Iraq, and they have found a five
thousand year old public eatery that still contains remnants of food.
Most sources have described this as a tavern or a pub.
It had an open air dining area with tables and benches,
(13:58):
as well as a kitchen. Found evidence of an oven,
a clay cooling device known as a zeir, and a
lot of storage vessels, as well as more than one
hundred and fifty serving bowls, some of them still containing
a residue of a fish stew. There's also evidence of
beer drinking.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
This tavern is part of a much larger settlement and
excavations have been going on there for decades, with interruptions
due to wars and other unrests, and of course due
to the COVID nineteen pandemic. This most recent work has
incorporated things like drone photography, thermal imaging, and microstratigraphic sampling,
which is a way of examining the layers of the
(14:38):
site at a very very small scale.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
Next, we have a trio of dairy finds. First researchers
studying a Mongol Era cemetery have found evidence that in
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, elite people in the Mongol
Empire were consuming the milk of various ruminants, including yax.
This discovery was made through examining the proteins on dental
(15:03):
calculus from remains in the cemetery. Although researchers already knew
that people in this area had been drinking milk for
at least five thousand years, it has not been as
clear exactly when people started drinking yack milk or when
people started domesticating yaks. Researchers in Poland have found evidence
(15:24):
that late Neolithic peoples were making cheese from the milk
of several different animals, including cows, sheep, and goats, as
long ago as the sixth millennium BCE. As is the
case with so many prehistoric food discoveries, this came from
examining pottery residues. This may help explain why there's so
(15:44):
much evidence of people consuming milk during a time when
virtually all adults were lactose intolerant. The genetic mutation that
allows people to digest lactose into adulthood didn't become common
in Europe until the Late Bronze Age. Assessing milk into
cheese would have helped to reduce its lactose content in
addition to giving it a longer shelf life and making
(16:07):
it delicious. Yes, we are both fans of cheese. In
our last little bit of dairy news, Chinese scientists have
found evidence of milk being consumed and stored in Tibet
as long as three thousand years ago. This research also
involved analyzing lipid residues from pottery. This pottery was found
(16:28):
in settlements very high up on the Tibetan Plateau, roughly
four thousand meters or thirteen thousand feet above sea level.
People in this area have historically consumed a really high protein,
high fat diet, and for a long time it has
mainly come from red meat, including beef and mutton, and
researchers noted that the addition to milk happened about the
(16:50):
same time as animals were first being domesticated for their meat.
We have another food find from Tibet, this one dating
back thirteen hundred years. Researchers found charred grains of rice
along with pieces of broken pottery. Genetic study confirmed that
it was Indica rice. Indica rice is one of the
(17:11):
two main species of domesticated rice grown in Asia. For reference,
basmadi and jasmine rice are both types of indicca rice.
The climate and elevation of this area are not suitable
for growing rice, so this rice would have been brought
in from somewhere else. So this find offers a clue
(17:31):
into trade networks in Asia and into how and when
consumption of this type of rice spread across Asia after
it was domesticated.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
We also have multiple studies into what neanderthals eight. Based
on shells found in a cave in Portugal, they probably
cooked and ate crabs. This is based on the discovery
of shell fragments from at least thirty three different brown crabs,
which showed evidence of being exposed to high heat and
of being intentionally broken apart with tools. The size of
(18:04):
the shells also suggests that people were intentionally harvesting the
biggest ones that they could find.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
One of the reasons researchers were surprised at the possibility
of Neanderthals eating crabs is that even if they were
going after the biggest ones of this type of crab,
the crabs are still just not very big. A common
assumption has been that the effort required to gather and
prepare crabs would not be worth it compared to what
(18:31):
Neanderthals might be able to get from a bigger animal,
like say, elephants. Researchers studying bones from a site in
central Germany have concluded that one hundred and twenty five
thousand years ago, Neanderthals were killing and butchering straight tusked elephants.
These elephants are now extinct, but at the time they
were the world's largest land animal. The meat from one
(18:55):
of them would likely have been enough to feed hundreds
of people. This is the earliest evidence found so far
of early humans killing elephants for food.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
And in our last food find researchers in Israel have
found eight ostrich eggs that are at least forty five
hundred years old, but maybe as old as seventy five
hundred years old. These were found at a camping site
used by nomadic peoples, along with tools, burned stones, and
pottery fragments. The number and position of the eggs suggest
(19:27):
that they were intentionally gathered to be eaten as food,
especially since one of them was directly in the fire pits.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
Next up, we have a few things that we are
calling cases of mistaken identity. First, there were some dueling
headlines in February and March about exactly what a two
thousand year old Roman object found at Vendolanda was used for.
This object is oblong, slightly tapered, and a little more
(19:58):
than six inches long, and it has a roughly horizontal
groove carved just below the smaller end.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
When this item was found in nineteen ninety two, archaeologists
described it as a darning tool. Then a paper published
in the journal Antiquity earlier this year concluded that it
was a quote large disembodied fallis. Three main ideas were
put forth for what this fallus may have been used for.
For sexual purposes, or as a pestle, perhaps with the
(20:28):
idea that its shape would give the ingredients being ground
a special potency, or for decorative purposes, maybe just as
part of a statue.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
But then, not long after this article came out, a
counter argument started making the rounds that it wasn't a
darning tool or a fallus, that it was a drop spindle,
and that notch at the end was used to secure
the fiber that was being spun. This explanation was offered
up by a spinner named Lindsey duncan Pitt, who saw
similarities between the design of this object in two different
(21:01):
types of Scottish drop spindles, and a letter to the
newspaper The Guardian, duncan Pitt also argued that a drop
spindle would make a lot of sense given the other
items that this object was found with, which included shoes,
dress accessories, crafting tools and scraps like pieces of leather
and worked antler, which just made my brain go this
(21:23):
was from an ancient costume shop.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
And speaking of antler, curators in Vietnam thought a pair
of deer antlers excavated in the nineteen nineties were simply
well preserved pieces of antler placed them in storage, but
researchers examined those antlers in the twenty teens and concluded
that they were really single stringed instruments. Their research was
(21:49):
published in the journal Antiquity in February. These items are
at least two thousand years old, making them the earliest
known string instruments ever found in Asia.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
Researchers in Brazil believe fifty thousand year old stone tools
long believed to have been made by early humans may
really have been made by capuchin monkeys. Basically, the monkeys
intentionally gather and use rocks for a number of different purposes,
and one of them is to crack nuts. So they
put a nut on a big flat rock and use
(22:21):
another smaller rock to smash the nut open. I watched
a monkey do this on a YouTube video for a
solid two minutes. In the process, little pieces of the
stone can flake away, and that results in the exact
same kinds of patterns that are found in rocks that
humans have modified intentionally to turn them into tools.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
This is not the first research to come to this conclusion.
Several papers have been published since twenty seventeen that have
suggested that objects that look like they were made by
humans may really have been made by monkeys. So this
research is adding to a greater body of work that
I find charming.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Yeah. This is also connected to ongoing research into when
humans first arrived in the America's, something that we briefly
mentioned in part one of this episode. For a while,
the most widely held idea within the field of archaeology
has been that the first people in the Americas were
what's known as the Clovis people, who crossed a land
(23:24):
bridge across the Bearing Straight roughly thirteen thousand years ago.
That idea contradicted the oral histories of a number of
indigenous nations, which described those nations' ancestors as being on
the continent earlier than that or as arriving by some
other route.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
A number of more recent studies have suggested that there
may have been humans in the Americas as many as
twenty thousand years before the Clovis people arrived, but some
of that research has focused on the kinds of tools
that were analyzed in this study. Now that doesn't mean
there weren't humans in the area years ago, but it
does mean that these tools may not be the evidence
(24:03):
that they were. This research was published in the February
twenty twenty three issue of the journal The Holocene.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
In somewhat similar tool news, one type of tool that
early humans used to do things like butcher animals and
pound plant material into food is known as Oldowan tools
or the old one industry. These were used as far
back as two point nine million years ago in parts
of eastern Africa, but a recent discovery at one site
(24:33):
in Kenya has raised questions about whether early humans were
the only ones using these tools. Specifically, some of these
tools were found near molars that came from not an
early human, but a hominin known as parenthropis. There are
two recognized species of Parenthropis who existed alongside several early
(24:56):
human species, but Parenthropis are not considered to be early humans,
more like early humans distant cousins.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Prior to this, many researchers have believed that other non
human hominids may have also used tools, but that Oldowan
tools were more sophisticated and were only used by hominids
in the genus Homo, or species that can be classified
as human. This has raised questions about whether parenthropists may
have been capable of making more sophisticated tools, but there
(25:28):
are also alternate explanations, including that the parenthropists these molars
came from was the victim of violence at the hands
of early humans.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
Back in the nineteen thirties, the Field Museum acquired a
sword that had been pulled out of the Danube River
in Budapest, Hungary, which was believed to be a replica,
but it turns out it really does date back to
sometime between ten eighty and nine hundred BCE, the field
had acquired a whole group of objects and that grew
(26:00):
included both authentic items and replicas, and this one was
misidentified as one of the replicas until the museum started
preparing for a new exhibition called First Kings of Europe. Apparently,
Hungarian archaeologists who were working on this exhibition recognized the
sword as authentic as soon as they saw it, and
(26:20):
further testing confirmed that its chemical makeup was a match
for other Bronze Age swords.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
Since the museum staff had not previously known that this
sword was authentic, it wasn't included in the Bronze Age
era of the exhibit. Instead, it was placed in the
main hall as a preview for the exhibit, and that
opened on March thirty.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
First, I'm going to take a quick sponsor break. Next up,
we are talking about some repatriations, some of which also
could have been classified under updates, and we're actually starting
(27:01):
with something that isn't exactly a repatriation, but it has
a lot of themes in common with a lot of
the repatriations that we talk about on the show. Charles
Byrne was nicknamed the Irish giant. He lived in the
eighteenth century and reached a height of about seven feet
seven inches tall, and became famous for that height. While
(27:24):
he earned a living by exhibiting himself as a curiosity,
he was also really afraid that somebody would try to
dissect his body after his death or put it on display.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
When Burn was twenty two, he became very ill. The
cause of that illness is not conclusively known, and researchers
have drawn different conclusions over the years as medical science
has advanced. In June of seventeen eighty three, he asked
friends to make sure that after his death, his body
would be buried at sea in a lead coffin to
(27:56):
prevent anyone from dissecting or displaying it.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
But after Burn died, surgeons swarmed his home with the
hope of claiming his body for their own purposes. One
of them, John Hunter, reportedly bribed one of Burn's friends
to steal his body from the coffin and replace it
with weights. Four years later, Hunter put Burns prepared skeleton
(28:20):
on display, and then after Hunter's death, his collection was
given to what's now the Royal College of Surgeons of
England under legal terms requiring that collection to be kept intact.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
The Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of
England has been closed for about five years while undergoing
a redevelopment process, and in January it was announced that
when the museum reopens in May, Burn's skeleton will no
longer be on display there at this point, however, it
is going to remain part of the museum's collection.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
Next moving away from things that our human remains. In
January the reports that the British Museum and the Nation
of Greece were nearing an agreement on the return of
the Parthenon marbles, which we have covered on the show
before and have talked about in a number of Unearthed
updates since then. This proposed agreement involved the British Museum
(29:17):
treating this return as a long term loan, but Greek
officials apparently rejected this deal under the argument that the
British Museum does not own these works and therefore has
no authority to lend them to anyone. In our year
End Unearthed for twenty twenty two, we mentioned that Pope
Francis had announced that Parthenon sculptures in the collections of
(29:40):
the Vatican City Museums would be returned to Greece. In March,
three fragments were returned, the head of a boy, the
head of a bearded man, and the head of a horse.
These fragments will be placed in the Acropolis Museum. This
was framed as a donation from the Vatican to the
Greek Orthodox Church and as a quote gesture of friendship.
(30:03):
We have also previously discussed French President Emmanuel Macran's announcement
that France would be returning looted artifacts to countries in Africa.
He first made that announcement in twenty seventeen, and it's
come up on the show a couple of times since then.
One of the items that was returned earlier this year
was a ten foot long, nine one hundred and forty
(30:27):
pound wooden drum which colonists seized in nineteen sixteen.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
Ivory Coast had requested the return of this drum, which
is known as the Talking Drum, in twenty eighteen, along
with one hundred and forty seven other objects. One reason
it's taken a few years to return the drum is
that conservators were working to restore it first. It had
been kept outside the home of the colonial governor in
Ivory Coast from nineteen sixteen to nineteen thirty, and during
(30:57):
that it had been damaged by weather and insects.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Next, one of the arguments that people sometimes make against
the idea of repatriating objects to their nation of origin
involves what will happen if that nation is facing some
kind of war or other unrest. There are whole nuances
to that argument that we're really not going to dive into.
(31:21):
But our next repatriation is an example of one approach
to dealing with that kind of situation. In February, the
United States started the process of repatriating seventy seven objects
to Yemen, but the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art
and the government of the Republic of Yemen have entered
into an agreement for the Smithsonian to store these objects
(31:44):
for up to two years in the wake of ongoing unrest.
The Embassy of the Republic of Yemen government hosted a
repatriation ceremony in Washington, d C. In February, and the
Yemeni government has the option to request an extension of
this agreement at the end of the two years if
it seems like it's necessary.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
We have mentioned Subash Kapoor a couple of times on
the show. That is the antiquities dealer who was convicted
of running an international smuggling ring. The items he smuggled
wound up in the collections of some major museums, and
one of these is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which
has recently announced a plan to return fifteen sculptures to India.
(32:29):
This came after the Supreme Court of the State of
New York issued a search warrant related to those fifteen items.
This is an ongoing process. The met has been communicating
with the Department of Homeland Security about works that may
be connected to Kapor since twenty fifteen.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
A couple of the pieces that were announced as being
returned over the last few months are items that had
been looted from their countries of origin during wars or
other periods of unrest just within the last couple of decades.
The US is returning a nearly three thousand year old
piece known as Furniture fitting with Sphinx trampling a youth
(33:07):
to Iraq. This was looted from the Iraq Museum during
the two thousand and three invasion of Iraq. A wooden
sarcophagus with a green face that's been in the collection
of the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences as being returned
to Egypt. It had been taken out of Egypt after
Egyptian President Hosni Murrak was overthrown in twenty eleven. To
(33:30):
circle back to the met for a second in twenty nineteen,
it returned a gilded coffin that had also been smuggled
out of Egypt by that same group of traffickers that
took this one with the green face.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
And for our last repatriation in twenty twenty two, Tuscarora
citizen Brennan Ferguson was at the Geneva Museum of Ethnography
in Switzerland and saw two Hadenashani sacred items on display there,
a mask and a turtle rattle. Ferguson met with the
mum director, who took the mask off of public display
(34:03):
at Ferguson's request, and then the museum began working with
the Hoddanashani Confederacy to return the items to them. The
Tuscarora are one of the six nations of the Hodanashani.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
The item was a return in February, and this whole
process took about seven months. Which is much faster than
a lot of the repatriations we have talked about on
the show, and interviews Ferguson and other tribal citizens who
were involved with this repatriation have mentioned that the museum
was quick to act and respectful through this whole process.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Now it is time to move on to shipwrecks, which
is how we're going to wrap up this edition of Unearthed,
starting with one that's also an update. So back in
twenty twenty, we talked about the wreck of the warship Grimshunden,
which belonged to King Hans of Denmark. This ship had
been loaded up with fine goods in preparation for negotiations
with Sweden. Sweden wanted to break away from the Kalamar Union,
(35:00):
which included Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and Hans wanted to
encourage Sweden to stay through the combination of extravagant gifts
and the presence of a great, big warship. But that
ship caught fire and it sank before arriving. Archaeologists with
Lund University in Sweden have found what's being described as
(35:21):
a trove of spices on board, including nutmeg cloves, mustard, dill,
Saffron and Ginger, suggesting that Hans had access to trade
goods from as far away as Indonesia.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
Next to fifteenth century shipwreck was found in Newport, Wales
during work on the city's riverfront theater in two thousand
and two. That wreck was sent to Portsmouth to be
dried and preserve, which was handled by some of the
same people who worked to preserve the wreck of the
Mary Rose. Now the ship is being sent back to
Newport as approximately twenty five hundred shipwreck pieces that are
(35:58):
going to need to be reassembled. The plan is to
eventually make it a public attraction. As I understand it,
they're having to find an appropriate place to put it
because of how big it is, and it also how
a big enough place to reassemble all twenty five hundred piece.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
I know, I'm picturing like the world's biggest lego table.
A shipwreck off the coast of Eastbourn, England, was found
in twenty nineteen, and for whatever reason, it did not
wind up on an episode of Unearthed at that time.
We don't think anyway, we don't. Neither of us recalls it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
I looked and I was like, I don't see anything
that sounds like the same thing. It may have been
on your list in one of the things that just
didn't make it that happens that has now been identified
as the seventeenth century Dutch warship klein Holandia, which was
involved in numerous battles during the Second Anglo Dutch War.
It sank after being attacked and boarded by an English
(36:53):
naval force in sixteen seventy two. Divers have found a
lot of material at the reck site, including parts of
the hull, some of the ship's cannons, and pieces of
Italian pottery. And finally, in twenty nineteen, a schooner barge
called the iron Ton was spotted on the floor of
Lake Huron using sonar imagery. This discovery was not announced
(37:15):
until March of this year to give researchers some time
to study it before the news was made public. The
iron Ton sank in what sounds like really a terrifying ordeal.
The iron Ton and another vessel called the Moonlight were
both being towed by a steamer and the steamer broke down,
and then a storm started and driving winds started, threatening
(37:39):
all three of these vessels, which led the crew of
the Moonlight to cut through the iron Ton's toe line
with the hope of preventing a collision with them.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
Not long after that, the iron Ton did collide, not
with the Moonlight, but with a totally different ship, the Ohio,
which was laden with grain. The iron Ton's crew tried
to deploy a lot lifeboat, but no one untied the
lifeboat from the iron Ton. It's not clear whether this
was someone's oversight or if it just wasn't possible to do.
(38:09):
In the middle of all of this, all but two
of the iron Ton's crew drowned. The Ohio also sank,
but all of its crew survived.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Divers have been to the wreck site and found the
iron Ton to be in such good condition that they
described it as not even seeming like a wreck, more
like just an intact ship sitting on the bottom of
the lake, and that lifeboat is still attached to it.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
Dundundi. Yeah, that is kind of a creepy note to
end on, which is fine by me. We're halfway to Halloween,
so this seems right. Sure, but we will be back
with more unearthed than three months or so, which may
or may not also have haunting imagery.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
Maybe so I have listener mail from Jennifer to take
us out. I loved the subject line of this email.
It says old vocabulary, and Jennifer wrote, Hi, Holly and Tracy,
I just wanted to send a brief note for me.
I tend to be wordy after today's episode. That episode
was the one about the autobiographies of Jenny June, so
(39:13):
Jennifer wrote, you mentioned that the word bisexual used to
mean people with characteristics of both sexes rather than how
we define it today. You can find a real world
example of that well into the nineteen sixties. In The
Star Trek, the original series episode the Trouble with Tribles,
doctor McCoy describes Tribles as bisexual reproducing at will. This
(39:34):
episode has a special place in my heart because it's
the very first episode I ever saw. Around nineteen eighty three,
when my dad, who was collecting the show on the
two episodes per tape release, got that episode and set
five year old meet in front of it, and I
was hooked. Star Trek became our thing. So of course
I immediately thought of that quote when you were discussing
(39:55):
vocabulary in this episode. I think I've sent pics in
my casts before, just in case here is Pumpkin, big
and round in orange, hopefully making the name self explanatory.
And Jamie, who my brother named after the boy on
the eighties show Small Wonder on a cross country RV
trip a few years ago. Don't worry, I took the
pics while we were stopped for the day. The bottom
(40:17):
one is Jamie and his baby girl, Joxer, who got
her name as a kitten before her mostly feral mama
Zena led us close enough to find out that she
was a girl. How mostly feral Zena had a litter
of kiddies after she'd come inside as a whole separate
story about my overly optimistic mom. But she kept all
three babies. I love that story. I love these names
(40:39):
for these cats. I love these cats pictures. These are great.
I also love the trouble with Tribbles. And I want
to note that you do still sometimes see the word bisexual,
meaning like having elements of two sexes, in things like
biology texts or botany texts and that kind of thing.
(41:00):
But it like it. We don't really use it that
way to describe people in everyday conversation anymore. So I
also now am vividly thinking about that like animated version
of Star Trek the original series. There was an ant
like just it was just like animated translations of episodes
(41:22):
as I remember it, and I remember seeing an animated
one on Nickelodeon or something. So anyway, and the live
action one. And now I'm just gonna think about triples
all day and cats. So thanks Jennifer for this email.
If you would like to send us a note about
this or any other podcast, we're at History Podcast atiheartradio
dot com and we're all over social media. Miss in History.
(41:44):
That's ree you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram,
and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio
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you Missed in His Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
(42:07):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Tracy Wilson
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