Unearthed! Year-end 2021, Part 1

It's time for what was unearthed in the last quarter of 2021! Part one this time includes lots of updates to previous episodes, as well as books and letters, exhumations and and repatriations.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. It's time
for Unearthed. I know there are folks who are very
excited about this because when we had a Saturday Classic

(00:23):
come out recently that had the word unearthed in the title,
heard from some excited people, and I was like, hold
on just a tiny bit longer until the actual new
unearthed stuff comes out, which is finally now. So if
you're new to the show, this is when we talk
about things that have been literally or figuratively unearthed over

(00:43):
the last few months. In this case, this is the
last quarter of this is two parts. Uh. Today we're
going to be talking about lots of updates to prior
episodes and some books and letters. Uh. Somehow the exhumations
and repatriation so been in part two of these for
a long time. I put him in part one this time, uh,

(01:05):
and then we'll talk about different stuff in part two
on Wednesday, and she's changing it up. Look out. Uh.
We have quite a few updates, but we are starting
on a more somber note to begin with. On August seen,
we did an episode called The Motherhood of Mamie Till Mobley.
She was the mother of Emmett Till, who was murdered

(01:26):
in Mississippi in nineteen fifty five after Caroline Dunham claimed
that he had grabbed her, threatened her, and made lewd
comments to her in her husband's grocery store. Emmett was
just fourteen at the time, and this was a particularly
brutal murder, one that was part of a pattern of
lynchings in which white men murdered black men and boys,

(01:46):
often after allegations of wrongdoing by white women. In a
tween episode of Unearthed, we talked about how the U. S.
Department of Justice had reopened the case and to Emmett
Sells murder. Let's follow the seventeen publication of a book
called The Blood of Emmett Till. The author of this
book had interviewed Caroline Donham and had reported that she

(02:09):
admitted to lying about her encounter with Emmett. When the
d o J announced that it was reopening this case,
some of the response to that announcement was understandably cynical.
The book had been out for more than a year
and a half at this point, so people were like,
why now. In December, the Justice Department announced that it

(02:30):
was closing the case again. Donham denied that she had
recanted her earlier testimony, and the FBI could not prove
whether that was true or not. The d o J
issued a release noting that if Donnam had lied to investigators,
that would be perjury, but perjury in state court is
not a federal matter, and the statute of limitations had
expired regarding both Donham's testimony in nine and an investigation

(02:55):
when the case was previously reopened in two thousand four. J. W.
Milum and Roy Bryant, who were both acquitted of this
crime but later confessed to it in a magazine article,
are both dead. The dj did not find any evidence
that would allow them to charge a living person with
a crime, so it closed the case again. The release

(03:18):
about this also noted quote in closing this matter without prosecution,
the government does not take the position that the state
court testimony the woman gave in nineteen was truthful or accurate.
Descendants of Henrietta Lacks have filed a suit against Thermo
Fisher Scientific for its use of lax cells without her

(03:39):
or her family's consent and without compensation to them. These
cells were taken from LAX's body without her knowledge or permission,
while she was being treated for cervical cancer at Johns
Hopkins in nineteen fifty one. Most cells die really quickly
after being removed from the human body, but these kept
living and repre you sing. They became the first immortal

(04:02):
human cell line and were known as HeLa cells. They've
been part of all kinds of medical research. This includes
research into drugs and treatments that were then sold for profit.
According to coverage in the Washington Post, civil rights attorney
Ben Crump, who's representing the family, expects to file other
suits against other companies that similarly earned a profit from

(04:24):
LAX's cells. We have not done an episode about Henrietta
Lax specifically, but she was part of our Six Impossible episodes.
There's a book about that in which we recommended that
people who were interested in Lax the story read The
Immortal Life of Henrietta A. Lax. That's a book by
Rebecca Sclute. That episode came out on September six. Moving on,

(04:46):
in our year end Unearthed for we talked about archaeologists
starting work at the site of Williamsburg's first Baptist church.
This church was founded by enslaved in free black people
in seventeen seventies. The congregation met in places like a
brush harbor and a carriage house before the church structure
was built. In eighteen fifty six, when we talked about

(05:09):
this in archaeologists had found thousands of artifacts and evidence
of two graves. In October of this year, it was
announced that the team has unearthed the building's foundations, as
well as more than twenty additional graves. This work has
been happening as Colonial Williamsburg has been trying to emphasize
Williamsburg's black history during the colonial period, something that the

(05:33):
historical attraction really ignored in earlier decades. This even extends
to the church itself. When First Baptist Church moved to
a new building in nineteen fifty six, it was because
Colonial Williamsburg had bought the property to turn it into
a parking lot. Next project is underway to study the
mummies in the Capucine Catacombs in Sicily, specifically focusing on

(05:57):
mummified children there. It's too early to share any results
from this work yet, but it intends to try to
close a current gap in the research by using non
invasive imagery to study forty one mummified children and get
a better idea of their lives and how they died.
We talked about the Capuchin Catacombs in the episode six

(06:18):
More Impossible Episodes on September six, Turkey open shipwrecks from
the Gallipoli Campaign as an underwater museum in October. Until
this area had been guarded by the Turkish military because
of the presence of unexploded torpedoes and other weaponry among
the wrecks, but the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism

(06:40):
took control of the site in advance of the anniversary
of the Gliboli Campaign and worked to map the site
and mark the locations of any explosives and make the
area safer for public diving. So this is now the
Gallipoli Historic Underwater Park, with twelve of the sixteen ships
in the area open to the public for diving. One

(07:02):
of the future plans for the site is to install
plaques with QR codes at the rex so that divers
can use waterproof phones to see what these vessels used
to look like. The site was originally planned to open
during the summer, but that had to be delayed due
to the COVID nineteen pandemic. Our episode on the Gallipoli
campaign came out on November. UNESCO called on Britain to

(07:26):
return the Parthenon marbles to Greece. At a meeting of
the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee for the Return of Cultural Property
to its Countries of origin in September, the committee unanimously
adopted a decision acknowledging that Greece's demand for the marbles
be returned was quote legitimate and rightful. In October, a
UK government spokesperson issued a statement that set, in part

(07:50):
quote our position is clear the Parthenon sculptures were acquired
legally in accordance with the law at the time. The
British Museum operates in the pendently of the government and
free from political interference. All decisions relating to collections are
taken by the museum's trustees. This was also on the
agenda during a meeting between the British and Greek Prime

(08:13):
ministers in November. Also, the parson On Gallery was closed
to visitors for more than a year, including after the
British Museum reopened. After its closure due to the pandemic.
This led to questions and contradictory answers from the museum
about what has led to that closure and whether that
closure is related to a roof leak in the gallery

(08:33):
where the sculptures are housed. Our two part episode on
Lord Elgin and the Marbles came out on January and
two of twenty twenty. Next Up, researchers have analyzed and
o'b Citian mirror belonging to John D, adviser to Queen Elizabeth.
The first prior host did an episode on John D

(08:54):
on October five eleven. This research was published in the
journal Antiquity. In our tober D used this mirror for
ritual purposes, including as a scrying object. Eighteenth century historian
Horace Walpole described it as quote the black stone into
which Dr D used to call his spirits. This research

(09:16):
is confirmed that the mirror is of Aztec origin and
made a volcanic glass from Mexico. The same was true
of three other obsidian objects also held at the British Museum,
all of which were studied using geochemical analysis. This mirror
was probably made in the early sixteenth century, and it's
possible that it was commissioned by the Spanish to take

(09:37):
back to Europe. The Spanish knew that obsidian was religiously
significant to the Aztecs, but we don't totally know how
it came into John D's possession. Everybody loves a shipwreck
and the Mary Rose sank in battle in fifteen forty
five and in n conservators raised it from the ocean
floor and took steps to conserve it. Today it is

(09:59):
in the mirror a Rose Museum. The Mary Rose was
part of prior Hosts episode five Shipwrecked Stories on April,
and it has also come up in previous editions of Unearthed.
Even though the water logged wood was treated to try
to preserve it, there were still bacteria living in the wreckage.
Conservators learned fairly recently that some of these bacteria were

(10:22):
secreting zinc sulfide nanostructures, which could turn acidic when exposed
to the air. This is threatening the wreck. The polyethylene
glycol that was used to preserve the ship can also
form acidic byproducts when breaking down over time. Researchers have
used X rays with scanning electron microscopy to pinpoint exactly

(10:43):
where the problem areas are this is still a work
in progress. It has basically let conservators see where the
problem is so they can figure out how to address it.
We still have a few more updates and we will
get to them after we take a quick sponsor break

(11:08):
now that we're back from the break. The latest round
of work at the Anti Catheras shipwreck site has concluded.
Although there were some objects that were brought to the surface,
this was really mostly a planning effort getting ready for
a project that will span from so there was a
lot of mapping work along with completing a three D

(11:29):
high resolution model of the site. One thing that they
have flagged for a future study is a partial statue
that's trapped under a boulder. The Anti Catheras shipwreck is
something else that makes a lot of appearances on Unearthed,
and our episode on the mechanism that it's named for
came out on July. The Neolithic city of Catay has

(11:50):
come up on several installments of Unearthed. The latest discovery
there involves what kind of fabrics its residents typically used.
The two biggest contenders have long been wool and linen,
but according to research published in the journal Archaeology, it
was neither of those. Instead, it was bass fiber, which
comes from trees. It's in the layer between the bark

(12:11):
and the wood. Moving on, in November, the Louisiana Board
of Pardons overwhelmingly voted to posthumously pardoned Homer Plessy. Homer
Plessy intentionally violated Louisiana's separate car law, which segregated its
street cars in eight The resulting legal action went to
the Supreme Court, and the court established that segregation was

(12:35):
legal as long as the segregated facilities were equal. The
final step in the pardon process is the approval of
Governor John Bell Edwards. As of recording this episode, Edwards
has not given that approval, but he had stated that
he planned to do so, hopefully at a formal ceremony
that would include members of the Plessy family. Our episode

(12:55):
on Plessy Versus Ferguson came out on February and other news,
The Boston Globe has reported a new clue in the
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Heist Paul Callin Tropo told the
Globe that in his friend Bobby Denaty came to his
office and showed him a finial in the shape of

(13:16):
an eagle. The fennel seemed to be one of the
thirteen pieces of art that had been stolen from the
museum in a very famous heist. After their conversation, Donaty
wrapped this fennel up and he left, but then he
was murdered the following year. Callin Tropo never saw him again.
Although this account is newly revealed, the possible connection between

(13:39):
Denaty and the heist is not new. He was identified
as a potential suspect back in and his name has
come up in other investigations into the heist. Our episode
on the Gardener Museum Heist most recently came out as
an update on April. We have talked about the system
of residential boarding schools that separated Indigenous students in the

(14:01):
US from their families and an act of cultural genocide
in several previous episodes. On December seven, the Department of
the Interior and the National Indian Boarding School Healing Coalition
announced a memorandum of understanding relating to sharing records and
other information. The Department will create a report due by

(14:22):
April one that will focus on historical records, especially on
burial sites. As part of all this, and in our
last update of one, the Gilgamesh dream tablet, which has
been discussed on more than one edition of Unearthed, was
formally repatriated to Iraq in a formal ceremony at a
Rocks Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and that happened in December.

(14:44):
We are going to move on now to books and letters.
During the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette kept up a correspondence
with Swedish count Axel von Ferston. He was her confidante
and there were rumors that he was also her lover.
They kept at this correspondence secretly while the royal family
was held at Tweelery Palace in seventeen nine one and

(15:06):
seventeen two. During that time, the family made a failed
escape attempt. Some of these letters are in the French
National Archives, but it's tricky to learn a lot about
this period in her life because parts of them have
been scribbled out. Researchers have now used X ray fluorescent
spectroscopy to read the scribbled out parts of eight letters.

(15:30):
They looked for the presence of different elements used in
the inks, along with using statistical analysis and other techniques
to further clarify those results. Historians who have reviewed the
revealed text has said that the letters show a lot
of affection for the Count, but they don't conclusively say
one way or the other whether the Queen and the
Count were having an affair. However, this research has suggested

(15:54):
who did that redacting and that it was the Count himself.
One of the challenge aspects with this research was how
similar the inks were that they were trying to separate
out to get a look at and after the original
writing and the redaction was done using the exact same ink,

(16:15):
suggesting that the Count did the scribbling himself, either as
he was making the copies of these letters or shortly
after copying them. This research was published in the journal
Science Advances in October under the title two d macro
XRF to reveal redacted sections of French Queen Marie Antoinette's
secret correspondence with Swedish Count excels on Person another correspondence news.

(16:40):
A team of researchers from M I T and King's
College London have been researching letter locking techniques. That is
a process of folding letters in a way that they
make their own envelope and then cutting a piece of
the paper and folding it through itself to make a
lock that, like seals, the letter shut the safeguarded the

(17:01):
letter because you could only open it by destroying that
paper lock, so it was impossible to read somebody else's
letter without them knowing it had been tampered with. These
locks could be incredibly intricate. A video that the team
released in ten shows a letter lock modeled after the
one on Mary, Queen of Scott's last letter. The folding

(17:22):
and cutting processes obviously slow for the sake of video clarity,
but even with that in mind, it takes about thirty
steps and four minutes to complete. Studying letter locking is
really challenging. This practice was most prevalent in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, and so the letters involved are old
and fragile, and then often at least part of the

(17:44):
lock is missing since it was destroyed when the letter
was opened. Unopened letters with intact locks do exist, but
they're extremely rare. But after studying about a dozen locks,
including those on letters by Mary, Queen of Scott's, Elizabeth First,
and Catherine de Medici, the team has published the Spiral

(18:04):
locked Letters of Elizabeth the First and Mary, Queen of
Scots that was published in Electronic British Library Journal. In
addition to illustrating specific locks using step by step diagrams,
this paper proposes a generic version of the spiral locks.
This is also an open access paper, so you can
go check out all these locks yourself if you want. Okay,

(18:26):
I'm waiting and I'm aching for someone to make like
a cricket file that we can I'll have a locked
letter um because it sounds amazing. A document known as
Chronica Universalist was discovered in it Is by Milanese friar
Galvinnius Flama, and it dates back to thirteen forty five.

(18:47):
While working with the document, professor Paolo Kisa of the
University of Milan found a passage that seems to describe
the continent of North America. Flamma describes sailors from Denmark
in Norway traveling to Iceland and beyond that a place
called Grolandia presumably Greenland, and then further west another land
named Marco Latta, where giants live. Kaisa believed that marco

(19:12):
Latta is the same place that the Norse described as Markland.
That was a place west of Greenland, probably what we
know today as Newfoundland or Labrador. This doesn't mean that
anybody from the Mediterranean, where this document was written, had
actually traveled there themselves, but it does suggest that at
least some people from the area had heard of it

(19:34):
all the way back in thirteen forty five, almost a
hundred and fifty years before Columbus's voyages. This was published
in the journal Terre Inconnite at the end of September,
but it didn't make mainstream news coverage until October. Moving on,
archaeologists from County Clare, Ireland, have found Ireland's oldest ink

(19:56):
pen at ca her Connell Castle ring Fort. This is
made of a hollow bird bone with a copper alloy
nib and it dates back to the eleventh century. At
that time, literacy was most associated with the clergy, but
this seems to have belonged to lay people. So archaeologists
wanted to confirm that this really was a pen, not

(20:17):
some other object that would not have had to do
with literacy, so they made a replica of it, and
it did indeed work as a dip pen that you
would dip into your ink. Uh. This suggests that literacy
may have been more common outside the clergy at this
point than was previously thought, especially among wealthier people, and

(20:37):
in our last bit of books and letters. According to
Dr Irving Finkel, curator of the Middle Eastern Department of
the British Museum, the oldest ever drawing of a ghost
has been discovered on a thirty five hundred year old
Babylonian clay tablet. This tablet was part of an exorcist's
instructions on how to get rid of ghosts by transferring

(20:58):
the ghost into a figurine aid by the exorcist. The
drawing shows what appears to be a male ghost with
his hands tied and the rope appearing to be held
by a woman. This tablet has been in the collection
of the British Museum since the nineteenth century, but it
had never really been studied before now. The first translation
of its uniform text was apparently incorrect, and then the

(21:21):
space where this drawing is looks empty unless it's lit
from above at the right angle, so the drawing in
particular was tricky to spot. And the text ends with
the magnificent phrase do not look behind you creeped me
out a little bit when I was working on this.
I love it so much. We now have a couple

(21:43):
of interesting finds involving toilets. First, in Smyrna, near Turkey's
western coast, archaeologists have found what they believe is the
actor's rest room from a theater. The space had room
for about twelve toilets arranged as a you, with eats
that were about sixteen inches high, so just about standard

(22:04):
in height. Right, it isn't a standard toilet in the
US between sixteen and seventeen. I haven't. I haven't done
any toilet work on my house recently. You gotta renovate,
pull out, and reinstall a toilet once in a while.
Um in Jerusalem, archaeologists have found a twenty seven year

(22:24):
old toilet and indoor toilet would have been a luxury
on its own at this point, and this one seems
to have been particularly nice, with the seat made to
be comfortable to sit on and a very deep septic
tank underneath. As is often the case with these kinds
of fines, there's lots to examine in that septic tank,
including animal bones and pottery that could offer some insight

(22:47):
into what the people of the household ate and drink.
We also have a few pieces of DNA research talk
about this time around first researchers have studied the DNA
of mummies that were in the Tareem Basin in western
China in the nineteen nineties. These mummies were preserved naturally
in the desert, and archaeologists had found their facial features, dress,

(23:10):
and hair color unusual for the region. That had fed
into the idea that perhaps these had been people who
had migrated into this area from somewhere else. The prevailing
hypothesis has been that these were Indo Europeans, but when
researchers evaluated the DNA from the thirteen oldest mummies at
one burial site, they found that they were a genetically

(23:32):
distinct ancient North Eurasian people. It's not clear why this
one group of people remained so genetically isolated, but the
people of the Tareem Basin also developed a unique and
distinctive culture. For example, they buried many of their dead
in wooden coffins shaped like boats with marker shaped like oars.
And our next bit of DNA research, the US military

(23:55):
has ended a six year project to identify the remains
of soldiers and marines from the USS Oklahoma who died
in the bonding of Pearl Harbor. They were doing this
using DNA and dental records. This project identified three fifty
five sailors and marines, but ultimately there were thirty three
crew members who could not be identified. The remains of

(24:17):
these marines and sailors were reinterred at the National Memorial
Cemetery of the Pacific. Autosomal DNA analysis has confirmed that
Ernie La Pointe is the great grandson of Tatonka Yotake,
also known as Sitting Bull, making him and his sisters
the Lakota Leader's closest living relatives. This analysis started with
a lock of Tatonka Yotak's hair, which had been in

(24:40):
the collection of the Smithsonian for more than a century
before being returned to the family in two thousand seven.
The family burned most of the hair in a religious ceremony,
but kept part of it for future analysis. It had
been stored at room temperature at the Smithsonian, which had
caused it to degrade, so it took fourteen years for
research ers to find a technique that would work. This

(25:02):
research was done not just to confirm the points ancestry.
Currently to Tonka yo Takes burial site is in South Dakota.
It's in an area that he wasn't culturally connected to,
and which the Point has described as being desecrated. The
point hopes that these remains can be exhumed, tested to
confirm that they did belong to his great grandfather, and

(25:24):
then reburied somewhere more appropriate. We should note here that
there are nuances to the use of DNA analysis to
confirm Indigenous family relationships. Different Indigenous nations have different perspectives
on when and whether it's appropriate to use DNA research,
and of course individual Indigenous people have their own opinions

(25:44):
as well. Requirements for providing DNA evidence also imply that
DNA is superior to Indigenous nations own records, but often
when it comes to something like repatriating a person's remains,
especially when it involves a non indigenous organization or government,
DNA evidence can back up Indigenous records and histories that

(26:05):
have already documented the family connections involved. There are also
a lot of ethical considerations to DNA research more generally,
and an ethical code for DNA research was just published
in the journal Nature in October. So we're gonna pause
here for another sponsor break, and then we'll come back

(26:25):
for repatriations. Next up. We are going to talk about
some repatriations from the last quarter of In October, the
Smithsonian Museum of African Art removed ten works of art

(26:48):
from the Kingdom of Benin from display. These ten are
amongst sixteen works at the museum that are known to
be connected to the raid on the Kingdom of Beneath,
in which British colonial forces looted thousands of works of art.
There are many other pieces at the Smithsonian which might

(27:08):
have come from this rate as well, but those connections
haven't been traced and confirmed yet. The museum is currently
negotiating with Nigeria's National Commission for Museums and Monuments on
a repatriation plan for these pieces. New York's Metropolitan Museum
of Art returned three pieces of Benin artwork to Nigeria

(27:28):
in November, including to sixteenth century brass plaques in a
fourteenth century brass head. These had originally been in the
UK and had actually been repatriated previously in nineteen fifty,
but then we're purchased by a private collector and later
donated to the met These artworks and the Kingdom of

(27:49):
Benin and the raid in all of that has come
up on several previous episodes of Unearthed and other episodes
of the show, so there is a forthcoming episode on
all of this dedicated just to it. The Government of
France repatriated twenty six objects from the Kingdom of Dahomey
to Benin in November as well. These are part of

(28:10):
the Royal Treasures of abam May and include the doors
of the Palace of Abba May. We've done an episode
on the Palaces of abam May on the show before. Yeah,
that's also gets into the kingdom itself, which to be clear,
this is not the same kingdom as Benin. The Kingdom
of Benin was in what's now Nigeria. Kingdom of Dahomey

(28:31):
is and what's and now. Another collection of objects was
returned to Ethiopia in November. The items being returned this
time came from Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands, but most
of them had been taken by the British Army in
eighteen sixty eight. These pieces included a ceremonial crown, two
silver embossed horned cups, a shield and other items. Ethiopian

(28:55):
officials described this as the largest repatriation of artifacts to
the tree so far. The Ethiopian government is also advocating
for the return of a long list of other objects
as well, including tablets representing the ark of the Covenant.
During the expedition in which the British Army had taken
these objects, they also attacked the fighting force of Emperor

(29:16):
to a drowse. The second the Emperor had been losing
ground and support among his nobility, and he ultimately took
his own life. In the face of all this, a
British Army officer took his son, Prince Ala Maehu to England,
where he died at the age of eighteen and was
buried at Windsor Castle. In addition to the other cultural
and artistic objects the Ethiopian government is trying to have returned,

(29:40):
they are also asking for the prince's remains. The US
has returned more than nine hundred objects to Molly. These
objects are presumed to have been stolen and falsely described
as replicas in their paperwork. The first group of them
was spotted in two thousand nine when they arrived at
the port of Houston as part of an illegal shipment.

(30:00):
Because have included axe heads, funerary urns, and pots. The
Denver art museum is repatriating four Khmer objects to Cambodia.
The museum had acquired these objects between two thousand and
two thousand five, but they had been looted from Cambodia
in the nineteen seventies. The art dealer who sold these
pieces to the museum was indicted in connection to a

(30:23):
vast looting network in ten but died the following year
before he could stand trial. These pieces include statues of
Hindu and Buddhist religious figures, as well as a prehistoric
bell that was believed to be part of a set
used to call warriors to battle. A private collector has
returned a piece of a Maya steely that disappeared from

(30:44):
an archaeological site in the nineteen sixties. This piece depicts
the masked head of an ancient Maya leader, and the
collector plans to auction it off in twenty nineteen, but
when Guatemalan authorities saw the listing, they called for the
piece to be returned. The collector did return this piece voluntarily,
although coverage of this does not deteril how they came

(31:06):
to possess it in the first place. And lastly, billionaire
hedge fund manager Michael Steinhardt has been banned from purchasing
antiquities for the rest of his life as part of
an agreement to return one d eighty objects that were
smuggled out of eleven different countries. Steinhardt purchased them without
regard to their legality, and this agreement means he will

(31:29):
have to stand trial. In a statement, Manhattan District Attorney
Cyvance Jr. Said, quote, for decades, Michael Steinhardt displayed a
rapacious appetite for plundered artifacts without concern for the legality
of his actions, the legitimacy of the pieces he bought
and sold, or the grievous cultural damage he wrought across
the globe. Investigations into this were a joint effort involving

(31:52):
authorities in Bulgaria, Egypt, Greece, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Syria,
and Turkey. Stolen objects are now being returned to these countries. Alright,
it's time for everyone's favorite, we heart exhumations. Uh, And
we have a few exhamations to talk about. In October,

(32:13):
police in Belgium exhumed remains of seventeen victims of the
nineteen fifty six boas Decaisier mining disaster. Only about ten
people who were in the mind when it caught fire survived.
Two hundred sixty two people were killed. The seventeen bodies
being exhumed were the ones who could not be identified.
The hope is to use DNA evidence to confirm who

(32:35):
they are by comparing their DNA to living relatives, but
a few of the miners listed as missing after the
disaster had no known relatives. Exhumations at the bon Secour
Mother and Baby Home in tomb Ireland are slated to
begin this year. The Mother and Baby Home has come
up on several prior installments of unearthed Nearly eight hundred

(32:57):
children are known to have died while this home was
in operation, but there were no burial records for them,
and part of the burial site is believed to be
a disused septic tank. In late November, authorities exhumed the
body of Poland's Commander in Chief, Edward Smigrids, who died
suddenly in December of n but there have been a

(33:18):
lot of unanswered questions about his cause of death and
when he actually died. There has been speculation that he
may have been poisoned and that his body was embalmed
to hide evidence of that crime, or even that this
was not his body and that he really escaped and
died much later. It is, of course too early to
have any results of that investigation yet. And lastly, there

(33:41):
have been a couple of recent calls to exhume particular
historical figures. German singer Roberto Blanco has called for the
remains of Ludwig von Beethoven to be exhumed for racial
DNA testing, and Joseph Stalin's grandson has called for his
body to be exhumed to determine whether he was poisoned,
as well as for him to be reinterred alongside his

(34:04):
wife rather than at the Kremlin. Now we have two
different signs about archipelagos that Europeans thought were uninhabited when
they first arrived there and also didn't seem to have
evidence of previous settlements. But it turns out people did
live there much earlier. Yeah, it's uh, it's easy to

(34:25):
sound real judge with this, but really this was challenging
evidence to find. First Portuguese sailors arrived in the Azores
in four seven, they believed it had never been inhabited.
It didn't seem like it had ever been inhabited, but
it's possible that people lived there seven hundred years before that.
Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of

(34:47):
Sciences examined sediment cores taken from several lakes on these islands.
The cores suggests that between seven hundred and eight fifty
there were livestock there, like cows and sheep. These were
not animals that would have lived there unless there were
humans there. These same years also saw an increase in

(35:07):
residues from large fires and a corresponding decrease in the
native tree pollen. One hypothesis is that these were North
seafarers and that they arrived in the Azores due to
shifting climate the temperatures and winds that encouraged exploration from
the northeast Atlantic. Similarly, Europeans first arrived in the Falkland

(35:28):
Islands in sixteen ten and similarly believed them to have
never been inhabited, but it looks like people may have
actually lived there hundreds of years earlier. The similar reasoning
at work here. There's a sudden increase in evidence of
large fires, including around the years one fifty and four ten,
as well as in seventeen seventy, which was after Europeans

(35:50):
that had established settlements there. Other evidence of earlier settlement
includes a projectile point similar to ones that were used
by indigenous people's on the South American continent, and mounds
of bones that show evidence of human activity. Their current
conclusion is that indigenous people from South America made brief

(36:10):
visits to the islands rather than establishing long term settlements there,
meaning that it would have been harder for Europeans to
see evidence of that once they got there in the
seventeenth century. It's also possible that these South American visitors
introduced the wara to the islands. This is the only
land mammal considered to be native to the Falklands, and

(36:32):
it's also called the Falkland Island dog or the Falkland
Islands wolf. It hasn't been entirely clear how this animal
got to the island, but Europeans hunted them to extinction
in the nineteenth century. Earlier research has suggested that they
have walked across an ice bridge, but this latest research
suggests that maybe folks from South America brought them along

(36:55):
and we have a final random occurrence to end on.
In October, the Westbrook Main Police Department reported that a
nineteenth century grave stone had been found in the middle
of a local road. The stone read Mrs Mary, wife
of David Pratt, died January one, eighteen forty, age fifty nine.

(37:17):
It appears that this stone belonged to Mary Pratt of Yarmouth, Maine,
who had been buried at the old Baptist Cemetery there.
The most likely scenario is that her grave had been
marked with this stone at the time of her death,
and that it was replaced when her husband died in
eighteen sixty one and was buried alongside her. There is
a stone at their graves now that commemorates both of them,

(37:39):
although it's not clear how this stone wound up in
the road. A hundred and sixty years later. Westbrook police
stressed that they did not believe foul play was involved. However,
The Boston Globe noted in its reporting that this is
one of a string of strange happenings in Westbrook, comparing
the town to something out of a Stephen King novel.

(38:00):
In ten there was a very large snake, as in
a ten foot long snake that was reported to be
living along the presump Scott River and was nicknamed Wessey
or the presump Scott Python. This was followed by a
strange disc of ice forming in the same river over
the winner of followed by on landslide. So, at least

(38:25):
in the Boston Globe's opinion, tombstone was just the latest
thing the snake brought it. Um, We're gonna have more
unearthed next time, but in the meantime, do you have
listener mail? Real quick listener mail from Jenny. Jenny wrote
and said I'm catching up on last month episodes and

(38:45):
had to write in about your mother Goose episode and
one of my favorite jokes on Sesame Street. Back in
the eighties when I was primed Sesame Street age, they
had a segment called the Ladybugs Picnic, and it's accounting
song about all the things the ladybugs do on their
nick like sack races and the like. But there's also
a great line in there about how they quote talk
about the high price of furniture and rugs and fire

(39:08):
insurance for ladybugs. Just so morbidly dark and hilarious all
at the same time. As an adult, it makes me
laugh every time I hear it and thought you might
enjoy it as well. Thanks for the great listening, Jenny.
Thanks Jenny for telling us about this. When I read
this email, I was like, I've never heard of this
song before in my life, and then when I clicked
on the YouTube link, I was like, no, wait, I

(39:30):
definitely have. I remember this from my childhood that was
similarly prime Sesame Street age. Maybe not quite in the eighties,
but definitely in the late seventies. So thanks Jenny for
this note and for the YouTube link. Uh It's on
Sesame Street YouTube page if you want to look at it,

(39:50):
if you want to send us a note. We're a
history podcast at I heart radio dot com and we're
also all over social media at missed in History, which
is where you'll find our Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest
and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on
the iHeart radio app or wherever you like to get podcasts.

(40:14):
Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.