Unearthed Year-end 2025, Part 1

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. It is time for our
most recent installment of Unearthed, which is when we talk

(00:22):
about things that were literally and figuratively unearthed over in
this case the last quarter of twenty twenty five. So
this is once again a two part episode, as is
pretty much always the case anymore. We've got a ton
of updates, some things about books and letters and animals
and an exhumation, and then we'll have other stuff that

(00:44):
was on Unearthed on Wednesday. So starting off with the updates.
In last falls installment of Unearthed, we spent quite a
bit of time talking about the Executive Branch's focus on
the Smithsonian Museums, including a request for the Smithsonian to
send a wealth of information about the museum's and their
exhibits to a committee at the Executive Branch for review.

(01:07):
The Smithsonian submitted materials on September eighteenth, and three months later,
on December eighteenth, a letter that had been sent to
Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch the Third was posted on
the White House website. The letter characterized the museum's submission
as a partial production of materials that was woefully incomplete,

(01:28):
and suggested that the Smithsonian's federal funding could be withheld
if it does not comply. This letter also reiterated that
federal funding is available to the Smithsonian only for use
quote in a manner consistent with Executive Order one four
two five three Restoring Truth Insanity to American History, which
is an executive order we have also discussed on the

(01:51):
show before. I really don't have much to add to this.
We have already talked about this executive order. We've already
talked about how the Smithsonian is not an executive branch agency.
So this is like just more of what we talked
about repeatedly over the course of twenty twenty five. Also, uh,

(02:12):
we've talked previously about just how important and valuable the
work of public media has been to our show, And
just yesterday, as of when we are recording this, the
board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting voted to dissolve itself.
That is, the corporation that has sent the money to
public Broadcasting for almost sixty years. President and CEO Patricia

(02:36):
Harrison said of this quote. For more than half a century,
CPB existed to ensure that all Americans, regardless of geography, income,
or background, had access to trusted news, educational programming, and
local storytelling. When the administration and Congress rescinded federal funding,
our board faced a profound responsibility. CPB's final act would

(02:59):
be too pet the integrity of the public media system
and the democratic values by dissolving, rather than allowing the
organization to remain defunded and vulnerable to additional attack. I
don't have a lot to add to this again either. Again,
this just happened yesterday as of when we are recording.
I found out about it after the end of business hours,

(03:20):
which is why I did not even send Holly a
brand new third update to this episode before we recorded it.
I'm glad you said that, because I was like, I know,
you should say. You were looking at me like and
this one is Scy's. Well, I was more worried that
I had. I was like, I know, I went to
the right email, but yeah, it would have been three

(03:42):
changes to the outline sent in the span of about
two hours. Fine by me. Uh. Moving on. In April
of twenty twenty two, we did a two part episode
on Ernest Shackleton, who led an expedition to Antarctica that
went very wrong after his ship, the Endurance, got trapped
in the ice. The Endurance was supposedly one of the

(04:03):
strongest ships of its time, and this disaster has been
blamed on an apparently weak rudder, which the ice was
able to tear away. With no rudder, of course, the
ship could not steer, so it couldn't get out of
the ice, and it was ultimately crushed. But a paper
published in Polar Record, a journal of Arctic and Antarctic research,
which came out in October, has come to a different

(04:25):
conclusion that the ship wasn't really all that strong to
begin with. According to this paper, the Endurance was really
designed to go at most to the edges of the Antarctic,
not deep into the pack ice farther south. That pack
ice can put huge amounts of pressure on a ship
as it moves. The weakest part of the Endurance's hull

(04:48):
was around the engine room area, and the engine room
also was large and not reinforced by beams, so all
of that would have made it a lot easier for
the ice to crush the sho and on top of that,
Shackleton may have known this before setting out on the expedition.
His nineteen twenty book South, which chronicled the expedition, said

(05:10):
that the shipwrights who had built the Endurance quote had
never done sounder and better work, and he framed its
destruction as the inevitable outcome for any ship that was
trapped in pack ice. But in a letter to his
wife Emily, he framed the Endurance as not as strong
as the Nimrod, which he had taken on an earlier
expedition in nineteen oh seven. Part of the research that

(05:33):
went into this paper came from underwater imaging that was
conducted after the wreck of the Endurance was found. Back
in twenty twenty two, we talked about that finding on
previous installments of on Earthed, and the research also examined
a lot of diaries and correspondence for coming to this conclusion.
In our Spring twenty twenty three on Earth, we talked

(05:54):
about a gold pendant that had been discovered by a
metal detectorist in twenty nineteen, which had just been unveiled
at the British Museum. That pendant was decorated with the
letters h and k, a tudor rose and a pomegranate bush,
which was a symbol of Catherine of Aragon. It was
made of high quality materials, but without the same level

(06:15):
of craftsmanship, so there was speculation that this had been
made in a hurry, perhaps as a tournament prize or
as something someone was going to wear at a tournament.
Now this pendant is believed to have been a commission
for a tournament that was held in October of fifteen
eighteen to celebrate the betrothal of Mary, daughter of Henry

(06:36):
the eighth than Catherine of Aragon, to Francis Dauphin of France.
At this time, Mary was a toddler and the Dauphin
was a baby. It is possible that Henry the eighth
was the person who commissioned this piece. He was known
to have jewelry like this made for members of his
court to wear at similar events. Because of its age

(06:57):
and condition and its connection to the twenty four year
marriage of Henry and Catherine, this pendant is being described
as one of the most important sixteenth century pieces ever
discovered in Britain. It is currently on display at the
British Museum and the museum is raising funds to try
to permanently acquire it. They've set a goal of three

(07:18):
point five million pounds or about four point six million dollars,
with a deadline of April of twenty twenty six. Next
prior hosts of the show did an episode on Rapanui
or Easter Island, and they also did an update to
that episode, which came out in twenty twelve, And of
course Rapanui has made a ton of appearances on Unearthed.

(07:40):
Several articles and papers about Rapanui and the Maai statues
there came out toward the end of last year, and
one of those papers was about how large statues were
moved from where they were made to the roads where
they are today, and the conclusion in this paper was
that they were walked there. And when I saw all

(08:00):
the headlines about this, my first thought was did we
not know that already? The idea that moi walked to
their destinations goes back to the eighteenth century, when the
island's inhabitants told Dutch explorer yakab Ragavin that was how
they moved back In twenty twelve, a team of US
anthropologists and archaeologists used a replica to demonstrate that three

(08:25):
teams of people could use ropes tied to the moi
to rock it back and forth so that it would move.
They moved that replica more than three hundred feet in
under an hour. Yeah, and in a way that you
could describe as walking. But while a YouTube video of
this experiment got millions of views, the academic paper that

(08:46):
the team published the following year got a lot of skepticism.
Among other things, when it was published, the prevailing narrative
about the island was that its residents had committed eco
side by cutting down the trees to make the rollers
to move the statues. We have talked about a lot
of research that contradicts and undermines this whole eco side

(09:09):
theory on past installments of an Earth that as well.
But the idea that they walked the statues just went
against the idea that they cut down big rollers and
deforested the whole island to do it. The new paper
that yielded this latest round of headlines was written to
address that skepticism. It was published in the Journal of
Archaeological Science, entitled The Walking Moi Hypothesis Archaeological Evidence, Experimental

(09:35):
Validation and response to critics. According to the authors, walking
the statues to their destinations is the explanation that best
fits the available evidence. The paper systematically addresses the various
critiques of the one that was published in twenty thirteen.
The paper's acknowledgments credit several Rapanui people for their involvement, insight,

(09:57):
and commitment to community based archaeology on the island. This
still is not completely settled, though archaeologists and Professor Sue Hamilton,
who was not involved in this research, was quoted in
Live Science as saying, quote the current work by the
author's further demonstrates the technical possibility of upright movement of

(10:19):
the statues moa I, but does not prove that it happened.
Hamilton also noted that there are other possible explanations for
what went on. This paper was written by Carlippo and
Terry L. Hunt, and they published another paper on Rapanui
in December. This one was also in the Journal of
Archaeological Science, and it examined the role of rats in

(10:42):
the deforestation of Rapanui using final evidence and ecological modeling.
Polynesian rats arrived on the island with people in the
twelfth century either as stowaways on their canoes or as
an intentionally introduced food source. At that point, the island
was covered with slow growing palm trees, and while people

(11:02):
did cut some of them down for various reasons, it's
likely that the bigger factor was the rats eating the
palm nuts that the trees used to reproduce, and since
the rats had no other predators on the island other
than people, they proliferated. So while Rapanui was largely deforested
by the time Europeans first arrived on the island, according

(11:23):
to this paper, it wasn't a case of humans just
cutting down all the trees. And there was also yet
another paper. LiPo Hunt and other co authors also published
an article in Plus one about Rapanuis society. At the
time that the moai were created. Prior to contact with Europeans,

(11:43):
Rapanui society was made up of small groups of independent
families rather than having one centralized leadership or government. So
this research looked at whether the quarry where most of
the moi were created, was similarly decentralized. They created a
comprehensive three D model of the quarry and found that

(12:04):
there were thirty distinct centers of quarrying and carving activity.
They also found evidence suggesting that once they were made,
the moai were transported out of the quarry in all
different directions. So their conclusion based on this is that
moai creation was decentralized, similarly to how Rapanui society was

(12:26):
decentralized overall, and the three D model that they made
for this is viewable online. Our episode on the Jacobite
Rising of seventeen forty five ran as a Saturday Classic
in May of twenty twenty one, and archaeological finds related
to it have come upon on Earth since then. In October,
archaeologists from the University of Glasgow and the National Trust

(12:48):
for Scotland announced the discovery of more than one hundred
projectiles at Culaden Battlefield, site of the last major battle
of the rising. These projectiles were found in an area
that had been investigated previously without producing any archaeological material,
possibly because the area was forested during that earlier investigation.

(13:10):
These projectiles included lead, musket balls and cannon shot. This
includes a three pound cannon ball believed to have been
fired by Jacobite artillery, and it's believed that some of
these are from the very last actions in the battle,
as the Jacobites were being defeated by government troops. The

(13:30):
musket balls may have been fired by Irish troops who
were in French service, known as the Irish Biquet, who
were fighting alongside the Jacobites and continued to fight against
British government troops while many of the Jacobites retreated. I
don't actually know if at the time if they said
that piquet as a French term, or if it was

(13:52):
said more like pickets, which is where that word comes from.
This likely saved the lives of the Jacobites who escaped.
The Jacobites were trying to restore the House of Stuart
to the British throne, so from the Hanoverian perspective, they
were rebels who would have been executed if they were captured,
but since they were serving in the regular French army,

(14:13):
captured Irish paquets would have been treated as prisoners of war.
We're going to take a quick break and then talk
about some more updates. It has been a while since

(14:33):
we have talked about the Maya Train on Unearthed. That
is the train that was built to carry tourists from
the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula to less visited sites
farther inland, including Mayan historic sites. This train was controversial
since its construction had the potential to unearth and possibly

(14:54):
damage other archaeological sites along the way, and there were
concerns that there might not be just enough time or
money to study and protect all of these sites in
advance of the construction, so simultaneously making historical and archaeological
sites far their inland more accessible, also potentially causing damage

(15:16):
on the way to get there. Last November, Creuz, working
on the Maya train, accidentally discovered an inscribed stone slab
in the ruins of the city of Kabbah, dated back
to the seventh century. It has been dubbed the Foundation Stone.
Conservators have restored the stone's hieroglyphs and a translation is
in the works. One of the things translators have substantiated

(15:39):
is the name of a female ruler, ex chak Chian,
who came to power in the year five sixty nine.
These hieroglyphs connect x chuk Chian to various deities and
suggest that she was involved in the construction of some
nearby sporting facilities. A lot of the work with this
is still very preliminary, but it suggests that she helped

(16:01):
guide the city of Koba into becoming an important regional power. Next,
work is still ongoing to find and identify victims of
the nineteen twenty one Tulsa Race massacre, which we originally
covered on the show in twenty fourteen and then ran
as a Saturday Classic in twenty nineteen. In November, officials

(16:21):
working at Oaklawn Cemetery in Tulsa announced that they had
documented the remains of eighty more people who had been
buried in unmarked graves, with nine of them meeting the
criteria to be exhumed and studied further. Those criteria are
based on historical records and eyewitness accounts describing where and
how victims were buried. Yet not every unmarked grave is

(16:46):
believed to have been connected to this massacre. This most
recent season of field work in Tulsa has concluded now,
but the lab work from that field work is ongoing.
The hope with this continues to be that they will
be able to identify the victims and connect them to
surviving family members wherever possible. On November sixteenth, twenty twenty two,

(17:10):
we did an episode on Boston's Coconut Grove Fire, which
took place in nineteen forty two and continues to be
the deadliest nightclub fire in history. On June twenty fifth,
Bob Schumway, last known survivor of the fire, died in
a senior living community in Naples, Florida, at the age
of one hundred and one. His death was covered in

(17:31):
The Boston Globe in November, and the Coconut Grove Memorial
Committee paid tribute to him during its annual anniversary vigil
on November twenty ninth. Humbwey was eighteen the night of
the fire, and had gone to Coconut Grove with a
friend after Boston College lost to Holy Cross in that
night's football game. Both of them were uninjured and stayed
at the club to help with the rescue and recovery.

(17:54):
Our next update is that on January nineteenth of twenty
twenty two, we did an episode on Britain's eighteen ninety
seven putative expedition into the Kingdom of Benin and the
removal of artworks and artifacts from that kingdom that are
known today as the Benin Bronzes. Much of Benin City
was destroyed by fire during this raid, and it is

(18:16):
not fully clear whether that fire was unintentional or if
the British forces set it on purpose, but then it
spread a lot farther and faster than they had expected
it really. I mean, the raid itself horrifying and bad, obviously,
but it does not seem like the intent was to

(18:36):
burn the whole city down right. Archaeological work has been
undertaken in Benin City ahead of the construction of the
Museum of West African Art, and some of it has
been focused on the site of the Obo's Palace, which
was one of the buildings that was destroyed. Archaeologists have
found parts of the palace that predate the colonial era
and archaeological layers that predate the establishment of the Kingdom

(18:59):
of Beni. In addition to evidence of the palace and
the post colonial structures that were built there afterward, researchers
found evidence of metalworking workshops, more than one hundred thousand
pieces of ceramics, glass bottles, smoking pipes, and other objects.
Analysis of all of this material is ongoing and should

(19:19):
lead to a better understanding of the pre colonial Kingdom
of Benin and the site's postcolonial development. Next there's always
work going on at Pompeii, and Pompeii has made an
appearance in multiple episodes of the show and as a
frequent flyer on Unearthed. Some of the most recently published

(19:40):
research about Pompeii is what some of the victims of
the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year seventy nine
were wearing. In particular, researchers have raised questions about why
some of the victims were wearing wool. Today, a lot
of people probably associate wool with war garments and cold weather,

(20:01):
but it really is a versatile material that can also
help keep people cool when it is hot out. Wool
is breathable and it's moisture wicking, and as sweat evaporates
out of it, it helps cool the person wearing it.
Wool was also a widely used and affordable fabric in
the area two thousand years ago, so by itself, evidence

(20:22):
of wool clothing on some of the victims of the
eruption doesn't mean anything unusual. But for a long time,
the eruption of Mount Vesuvius was believed to have happened
in the month of August. Based on the writing of Pliny,
the younger. Some of these people weren't wearing summer weight garments,
but instead multiple heavy layers of wool, so these garments

(20:44):
could back up the competing hypothesis that this eruption really
took place later in the year, more like October, in
the autumn, when temperatures would have been cooler. That's sort
of one possibility. Another is that people might have put
on multiple layers of heavy clothes while trying to escape

(21:04):
Pompeii because they thought that those layers would help protect
them from volcanic debris. Either way, some questions suggested by
the fact that people had heavy wool on and for
our last update, prior hosts of the show did an
episode on the Bio Tapestry in twenty eleven, and it
has been featured on several installments of Unearth since then.

(21:28):
There are a number of questions about the tapestry, one
of them being where it was hung before it wound
up at Biocathedral in France, where it was listed on
an inventory from fourteen seventy six. One of the proposed
locations has been the dining hall of the Dover Priory,
but a paper published in the journal Historical Research suggests

(21:48):
a different location, the refectory at Saint Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury,
and this paper also suggests a purpose for what we
commonly call a tapestry, but it's really an embroidery. The
Benedictine monks who lived at this abbey were required to
eat in silence while listening to a reader. If the

(22:10):
bay a tapestry were hanging from the walls of their refectory,
it could have served as kind of a visual accompaniment
to the religious or moral or historical texts that were
being read from during meals. Refectories of this era typically
had very long, uninterrupted walls, which would have provided enough

(22:30):
space for the embroidery to hang as one piece. That's
actually one of the arguments against the idea that it
was designed to be hung in by a cathedral which
did not have that kind of continuous uninterrupted wall space.
This is of course all speculative, and the paper does
not try to present it as a final answer. This

(22:52):
paper also has origins in a class at the University
of Bristol in which students study the tapestry in the
current research around it and were as to come up
with possible alternative explanations for the Bayou Tapestry. The Bayou
Tapestry Museum in France is being renovated right now, which
is part of why this embroidery is being loaned to

(23:13):
the UK for the first time. It will be on
exhibit in the British Museum from September of twenty twenty
six until June of twenty twenty seven. This loan has
involved the British government ensuring the embroidery for about eight
hundred million pounds or roughly a billion dollars. Yeah. Some

(23:34):
of the headlines that I saw regarding this is like,
at last the Bayou Tapestry returns to Britain where it belongs.
There's a whole I mean that there's a lot of stuff, right,
It's discussed in that episode. Also, I mean a billion
dollars is a lot of money, but the tapestry is irreplaceable,
so yeah, yeah uh. Anyway, moving on to books and letters.

(23:59):
According to rec search published in Current Anthropology, signs used
in murals and undecorated pottery in the ancient city of
Teote Juacan in Central Mexico may constitute a written language.
It's possible that they're a very early form of udo
as Tecn, which later developed into multiple other languages, including
cora Quito and Noir. If this is true, it could

(24:22):
also shed some light on who lived in Teotihuacan and
when the Nadel speaking Aztecs arrived in the area. Researchers
involved with this work have described it as difficult because
the logograms that are used sometimes seem to have a
clear representative meaning, like pictures of birds and animals, but
together they can seem almost like they're meant to be

(24:44):
read as a rebus puzzle with different elements meant to
be sounded out to form a word. Yeah, a lot
of this sounds very preliminary to me, but also really
interesting of like how it might be interpreted and what
those interpretations might mean. Next, a small book containing religious
songs that was passed down through a family before being

(25:05):
given to the National Library of Norway may actually be
Norway's oldest book. This book currently has eight remaining pages.
Those pages are written in Latin and it is bound
in sealskin. According to this family, it came from a
monastery in western Norway. It is believed to date back

(25:27):
to the thirteenth century or older, and this sealskin binding
is being described as unique. There are only two other
known books of a somewhat comparable age in Norway, and
one of those is missing its binding. Next, a family
picking up trash on Wharton Beach in Western Australia found

(25:48):
a schweps bottle containing messages from two World War One soldiers,
Malcolm Alexander Neville and William Kirk Harley, who were traveling
on the same troop transport wrote a letter to his mother,
while Harley's letter said that his mother had died, so
anyone who found the letter should keep it. They corked

(26:08):
this bottle and threw it overboard. Once it washed up
on shore, it got covered in sand, which helped protect
the contents until it was uncovered by storms earlier last year.
Deborah Brown, who found this bottle, went on a quest
to try to find the families of these soldiers and
return their letters to them. Neville was killed in action

(26:29):
in April of nineteen seventeen, and she was able to
track down his great nephew. Harley did return home from
the war, and Brown was able to reach his granddaughter.
There's been a lot of very heartwarming coverage of this
in the Australian Press. If you want to just go
read some feel good stories about family members being reconnected

(26:52):
to this message from an ancestor, go google that. And lastly,
linguists are trying to compile the first ever complete dictionary
of ancient Celtic, scouring all kinds of surviving sources to
bring together a collection of what will probably be about
one thousand words. Ancient Celtic contained many more words than that,

(27:13):
but there is very little written documentation of it remaining today.
Sources include everything from accounts of Julius Caesar's conquest of
northern Europe two memorial stones that date back roughly two
thousand years. This is a work in progress, but the
plan is for it to be publicly available when it
is complete. We're going to take another quick sponsor break

(27:35):
and then talk about some animals. Now we will talk
about some research involving animals, starting with domestic dogs. Research
published in the journal Science in November has looked at

(27:58):
the physical characteristics domesticated dogs and how those characteristics have
changed over time. So this research analyzed six hundred and
forty three modern and archaeological skulls, including ones from recognized
dog breeds and street dogs and wolves. The oldest skulls

(28:20):
that they analyzed were from about fifty thousand years ago,
which is before dogs are known to have been domesticated.
The team created three D models of each skull and
used a method called geometric morphometrics to compare them, and
they found that during the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods there
was already a lot of diversity in dogs. The oldest

(28:43):
skull that could really be distinguished as a domestic dog
rather than a wolf was from about eleven thousand years ago,
which wasn't that long after dogs were first domesticated relatively speaking.
The team found a lot of variety in the shapes
of dog skulls by about eight thousand years years ago.
To this variety was probably connected to how dogs and

(29:05):
people were living and working together, and how quickly different
groups of people started using dogs for specific roles, as
well as what kinds of tasks those dogs were doing,
like if the dogs were helping humans to hunt, or
if they were hurting livestock or controlling pests. Basically, breeds
were developing really early on in the development of dogs

(29:28):
as a domesticated animal. At the same time, though, the
researchers noted that while these domestic dogs skull shapes really
quickly started showing a lot of variation, this variation was
not nearly as extreme as you can see in some
of today's dog breeds. They did not have the equivalent

(29:49):
of like a pug. There were no sharpays. No, there
was variety, but the spectrum was smaller. Right Moving on
to cat domestication, research from a team at Peking University,
published in December has looked at the timeline of when
domesticated cats were introduced to China. We have talked about

(30:12):
a couple of other studies looking at this same question
on Unearthed before, and this research involved twenty two small
bones from fourteen archaeological sites around China, the oldest dating
back about five thousand years. According to this research, leopard
cats were living around human settlements more than five thousand

(30:32):
years ago, and they continued to do so until about
the year one hundred and fifty CE. Then there was
a gap in felines around settlements, with the first definitive
example of a domestic cat in China dating back to
about the year seven point thirty. While leopard cats still
live in much of Asia today, they never became domesticated

(30:53):
in the way that cats did. They are very cute.
Researchers also looked at the DNA of modern and ancient
cats in China to try to pinpoint the geographic origins
of domesticated cats when they were introduced to China, and
their research suggests that domesticated cats were introduced along the

(31:14):
Silk Road. Not very surprising as a way for that
to happen. This research puts the introduction of domesticated cats
into China even later than research we have talked about
on the show before. Researchers have found the oldest mule
in Western Europe. This animal's remains were found during an
archaeological dig in Catalonia back in nineteen eighty six and

(31:37):
they date back to some time between the eighth and
sixth centuries BCE, three to four centuries before it was
believed that mules were present in Western Europe. Yes, is
one of those re explorations of an older find with
new technology and techniques that are available today. Mules are,
of course a hybrid of a donkey and a mare,

(31:58):
so this suggests that people in this part of Europe
learned about hybridizing equine species a lot earlier than was
previously thought. It is possible that this mule was bred
on the Iberian Peninsula after the Phoenicians introduced to donkeys
into the area, but future research using genetic and isotopic

(32:19):
analysis will be needed to actually confirm that. They'll use
those isotopes to figure out things like what the mule
ate when it was alive. Speaking of donkeys, there are
written records of colonists bringing horses to what is now
Virginia in the early seventeenth century, and no written records
of donkeys on things like ship manifests. But archaeological research

(32:42):
at the site of the Jamestown settlement has revealed that
colonists brought donkeys with them as well. This isn't really surprising,
since donkeys were already known for being working animals on
the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. These were likely
brought from the Iberian Peninsula or from western Africa. These
donkeys and the horses that had been brought with them

(33:04):
became food sources for the colonists during the winter of
sixteen oh nine to sixteen ten, which is known as
the Starving Time. Researchers have found the remains of two
wolves on the Swedish island of Stora Carlzo, which is
a small island that does not have any native land mammals.
This suggests that seal hunters and fishers who used this

(33:26):
island between three thousand and five thousand years ago brought
wolves there for some reason. The wolves also have some
traits that suggest that they may have been living alongside humans,
including some isotope analysis that suggests they were eating a
lot of seal meat and fish, which would not be
the typical diet for a wolf unless someone were feeding

(33:49):
it to them. One of these wolves had some kind
of a leg condition that probably would have affected its mobility,
meaning that it might have only been able to survive
with the help of people. These remains are somewhere between
three thousand and five thousand years old, and according to
DNA research, they are definitely wolves and not domesticated dogs.

(34:12):
They are also somewhat smaller than a typical wolf of
the time, and one of the two seems to have
a reduced amount of genetic diversity. So it seems like
these wolves were living alongside people for some reason, but
there's a lot that is unclear about that, like had
people managed to tame some wolves. Were the wolves being

(34:33):
kept caged or were they otherwise restrained? Was there some
other method of managing the wolve's behavior and keeping them
around the settlement with people. We don't really know the
answers to any of that. Researchers in Sweden have found
the burial site of a dog dating back about five
thousand years. The area where it was found is now

(34:54):
a bog but at the time it was a lake.
This dog was clearly buried in tensionally, it was likely
placed in a bag or a container made of skins,
along with stones to weigh it down. The dog also
had a polished bone dagger between its paws. Research into
this burial is ongoing, including some isotopein DNA analysis that

(35:18):
might reveal more about the dog and where it came from.
But it is possible that this burial was part of
a ritual rather than the simple burial of a pet
or a working dog that had died and our last
animal find. According to research published in the Journal of
Roman Archaeology, Roman officers stationed in the Egyptian port of

(35:39):
Baronyke may have kept Indian macaques as a mark of status.
This comes from the analysis of thirty five monkey burials
at an ancient animal cemetery in Baronyke. In addition to
providing a glimpse of what wealthy officers might have spent
their money on, this also provides some of the earliest
evidence of an animal trade between India and Roman Egypt.

(36:03):
Almost eight hundred burials have been examined at this animal cemetery,
and the monkeys have some notable differences from the other burials.
About forty percent of the monkey burials included grave goods,
so objects buried along with the monkeys, and that was
true of only about three percent of the cat and
dog burials. The grave goods that were buried with the

(36:26):
monkeys included things like food shells and collars that were
made of luxury materials. Some of these monkeys also seem
to have been buried with other small animals that seem
like they were meant to be the monkey's own pets.
We are going to finish off today's episode with one
historically relevant exhumation. Eliza Monroe Hay, oldest daughter of US

(36:49):
President James Monroe, was exhumed from her burial site in
Paris and returned to the United States, where she was
reburied with others in the Monroe family at Hollywood sen
Matery in Richmond, Virginia in October. So Eliza and Roe
hay had died in Paris in eighteen forty, and the
burial plot where she had been laid to rest had

(37:12):
been paid for by an American diplomat named Daniel Brent.
After hearing that this plot was going to be cleared
and resold, Barbara Varndick, who is the author of Eliza's
True Story, the first biography of President Monroe's eldest daughter,
started a two year process to have Hayes body return

(37:32):
to the US. That obviously was successful. I just said
she was returned to the US and laid to rest here,
and that biography came out just last year. We're going
to have more unearthed on Wednesday. But in the meantime,
do you have listener mail, Tracy? I do. I have
listener mail that is from Mary. It's from October, and

(37:53):
I don't think i've read it before. Mary wrote, Hello,
Tracy and Holly. I've been listening to the podcast for
several years. I've gone pretty deep into the archives, though
I have not completed my symhcphd. In parentheses yet I
love history and learning and appreciate the variety of topics
you cover. I also appreciate your willingness to stand for justice, ethics,

(38:15):
and all the good things decent humans should be doing
during challenging times. Standing firm and what'strit and has never
been more important. I was really excited to see the
history of soap episode recently. A few years ago, I
had some allergy testing and learned I am allergic to
coconut Coconut oil is in very nearly all soaps, including

(38:37):
Syndet cleaners, which use coconut derived ingredients. I decided to
learn how to make my own soap and other skincare
products out of necessity apart from learning in my fifties
that showers and baths are in fact not supposed to
be an inherently itchy experience. I discovered that I love
making soap. I get to tap into my creativity by

(39:00):
using different colorants, fragrances, and butters and oils to make
each batch unique and end up with a useful product.
So making has become my happy place and a great
source of stress relief. Since January alone, I have made
so much soap. If you still had a physical address,
I would share the wealth. If you wanted to give
me an address I could use to ship soap too,
I would love to share it as a thank you

(39:21):
for all of the enjoyment and learning I've had from
your podcast over the years. For picture tax, I have
attached a picture of a small sample of the soap
I've been making recently. I also added pictures of both
my daughter's cats. The two black cats will be moving
in with us in a few weeks while my daughter
and her wife return to the nest in order to
work toward grad school. Orange Kitty, it's very sweet and

(39:43):
sociable and very chatty. And then there's like a ps
that says part two. I wrote this message and forgot
to hit send. And that's not all bad. I just
finished the eponymous diseases episode, and there's another topic that's
right up my alley. I work as a public health professional.
Years ago I used to do communicable disease investigation, including

(40:04):
vector borne diseases. This brought back memories. Your listener mail
response at the end about researching and verifying sources can't
be understated, especially with the degradation of public health systems
and available resources. Thank you for being a source of
education and support. Mary. Thank you Mary so much for
this email. These are some incredibly cute cat pictures. We

(40:27):
have an orange tabby kitty cat wearing what looks like
a little shirt, standing with two front paws on an
open book, and the biggest of big eyes with huge pupils.
A black kitty cat curled up on a chair who
does not look happy to be having a picture taken.

(40:49):
And then a black kitty cat on top of a
dresser cabinet kind of thing looking into the middle distance
I feel, which is a thing that cats do. And then,
oh man, these soaps are beautiful. These it's a picture
of a lot of different soaps. They have kind of

(41:10):
a marbled appearance of different swirls of color. Really lovely.
Those are very beautiful soaps. Thank you so much for
the offer of sending us things. I am touched. Anytime
anyone wants to send us things, I will say when
we did have a physical address, the amount of things
received became overwhelming, and again deeply appreciated and am grateful

(41:36):
for anyone's attention in that way. That it was more
stuff than we could deal with. Some of it from listeners,
A lot of it from book publicists who sent us
unsolicited re few copies of things, and it was just
more than we could really handle. And then now we
have a dispersed working environment and we don't have a

(41:57):
centralized place for things. But again, thank you were even
the suggestion and for these beautiful, amazing pictures. I love
this whole email, except for the part that you had
to spend many years being itchy anytime you bathed or showered.
That's not good at all. When I was little, I
had a lot of trouble with itching, and it took

(42:21):
getting rid of anything that involved fragrance in our household.
But anyway, thank you again. If you would like to
send us a note about this or any other podcast,
we are at History podcast atiheartradio dot com and you
can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, but
anywhere else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you

(42:46):
missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Yeah,

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Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

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