Unearthed! In Spring 2026, Part 1

Episode Transcript
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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. I'm Tracy V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. This is time for the latest
installment of Unearthed. I feel like I said those words
in a weird order, but it's okay. We're going to
power through. If you are brand new to the show,
Unearthed is when we talk about things that have been
literally or figuratively unearthed over the last few months. So

(00:37):
that's what we're going to talk about all week long,
and today we are going to talk about medical things,
books and letters, some oldest things, and some smells. I
did not realize we were going to have a smells category,
and we actually wound up with fewer smells and expected,
which is that's a story for Friday. We will start,

(00:59):
as we usually do with updates to past episodes. We
don't actually have that many this time, comparatively fewer updates
than the last several episodes of Unearthed. Also, I don't
have any new updates regarding things like the President's House site,
oh or the other ongoing issues here in the US

(01:22):
with like the field of history and education and those
kinds of things that we've been talking about a lot
on or Unearthed over the last year. A lot of
our updates, though, are frequent flyers on Unearthed.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
And we are kicking off those updates with several finds
from Pompeii. Researchers have used reflectance transformation imaging to identify
seventy nine previously undetected inscriptions on a corridor that connected
Pompey's theaters to the city Central Street via Stabyana. Reflectance

(01:56):
transformation imaging captures images under multiple lighting angles, making it
possible to see very faint scratches that aren't detectable to
the unaided eye. This corridor has been studied before. More
than two hundred inscriptions had already been found there, including
various love notes and pleas to the goddess Venus for

(02:17):
her favor in matters of the heart. One of the
newly discovered inscriptions is on that theme. It starts off
with the words Erato loves uh and then I don't
know how that person was going to finish that inscription.
Who does Erado love?

Speaker 2 (02:34):
We don't great question? Or what there's it could be
kidney pies, we don't know. I was thinking pickles for
some reason. There's also a sketch of two gladiators fighting.
These seventy nine newly discovered inscriptions add to those more
than two hundred that have already been found. This is

(02:54):
growing body of knowledge. Other researchers have used isotope analysis
to examine carbonate deposits in parts of Pompey's water infrastructure,
like they're aqueducts, well shafts, and water towers, as well
as the pools of public baths. They found that the
groundwater in the wells was highly mineralized thanks to the

(03:15):
volcanic deposits that they were drilled through.

Speaker 1 (03:18):
That wouldn't have been very good as drinking water and
was mainly used in the baths. But this same research
concluded that the bathing water wasn't renewed very often, so
it also would not have been very hygienic.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
Yeah. They made comparisons to other Roman Empire cities as
having much cleaner baths. Made it sound like POMPEII was
just a little behind the times and how clean to
keep that water just.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
A new sense to the word community.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
Yeah. Yeah. Lastly, in November of last year, archaeologists from
Herculaneum Archaeological Parks started work at another site that was
also destroyed in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. That's Torre
del Greco on the coast northwest of Pompeii. In February,

(04:08):
they announced that they had excavated a small but very
highly decorated room there. The walls of this room have
figurative elements and bars of cinnabar red paint against a
dark background, and these figurative elements include herons and a
golden candelabra. The room also contained three highly decorated cyste

(04:30):
which are essentially boxes, and architectural elements that were of
very good quality. There is speculation that this room was
being used for storage for things that were part of
an ongoing construction project when the volcano erupted. Having recently
helped a friend who bought a new house paint the
interior of a bedroom closet, it cracks me up that

(04:52):
this probably a closet storage space had very highly decorated walls.

Speaker 1 (04:57):
We could talk about this on behind the scenes.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
There could be so many behind the scenes conversations this week.
Moving on. Stonehenge got its own entire episode of the
show back in twenty fourteen, when news broke about a
lot of new findings there and we realized we did
not have an existing Stonehenge episode to update. One of

(05:20):
the things we talked about in that episode and probably
other installments of On Earth since then, was debate about
exactly how the somewhat smaller stones known as bluestones got
to the Stonehenge site. Some of those stones are believed
to have been moved from hundreds of miles away, and
one hypothesis has been that the stones might have been

(05:42):
carried closer to the Stonehenge site by glaciers. This research
examined microscopic mineral grains found in rivers near Salisbury Plain
in southern England, that's where Stonehenge is located. They focused
on more than five hundred zircon crystal to see if
any of them could have been associated with the presence

(06:03):
of glaciers. They concluded that they did not, meaning that
the bluestones were moved to Salisbury Plane through intentional human effort.
We also have an update on the natural Mummy, popularly
known as Utsey the Iceman, who lived sometime between thirty
three fifty and thirty one oh five BCE. Previous hosts

(06:25):
of the show did an episode on Utsy back in
twenty twelve, and it seems like he has been on
almost every episode of Unearthed. According to a pre print
paper that was published at the end of last year,
Utsey was probably infected with a cancer causing strain of
the human paploma virus known as HPV sixteen. According to

(06:47):
this research, the ustashim Man probably was infected with this
as well. The ustashim Man is the name used for
a forty five thousand year old fossil remains that it's
not It's not like a whole mummified body like with Utsi.
It's a smaller set of remains that was found in Siberia.
This means that HPV has existed essentially for all of

(07:11):
human history. One hypothesis for how HPV made its way
into human beings was that it first infected Neanderthals and
was passed to humans through interbreeding. The ostashim Man has
Neanderthal DNA in his lineage. That doesn't conclusively confirm that hypothesis,
but it means that it is at least possible. Since

(07:33):
this is a preprint paper, as Tracy mentioned, it has
not yet been.

Speaker 1 (07:37):
Through peer review.

Speaker 2 (07:39):
Moving on, in our last installment of Unearthed, we talked
about a gold Tudor era pendant that was in the
shape of a heart that had come up on a
previous episode of On Earth's as well. At that point,
this Tutor heart was on display at the British Museum
and the museum was trying to raise three point five
million pounds or about four point seven million dollars to

(08:01):
purchase it. That fundraising effort was successful and it was
announced in February that this pendant will be staying in
the museum. And lastly, in March, newspapers started covering a
report from the University of East Anglia about research into
King Harold's journey to the Battle of Hastings that's long

(08:21):
been described as a two hundred mile march, but medieval
history professor Tom License argues that it's a misunderstanding of
the Anglo Saxon Chronicle. The Anglo Saxon Chronicle says that
Harold's ships quote came home, which has been interpreted as
Harold having dismissed them back to all of their original
home ports, but according to License, the word home meant

(08:45):
the fleet's home base in London and Harold continued to
use the fleet from there. So this press release just
came out on March twentieth, just a couple of weeks
before we are recording this, and he was scut to
present on this research at a conference four days after that.
He also has a book on Harold that is coming

(09:07):
out in August, so that's not really available for people
to read yet. So at this point it's really early
for historians to thoroughly respond to these arguments. But there's
already been some controversy with other historians noting that this
entire interpretation, at least in terms of what's publicly available
when we were working on this installment of on Earthed,

(09:29):
it all basically hinges on the interpretation of one word.

Speaker 1 (09:33):
Next, we're going to move on to some medical things.
Research published in the Journal of Archaeological Science has examined
a mass grave associated with the Plague of Justinian that
started in the sixth century. The burial site was in
the hippodrome of the city of Jiaj in what's now Jordan.

Speaker 2 (09:51):
According to DNA research conducted on the remains that were
buried there, this burial site did represent the dead from
a single event. It was not people who died in
a community over a long period of time. The team
studied DNA from the teeth of these plague victims and
found that they were demographically very diverse, suggesting that this

(10:13):
disease struck the whole population. It did not really differentiate
with people's social status, or age or sex. This is
the first known Mediterranean mass grave associated with the plague
of Justinian.

Speaker 1 (10:27):
Research published in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports has
examined the contents of a nineteen hundred year old glass
vial called an unguitarium, which was found in a tomb
in western Turkia. They identified fecal biomarkers as well as
an organic compound known as carvacrol, which is found in
essential oils from herbs. The conclusion this was feces mixed

(10:52):
with time, probably to disguise the smell. Medical preparations made
from feces are described by the Roman physician in Galen
and in the work of Pliny the Elder. This is
the first direct physical evidence for these kinds of remedies
being used in the Greco Roman era and in our
last medical find.

Speaker 2 (11:13):
Neanderthals may have used birch bark tar for medicinal purposes,
and that tar might have been effective. We do know
that Neanderthals made birch tar. There's archaeological evidence of this
going back almost two hundred thousand years, and there are
also indigenous methods of making birch tar that go back

(11:34):
thousands of years and have survived until today, so not
associated with the Neanderthals, but ancient uses of birch tar.
Researchers used three different techniques to produce tar from two
species of birch, downy birch and silver birch. Then they
tested these batches of tar against two pathogens Staphylococcus arius

(11:55):
and E. Colime, and the birch tar was effective against
staff ari but not against decline, and one method seemed
less effective than the others. Burning downy birch material and
letting the tar condense onto a fireproof stone didn't produce
much tar, and what little tar there was was not
effective against anything. So this of course is not definitive

(12:20):
proof that Neanderthals were using birch tar medicinally, but there
is archaeological evidence suggesting that Neanderthals used plants medicinally, so
we know they used plants for medicine. We know they
made birch tar. It's at least in the realm of
possibility that they used birch tar as medicine. We'll take

(12:41):
a quick sponsor break and then come back for some
books and letters. We will pick up this installment of
on Earth with some books and letters. Ostraca are bits
of potter that were often used sort of like notepaper

(13:02):
in ancient Egypt. An excavation at Athribis in Lower Egypt
has unearthed thirteen thousand ostraca, bringing the total number of
them found out that site to forty three thousand, so
many pieces of pottery used like post it notes. Basically,
people lived at this site for more than one thousand years,

(13:23):
and it was also home to a necropolis and a
temple complex. So the ostcra that have been found here
really range in age. They are from as early as
the third century BCE to as late as the eleventh
century CE.

Speaker 1 (13:40):
They also represent a number of languages. The oldest fragments
are tax receipts written in Demotic script, which was used
for both business and literary purposes. There are also fragments
with writing in Arabic, Greek, hieratic and coptic as well
as hieroglyphics. There are also lots of pottery for fragments

(14:00):
at the site that have nothing written on them. Together,
this group of fragments are helping scholars understand how life
and Athrobisk changed over the many centuries that it was occupied.
Moving on, I don't include a ton of like many
years overdue, library books, stories and unearthed because after a

(14:20):
while they start to sound really repetitive. Unless there's something
really special about the book, it can seem like the
same exact story over and over. This one, though it
has another layer. A copy of Harry the Dirty Dog
that had been checked out by a little boy was
due back at the Chantilly Regional Library in Virginia in

(14:41):
nineteen eighty nine. It did not get turned back in,
and now, as an adult, this man found the book
on a shelf while he was looking for something to
read to his own son while visiting his parents. That
shelf that he found the book on was not in Virginia,
though it wasn't even the United States. It was in Greece.

(15:03):
His parents were diplomats, and after leaving the Washington, DC area,
they went back to Greece. And the des Syria, Japan,
and the Netherlands before going back to Greece once again,
and that book apparently went with them. Harry the Dirty
Dog has now been turned back into the library and
it looks like it is in very good condition, especially

(15:24):
considering that it went through multiple international moves. I feel
like this book is better traveled than many people I know.

Speaker 2 (15:30):
Yeah, they took very good care of it. Also, I
feel like books that have been sitting quietly on my
shelves have had more awar than this book seems to.

Speaker 1 (15:44):
Next.

Speaker 2 (15:44):
Back in the nineteen thirties, archaeologists found remnants of Roman
era writing tablets at a site in what's now tongarin Burgloon, Belgium.
Additional tablets were discovered in twenty thirteen. It brought the
total number of tablets to eighty five. When these tablets
were originally used back in the Roman Era, they had

(16:06):
a thin coating of wax on them and then people
used a sharp stylus to write on the wax. They
were reusable. People could remove that wax layer and put
down a new layer to write something else. When these
were unearthed, what the wax was gone and it did
not look like there was any kind of legible writing

(16:27):
left on the wood.

Speaker 1 (16:28):
These tablets were rediscovered in a museum collection in twenty twenty,
and deciphering them was an extremely challenging process. At this point,
the wood is completely dried out, so it could be
hard to distinguish intentionally made marks from just natural variations
in the wood. The wax layer that was used on
these tablets was so thin, so it was easy for

(16:51):
a stylist to go through it and mark the wood underneath.
Some of the tablets contained legal documents, and this seemed
to be done intentionally to make the text more permanent.
But in more informal documents that wasn't necessarily true, so
the marks made through the wax just weren't always consistent,
and since the tablets were reusable, there were overlapping markings

(17:12):
from different lines of text. Many of the tablets had
been broken in half and thrown into a well, apparently
an intentional attempt to make them eligible. I don't know
why I love that detail. This is like tearing up
a paper, but you'd have to break it.

Speaker 2 (17:30):
Yeah, those were like the legal contracts that weren't valid anymore,
that would have been put through a shredder but nope,
they were broken in half and thrown down a well.
Looking at these became kind of an early pandemic era
project for people. They spent a lot of time looking
at all these writing tablets through magnifying glasses and microscopes

(17:52):
lit from multiple directions. The team used high resolution photographs
and other imaging technologies well, and they were able to
find legible text on about half of these tablets. As
Holly just said, a lot of the ones that had
been intentionally broken and thrown into the well, those had
contained things like legal contracts other official documents. But other

(18:16):
tablets which were found in a heap more like in
a midden place that people just threw their refuse those
included things like student writing exercises and a draft of
an inscription for a statue of Emperor Carcela.

Speaker 1 (18:34):
In the words of the abstract of a book that
was published detailing all of this quote. The tablets not
only provide concrete information about religious, judicial, and administrative practices,
but they also enhance our understanding of the complex processes
of Romanization and Latinization in the northwestern civitates and municipia

(18:54):
of the Roman Empire.

Speaker 2 (18:57):
Moving on, British infant treatman. Shadrack Byfield was the author
of a narrative of a Light Company soldier's service and
that was published in England in eighteen forty and it
recounted his experiences fighting in the War of eighteen twelve,
including the amputation of his forearm after being hit by

(19:18):
a musket ball. This book, that's it's long been known,
not a surprise. It has been a source for historians
writing about the British military, or the War of eighteen twelve,
or the Great Lakes region where he fought. But a
Cambridge University historian has unearthed another book by Byfield in
the Western Reserve Historical Society's library in Cleveland, Ohio. This

(19:42):
one was called History and Conversion of a British Soldier
and it was published in eighteen fifty one. The copy
in the Historical Society library is the only one known
to have survived until today. My understanding is like this
was in the library catalog, Like they knew the book

(20:03):
was in the library, but nobody had made the connection
to the fact that this was the same person and
that he had written another book. The whole book has
been transcribed and published as an open access document at
the University of Cambridge Libraries and Archives website, and it's
very different from his earlier memoir. It's focused more on

(20:24):
information about his life that we did not know before,
including what his life was like after he returned to England.
Researchers working with paleolithic objects dating back to between thirty
four thousand and forty five thousand years ago have concluded
that they contain a precursor to written language. These objects
were mostly found in caves in what is now Germany,

(20:46):
and they're covered in repeating sequences of notches, dots, and crosses.
The objects are made of materials like mammoth tusk, and
they date back tens of thousands of years before the
earliest known writing systems of qunea form and hieroglyphics. They
also predate the precursors to either of those systems, so

(21:06):
researchers weren't trying to decode or decipher these markings. They
were measuring the signs and looking for patterns in them,
and after analyzing more than three thousand signs on two
hundred and sixty objects, they concluded that the patterns of
markings had a similar level of information density to the
earliest proto Cuneiform tablets found in Mesopotamia. It's also clear

(21:31):
that these markings were not meant to represent the sounds
of a spoken language, since the repetitions involved do not
follow the same patterns that known languages do. The suggests
that the precursors to written languages may have been developing
a lot earlier than was previously thought.

Speaker 1 (21:51):
Alterations made to a thirty three hundred year old papyrus
are being described as having fixed a mistake with white out.
The scroll is a copy of the Book of the
Dead that was made for a scribe named Ramos. It
was being prepared for a museum exhibit when curators realized
that the body of a jackal headed god had been

(22:11):
made to look thinner by adding a line of white
paint to the sides of its body and parts of
its legs. Researchers used a three D digital microscope to
figure out what kinds of pigments were used in this
white paint, and found that it had a different makeup
from the white paint used in other parts of the papyrus.
It also contained some flex of yellow paint, which would

(22:32):
have helped it blend into the color of the papyrus
at the time it was originally painted. It does not
look that blended today little photo retouching. Yeah, maybe this
jackal headed god was very vain.

Speaker 2 (22:48):
Yeah, the way the pigments and the papyrus have each aged,
it does not really look blended today, but it would
have been a much closer match at the time. Moving on,
a researcher from the French National Center for Scientific Research
or CNRS has found a page from the Archimedes Palimpsest

(23:08):
that was believed to have been lost. The Palimpsest is
a tenth century Greek manuscript containing multiple treatises by Archimedes,
who lived in the third century BCE, so some of
the texts that are included in this palimpsyst are very rare.
In the thirteenth century, part of the manuscript was erased

(23:29):
so the parchment that it was written on could be reused.
That was a very common practice. The manuscript also changed
hands several times after its leaves were photographed in nineteen
oh six, and at some point three of the leaves
that were documented in those photographs disappeared.

Speaker 1 (23:49):
The rediscovered page is one of those missing leaves. It
contains part of Archimedes' Treatise on the Sphere and the Cylinder.
One side is partly led, even with prayers having been
written over it. The other has been obscured by a
forged illumination of the prophet Daniel that was most likely
added sometime in the twentieth century when a dealer was

(24:12):
attempting to increase that page's value. Ongoing research is planned
for this leave to try to reveal the text underneath
this illumination. When I started reading about this, I kept
reading about how there was this illumination of Daniel added
sometime in the twentieth century, and I was.

Speaker 2 (24:29):
Like, why, why would somebody be doing that? And then
I found the additional detail trying to increase its value
to sell it by putting a forgery on there. Yeah,
our last book find is more book adjacent. In February,
repair work on the floor of Saint Peter and Paul

(24:49):
Church in the Netherlands led to the discovery of human remains.
Work is underway to try to confirm whether these are
the remains of child di bactic Castle. More account to d'Artagnan.

Speaker 1 (25:02):
Inspiration for the character.

Speaker 2 (25:03):
d'Artagnan in the novel The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Duma.
We got an email about this from a listener who
was embarrassed to admit that they did not realize that
d'Artagnan was a real person. Do not feel bad, neither
did I.

Speaker 1 (25:19):
Really.

Speaker 2 (25:20):
Athos, Porthos, and Arabis were all fictionalized versions of real
people too.

Speaker 1 (25:25):
The historical d'Artagnan died when a musket ball struck him
in the throat during the Franco Dutch War in sixteen
seventy three. The remains that were discovered in the church
had a musketball lodged in the chest area. A coin
from sixteen sixty was found in the grave as well.
Perhaps we will have an update on this one at

(25:45):
some point in the future.

Speaker 2 (25:47):
For now, we'll have a quick sponsor break. A lot
of discoveries in the last few months have all been
described as the first or oldest known, and so we

(26:08):
are going to talk about a few of them.

Speaker 1 (26:10):
First.

Speaker 2 (26:10):
The oldest known arrow poison in the world has been
found on a sixty thousand year old quartz arrowhead from
a rock shelter in South Africa. This poison is plant based.
It's from a plant known as boophany dishcha or gift bow.
This plant still grows in the region. It is also

(26:32):
nicknamed the bushman's poison bulb. It is a flowering plant
with narrow leaves that form a fan like shape.

Speaker 1 (26:41):
This research has been a joint project involving scientists from
both South Africa and Sweden. It's the oldest direct evidence
of the use of aerow poison and it also provides
evidence that bows and arrows were being used in Southern
Africa much longer ago than was previously thought. Similar poisons
have also been found on two hundred and fifty year

(27:03):
old arrows that were in Swedish collections. Those had been
purchased by Swedish travelers to South Africa.

Speaker 2 (27:10):
Next, research in the journal Science Advances has reported on
the oldest known intentional cremation in Africa. This is a
pyre that was built about nine thou five hundred years
ago at the base of Mount Hora and what's now Malawi,
and it was used to cremate the body of a
woman before that body had started to decompose. There is

(27:33):
evidence of burned bodies from much farther back in the
archaeological record up to forty thousand years ago. But not
of intentionally built pires. This is also one of only
a very few known pires that would have been associated
with a hunter gatherer culture. Cremation practices continue to be

(27:55):
rare among most hunter gatherer cultures today because creating a
fewuneral pyre requires a lot of labor, time, and fuel.
This specific pire probably required about thirty kilograms of deadwood
and grass. Analysis of the ash sediments and bone fragments
also suggests that someone tended to the fire, disturbing it

(28:17):
and adding more fuel over time. Next, researchers working on
the island of Sulusi and Indonesia believe they have found
the oldest known rock art in the world. The cave
is on the island of Muna, which is a satellite
island on the southern edge of Sulusi, and there's a
fragmentary hand stencil that is at least sixty seven thousand,

(28:41):
eight hundred years old. The partial stencil was modified to
make it look kind of like a claw, and it
is surrounded by more recent artwork. This island has come
up on Unearthed before, including in twenty twenty four when
the same researchers found a painting of three people surrounding

(29:01):
a pig. That painting was an estimated fifty one thousand
years old and was believed to be the oldest figurative
art in the world when it was discovered. This suggests
that the people who were living on the island tens
of thousands of years ago had an artistically rich culture.
Archaeologists have re examined a copper alloy object that was

(29:23):
found in Egypt in the nineteen twenties, which at the
time was described as an all new research suggests that
it is really Egypt's oldest rotary drill, dating back to
the fourth millennium BCE. This conclusion comes from examining the
object under magnification, which revealed that it was used with
a rotary motion rather than to just punch through things.

Speaker 1 (29:47):
That earlier description of the drill also noted that it
was attached to some leather thong. These researchers have concluded
that this leather thong was part of a bowstring that
was used to power the drill. All of this suggests
that people in Egypt were using these types of drills
much earlier than was previously thought. Next, elk hyde from

(30:09):
a cave in Oregon sown with a strip of cord,
maybe the world's oldest soone material. This find dates back
about twelve thousand years and other items found in the
cave include fiber cordage, pieces of hide, and bone needles.
There were also some components that were used to make
wooden traps and some projectile points. It's not clear what

(30:33):
the son el kyde was used for, but it could
have been clothing or maybe some type of a bag.
There have been some complexities to the study of these objects.
Cougar Mountain Cave where they were found, was excavated by
an amateur archaeologist who self published a book on his
findings in nineteen fifty eight. When he died about forty

(30:54):
years ago. The excavated objects were then transferred to a museum.
The authors of the paper in the journal Science Advances
describe his provenance reporting as incomplete, so they had to
sample nearly all of the fiber and wooden items in
the collection for radiocarbon dating. Research published in the Proceedings

(31:15):
of the National Academy of Sciences has described the earliest.

Speaker 2 (31:18):
Known hand held wooden tools. One is a piece of
alder trunk that was probably used as a digging tool
and The other is a very small piece of wood
that might have been used to make other tools from stone,
sort of something that helped shape the stone. These were
found at a site in Greece that also included butchered
elephant remains, and there are approximately four hundred thirty thousand

(31:43):
years old. That is about forty thousand years older than
the previous oldest handheld wooden tools. A fragment of bone
discovered in southern England back in the nineteen nineties is
now believed to be Europe's earliest known elephant bone tool.
It dates back roughly five hundred thousand years and it's

(32:03):
roughly triangular in shape. It wasn't until it was examined
with recent three D scanning technologies that people were able
to see marks that showed that it had been intentionally shaped.

Speaker 1 (32:15):
It was most likely used as a hammer.

Speaker 2 (32:18):
There are much older elephant bone tools from other parts
of the world. The oldest known anywhere in the world
was found in Tanzania and is about one point five
million years old. This is the oldest in Europe. Part
of this has to do with the time it took
for humanity to migrate beyond Africa into these parts of Europe.

Speaker 1 (32:41):
A single find in Anatolia is two oldest things. It's
Anatolia's oldest indigo dyed textile and the oldest use of
nal bending or single needle knitting. This piece dates back
to between nineteen fifteen and seventeen forty five BCE, and
it is not just the oldest but also the only

(33:02):
example of now bending or now binding, depending on how
you like it, that's ever found in the region. It
was found in a space that looks like it was
a weaving workshop. There were also spindle whirls, loom weights,
and needles there. The presence of sophisticated textiles and the
use of the color blue suggests that this workshop was

(33:23):
making luxury textiles for the very wealthy and our.

Speaker 2 (33:27):
Last oldest thing. An archivist at the Woods Whole Oceanographic Institution,
which I learned while working on this people pronounce as Whoey,
may have found the world's oldest recording of a whale song.
Back in nineteen forty nine, Hui researchers used a gray autograph,
which was usually used for taking dictation, to record underwater

(33:52):
sounds in the ocean near Bermuda. At the time, they
really didn't know what they were hearing on these recordings,
and so they ultimately ended up just mark as fish noises.
Archivist Ashley Jester was digitizing these fish noises back in
twenty twenty five and recognized the whale song. It has
now been identified as coming from a humpback whale. This

(34:15):
recording was made on March seventh, nineteen forty nine, and
lucky you, you can listen to it on who He's
YouTube channel. To close out part one of this installment
of on Earth, we have three fines related to smells.
Some of them are also kind of updates, so it's
like we're circling back to the start of the episode.

(34:36):
A year ago, we talked about research that focused on
the smells of Egyptian mummies which had the potential to
pinpoint substances that had been used in mummification rituals without
doing invasive testing on the mummies. This work that we
talked about earlier involved both chemical analysis and a panel

(34:56):
of human beings who smelled the mummies in In March,
a new paper was published in the Journal of Archaeological
Science that was based on this same basic idea of
mummy smells. It analyzed volatile organic compounds that were being
given off by mummies, including ones associated with particular smells.

(35:17):
To work out the ingredients in the balms that these
mummies were mommified with.

Speaker 1 (35:23):
Researchers used a pair of techniques to do this. Using
headspace solid phase micro extraction, they captured volatile gases from
the air around the mummies. Then they created profiles of
the organic compounds involved through a process called gas chromatography
slash quadruple time of light mass spectrometry. Don't ask me

(35:45):
to tell you what that is, but they conducted these
tests on thirty five samples from nineteen different mummies.

Speaker 2 (35:52):
One of the press releases that I read about this
only had acronyms, and so I was like, what is
that stamp for? Though, the ingredients that they identified using
these techniques fell into four main groups, fats and oils,
bees wax, plant resins, and bitumen. These ingredients appeared in

(36:13):
different proportions that changed over time. For example, later recipes
tended to be more complex, and they tended to have
more resins in bitumen, which would have been more expensive
ingredients than the fats and oils or the beeswax. Sometimes
different recipes were also used to modify different parts of

(36:34):
the same body at.

Speaker 1 (36:36):
Least you a lay person's ear. The chemical analysis involved
with this sounds a bit more complex than what we
talked about last year, but it was still described as
suitable for initial work. Further study on these mummies could
still require the use of physical samples for analysis. Museums
have also started using chemistry to recreate sense from history.

(37:00):
In twenty twenty three, we talked about the recreation of
sense from the mummification process. Popular thing to be working
with smells u and that was planned for use in
an exhibition at the Mozguard Museum in Denmark. That planned
project did happen. The scent was ultimately called the Scent
of the Afterlife and museum visitors were able to experience

(37:21):
it through a scent diffusing station. A scented card with
the same scent was also used as part of visitor
tours a museum. Auguste Kessner and Hanover. And lastly, we're
going back to POMPEII in something else that could have
gone in the updates section. Research published in the journal
Antiquity has examined what incense used in Pompeii was made

(37:44):
of a lot of incense burners had been unearthed at Pompeii,
but most of them don't still have ash residues associated
with the burning of incense.

Speaker 2 (37:54):
That's not the case with the two burners that were
part of this study, one of which is described as
a cup it looks sort of like a goblet. The
other is described as a hemispherical bowl decorated with three
human figures around the rim. The team took tiny samples
of the ash from each of these sensors. The cup

(38:16):
contained charred bits of woody plants like oak and laurel,
which may have been meant to honor the gods Jupiter
and Apollo. The bowl contained plants and some material that
might have come from grapes that was possibly in the
form of either vinegar or wine. There are some bits
of material in there also that may have been frankincense,

(38:39):
which is made of tree sap. This contributes to knowledge
about religious and ritual practices in Pompeii and about trading networks,
since some of the aromatic substances would have come from
Africa or Asia. We are going to talk about more
stuff next time, but right now, do you want to
talk about listener?

Speaker 1 (38:59):
May I do I?

Speaker 2 (39:01):
Have a listener mail from Stacy. Stacy wrote, Hi, Holly
and Tracy, a longtime listener, first time emailer. I wanted
to thank you both for your work on the podcast.
It's the one I'm always recommending to people. But I'm
finally writing to specifically thank you for the recent episode
on Elizabeth Bisland because it pushed me to get off
my petuit and finally read the biography of Leftcatioharn that

(39:25):
I randomly bought in Little Tokyo years ago but have
left languishing far too long. The book is called The Outsider,
The Life and Work of Leftkadio Hearn, the man who
introduced voodoo, creole cooking, and Japanese ghosts to the world.
I know you too love a long title, so I
wanted to write it all down. Personally, I think the

(39:46):
life of Left Coatioharn is indeed interesting enough to merit
its own episode. But I'm only halfway through the book
and I had to share some other connections that I
find interesting. When Hearn was working as a reporter in
Cincinnati and the eighteen seventies, he covered a couple of
gruesome murders and guests who helped him out with the

(40:06):
woodcut illustrations to accompany his stories. Frank Duvenik I recognized
his name and searched on Lyne to confirm that he
was indeed the previous podcast subject of further interest to
me is another connection and my suggestion for a future episode.
Hearn was apparently a big fan of writer Eta Hoffman,

(40:26):
who wrote, among other things, the novella from which Chaikowsky
adapted The Nutcracker. I myself, I am a big fan
of Canadian writer Robertson Davies, who once made Eta Hoffman
a character in one of his novels who was stuck
in limbo having to watch modern day artists adapt one
of his untapped works into a new opera. Anyway, at

(40:48):
the time I discovered Robertson Davies, there was no Internet,
and I assumed Eta Hoffman was a made up character.
It was only later that I learned he was an
actual person, a Gothic fantasy and horror author who lived
in the eighteenth century. As far as I can tell,
it makes perfect sense that Leftcadio Hearn was a Hoffman fan. Anyway,

(41:09):
I was tickled by these connections and wanted to thank
you for giving me the incentive I needed to actually
pick up the loft Coatio, hearn biography and began reading.
I was delighted when I heard him mentioned in the
Elizabeth Bisland episode and got to experience the most fleeting
of human emotions, the brief false impression that I was
a smarty pants for having heard of Lofcadio heard previously.

(41:31):
Thank you for the work you do for my pet
tax I am including picks of our kitties, Billy Bones,
sweet black Kitty, Moxie, the one by the knitted frog dissection,
and Leah, our three legged wonder kitty appropriately sitting on
the Millennium falcon rug. Thank you again and keep up
the good work. Thank you Stacy for this great email

(41:54):
and for great cat pictures. I always love pictures of
black kitties. They are great. This last one looks a
little sleepy and the knitted uh the knitted dissected frog
is also very fun in the background of one of
the pictures. Thank you again, Stacy for this. I am

(42:17):
delighted that you got to feed this biography. Eta Hoffman
came up in our episode on the Nutcracker, and I
don't remember if I really learned much about him, aside
from the fact that he had written that novella. Now
I'm more curious. So if you would like to send
us a note, we're at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.

(42:38):
And if you would like to see our show notes
that includes an innumerable number of articles for our episode
of on Earth, that is at our website missinhistory dot com,
and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio
app and anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts.

(43:00):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
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Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

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