Unearthed! In Spring 2026, Part 2

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy be Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. This is part two of our
latest installment of Unearthed, where we talk about things that
have been literally and figuratively unearthed over the last few months.
In this part two, we have animals, artwork, edibles and potables, shipwrecks,

(00:34):
and then, as always kicking it off with some random
stuff that I call popery because jeopardy.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
A six month long excavation in England, about ten miles
south of Hadrian's Wall has unearthed at least eight hundred
wet stones dating back about two thousand years to the
Roman era. There are probably hundreds more still to be
discovered at the site. Before this find, only about two
hundred and fifty wetstones had been found in the entirety

(01:06):
of Britain and Ireland.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
This was probably a whetstone factory in an industrial area,
and the stone to make the whetstones may have been
quarried from the northern bank of the river near where
all of this was found. The surviving whetstones at this
site all seem to have been broken or incorrectly cut,
which means that these are the cast offs, and it's
likely that many many more intact whetstones were transported out

(01:33):
of this area to the coast and then from there
to other parts of the Roman Empire. Now I kind
of want other research tracing the origins of the stone
in other whetstones found elsewhere in what had been Roman territory.
Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of

(01:54):
Sciences has looked at the genetic legacy of the Mongol Empire,
especially rulingly from the group known as the Golden Horde
in Central Eurasia. The Golden Horde was founded by Genghis
Khan's eldest son Joshi and his descendants. Local law in
Kazakhstan has suggested that one of the four Golden Horde

(02:14):
tombs that was analyzed in the study was that of
Djoshi and his family. According to this research, these elites
descended primarily from ancient Northeast Asians, with some ancestry from
ancient North Eurasian and Scythian populations. Genetic research on the
remains from the four tombs suggests that the males had

(02:38):
y chromosomes, from a particular ancestral branch that originated on
the Mongolian Plateau. Many people living in Central Eurasia today
have this cluster of DNA as part of their genome.

Speaker 1 (02:53):
However, this research also raises some questions about the popularly
held ie idea that one out of every two hundred
men is related to Ginghis Khan. Researchers also ran comparisons
to modern DNA and didn't find this why chromosome cluster
as frequently in modern populations as it is in the

(03:14):
men buried in these tombs. Researchers also noted that we
don't have Ginghis Khan's DNA to go on. While Joshi
and his father would certainly have had some similarities in
their genomes, we don't know whether that would include this
specific cluster. And Lastly, researchers in Hungary have been studying

(03:36):
one hundred and twenty five skeletons from two Neolithic cemeteries,
looking at patterns and how these people were buried and
what that can tell us about gender roles and among
these people. These remains date back about seven thousand years,
so they examined the bones themselves, looking for evidence of

(03:57):
wear that could tell us about these peoples, maybe a
little about what kind of work they might have done,
and they also looked at the positions the people were
buried in and what kinds of grave goods they were
buried with. At one of the cemeteries, there wasn't a
lot of variation in how people were buried. In general,

(04:17):
the people buried at this cemetery seemed to have done
harder physical work, but those patterns didn't vary by sex either.
At the other site, though, things seemed to be structured
along clearer lines of gender roles. Most of the female
skeletons were buried on their left side with shell beads,

(04:40):
and then most of the male skeletons were buried on
their right side and they had stone tools. There were
also two male skeletons and five female skeletons that departed
from this pattern. In one case, there was a female
skeleton buried with stone tools, and the wear on her
towbone showed that she did a lot of kneeling. That

(05:03):
was something that was more common among the male skeletons.
There was not anything to suggest that this person had
some kind of unique social position, but these findings do
suggest that there were people living in this community thousands
of years ago who weren't aligned with the typical pattern
of gender and gender roles in their area. This paper

(05:27):
was titled Fixed and Fluid the Two Faces of Gender Roles,
A combined study of activity patterns and burial practices in
the European Neolithic.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
Now we are going to move on to some animal finds.
A bone found at a site in Cordoba, Spain in
twenty twenty may be the first direct evidence of war
elephants from the Punic War period. There are historical depictions
of elephants being used in the Punic Wars, and there

(05:59):
are depictions on things like coins. They have most often
been associated with Carthaginian general Hannibal, but until this point
there has not been physical evidence of actual war elephants.

Speaker 1 (06:15):
This small bone was compared to the bones of mammoths
and modern elephants, and radiocarbon dating placed it in the
fourth or third centuries BCE, which is when the Punic
Wars took place. There were also several military related objects
found at the site, like artillery projectiles, as well as
coins and ceramics.

Speaker 2 (06:36):
Reading through this research, it does not seem like this
identification is one hundred percent certain they did compare it
to mammoths and elephant bones, but the bones condition is
too poor for DNA to be extracted from it, and
it's also possible that it was brought to the area
as a trade good rather than in the body of

(06:58):
a living war elephant moving on. A burial site in
northern Norway has been found to contain the body of
a Viking age woman who was buried along with her dog.
This discovery was made by a couple of people who
were searching the area with metal detectors and contacted authorities
about what they found. The woman and the dog were

(07:19):
buried together in a boat, along with tools, a weaving sword,
a wetstone, and a sickle. Next, there is a traditional
Irish breed of goat that is known as the Old
Irish goat, which just delights me such a simple, straightforward name.
This goat is bred for both meat and milk. According

(07:40):
to research published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, today's
Old Irish goats have a continuous lineage stretching back to
at least the Late Bronze Age roughly eleven hundred to
nine hundred BCE. This conclusion came from analysis of goat
remains at an iron Age Hill Fort. These are the

(08:01):
oldest goat remains found in Ireland.

Speaker 1 (08:05):
The old Irish goat is a rare breed today and
there are small faral herds of them in parts of Ireland.
Wild goats play a part in Irish folklore, so these
goats have an ongoing connection to Irish culture and history
and animal domestication and husbandry in Ireland.

Speaker 2 (08:24):
According to research published in the journal Nature Communications, there
was a sophisticated long distance trading network for parrots in
the Andes Mountains in coastal Peru that predated the establishment
of the Inca Empire. This conclusion came from analysis on
parrot feathers from Pachacomic, which was a religious center that

(08:46):
was well outside the bird's native range. Researchers used DNA sequencing,
isotope chemistry, and computational landscape modeling to determine where the
birds came from and where they were taken. In the
words of doctor George Ollah from the Australian National University
A and You, who is the paper's lead author, quote

(09:08):
our ancient habitat modeling confirmed that the western side of
the Andes was just as inhospitable to these species one
thousand years ago as it is today. These parrots are
strictly rainforest dwellers, with a natural home range of around
one hundred and fifty kilometers. The fact that they ended
up more than five hundred kilometers away on the other

(09:29):
side of South America's highest mountain range proves human intervention.
They do not naturally fly over the Andes. Researchers from
the University of Liverpool have published work on the development
and spread of early domesticated dogs. This includes work from
a rock shelter in Anatolia where people and dogs stayed

(09:53):
together roughly fifteen thousand, eight hundred years ago. These people
buried their dead, and they also buried their dogs in
a way that was very similar to human burials.

Speaker 1 (10:06):
Professor Doug Baird of the University of Liverpool was quoted
as saying the archaeology makes clear that these dogs were
close companions of humans. Isotope analysis showing the dogs ate fish,
a major element of the human diet, and like humans,
were carefully buried in the rock shelter near human burial,
thereby receiving ritualized treatment analogous to the humans. These people

(10:29):
hunted animals like wild sheep and dangerous wild cattle, so
it seems likely that these animals were hunting, but also
possibly guard dogs, given the presence of large predators like
wolves and leopards in Central Anatolia at that time. And lastly,
we have a depiction of an animal. A hiker on

(10:51):
the island of Majorca in Spain found a tiny bronze
bull's head. It is roughly three thousand years old. This
is one of only four more such skull representations ever
found on the island, and it is little. It's a
little more than an inch long. This hiker delivered the
fine two authorities and the plan is for it to

(11:11):
be placed in a museum. It is time to take
a little sponsor break and then we'll be back to
talk about art.

Speaker 2 (11:27):
Okay, now for some art. A professor who specializes in
rock art research has partnered with traditional owners in Australia
to study fourteen newly documented images of the extinct Tasmanian
tiger or thyloside. These images are from two different locations

(11:49):
in Northern Territory. There are also pictures of Tasmanian devils. Today,
Tasmanian devils live only on Tasmania, but they used to
live on the Australian mainland as well.

Speaker 1 (12:02):
They look nothing like that cartoon.

Speaker 2 (12:05):
They really don't as and Tasmanian tigers don't look that
much like tigers either. Some of these artworks are believed
to be less than a thousand years old, and the
Tasmanian devil is believed to have been extinct on the
mainland three thousand years ago. This has raised some questions
about whether the paintings were made by someone who had
seen a living Tasmanian devil, meaning that they survived longer

(12:28):
on the mainland than was previously thought. The paper on
this find, which was published in the journal Archaeology in Oceania,
also includes information from Aboriginal oral histories about these animals
and their cultural importance. In other rock art news, researchers
in France have used carbon fourteen dating to directly estimate

(12:51):
the age of several pieces of.

Speaker 1 (12:54):
Black line art.

Speaker 2 (12:55):
This is the first time carbon fourteen dating has been
used directly off art in this region because it was
believed that all of the pigments that were used were
made of metals that didn't contain any carbon, so there
would have been no carbon fourteen to test.

Speaker 1 (13:12):
This team used non invasive methods to test the composition
of the pigments used in two figures. They found traces
of charcoal, and the distribution of the charcoal was consistent
enough that it seemed like part of the pigment and
not like contamination from some of their point in history.
They extracted extremely small amounts of this pigment for testing

(13:35):
and concluded that one of the figures dates to about
thirteen thousand years before the present, while the other had
pigment that seemed to come from two different time periods,
the first about eighty five hundred years before the present
and the other more likely fifteen thousand years before the present.
It is possible that this was an older artwork that

(13:56):
was retouched or altered thousands of years later. A painting
by Italian Renaissance artist sophonisba Anguisola was thought to have
been lost, but has now resurfaced. It turns out it
was bought by a private collector in nineteen seventy seven.
The painting's current owners are relatives of the person who

(14:17):
bought it, and they looked into the painting's history after
seeing a lecture on the artist, which was presented by
the National Gallery of Art in twenty twenty four. This
painting was publicly displayed for the first time since then
this past February. This portrait is called Portrait of a
canon Regular and it depicts a clergyman whose identity is unknown.

(14:41):
Sophonisba Anguisola was one of the few women artists to
become really recognized during the Renaissance, and fewer than twenty
signed paintings of hers have survived until today.

Speaker 2 (14:53):
Speaking of resurfaced Renaissance art, a previously unknown postcard sized
drawing by German Renaissance artist Hans Baldengrin has been found
among the possessions of the descendants of Susannah Fefinger, who
sat for this portrait back in fifteen seventeen. The portrait

(15:15):
was done in silver point on paper that was treated
with bone powder, and it was part of a collection
of artwork that the family had taken in for valuation.
This is the only known silver point work from this
artist that is still in a private collection. Back in
nineteen eighty three, a mold was found at an archaeological

(15:36):
site at a Slavic hillfort in Spandau, which is one
of the burrows of Berlin today. This mold would have
been used to cast a small devotional object in the
shape of a wheel cross or a cross that's in
a circle. In January, a find was announced from a
site in Javelan, Germany, roughly seventy kilometers away, which is

(15:57):
a bronze wheel cross that was made with the mold,
which was found by a volunteer using a metal detector.
These date back to the tenth or eleventh century and
they're two of the oldest Christian artifacts in the region,
dating back to when it was first being Christianized. Archaeologists
have found fragments of decorated ostrich egg shells at sites

(16:20):
in Namibia and South Africa. These shells were used as
water vessels more than sixty thousand years ago, and people
decorated them by engraving them. Researchers analyzed the engravings on
one hundred and twelve fragments and found that eighty of
them had what they described as coherent special regularities. That is,

(16:45):
they had patterns of parallel lines or patterns of the
same angle being used over and over. Some of them
had repeating grids and diamond shaped motifs, which are the
most complex designs patterns are very consistent. They showed an
ability not only to repeat an etching consistently, but also

(17:07):
to plan it out so that these patterns and lines
would cover the desired space in a regular way over
the curved surface of an ostrich egg So this is
basically more advanced thinking than might have been expected from
people who were living sixty thousand years ago. I don't

(17:28):
think I could just plan out in my head a
bunch of etchings on an ostrich eggshell and have it
come out evenly.

Speaker 1 (17:37):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (17:38):
I bet if you did it a bunch you could
maybe eventually with a lot of practice.

Speaker 1 (17:43):
Right, it's mastery. We are going to wrap up our
art talk with some art acquisitions that made headlines over
the last few months. The Italian government paid almost thirty
five million dollars for a Caravaggio portrait. The portrait of
Monsignor Maffeo Barbrini, who would later become Pope Urban the
eighth had been on loan to the Palazzo Barberini in Rome.

(18:05):
Now it is.

Speaker 2 (18:06):
Part of the permanent collection at the Palazzo. The National
Gallery of Arts in Washington, d C. Has acquired Mary
Magdalen in Ecstasy by past podcast subject Artemisia Gentileski. This
is the first Gentileeskie painting in the museum's collection and.

Speaker 1 (18:26):
A museum I love desperately. The Dali Museum in Saint Petersburg,
Florida acquired Salvador Dali's largest painting at auction for two
hundred ninety three thousand, two hundred forty dollars. This painting
was a strange landscape created as a stage set for Bacchanal,
which was a surrealist ballet that premiered at the Metropolitan

(18:47):
Opera in New York in nineteen thirty nine. It is
made of thirteen panels and four canvases and measures sixty
five by one hundred feet. Dali also wrote a libretto
and designed costumes for this production.

Speaker 2 (19:02):
Now we will get into the edibles and potables, which
are always one of my favorites. The four corners potato
is a small, nutritionally very dense potato that people in
southwestern North America have been growing for millennia.

Speaker 1 (19:17):
Today it is.

Speaker 2 (19:18):
Still eaten and used for spiritual and medicinal purposes. Research
published in the journal plus one has looked at its
history and early domestication by both examining more than four
hundred stone tools and by interviewing indigenous elders.

Speaker 1 (19:36):
Those tools came from fourteen archaeological sites beyond the Four
Corners Potatoes natural range. The team looked at large slabs
and handheld stones used for grinding and found microscopic potato
starch granules on tools from nine of the fourteen sites.
Four of the site showed consistent use of the potato

(19:58):
stretching as far back as ten t thousand years ago.

Speaker 2 (20:02):
Hope and Denay elders who were interviewed nearly all had
knowledge of this potato and Denay women, in particular, new
techniques on how to process and prepare them to make
them less bitter. Denay doctoral candidate Cynthia Wilson, who's a
co author of this study, was quoted as saying, quote
the mobility of indigenous food ways was driven by kinship

(20:25):
based practices across the landscape. Indigenous knowledge holders, especially matrilineal women,
held onto these seedlings and stories across generations to sustain
ties to ancestral land and food ways. This research combines
with other work to suggest the Indigenous people in the

(20:45):
American Southwest domesticated the Four Corners potato. This contradicts earlier
assumptions that the domesticated crops grown in the Southwest were
not domesticated there, but were domesticated in America and then
introduced from there. This new information also augments other research

(21:06):
and suggests that now perhaps agave, barley, and amaranths were
all cultivated in North America. Researchers working at sites in
what's now Ukraine have used the preserved proteins and dental
calculus to confirm that Iron age Scythians consumed milk from
horses as well as from cattle, sheep, and goats. There

(21:29):
are historical accounts describing Scythians as consuming mayre's milk, but
this is the first physical evidence of that. Only one
of the twenty eight individuals in the study showed evidence
of consuming horse milk, so it doesn't seem like something
that was common, at least among this particular group of people.

(21:50):
It is possible that the proteins in horse milk did
not survive as well in the dental calculus as proteins.

Speaker 1 (21:56):
From the milk of other animals. Since the Scythians are
becoming understood as a culturally and ethnically diverse group rather
than more of a homogeneous culture. It is possible that
there were also cultural differences involved, or there could have
been cultural factors involved, and who was caring for the
horses and thus who was consuming horse milk.

Speaker 2 (22:18):
Someone at an estate sale in Minnesota found a silver
pap boat and recognized it as the work of nineteenth
century silversmith Peter Benson, who was born in Saint Croix
and later moved to Philadelphia. He was one of the
first known silversmiths of African descent in the United States.
Fewer than thirty pieces made by Benson are known to

(22:41):
have survived until today, and they are identifiable through a
hallmark which he used to see their pee Benson or
as his initials. So a pap boat is a little
like a gravy boat, but it was used to feed
a thin porridge or pap to babies and too sick people.

Speaker 1 (22:59):
This pap boat was purchased at the estate sale for
forty dollars and then it was sold at auction for
twenty four thousand dollars. The buyer was reportedly a prominent
American institution, but that institution has not been named.

Speaker 2 (23:15):
Research published in the journal plus one has used a
combination of techniques to look at the residues left on
pottery dating back to the third through the sixth millennium BCE.
We talk about food residues on pottery fairly often on
unearthed but often the focus is on fatty residues, and

(23:37):
that largely limits the results to residues that came from animals.
This research used a combination of techniques, including microscopic examination
and chemical analysis to try to instead look for plant residues.
This involved fifty eight pieces of pottery from thirteen archaeological

(23:57):
sites across northern and eastern US. The team found tissue
samples from an assortment of plants, including grasses, berries, leaves,
and seeds. Often there were animal remains as well, most
often fish or some other kind of seafood. The combination
of ingredients seemed to vary, but suggested that people had

(24:18):
already developed complex culinary traditions by this point.

Speaker 1 (24:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:23):
I think sometimes people imagine people from thousands and thousands
of years ago just like spearing a fish on a
stick and charring it over a fire. This was more
nuanced than that.

Speaker 1 (24:35):
They were very picky about their plating.

Speaker 2 (24:40):
Grounds keeper working on a golf course in England noticed
a sinkhole that had turned out to be a brick
wine cellar that was abandoned more than one hundred years ago.
This wine cellar probably belonged to a manner in the
area that was torn down at the end of the
nineteenth century. The cellar so was full of wine and

(25:02):
port models which were now empty. I was unclear on
whether they were empty when the wine cellar was abandoned,
or whether their corks degraded at what was inside evaporated
or spilled, or what exactly. For now, though, the cellar
has been sealed up while the staff at the golf

(25:22):
course figure out what they should do about it make.

Speaker 1 (25:26):
It a gaming room. Speaking of wine, research published in
the journal Nature has looked at four thousand years of
viticulture in France. This has involved extracting DNA from forty
nine grape seeds found at various archaeological sites. The oldest
came from wild grape vines, but what is being described

(25:47):
as essentially identical to pino noir grapes that are grown today.
That one came from a toilet at a fifteenth century
hospital at Valenciennes in northern France. This suggests that people
have been propagating grapes through cloning for more than five
hundred years. Researchers have studied maize or corn samples in

(26:08):
thirty five tombs from the Chincha Valley and they found
that the samples had exceptionally high levels of nitrogen. There
was a lot more nitrogen in them than could have
just come from the soil in the area. So this
suggests that the Chincha Kingdom, which lived in what's now
Peru before the development of the Inca Empire, fertilized its crops,

(26:32):
probably with seabird guatto that was harvested from the Chincha Islands.
Researchers believe this use of fertilizer was a factor in
how this kingdom became one of the wealthiest and most
powerful societies in their era. Basically, they had crops that
had a lot better yield than some of their neighbors

(26:53):
as part of how they became wealthy. Hey, hey, it's
almost time for everybody's favorite shipwrecks. The first going to
pause and have a sponsor break.

Speaker 2 (27:11):
We will close out this installment of Unearthed with some shipwrecks.
Divers have been exploring the site of a Roman shipwreck
on the bottom of Lake Nukatel in Switzerland. This ship
sank roughly two thousand years ago and the vessel itself
has decayed, but the cargo it was carrying is mostly intact.

(27:35):
This was a merchant vessel and it was carrying hundreds
of pieces of ceramic tableware and m fora that were
carrying Spanish olive oil. There were also wheels, harnesses and
swords that may have been connected to the vessel, possibly
having guards or a military escort on board. This wreck

(27:56):
is being described as unique among inland shipwrecks, and its
cargo is expected to be exhibited in a museum once
it's recovered.

Speaker 1 (28:06):
Maritime archaeologists from the Viking Ship Museum in Denmark have
announced the discovery of the world's largest cog in the
Strait between Denmark and Sweden. The cog was a type
of cargo ship that was developed in the late twelfth
century and it really revolutionized maritime trade, allowing small crews
of sailors to handle ships that had an enormous carrying

(28:28):
capacity relatively speaking. This one was probably built around fourteen ten,
based on the tree rings in its timbers, and it
had a capacity of about three hundred tons. It was
made from timber that came from what's now Poland and
the Netherlands, with large timbers being shipped to the Netherlands
where the vessel was built. This wreck has also provided

(28:50):
direct evidence that some cogs had high castles at the
bow and the stern. These had been documented through things
like illustrations and written to descriptions of cogs, but this
is the first time that these structures have survived in
an actual wreck. Often because of the conditions in this
part of the world, all that remains of the vessel

(29:12):
by the time it's discovered underwater is just the bottom.
If that this wreck is also just very well preserved,
with parts of its riggings still intact. Part of the
galley has also survived, and items found on board include
kitchen items like bronze pots, tablewear and bowls, as well
as sailors personal items like shoes and combs, and even

(29:35):
rosary beads. But no cargo has been found with this wreck.

Speaker 2 (29:40):
It is possible that it was carrying goods in barrels
and that those barrels may have floated away after the
ship sank. Denmark's Viking Ship Museum has also announced the
discovery of the wreck of the Danibroge, which was sunk
by the British Navy during the Battle of Copenhagen in
eighteen oh one. This this was the flagship of the

(30:01):
Danish Norwegian fleet, and it caught fire and exploded after
the British Navy struck it.

Speaker 1 (30:09):
This announcement was made on the two hundred and fifty
fifth anniversary of the battle, which was April second, So
technically this was a second quarter find, but just on
the edge. But both this and the Cog were found
and studied as part of advanced work ahead of construction
of an artificial island that will both act as a
new housing district and worked to mitigate the threat of

(30:31):
sea level rise.

Speaker 2 (30:33):
The articles that I was reading about both of these
were written in English, but they were obviously like published
four people in Denmark and surrounding areas, and so they
didn't really specify what was going on with this construction site.
And I kept being like, okay, but these are shipwrecks.
How are the shipwrecks a construction site? And the answer

(30:56):
is building an island?

Speaker 1 (31:01):
Uh?

Speaker 2 (31:02):
Which sounds fascinating. Maritime archaeologists have published findings from the
excavations of a shipwreck off the coast of Singapore. The
excavations were carried out in sort of phases between twenty
sixteen and twenty nineteen. They recovered three point five tons
of broken ceramic and a few intact ceramic pieces. This

(31:23):
wreck is being described as the first ancient shipwreck ever
found in Singapore waters, and the cargo dates back to
the fourteenth century Yon Dynasty.

Speaker 1 (31:34):
Much of this cargo was blue and white ceramic. There
was more of this style of ceramic that has been
found in any other shipwreck in the world. There were
also a number of other styles of ceramic represented. The
ship's hull has not survived, but it's believed to have
been a Chinese junk that was bound for Temasek, which
was the port that preceded the establishment of modern Singapore.

Speaker 2 (31:58):
The wreck of the Lac LaBelle has been found on
the floor of Lake Michigan, almost exactly one hundred and
fifty years after it disappeared in a storm that was
in seventeen eighty two, and a shipwreck hunter spotted it
in twenty twenty two. But the find of the wreck
was not announced until earlier this year because its discoverer

(32:18):
wanted to create a three D model of the wreckage.
Four other people learned where it was.

Speaker 1 (32:24):
The Lach LaBelle was sailing from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Grand Haven, Michigan,
carrying both passengers and cargo, and it started to leak
about two hours into the trip across the lake. The
ship turned back to Milwaukee but foundered in the stormy weather.
The passengers were moved to lifeboats before the ship sank,

(32:44):
although eight people drowned when one of the lifeboats capsized.

Speaker 2 (32:49):
Storms that struck the UK in late January may have
exposed the timbers of a seventeenth century shipwreck. The ship
sank off the coast of southern England and it made
the Fame, which was a Dutch merchant vessel that sank
in sixteen thirty one. Other parts of this wreck had
already been discovered underwater in the Swash Channel, and there

(33:11):
had been some research work at that wreck site. But
these timbers that the storm exposed on the beach might
be part of the hull that was missing people could
not find when they did that earlier work. The plan
is to take these timbers to a conservation lab and
take some samples from it to compare what they found

(33:31):
on the beach with what they found underwater to see
if it matches.

Speaker 1 (33:35):
And finally, we have talked about the Parthenon marbles on
the show before. In March, it was announced that last
year the Greek Ministry of Culture reclaimed a piece of
the Parthenon that had been removed by Lord Elgin to
be taken to the UK. There recovered pieces did not
come straight from England, though it came from the wreck
of elginship Mentor, which sank in eighteen oh two. This

(34:00):
is a small piece of marble that is believed to
have been part of a beam or a roof of
the Parthenon. Seventeen crates of marbles were recovered from the
shipwreck by Elgin Secretary, So most of the Greek Ministry
of Culture's discoveries of the site have been remnants of
the ship itself and items like everyday pottery.

Speaker 2 (34:19):
Yeah, I appreciated how the recovery of this tiny piece
of marble was hailed as like a giant success because
of all that context around the Parthenon marbles and the shipwreck.
That's it for this installment of Unearthed, with the exception
of some listener mail, I have a listener mail from Whitney.

(34:41):
Whitney wrote, Hi, there, my family and I recently went
to the Titanic exhibit at the Oregon Museum of Science
and Industry in Portland, and thanks to your wonderful podcast,
I was able to impress one of the people working
at the exhibit. While walking around looking at the artifacts,
a museum employee came up to me with a replica
of a life jacket that was have been on the
Titanic and asked me if I wanted to wear it.

(35:03):
I of course said yes, and the employee mentioned how
the life jacket was heavier than the ones we use nowadays.
When he asked me what I thought the life jacket
was made out of, without hesitation, I said cork. I
don't remember the specific podcast episode or really much of
the details, but I remember you guys covering a story
of a shipwreck that happened near the shore. There weren't

(35:25):
enough lifejackets, so people on board fought each other to
get one, but due to the life jackets being old
and made of cork and I think having previously been used,
the unfortunate individuals who had a lifejacket ended up sinking
and drowning instead of floating and slafe fleet making it
to shore. When I correctly answered the question, the museum
employee did a double take and told me I was
the only person that day to have correctly answered the question.

(35:48):
Although I must admit it was still pretty early in
the day and I only knew the answer because of
you two. It was a small thing but really made
my day. I know that you guys love animals, so
I've also included a picture of my mom's favorite child,
little Bear. Little Bear was very upset about not getting
to go to the museum. Thanks so much for all

(36:09):
you do. I love learning and I have been a
big fan of your podcast for years. Sincerely, Whitney, we
have a very cute little white, white scruffy dogs, little Bear.
I went to refresh my memory about which episode that
was about the life jackets made of cork. I have
already forgotten which episode it was, and that was like

(36:30):
two hours ago that I went and looked it up.
But yeah, the issue was that some of the life jackets.
The cover on the life jacket had deteriorated and let
water get in some of them, it was that the
cork had deteriorated. Yeah, so when water permeated through the
life jacket, like the material on the outside, it just

(36:54):
soaked into the cork and became heavy, which is terrible. Yeah,
it was not no longer buoyant cork, just porous cork. Yeah,
I'm pretty sure. There was also a different shipwreck episode
where the life jackets had been standardized by weight. There
was a weight requirement for how much cork, and so

(37:15):
some unscrupulous life jacket manufacturers had supplemented the weight of
their life jackets with iron bars, which're not buoyant. Uh,
not even not even So thank you so much for
the email. I love to feel smart.

Speaker 1 (37:35):
What's that like? I don't know.

Speaker 2 (37:37):
Lately, lately I feel more like I'm sort of struggling.
I remember being at the Bookbinders Museum in San Francisco
and the docent asked me what I thought the apprentices
had used to clean the things that they were using,

(37:57):
and I was like, I don't know, probably urine, and
that was right, and I felt very smart. So I
feel a kinship with Whitney with this email. If you
would like to send us a note, we are at
History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. If you want to
see our show notes, which include so many articles that
went into Unearthed, they are at our website of Missed

(38:19):
Inhistory dot com, and you can subscribe to our show
on the iHeartRadio app and wherever else you'd like to
get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to

(38:43):
your favorite shows.

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