Unearthed Year-end 2025, 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 V.

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
This is part two of what was Unearthed in the
fourth quarter of twenty twenty five. It is now January
of twenty twenty six, which is how this thing usually goes.
We are going to kick this off as we typically
do with all the stuff. I just thought was cool,
but it doesn't really fit into a category. I always
call that the potpoury. I feel like we have more

(00:38):
popery than usual this time.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
Great. We put it in a basket, put it in
a bathroom. Feel smell nice for everyone. In October, the
remnants of typhoon Hellong did catastrophic damage in western Alaska,
and this included massive flooding, with houses and infrastructure being
completely washed away. Many of the most affected communities were

(01:03):
Alaska Native communities in low lying areas along the coast
that were already being negatively affected by climate change, including
worsening cycles of freezing, thawing, and erosion. At least one
person died as of mid December, when Tracy was putting
this episode together. Hundreds of people were still displaced from
their homes, and it is likely that they may not

(01:25):
be able to return for more than a year.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
The community of Quinnock, which is on the Cuscoquin Bay,
did not face these levels of destruction in terms of
things like homes and roads and other infrastructure. But this
area used to be permafrost, and in recent years that
permafrost has started to thaw. So the storm was able
to just strip away a lot of the village's shoreline,

(01:51):
and that included damaging an archaeological site that had been
undergoing excavation and that instantly exposed one thousands and thousands
of artifacts, maybe even as many as one hundred thousand.

Speaker 1 (02:05):
The area's Yupik residents had already been collaborating with archaeologists
to survey and preserve artifacts at this site. After the storm,
volunteers and archaeologists started a rescue archaeology project to try
to save as many objects as possible before the temperature
started to dip below freezing. They were working with experts

(02:26):
to retrieve exposed items, soak them in fresh water, and
treat them so they do not shatter as they dry
out after centuries of being buried. This project is expected
to resume with warmer weather in the spring.

Speaker 2 (02:39):
Yeah. This is something that has been described in local
reporting with words like bittersweet, like the whole community coming
together to really work on this, but also a tragic
thing to have to do because so many things were
just exposed by this storm.

Speaker 1 (02:58):
Moving on.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
Equiano, author of the interesting narrative of the life of
Olauda Equiano or Gustavus Vasa, an African, has been on
my list for a while. For an episode in November,
The Guardian reported that the burial site of his daughter,
Anna Maria Vasa had been located thanks to an A

(03:20):
level student's paper that had been written all the way
back in nineteen seventy seven. This paper was found during
research into a signed Equiano letter that was done in
twenty twenty one. The students who wrote the nineteen seventy
seven paper had found and photographed a likely burial plot
in a churchyard. In October, researchers visited the location and

(03:45):
determined that the student paper was correct. Anna Maria Vasa,
who died at the age of three, was buried at
Saint Andrew's Church in Cambridge. There is also an epitaph
on the church's north Wall, written by abolitionist Edward eind
who was a friend end of Uluda Equiano at the
time of Anna Maria's death. Next back in twenty twenty four,

(04:06):
a hiker in Norway found a bunch of wooden logs
and branches that seemed to have been arranged almost like fences.
This find was that an elevation of about forty six
hundred feet and in an area that had previously been
covered in ice. He reported this find to the authorities
and a team from the University Museum of Bergen investigated.

(04:30):
They have concluded that this arrangement of logs and branches
was a reindeer trap, dating back about fifteen hundred years.
Photos of it show sort of a three sided structure
which has now collapsed, which would have acted both as
a hunting blind for the hunters and as an obstacle

(04:51):
to corral the reindeer and make it easier for the
hunters to hit them with their spears. Authorities also found irons, spearheads,
arrows and bows, along with the antlers of about one
hundred reindeer in the area. For another surprise, find a
man digging for worms near his home in Stockholm Sweden

(05:12):
found a huge horde of coins, beads and rings buried
in the remains of a deteriorated copper vessel. This find
totaled more than twenty thousand items. Authorities were again notified
and investigators found that most of these objects date back
to the twelfth century, during the reign of newt Ericsson.

(05:33):
This is one of the largest silver hoards from this
period to be found in Sweden. Next, teams working at
a site in Australia known as Windmill Way have found
extremely rare examples of Aboriginal string craft. It is likely
that ninety percent or more of the artifacts that Aboriginal

(05:55):
peoples in Australia were using in daily life centuries were
made of plant and animal materials, and those are just
not as likely to survive in the archaeological record. But
the oldest of these stringwork samples date back about seventeen
hundred years. There are also some more durable specimens at

(06:17):
the site, like charcoal from campfires, and some of those
are even older than that. These stringcraft examples are in fragments,
but many of them can still be identified as coming
from specific items. Some are parts of dilly bags. That's
something that's comparable to a backpack. Others probably came from

(06:38):
fishing nets, and some pieces were parts of belts and necklaces.
A lot of these stringwork pieces used things like knots
or loops, or they were made into a mesh or
some other configuration, but the core techniques to make them
stayed really consistent, from the oldest pieces to the newest ones.

(06:58):
The newest pieces date back to after contact with Europeans,
so in addition to showing how these pieces were made,
this find also demonstrates how the techniques were making them
were passed down through generations for centuries.

Speaker 1 (07:14):
This work was part of a larger project studying the
rock art and life ways of the Cape York Peninsula.
It's a collaborative project bringing together multiple aboriginal corporations and
traditional owners, university researchers, and technological partners. Moving on, researchers
in China have used the DNA from thirty two adult

(07:37):
volunteers to explore whether today's Bo people are descendants of
an ancient culture known as the hanging coffin culture, which
has sometimes been called the Ancient Bo. Hanging coffin sites
have been dated back to about thirty five hundred years ago,
and they involved funerary rituals in which the deceased replaced

(08:00):
into wooden coffins, and then those coffins were carried to
steep hillsides and anchored into the cliff faces. This could
involve scaffolding ropes or naturally occurring or constructed ledges and trails.
This practice has been documented in parts of southern and
Southeast Asia, but the use of these specific cliff mounted

(08:24):
coffins ended during the Late Ming dynasty, so these sites
are attributed to multiple ancient cultures, one of them being
the ancient Bo people. Nine of the thirty two volunteers
had to be excluded from the study because it turned
out they were related to one another too closely to
meet the criteria. The DNA of the remaining volunteers was

(08:47):
compared to fourteen genome samples from hanging coffin sites in
southeast China and northern Thailand. This research suggests that the
ancient hanging coffin practitioners were genetically some are to one
another and to populations that lived along the coast of
southeastern China during that same period, and also that suggests

(09:09):
that Bo people today are descended from hanging coffin practitioners
in what's now Unan province. So this confirms the oral
history of Bo people living today and our last bit
of potpourri. Researchers from the University of Barcelona believe that
twelve large shells found at Neolithic sites in Catalonia may

(09:31):
have been used as both communication devices and musical instruments,
which would make them the oldest known musical instruments in
the world. These samples date back to between five thousand
and four thousand BCE. These shells came from c snails,
but they appear to have been gathered after the snails

(09:52):
that ted used them had died, meaning that they were
not likely collected for use as food. Eight of the
shells were int packed enough to produce a sound theoretically,
so researchers got permission to try to use them that way.
I think more often in the research like this that
we've talked about, there have been replicas made, but this

(10:13):
was apparently the actual shells, and the researchers found that
if they blew through the opening of the shell, it
produced a clear, stable tone. They could change that tone
depending on how they blew into the shell and whether
they put their hand into the shells opening. They posted
a video along with this press release, and in that video,
this sounds kind of like a trumpet or a bugle.

(10:36):
In addition to their potential use as musical instruments, some
of these shells were found in a mine, and researchers
have speculated that mine workers may have used them to
communicate between one gallery and another.

Speaker 2 (10:50):
That is all the potpourri. It took all of the
first arc of this episode. So now we will take
a quick break. There were a number of fines late
last year that were all related to tools, so we're

(11:12):
going to talk about tools for a little bit first.
According to research published in Plus one, ancient humans in
Italy used small tools to butcher elephants for their meat,
but then they used the elephant's bones to make bigger tools.
This conclusion came from research out a site dating back
more than four hundred thousand years, which included three one

(11:35):
hundred bones and other skeletal pieces from a single elephant,
as well as an assortment of stone tools, most of
which were thirty millimeters in size or smaller.

Speaker 1 (11:47):
The elephant appeared to have died of some kind of
natural cause, rather than being hunted by humans. The bones
did not have much evidence of cut marks, suggesting that
small tools had been used to remove them eat from
the bones, but several of the bones appeared to have
been broken on site using blunt force to extract the
marrow from inside, and then some of them had been

(12:10):
modified to make larger tools than the ones used for
butchering the elephant. I don't know why this particular story
was kind of I was like, yeah, they had tiny
little tools, and then they had elephant bones, so they
could make much bigger ones. Next, researchers working at a
Celtic settlement in Poland believed they have found a trepanation tool,

(12:32):
or a tool used to make holes in the skull.
This tool is about twenty three hundred years old and
made of iron with a blade that transitions into a spike.
It might have originally also had a wood handle, although
if it did, that handle has not survived. Trepanation could
be carried out for both medical and ritual purposes, and

(12:54):
Celts in this region were known to have practiced it,
although there have not been any human remains found showing
evidence of trepanation in the area where this tool was found. Next,
Archaeologists from Griffith University on the East coast of Australia
found a large horde of stone tools that were buried
near a waterhole roughly one hundred and seventy years ago.

(13:17):
They have worked with the Pedapitta people, who hold native
title for the area where the cash was found, to
analyze and study the tools. They are stone tulahs, which
are affixed onto handles and used for woodworking, including making
other culturally important items like boomerangs and vessels called kulmans.
This cache included about sixty of the stone toolheads.

Speaker 2 (13:41):
It is possible that this was a supply of toolheads
that had been made to trade with other communities, but
it's not totally clear why they were buried near this
waterhole or exactly when that happened. Attempts to date this
gave an estimate of some time between seventeen ninety three
and no nineteen thirteen, which is kind of a long range.

(14:03):
Europeans arrived in the area and started establishing towns and
a police camp in the late nineteenth century, so if
it was after that or around that time, it's possible
that these tools were buried with the intent of retrieving
them to use them for trade, but then the arrival
of Europeans disrupted the region's trading patterns. And lastly, researchers

(14:28):
at Pound Cave and Gabon in Central Africa have found
that stone tool technology associated with the cave stayed very
stable for about five thousand years. This conclusion came from
tool fragments and flakes, which were both used as tools
and were a byproduct of napping. This find suggests that

(14:48):
people in the cave were making basic tools using the
same methods constantly over thousands of years, but not creating
standardized or specialized tool types. The site all who includes
a lot of animal remains, many of which seem to
have died naturally in the cave, while others were used
for food. Many of the animals that died naturally in

(15:10):
the cave understandably were bats. Also, over the last few months,
there were a lot of fines about Neanderthals. First DNA
retrieved from a tiny piece of Neanderthal bone suggests that
some Neanderthals at least migrated very long distances. This little

(15:30):
piece of bone was excavated from a cave on the
Crimean Peninsula and it's between forty six thousand and forty
four thousand years old. The DNA results suggest that this
Neanderthal was most closely related to a group of Neanderthals
from Siberia, more than three thousand kilometers away. This suggests

(15:53):
that there was a long distance migration across the Eurasian
step at some point. It might have been during a
warming period that took place either sixty thousand or one
hundred and twenty thousand years ago. Those are two different
known warming periods to have happened.

Speaker 1 (16:10):
This bone is a piece of thigh bone, and it's
one of many fragmented bones found in the cave. Researchers
have analyzed about one hundred and fifty of these bones
and found that the vast majority belonged to horses or deer,
as well as some mammoth bones. These are likely the
animals that the Neanderthals in the area were using for food.

Speaker 2 (16:31):
Next we have talked about Neanderthals interbreeding with Homo sapiens
on previous installments of Unearthed, and we've also talked about
various explanations about how and when the Neanderthals died out.
A preprint that was posted in October, meaning this is
not something that had been through peer review yet suggests

(16:53):
the possible genetic reason for the Neanderthals dying out, and
it's one that is connected to their interbreeding with Homo sapiens.
This is that Neanderthals had a gene variant that gave
them a trait called red blood cell oxygen affinity, which
affects how oxygen interacts with hemoglobin in the blood.

Speaker 1 (17:17):
This trait could have been beneficial for the Neanderthals, but
once they started interbreeding with Homo sapiens, it could have
led to a genetic incompatibility. Basically, if a Neanderthal had
both Neanderthal and Homo sapien ancestry and she became pregnant
with a fetus that had two copies of the Homo
sapien version of the gene, then her body might not

(17:38):
be able to provide enough oxygen for that fetus to grow.
This genetic incompatibility might have made it easier for Homo
sapian mothers to carry their pregnancies to term, and this
could potentially explain why about two percent of the genome
of modern humans from Europe and Asia comes from Neanderthals,
but there is no Neanderthal influence in modern heath humans.

(18:00):
Mitochondrial DNA, which comes only from the maternal line.

Speaker 2 (18:05):
Yes, provides a hypothesis for why it appears that there
were no Neanderthal women carrying babies to term and providing
part of this future genetic lineage. Next, research at Neanderthal
sites in Crimea and Ukraine suggests that Neanderthals used ochre
for symbolic purposes like drawing and marking things. This conclusion

(18:29):
comes from a collection of sixteen pieces of ochre that
were basically used as crayons up to seventy thousand years ago.
Some of these ochre pieces appeared to have been intentionally
shaped into a point, so this point was put there
on purpose, It was not just a byproduct of the
ochre being rubbed against a surface to market. This is

(18:50):
not the only evidence of Neanderthals using symbols or making art.
We've talked about some of them before on the show.
Some other examples that people have discovered include finger flutings,
the use of charcoal and other pigments, and handprints intentionally
made onto surfaces, all of which date back before the
development of Homo sapiens.

Speaker 1 (19:11):
And lastly, research published in the journal nature suggests that
Neanderthals were making controlled use of fire much much longer
ago than previously thought. Earlier research put Neanderthal fire making
in what's now northern France about fifty thousand years ago,
but according to this research, Neanderthals in what's now England

(19:32):
were deliberately making fires four hundred thousand years ago. This
conclusion came from research at a palaeolithic site in Suffolk,
which revealed baked clay and flint hand axes that had
been cracked by extreme heat. There were also pieces of
iron pyrite, which can make sparks when struck against a flint,

(19:54):
and that is not found naturally in this area, so
it would have been brought from somewhere else. Geochemical tests
suggest that things were burned at this same area repeatedly,
and that the temperature of those fires exceeded seven hundred
degrees celsius or two hundred and ninety two degrees fahrenheit,
which they said ruled out this being the result of

(20:16):
something like natural wildfires. Next up, we have just a
few edibles and potables. Archaeologists in Turkia have found five
loaves of bread dating back to the seventh and eighth
centuries stamped with religious imagery. These were likely used for
eucharistic rituals within the Greek Orthodox Church, either as part

(20:37):
of communion or as blessed bread that was distributed to
the congregation after services. These loaves are very heavily carbonized
and a lot of their detail is really well preserved.
It was surprising to me how clearly you can see
these designs on the surface of the bread. Next, archaeologists

(20:59):
in Tunisia have unearthed a Roman era olive oil processing complex,
which is the second largest one ever uncovered in Tunisia.
One of the facilities there has twelve oil presses, while
another nearby has eight. This highlights how important olive oil
production was to the area and to the Romans.

Speaker 2 (21:19):
There are also cisterns and a water collection basin. And lastly,
archaeologists in Switzerland have found an amphora full of sardine
bones in fish sauce dating back to the Roman era,
which is the first direct archaeological evidence that people were
eating sardines in Roman Switzerland. This was found during archaeological

(21:41):
work and a Roman site in advance of a construction project.
Now we will move on from edibles and potables to art,
and we also have just a few art finds this time.
I feel like this last three months had like a
little smattering of a lot of different things and then
a lot of updates and randomness. Researchers have identified the

(22:03):
subject of a nineteenth century portrait painted by Thomas Phillips.
This portrait shows a black man in a military uniform,
which is not something that you see a lot in
nineteenth century art. He's wearing a fur police, meaning he
was in a cavalry regiment, and he's also holding a
symbol meaning the musical instrument symbol, suggesting that he was

(22:25):
a musician. These details, together with his race and his
apparent age in the painting, led researchers to a man
named Thomas James, who was born in Montserrat in seventeen
eighty nine and enslaved from birth. At some point, he
made his way to England and worked as a servant
before enlisting in the eighteenth Light Dragoons and earning the

(22:48):
Waterloo Medal for bravery during his military service. This research
came about after the National Army Museum acquired this painting,
and the painting has also been conserved and gone on
display at the museum.

Speaker 1 (23:01):
Researchers have evaluated cave art in Southwest Texas in northern Mexico,
finding that the oldest works in them were created six
thousand years ago and that the practice continued for about
four thousand years. Over that time, the style, imagery, motifs,
and use of color in the artwork in these caves
remained very consistent. That makes these paintings one of the

(23:24):
longest lasting artistic traditions in North America. They made this
determination by extracting small amounts of carbon which probably came
from an organic binder that was used to make the paint,
and then they used accelerator mass spectrometry to estimate the
age of that carbon. And lastly, research published in the

(23:46):
Journal of World Prehistory has looked at artwork from the
Halafian culture of northern Mesopotamia. This includes depictions of flowers, shrubs,
and other botanical elements on pottery, some of which are
naturalistic and others of which are more abstract. Many of
the images are all very symmetrical, and sometimes they show

(24:06):
a progression in the number of objects like flowers and
flower pedals. In a sequence of four eight, sixteen, thirty
two and sixty four. So this has connections both to
art history and the history of mathematics, as the people
who made this art seem to be thinking about space sequences,
patterns and geometric progression. We are going to take another

(24:30):
sponsor break and then we'll talk about some shipwrecks. Okay,
as we said before the break, it is time for shipwrecks.
Researchers working in the Eastern Mediterranean have investigated the cargo

(24:51):
of three Iron Age ships at the archaeological site of
Tel Door. The cargoes of these ships date back to
between the eleventh and seventh centuries BCE, and they are
the first Iron Age cargoes associated with this ancient city.
They provide some evidence of the trading network that existed

(25:12):
in this area thousands of years ago. So, for example,
the oldest cargo dates back to the eleventh century BCE
and includes a collection of storage.

Speaker 2 (25:22):
Jars as well as an anchor. The jars are a
style that was connected to the Phoenician coast, while the
inscriptions on them suggest connections to both Cyprus and Egypt.
This excavation work is ongoing only about a quarter of
the sand bar where these cargoes are located. Has been investigated.

Speaker 1 (25:43):
The remains of a wooden ship have been found on
Malacca Island in Malaysia. This probably dates to the thirteenth
century and is made of saga wood, which is native
to the area. It's estimated to be about fifty meters
to seventy meters in length, and it's been described as
one of the area's most significant archaeological finds. As of October,

(26:04):
the plan for this wreck was to conserve and preserve
it and eventually to place it in one of Malacca's museums.

Speaker 2 (26:12):
Next, the only known surviving Josun dynasty's ship has been
recovered from the seabed off the coast of South Korea.
This cargo ship is known as Mato Flour. It's about
six hundred years old and it was discovered in twenty fifteen.
Over the last decade, hundreds of pieces of cargo had
already been brought up from the ship, including some carefully

(26:35):
labeled cargo tags that gave the ship's origin and destination.
Those were two different cities and what's now South Korea.
The cargo includes one hundred and fifty two pieces of
light blue green stoneware and this hull that is the
part that's most relevant today is largely intact. It was
reburied during earlier excavations, but then uncovered and retrieved this year.

(27:00):
As with this shipwreck that was found in Malacca. The
goal for this is for the ship to be preserved
and then displayed in a museum, although that process is
expected to take about fifteen years. The shipwreck that probably
got the most headlines at the end of last year
is a pleasure barge dating back to the first century
CE off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt. Barges like these

(27:24):
were described in the work of Greek geographer and historian
Strabo and depicted in artwork, but this is the first
one to be unearthed off the coast of Egypt. This
barge was built for shallow water. It had no sails
and was powered by a crew of about twenty rowers,
with space in the middle for a pavilion and a
decorated cabin. It is possible that this ship sank in

(27:49):
an earthquake. It was found near the remains of the
Temple of Isis that was known to have been destroyed
in an earthquake, but this raised some questions about whether
this ship was actually being used as a pleasure craft
like it is a style of barge that the Ptolemies
were known to use to host extravagant beasts on board.

(28:11):
But it's possible that it belonged to this temple, and
that the temple might have been using it for some
kind of ceremonial purposes rather than as a quote pleasure barge.

Speaker 1 (28:20):
The one hundred seven year old shipwreck known as the
Iron Scow, which is lodged above Niagara Falls, shifted in
the river in November, moving downstream about ten feet. This
ship became stuck in the river in nineteen eighteen when
it was being used for a dredging operation and broke
loose of the tug boat that was towing it back
to shore. The two men who were aboard made it

(28:43):
to safety, although their rescue took about seventeen hours total.

Speaker 2 (28:48):
The Iron Scow has shifted and moved periodically since then,
including during severe weather on Halloween in twenty nineteen and
when icy weather damaged it in twenty two too. Experts
suggest that over time, pieces of this wreck will be
broken off and swept over the falls until it eventually
just kind of gradually disappears. They say it's not likely

(29:11):
for the whole wreck to be dramatically swept over all
at once. Of course, having said that, now, I hope
that's not what happens. Yeah, between now and when this
episode comes out, making it immediately wrong.

Speaker 1 (29:23):
Yeah. In the fourth century BCE boats attacked the island
of All's off the coast of Denmark. The identity of
the attackers is not known, but they were fought off.
Their weapons were piled into one of their boats, which
was then sunk into a bog, apparently as an offering.
This boat and its contents were discovered in the bog

(29:45):
in the eighteen eighties and are the only example of
a prehistoric plank boat to be found in Scandinavia. In December,
researchers announced that they had found a fingerprint in the
tar that was used to waterproof the boat.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
Researchers have described this fingerprint as highly unusual. Fingerprints just
aren't something that they see a lot in boats that
are this old. The tar also has offered clues to
where the boat came from. So the waterproofing material made
from pine pitch and animal fat, and there are not
a lot of pine forests in Denmark, so it's possible

(30:22):
that the pitch was a trade good, or that the
ship itself was made somewhere else along the Baltic See
where pine forests are more common, and lastly, something that.

Speaker 1 (30:33):
Might be shipwreck related. Late last year, teams working to
restore rock pools on the coast of Whales started digging
up boots, hundreds and hundreds of Victorian boots. They all
seem to date back to the same time period, although
they are in different sizes and styles. Locals have talked
about finding shoes before this, but this rock pool restoration

(30:57):
project has found a lot of them, reported two hundred
of them in one week toward the end of December.
There's speculation that this is cargo from a ship that
sank after hitting an outcropping known as Tusker Rock not
far from where the shoes were found. Next we will
move on to some medical stuff. Researchers have found what

(31:18):
they believe is evidence of infantile cortical hyperostosis also called
icch or caffe disease, which is a rare disease that's
not often seen in the archaeological record. This child was
probably about three years old when they died, and their
skeleton was found in a tomb in Turkya that dated
back to the tenth to the twelfth century, and there

(31:40):
were other skeletal remains in this tomb as well. This
conclusion involved ruling out multiple other possible causes of unusual
features in the skeleton, including parts of the bones that
were swollen or thickened, and a discrepancy between age estimates
coming from the child's teeth and long bones. The long

(32:00):
bones appear to be those of a child between the
ages of eighteen months and two years, while the teeth
seemed to come from a two and a half or
three and a half year old.

Speaker 2 (32:11):
Icate usually develops around five months of age, although it
can develop earlier, including in utero, and then it typically
resolves around the age of three. This is apparently about
the age that this child died, and the child's skeleton
shows some signs of recovery before their death at about

(32:31):
three next.

Speaker 1 (32:33):
Researchers at the Institute Pasteux have found evidence of two
different diseases in the remains of soldiers from Napoleon's army
who were part of the retreat from Russia in eighteen twelve.
They extracted material from the teeth of thirteen soldiers and
Genetic analysis identified two pathogens, Salmonella and di rico, which

(32:54):
causes paratiephoid fever, and Brellia recorrentis, which causes relapsing fever,
both of which line up with historical accounts describing illnesses
among the soldiers. The two diseases have somewhat overlapping symptoms,
including fevers, fatigue, and gastro intestinal distress. Previous studies have

(33:15):
also identified two other pathogens among Napoleon's retreating army, Ricketzia prawezechi,
which causes epidemic typhus, and Bartonella quintana, which causes trench fever.

Speaker 2 (33:27):
The first evidence of plague DNA in Edinburgh has been
unearthed in the skeleton of a teenager who died in
the fourteenth century. He was buried in Edinburgh's Saint Giles
Cathedral and researchers had not expected him to have plague
because he was buried on his own in an individual
grave rather than in one of the mass graves that

(33:49):
was used for plague victims. Two known plague outbreaks took
place in Edinburgh around the time he died. Plague DNA
has not been identified in Edinburgh's archaeological record before now,
in part because the use of DNA research to make
these kinds of determinations is still relatively new and has

(34:10):
not been done as much in these particular sites.

Speaker 1 (34:14):
And in other plague news. Research published in the journal
Communications Earth and Environment in December suggests that a volcanic
eruption in thirteen forty five may have set the stage
for the spread of bubonic plague in Europe. The idea
is that the debris from the eruption blocked the sun,
which lowered temperatures across much of the Mediterranean, which caused

(34:36):
crop failures in famine, which led cities in Italy to
import grain, and rats and fleas infected with Yoursennia pestis
came along with that grain.

Speaker 2 (34:47):
This volcanic eruption probably would have happened somewhere in the tropics,
but it is not clear exactly where or when. Various
physical evidence does suggest that there was volcanic activity happening.
That includes some tree ring evidence suggesting cold wet winters
from thirteen forty five to thirteen forty seven and volcanic

(35:08):
sulfur found in ice samples from Antarctica and Greenland and.

Speaker 1 (35:13):
To conclude this installment of Unearthed. A number of repatriations
were reported on in the last three months of twenty
twenty five, including cultural and ceremonial objects belonging to Indigenous
and First Nations communities in the United States and Canada,
and children who died at Carlisle Indian Industrial School who
were returned to the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma

(35:36):
and the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma. There were also a
lot of looted and illegally sold artworks that were returned
to their home countries. But one story in particular stood
out to Tracy as different from some of what we
have talked about on the show before. It's not exactly
a repatriation since both of the works it involves are

(35:56):
still in the museum.

Speaker 2 (35:58):
So in October, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston announced
that it had reached an agreement with the descendants of
David Drake, also known as Dave the Potter, who made
stoneware vessels while enslaved in Old Edgefield, South Carolina, in
the nineteenth century. During his lifetime, he made thousands of

(36:19):
these vessels, and he inscribed a lot of them with poetry,
which is significant because at the time it was not
legal for enslaved people to read or write. These jars
were sold to benefit his enslaver, and Drake was not
compensated for his work, and the pottery that he made
was not considered to be his. So the Museum of

(36:41):
Fine Arts Boston had acquired two of Drake's jars, one
in nineteen ninety seven and the other in twenty eleven,
and under this new agreement that was announced last October,
the museum restored the ownership of both jars to Drake's descendants.
It then repurchased one of the jars, called the Poem Jar,

(37:03):
from the family. The other jar currently still belongs to
the family, but they have loaned it to the museum
long term.

Speaker 1 (37:11):
That's a sort of a lovely end to that story.
It is.

Speaker 2 (37:14):
And I've seen these jars and some of the other
jars from the same era in the Museum of finer
They're very striking, And so when I saw this headline
number one, I was thinking about, Oh, I've seen those jars.
I know what we're talking about. But then also I
don't recall talking about the ownership of something being restored

(37:34):
to the descendants of an enslaved person on the show before,
so that is why I chose this one in particular
to talk about in more depth than just briefly mentioning.
Have you also chosen a particular listener mail to talk about?
I sure have.

Speaker 1 (37:50):
This email is from Ruth. Hello.

Speaker 2 (37:53):
I'm a longtime listener since back in the short form
days of Sarah and Deblina. It's been one of my
constants in the podcast stirtation for nearly fifteen years. The
reason for emailing today is that in your recent Christmas
Carol podcast, the title of Sans book History of the
Violin perked my ears. I ran to my bookshelf, and

(38:14):
sure enough, I've been reading that very book often on
this year in my effort to learn more about the
history of the instrument. I'm a lifelong violinist and a
medieval reenactor, hence my interest. It is a wandering and
dense read, and I must admit I'm only about fifty
pages in, but I was delighted to hear the mention
and that I recognized it's thee cover of book an

(38:35):
attached photo. I enjoyed the episode for many reasons, not
the least of which being that my mother's name is Carol,
and it was fun to learn the history of the
word for pet tax find my precocious and photogenic baby
tune a doodle Doo, the textedo, and the lovely laser
whose brain has no wrinkles. Thoughts just slide right off
the void.

Speaker 1 (38:54):
Baby.

Speaker 2 (38:54):
Much love and happy holidays, Ruth uh Okay. First of all,
it did occur to me that anyone would be reading
the History of the Violin by William Sands in today's
modern era, except maybe like musical instrument historians. So the

(39:15):
fact that someone is reading it right now, I just
I love it. I love it so much. Also, boy,
am I not surprised that it is described in this
email as wandering and dnse. That feels absolutely like William
Sand's m for writing things. We've also got good goodness,
just some really adorable kitty cats. I always love kitty cats.

(39:38):
We have said many times. I have two black cats
that live in my house. They completely stole our hearts
when we adopted them, and they are great. Man, if
you have cats your life, I hope they let you
snuggle them. They don't have to be smart, they just

(39:59):
have to be cats. And if they don't let you
snuggle them. I hope they bring joy into your life
in some other way. Thank you so much, Ruth for
this email and the pictures. I love all of it.
If you would like to send us a note about
this or any other podcast or at history Podcasts atiheartradio
dot com, and you can subscribe to our show on
iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you like to your podcasts.

(40:26):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
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Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

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