January 5, 2015 • 33 mins
It's time to look at some of the stuff that was literally or figuratively dug up in 2014. This episode includes: connections to past episodes, some extreme serendipity, shipwrecks, a couple of Holocaust-related unearthings, and lots of Oldest Things Ever.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry and it's
that time of year again. Uh, we're talking about things
that have been unearthed. Uh. Usually this has sort of
(00:23):
grown from a kind of one episode thing to two episodes,
and this year we've had four episodes because we had
a whole episode on the Franklin Expedition, a whole episode
on Stonehenge. Now we're going to get into our year
and roundup of all the stuff that was literally and
figuratively dug up in and there's been a lot this year.
(00:45):
So we got to go to two parts. Yep, yep,
we had I think we had two parts last year,
but we didn't have additional dedicated episodes. So if you
love Unearthed season, you're super set this year. Uh. We
know that you are listening to this in ten at
the earliest, but as we are recording it is still
(01:06):
so when we say this year, we mean uh. And
we also have a couple of caveats. So last year,
Holly and I came onto the show in March and
we didn't really start keeping up with unearthed things until
later in the year. So this year I started a
pinboard and basically kept up with things that were unearthed
(01:26):
beginning in January, which means that by the time that
it became time to record, we had like a hundred
and six things to talk about. We are not going
to talk about all hundred and six things, because even
with two episodes, that's that's too much to talk about. Also,
in spite of having Google alerts and RSS feeds and
(01:47):
all of this other stuff, there are some parts of
the world that are highly underrepresented. Here. For example, I
went looking specifically about news from Africa that was not
from Egypt. I had a really hard time. So I
don't know how much of that is my fault for
not being a very good searcher, and how much of
it is like indicative of the media not paying a
(02:09):
lot of attention to what's happening in Africa. Probably a
combination of both. So that's on my to do list
to work on for Unearthed season. So this episode includes uh,
lots of connections to past episodes, some extreme serendipity, shipwrecks,
(02:29):
a couple of Holocausts related under things, and lots of
the oldest things ever discovered. It's a whole lot of fun.
So starting off, remember all of that hubbub that went
on about Richard the Third last year still in the news.
This time it's following DNA analysis. So first things first,
that is definitely Richard the third uh per the DNA evidence. However,
(02:52):
the team had a little more trouble with the party
of the analysis that involved matching his DNA to his
living relatives. Everything went pretty smoothly on the maternal side,
but on the paternal side, Richard's DNA does not match
his purported male descendants. The explanation that most often comes
up in the original paper is false paternity, and that's
(03:12):
what quotes around it. In other words, someone was not
really being the daddy somewhere along the line between Richard
the Third and his own living male relatives. And this
of course gets into all manner of speculation about what
and who and whether it affects the current royal family.
But we're not going to get into all of that.
As we've learned the hard way that people are very
(03:33):
ready to yell at us for consiping about Richard the
Third and his family line. Yeah, but we got so
much hate about that and other King kingly news that
ties back to past episodes of the podcast. A set
of remains was found there were actually several sets, but
found in a tomb in Greece in the late nineteen seventies,
(03:56):
and there has been intense speculation ever since then about
exactly whose remains these were. But this year researchers announced
that they had confirmed that they're the remains of King
Philip the Second, Alexander the Great's father. These bones, as
we said, had just been highly controversial for all this time,
and the final identification mostly came by examining his injuries,
(04:19):
so it was kind of a forensic anthropology bones study.
There was evidence of sinusitis that could have come from
being hit in the face with an arrow, as happened
to Philip the Second. There was also damage to his
ribs that matches a blow from a lance, which Philip
the Second also sustained around three forty five or three
(04:41):
forty four BC. So there is ongoing debate about the
identity of all the other skeletons that were in the tomb,
but this one in particular King Philip the Second, and
related to you. One of my favorite episodes, uh an
international expedition to the shipwreck that gave us the Anti
kids A mechanism has turned up so much additional stuff.
(05:04):
Earlier efforts to study the wreck have failed because the
area was particularly treacherous, but this time divers were outfitted
with exo suits, which are described as wearable submarines, which
let them go into very deep water for hours at
a time without the risk of decompression sickness. So it's
a huge advancement in terms of the technology that allows
(05:24):
them to really explore these kinds of things, and their
findings include ship components. They found a spear from a
life size statue, there is an intact jug and other treasures.
They were able to make a really extensive three D
map of the area, including artifacts that are scattered around
the sea floor around the wreck, and there may be
(05:45):
some more about this in as They are indeed planning
to return to the wreck for further study, which is
especially awesome considering that they believe this ship is mostly
full of amazing Greek treasures. For all we know there
is another Antikithera mechanism down there that would be cool. Yeah.
The prevailing theory is that this is basically a ship
that was specifically loaded up with awesome Greek things and
(06:07):
then set sail for Rome, which means that further exploration
of it would be incredible. This is actually not the
only anti Citherin news that came in. James Evans, who's
a professor of physics, and Christian Karmen, who's a history
of science professor, got together and published a paper in
(06:27):
which they claimed that the anti Cithera mechanisms start date,
so sort of the date on which it's calculations begin
was in two hundred five b C. So if you
have not heard the anti Cithera mechanism uh episode that
we have in the archive, this is basically an astronomical
(06:47):
clock that has been dubbed the world's first computer. So
what these two professors did was they compared the mechanism
and the astronomical events that it sort of shows with
records of historical eclipses to figure out exactly where they
lined up. So their work suggests that the device is
actually between fifty and a hundred years older than we
(07:09):
all previously thought. If this is true, it up in
some of our prior understanding of the device because it
means that number one people were able to predict eclipses
much earlier than previously believed. Number two, it means that
the math that was used to put this whole thing
together was actually Babylonian arithmetic and not Greek trigonometry. It
(07:33):
lastly means that there's a possibly apocryphal story about the
antikithera device that could actually be true, and that story
is that Archimedes made something similar. Uh. This earlier time
frame of when it was potentially made means that it actually,
possibly very conjecturally existed during archimedes lifetime, which was not
(07:55):
possible in the earlier thinking that the thing was made
a hundred years later. I suspect there will be ongoing
discoveries about the anti kids or a mechanism, because it is.
It's one of those things where there are constantly new
analysis analyzes going on and new versions of it made
out of lego yes uh. In other news, during restoration
(08:18):
work at took At Castle, an archaeological team found along
with a secret tunnel to dungeons and they believed that
these were where Prince Vlad the Third a k Vlad
the Impaler was imprisoned and tortured in the early fifteenth
century while he was being held captive in Romania. A
lot of that was reported as Vlad the Impaler's dungeon found,
(08:41):
which really made it sound like was the dungeon he
was torturing people. Yeah, those those headlines were very misleading.
They really were. It was kind of disappointing to a
number of people. A sand storm appears to have revealed
some previously unknown Nascal lines in Peru. These geoglyphs were
(09:04):
spotted by pilot Eduardo Haran Gomez de la Torre, and
these newly discovered lines include a snake that's about a
hundred and ninety six ft long, a bird, a creature
that looks like a camel, and some zigzags. So archaeologists
were hoping to confirm all of these findings that that
they really were new and not previously discovered. I was
(09:25):
not able to define confirmation of what they had found yet.
Once we actually recorded this episode, the BBC reported that
some bones found under a Colchester department store were Buddhica bones,
and we put Boudica in quotes there. These bones, from
a jaw and a shin were found among burned building
rubble and appeared to date back to the time of
(09:47):
Boudica's rebellion. The BBC quoted Philip Crummy, director of the
Colchester arch Archaeological Trust, is saying they were quote likely
to be the remains of people who died in buildings
set on fire by the British as they over round
the town. Also at this department store, and similarly mixed
in with burn debris, was a collection of Roman jewelry,
(10:07):
also dating back to the year sixty one. The collection
includes a small jewelry box along with armlets, necklaces and
bracelets of silver and gold. The theory is that these
were buried before their owner fled from Budhica's army. This
is an example where I had two different articles that
were from two different uh months of the year, and
(10:27):
they were both about this department store, and I was like,
is it the same department store? Yes, it appears to
be the same department store. In our last connection to
a previous episode of Stuffie misson history class last year,
a tooth was found on Beacon Island, off the coast
of Western Australia. This year, surveys started in that area
(10:50):
in the hope of finding remains from the wreck of
the Batavia and the bloody events that followed it. But
before they could get into doing that research, they had
to remove a lot of more recent structures and whatnot
from the area because they were going to get in
the way of their study. This included some concrete slabs
that are between fifty and sixty years old and that
(11:10):
they were pretty sure we're covering up things that were
potentially of archaeological significance. Uh. These tools that they're using
for their surveys include geophysical remote sensing tools like ground
penetrating radar, and what they're looking for is burial sites
of the people who were killed in the aftermath of
(11:30):
the the wreck of the Batavia and the mutiny plans
that we're going on. So I'm hopeful that when we
do unearthed in we'll have lots of new news about
the Batavia to share with everyone. Yes, before we move
on to some particularly serendipitous fines, I mean, all the
(11:51):
fins are pretty serendipitous, but these ones are particularly So
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return this time to the world of uh extra serendipity.
In January, Antiquities Minister Mohammed Ibraheim of Egypt announced that
(13:57):
a University of Pennsylvania team had identified the two of
pharaoh uh so Becco Tep the First and so Becco
Tep the First is believed to be the founder of
the Thirteenth Dynasty, which was three thousand, eight hundred years ago,
and he ruled Egypt for about four and a half years,
which is rather long for a pharaoh during that time period. However,
(14:18):
before this discovery, there was really not a lot known
about him or his rule, which made this a particularly
important finding. However, the extra serendipitous part is that while
excavating this tomb, the team also found the tomb of
a completely different, previously unknown king. This was King wosirib
(14:38):
snib K, and this tomb had sadly been pretty damaged
by looters who had stolen a lot of the artifacts
and damaged the king's mummy, but the team was able
to reconstruct some of the remains, and although it's previously unknown,
it's possible that uh this was actually someone who was
named in the Turin king list, but the similar name
(15:02):
on that list is spelled completely differently from this one,
so it's possible that while excavating the tomb of one king,
they found the tomb of another king who was previously
unknown to history. On another fabulous happenstance, four children that
were on an archaeological dig for school kids dug up
(15:22):
an extremely rare gold hair ornament in kirkha in Northumberland.
The four boys were all between the ages of seven
and ten, and we're completely surprised when it turned out
that the plastic do dad that they thought they'd found
was in point of fact and extremely rare artifact dating
back to b C. There have only been ten similar
(15:42):
fines in Britain. This one, in a strange coincidence, is
a match set with one that was dug up in
ninety five, and two of the boys, Luca and Sebastian Alderson,
are the great great grandsons of Joseph Alderson, who was
part of the team that dug up that earlier ornament.
So there's kind of layered serendipity to this one. Yes. Uh.
(16:04):
Curator Barry Ager, who's a Viking specialist at the British
Museum whose name I hope I am pronouncing correctly, found
an ancient Celtic artifact inside and an item that the
museum already had in its collection. This item was a
lump of organic material that had been excavated from a
Viking burial site. The purported organic lump was excavated in
(16:28):
Norway in the eighteen hundreds and acquired by the museum
in eighteen ninety one, but it wasn't until this year
the Ager, who was basically looking through the collection in
advance of a visit from another researcher, saw something sticking
out of it that he thought warranted an extra look.
It turned out to be a Celtic disk that had
(16:48):
probably been plundered by the Vikings and returned to what's
now Norway with them. Probably this disc used to be
part of a shrine, but the Vikings who looted it
turned it into a brooch and further research on this
organic lump is now ongoing. And this was not the
only British artifact found in Viking plunder this year. Examination
(17:10):
of several Viking hordes in yielded ancient artifacts from all
over the British aisles. And we have one more serendipitous slash.
Oh this was in the museum's collection. The whole time story.
Researchers at the Pen Museum rediscovered a complete six thousand,
five hundred year old skeleton in their own collection. The
(17:32):
skeleton had been in storage in the museum for eighty
five years, and it was found again by chance while
the museum was working to digitize all of its old documentation.
So everyone knew that the box was there, they just
didn't know what was in it. Since it had no
catalog card or number, it wasn't matched up with any documentation.
They finally managed to match the mystery box to a
(17:55):
skeleton that had been labeled quote not accounted for during
a previous look through the archive in nine, and the
records and the skeleton both existed all of that time.
It wasn't until they were trying to digitize all the
records that they were able to match up the skeleton
with its paperwork. A complete skeleton from this long ago
(18:18):
is extremely rare, and this one was dug up in
what's now Iraq and was from one of forty eight
graves that were excavated there between ninety nine and nineteen thirty.
And now moving on to a listener favorite shipwrecks, So
a new year's low tide revealed the remains of a
shipwreck in ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. Five of the ship's
(18:40):
iron ribs had actually been uncovered way back in two
thousand eight during another low tide, and this time the
low tide revealed forty two of the ship's ribs, which
gave researchers a lot more to go on in figuring
out its identity. The Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program, and that's
an organization that researches the maritime history and our geology
(19:00):
of the St. Augustine area started combing through old records
to try to find out what this was. By checking
the wreckage that had been revealed against a list of
shipwrecks that had happened in the area between eighteen sixty
six and nineteen seventy four, they figured out that it
was the British Flag Deliverance, which was a motorized sailing
ship that wrecked in December of nineteen forty seven. Also
(19:24):
this year, a team of Russian excavators who were working
underwater off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt found a collection
of French artillery that belonged to Napoleon's fleet. These had
been on board a French vessel known as La Patoyal,
which had been part of a French expeditionary fleet in seventeen.
This collection included guns, pistols and cannons, which were all
(19:48):
sent to the Grand Egyptian Museum for restoration and further study.
Noah's Office of National Marine Sanctuaries released three D images
of the wreck of the s s City of Rio
de jan Niro, which sunk off San Francisco, California, in
February of nineteen o one. One. Twenty eight of the
two and ten people aboard were killed in that sinking,
(20:10):
most of them immigrants from China and Japan, and now
the wreck lies just outside the Golden Gate Bridge. The
mapping project revealed that the wreck is in very poor
condition and it's encased in sediment. The team also mapped
another nearby wreck, the SS City of Chester as well.
And moving away from shipwrecks, we have a couple of
(20:31):
things that are related to the Holocaust. So before going
into hiding with her family and Frank gave her marbles,
a book and a tea set to her playmate, Tusia
Cooper's who I hope I'm saying her name correctly. She
gave them to Tusia for safekeeping and her friend was
supposed to hold onto them until Anne came home again,
(20:53):
but as we probably all know, and died of typhus
in a concentration camp just weeks before it was liberated
after the end of the Holocaust, when only Ann's father
Otto had survived among the family, Tusia offered to return
Ann's belongings to him and he told her to keep them,
so she did, and eventually she sort of forgot that
(21:14):
she had them. She found them when she was moving
in and this year the marbles went on display at
a museum in Rotterdam for the first time. Also Holocaust related,
the Memorial and Museum at Auschwitz ber can Now announced
in March that a tool that was used to tattoo
prisoners had been added to its collection. It's a set
(21:35):
of removable plates and needles that could be put into
a stamp in order to fashion a specific number. And
it's not a whole set of tools. It's just a zero,
two threes, and two stamps that could be sixes or nines.
But there's only one other known tattooing device from the camp,
so this newly discovered one was found along the evacuation
route at auschwitzber can Now. Auschwitz is the only one
(21:57):
of the camps that tattooed its prisoners, which is a
practice that started in At first those numbers were tattooed
onto prisoners chest and then in two they moved the
numbers to the forearm. I think that's probably the most
distressing find that we are talking about this year, at
least in this episode. It is. It's it's one of
(22:19):
those pieces of history that's troubling but important. Yeah, And
this particular article that talked about the Fine discussed how
many of the surviving Holocaust prisoners who were tattooed as
they're getting older, starting to die because it was that
long ago, and how important it is that they were
able to find this piece of evidence to put into
(22:41):
the collection so that people do not forget that that
was part of what was going on. Uh. We have
a lot of things that have been dug up that
are purportedly the oldest of their kind, and we are
going to talk about that after another brief word from
a sponsor. So we are going to conclude this, uh,
(23:02):
this half of our Unearthed with several things that are
purported to be the oldest of their particular item. Another
announcement from way back in January was the discovery that
a collection of calligrapheed bamboo strips was really the world's
oldest base ten multiplication table. These strips themselves were actually
(23:25):
found about five years ago. There were twenty five hundred
of them that had most likely been illegally removed from
a tomb, and they were sold at a market in
Hong Kong. The person who bought them donated them to
a university in Beijing, and at that point they were filthy,
they were covered with mold, and they were all kind
of jumbled together. So after restoring them and studying them
(23:49):
and putting them all back together like a puzzle, researchers
determined that they were from sixty five different ancient texts.
Twenty one of the strips only contained numbers, and these,
when assembled in the right order, reveala times table that
dates back to about two hundred five b C and
looks just like a times table from today. The researchers
(24:11):
think that this multiplication table was used to calculate everything
from land area to tax collection at the time that
it was made. Researchers at the Naturalists Museum in the
Netherlands have found a five hundred forty thousand year old
shell marked with zigzag markings. It's part of a collection
of one hundred and sixty six shells excavated in Java
(24:33):
in the eight nineties. Sentiment within the markings is about
the same age as the shell, making it possibly the
world's oldest geometric carving. This would have made it the
work of human ancestor Homo erectus. Archaeologists in Rome found
the foundations of what's believed to be the oldest temple
from Roman antiquity. The temple when it was built, was
(24:55):
situated at a bend in the Tiber River, which is
now farther away the It was at that point the
stig was particularly challenging because the ruins themselves are deep
enough and close enough to the river that they're actually
below the waterline, so they had to work to make
sure that it didn't just fill up with water. In
addition to the foundation of the temple, the team found
(25:17):
offerings from foreign traders that included miniature drinking vessels, and
for this reason they believed that the temple was specifically
to the goddess Fortuna. Unfortunately, the depth of the pit
and the fact that it was seven and a half
feet below the water table means that they couldn't leave
it open. They had to fill the trench back in
(25:38):
once they were done looking at what was down there.
I would almost hate to be the guy that says, Okay,
we're done looking at this amazing ancient find, fill in
the dirt, which I break my heart to make that call.
I think some of them were actually relieved because working
down there was apparently extremely claustrophobic. That I can believe. Uh.
In other news of fishermen found a one d one
(26:00):
year old message in a bottle, believed to be the
oldest ever found, or at least the oldest found with
the message inside still intact, and that was in the
Baltic Sea off the city of Kiel. While the postcard
itself is intact, the message is largely illegible. Richard Platts
had written the message in while in a nature hike
and then tossed the bottle into the sea. Researchers found
(26:23):
his granddaughter and presented her with the message inside. The
message and the bottle were set for a museum display.
As of this recording, they were also hoping to be
able to piece together with the message actually said I
I'm not sure if they've been able to do that yet.
The oldest known figurative cave painting was reported in the
(26:43):
journal Nature this year. The painting, which was found on
the Indonesian island of Sulawaisti, depicts up batarusa, which is
a very large tusked pig that eats fruit and is
also called a pig deer, which I find kind of charming.
This cave painting is about forty thousand years old, making
(27:03):
it about the same age as the other previously known
oldest figurative paintings in Europe. This is notable because a
lot of archaeologists previously thought that decorative and figurative painting
really started in Europe, but this finding makes it seem
like it was really happening at roughly opposite ends of
(27:24):
the prehistoric world at about the same time. So now
the theory is that perhaps this was something that started
much earlier with early Man in Africa and was taken
with uh the migration out into the rest of the world.
In this same Indonesian cave are a series of handprints
that were made by putting h the hand against the
(27:45):
wall and then blowing ochre over it like a stencil
from your mouth with the ochre in your mouth, which
just to me, I imagine that that is a lot
like having just a mouthful of dirt. So I just
want to applaud the prehistorian artists who did this. I
know it makes me want to refreshing beverage. Real bad uh.
(28:05):
And then to wrap up, archaeologists found the oldest known
pants or trousers depending on where you're from, and two
tombs in China. I love this fine. They date back
to roughly one thousand BC, and they're between three hundred
and five hundred years older than the previous record holder
for the oldest pants. The garments are made of wool,
(28:25):
and they have a three piece construction made of two
straight cut legs and then a crotch piece that connects them.
As an aside, it was most likely domesticating horses and
riding that prompted the construction of pants with separate crotches
so that it would protect your sitting parts. I'm glad
you got to do that one me too, because I remember, um,
I think I posted a link to that on our
(28:47):
Facebook page when it first came up, and uh, there
was much discussion about whether or not I should try
to make a pair, which I never got around to.
But I love that it would But I, um one,
I couldn't wear them like just the a Those kind
of style of panther cut are not for my um
body shape. So it would have been like, these are
neat and then fold them and put them somewhere, and
(29:09):
then we would trick later archaeologists who are like, but no,
we found a bear in Atlanta, how strange. So we
have lots more stuff in our next episode that came
out of the dirt, either literally or figuratively this year. Uh.
Before we close out for the day, though, I have
(29:31):
a little bit of a listener mail. This mail is
from Keith, who says, Hello, Tracy and Holly love the podcast.
I just finished listening to your installment about the Iroquois
theater disaster. He might have come across this in your research,
but in case you didn't, here's an interesting factoid. Frank
Lloyd Right, America's most famous and infinite infamous architect, has
(29:53):
a connection with the theater disaster too. If his sons
were there when it happened. Lloyd Wright and John Lloyd Right,
we're there with their grandmother. Lloyd was thirteen, John was eleven.
John writes about it in his book entitled My Father
Frank Lloyd Wright, which is sometimes published as My Father
Who Is on Earth. He describes the account just like
(30:14):
you did, though with a few extra details. He says,
there was a Christmas extravaganza going on and a double
arctette was singing in the pale moonlight when quote balls
of cotton on fire dropped on the stage. This was
followed by an explosion than the scenery caught fire. That's
the end of the quote. He goes on to describe
Boyd running onto the stage half costumed and half made up,
(30:37):
how we tried to keep the crowd quiet, etcetera. He
said they were sitting in the third row center on
the main floor, which is probably why they made it out.
The three of them got separated in the crowd, but
John found his father, franklod Right when he got out.
He had an office nearby and probably heard the commotion,
he claims. Frank Lloyd Right then ran into the burning
(30:58):
theater to look for Lloyd and their grandmother. All were fine,
but the account obviously affected them. The incident was definitely
a harbinger for Frank Lloyd Right, as he did lose
his ment, his mistress, and her family in a terrible
fire at their home in Spring Green, Wisconsin. A disgruntled
servant let the house on fire only after bolting all
(31:19):
the windows and doors so no one could escape. John
was with Frank Lloyd Right in Chicago when they got
the news. Lloyd Wright had a successful career as an architect,
designing many houses and structures in California and periodically assisting
his father. John Lloyd Wright had a career as an architect,
though he was significantly less successful. He is, however, the
(31:39):
inventor of that ever popular toy, Lincoln Logs. Since Frank
Woyd Wright and his disciples so shaped modern American architecture,
one wonders if the Iroquois theater fire affected their thought
process about design and safety. I can't imagine it, didn't
love the podcast. Keep it up, Keith. So for the record,
I did not time that when I was researching the
(32:01):
theater fire. Uh, this is a great story though, And
I did actually know about, um the fire that was
started by a disfrontled servant. That is a thing that
I have thought about doing an episode on at various
points a couple of times when we've asked people, Hey,
we're looking for some cheery or subject matter. People have
(32:23):
talked to Frank Lloyd Wright and I kind of go
actually so much with the cheery. It just happened. Yeah,
So thank you so much Keith for writing to us.
If you would like to write to us, We're at
History Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com. We're also
on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in history
and on Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler is
(32:45):
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Pinterest at pinterest dot com slash missed in History. If
you would like to learn a little more about what
we've talked about today, you can come to our web website.
Put the word Lad in the search bar. You will
find who was the you'll count Dracula. We can do
that at our parent company's website, which is called stuffworks
(33:05):
dot com. Or could you can come to our website,
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and an archive of every single episode ever. You can
do all that and a whole lot more at how
stuffworks dot com or mimson history dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics because it has
stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry and it's
that time of year again. Uh, we're talking about things
that have been unearthed. Uh. Usually this has sort of
(00:23):
grown from a kind of one episode thing to two episodes,
and this year we've had four episodes because we had
a whole episode on the Franklin Expedition, a whole episode
on Stonehenge. Now we're going to get into our year
and roundup of all the stuff that was literally and
figuratively dug up in and there's been a lot this year.
(00:45):
So we got to go to two parts. Yep, yep,
we had I think we had two parts last year,
but we didn't have additional dedicated episodes. So if you
love Unearthed season, you're super set this year. Uh. We
know that you are listening to this in ten at
the earliest, but as we are recording it is still
(01:06):
so when we say this year, we mean uh. And
we also have a couple of caveats. So last year,
Holly and I came onto the show in March and
we didn't really start keeping up with unearthed things until
later in the year. So this year I started a
pinboard and basically kept up with things that were unearthed
(01:26):
beginning in January, which means that by the time that
it became time to record, we had like a hundred
and six things to talk about. We are not going
to talk about all hundred and six things, because even
with two episodes, that's that's too much to talk about. Also,
in spite of having Google alerts and RSS feeds and
(01:47):
all of this other stuff, there are some parts of
the world that are highly underrepresented. Here. For example, I
went looking specifically about news from Africa that was not
from Egypt. I had a really hard time. So I
don't know how much of that is my fault for
not being a very good searcher, and how much of
it is like indicative of the media not paying a
(02:09):
lot of attention to what's happening in Africa. Probably a
combination of both. So that's on my to do list
to work on for Unearthed season. So this episode includes uh,
lots of connections to past episodes, some extreme serendipity, shipwrecks,
(02:29):
a couple of Holocausts related under things, and lots of
the oldest things ever discovered. It's a whole lot of fun.
So starting off, remember all of that hubbub that went
on about Richard the Third last year still in the news.
This time it's following DNA analysis. So first things first,
that is definitely Richard the third uh per the DNA evidence. However,
(02:52):
the team had a little more trouble with the party
of the analysis that involved matching his DNA to his
living relatives. Everything went pretty smoothly on the maternal side,
but on the paternal side, Richard's DNA does not match
his purported male descendants. The explanation that most often comes
up in the original paper is false paternity, and that's
(03:12):
what quotes around it. In other words, someone was not
really being the daddy somewhere along the line between Richard
the Third and his own living male relatives. And this
of course gets into all manner of speculation about what
and who and whether it affects the current royal family.
But we're not going to get into all of that.
As we've learned the hard way that people are very
(03:33):
ready to yell at us for consiping about Richard the
Third and his family line. Yeah, but we got so
much hate about that and other King kingly news that
ties back to past episodes of the podcast. A set
of remains was found there were actually several sets, but
found in a tomb in Greece in the late nineteen seventies,
(03:56):
and there has been intense speculation ever since then about
exactly whose remains these were. But this year researchers announced
that they had confirmed that they're the remains of King
Philip the Second, Alexander the Great's father. These bones, as
we said, had just been highly controversial for all this time,
and the final identification mostly came by examining his injuries,
(04:19):
so it was kind of a forensic anthropology bones study.
There was evidence of sinusitis that could have come from
being hit in the face with an arrow, as happened
to Philip the Second. There was also damage to his
ribs that matches a blow from a lance, which Philip
the Second also sustained around three forty five or three
(04:41):
forty four BC. So there is ongoing debate about the
identity of all the other skeletons that were in the tomb,
but this one in particular King Philip the Second, and
related to you. One of my favorite episodes, uh an
international expedition to the shipwreck that gave us the Anti
kids A mechanism has turned up so much additional stuff.
(05:04):
Earlier efforts to study the wreck have failed because the
area was particularly treacherous, but this time divers were outfitted
with exo suits, which are described as wearable submarines, which
let them go into very deep water for hours at
a time without the risk of decompression sickness. So it's
a huge advancement in terms of the technology that allows
(05:24):
them to really explore these kinds of things, and their
findings include ship components. They found a spear from a
life size statue, there is an intact jug and other treasures.
They were able to make a really extensive three D
map of the area, including artifacts that are scattered around
the sea floor around the wreck, and there may be
(05:45):
some more about this in as They are indeed planning
to return to the wreck for further study, which is
especially awesome considering that they believe this ship is mostly
full of amazing Greek treasures. For all we know there
is another Antikithera mechanism down there that would be cool. Yeah.
The prevailing theory is that this is basically a ship
that was specifically loaded up with awesome Greek things and
(06:07):
then set sail for Rome, which means that further exploration
of it would be incredible. This is actually not the
only anti Citherin news that came in. James Evans, who's
a professor of physics, and Christian Karmen, who's a history
of science professor, got together and published a paper in
(06:27):
which they claimed that the anti Cithera mechanisms start date,
so sort of the date on which it's calculations begin
was in two hundred five b C. So if you
have not heard the anti Cithera mechanism uh episode that
we have in the archive, this is basically an astronomical
(06:47):
clock that has been dubbed the world's first computer. So
what these two professors did was they compared the mechanism
and the astronomical events that it sort of shows with
records of historical eclipses to figure out exactly where they
lined up. So their work suggests that the device is
actually between fifty and a hundred years older than we
(07:09):
all previously thought. If this is true, it up in
some of our prior understanding of the device because it
means that number one people were able to predict eclipses
much earlier than previously believed. Number two, it means that
the math that was used to put this whole thing
together was actually Babylonian arithmetic and not Greek trigonometry. It
(07:33):
lastly means that there's a possibly apocryphal story about the
antikithera device that could actually be true, and that story
is that Archimedes made something similar. Uh. This earlier time
frame of when it was potentially made means that it actually,
possibly very conjecturally existed during archimedes lifetime, which was not
(07:55):
possible in the earlier thinking that the thing was made
a hundred years later. I suspect there will be ongoing
discoveries about the anti kids or a mechanism, because it is.
It's one of those things where there are constantly new
analysis analyzes going on and new versions of it made
out of lego yes uh. In other news, during restoration
(08:18):
work at took At Castle, an archaeological team found along
with a secret tunnel to dungeons and they believed that
these were where Prince Vlad the Third a k Vlad
the Impaler was imprisoned and tortured in the early fifteenth
century while he was being held captive in Romania. A
lot of that was reported as Vlad the Impaler's dungeon found,
(08:41):
which really made it sound like was the dungeon he
was torturing people. Yeah, those those headlines were very misleading.
They really were. It was kind of disappointing to a
number of people. A sand storm appears to have revealed
some previously unknown Nascal lines in Peru. These geoglyphs were
(09:04):
spotted by pilot Eduardo Haran Gomez de la Torre, and
these newly discovered lines include a snake that's about a
hundred and ninety six ft long, a bird, a creature
that looks like a camel, and some zigzags. So archaeologists
were hoping to confirm all of these findings that that
they really were new and not previously discovered. I was
(09:25):
not able to define confirmation of what they had found yet.
Once we actually recorded this episode, the BBC reported that
some bones found under a Colchester department store were Buddhica bones,
and we put Boudica in quotes there. These bones, from
a jaw and a shin were found among burned building
rubble and appeared to date back to the time of
(09:47):
Boudica's rebellion. The BBC quoted Philip Crummy, director of the
Colchester arch Archaeological Trust, is saying they were quote likely
to be the remains of people who died in buildings
set on fire by the British as they over round
the town. Also at this department store, and similarly mixed
in with burn debris, was a collection of Roman jewelry,
(10:07):
also dating back to the year sixty one. The collection
includes a small jewelry box along with armlets, necklaces and
bracelets of silver and gold. The theory is that these
were buried before their owner fled from Budhica's army. This
is an example where I had two different articles that
were from two different uh months of the year, and
(10:27):
they were both about this department store, and I was like,
is it the same department store? Yes, it appears to
be the same department store. In our last connection to
a previous episode of Stuffie misson history class last year,
a tooth was found on Beacon Island, off the coast
of Western Australia. This year, surveys started in that area
(10:50):
in the hope of finding remains from the wreck of
the Batavia and the bloody events that followed it. But
before they could get into doing that research, they had
to remove a lot of more recent structures and whatnot
from the area because they were going to get in
the way of their study. This included some concrete slabs
that are between fifty and sixty years old and that
(11:10):
they were pretty sure we're covering up things that were
potentially of archaeological significance. Uh. These tools that they're using
for their surveys include geophysical remote sensing tools like ground
penetrating radar, and what they're looking for is burial sites
of the people who were killed in the aftermath of
(11:30):
the the wreck of the Batavia and the mutiny plans
that we're going on. So I'm hopeful that when we
do unearthed in we'll have lots of new news about
the Batavia to share with everyone. Yes, before we move
on to some particularly serendipitous fines, I mean, all the
(11:51):
fins are pretty serendipitous, but these ones are particularly So
let's take a brief moment for a word from a sponsor.
I think that sounds lovely. Our sponsor today is square space,
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Go to squar space dot com slash history to get
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your first purchase. So that is squarespace dot Com an easy, beautiful,
dragon drop intuitive way to make awesome websites. So to
return this time to the world of uh extra serendipity.
In January, Antiquities Minister Mohammed Ibraheim of Egypt announced that
(13:57):
a University of Pennsylvania team had identified the two of
pharaoh uh so Becco Tep the First and so Becco
Tep the First is believed to be the founder of
the Thirteenth Dynasty, which was three thousand, eight hundred years ago,
and he ruled Egypt for about four and a half years,
which is rather long for a pharaoh during that time period. However,
(14:18):
before this discovery, there was really not a lot known
about him or his rule, which made this a particularly
important finding. However, the extra serendipitous part is that while
excavating this tomb, the team also found the tomb of
a completely different, previously unknown king. This was King wosirib
(14:38):
snib K, and this tomb had sadly been pretty damaged
by looters who had stolen a lot of the artifacts
and damaged the king's mummy, but the team was able
to reconstruct some of the remains, and although it's previously unknown,
it's possible that uh this was actually someone who was
named in the Turin king list, but the similar name
(15:02):
on that list is spelled completely differently from this one,
so it's possible that while excavating the tomb of one king,
they found the tomb of another king who was previously
unknown to history. On another fabulous happenstance, four children that
were on an archaeological dig for school kids dug up
(15:22):
an extremely rare gold hair ornament in kirkha in Northumberland.
The four boys were all between the ages of seven
and ten, and we're completely surprised when it turned out
that the plastic do dad that they thought they'd found
was in point of fact and extremely rare artifact dating
back to b C. There have only been ten similar
(15:42):
fines in Britain. This one, in a strange coincidence, is
a match set with one that was dug up in
ninety five, and two of the boys, Luca and Sebastian Alderson,
are the great great grandsons of Joseph Alderson, who was
part of the team that dug up that earlier ornament.
So there's kind of layered serendipity to this one. Yes. Uh.
(16:04):
Curator Barry Ager, who's a Viking specialist at the British
Museum whose name I hope I am pronouncing correctly, found
an ancient Celtic artifact inside and an item that the
museum already had in its collection. This item was a
lump of organic material that had been excavated from a
Viking burial site. The purported organic lump was excavated in
(16:28):
Norway in the eighteen hundreds and acquired by the museum
in eighteen ninety one, but it wasn't until this year
the Ager, who was basically looking through the collection in
advance of a visit from another researcher, saw something sticking
out of it that he thought warranted an extra look.
It turned out to be a Celtic disk that had
(16:48):
probably been plundered by the Vikings and returned to what's
now Norway with them. Probably this disc used to be
part of a shrine, but the Vikings who looted it
turned it into a brooch and further research on this
organic lump is now ongoing. And this was not the
only British artifact found in Viking plunder this year. Examination
(17:10):
of several Viking hordes in yielded ancient artifacts from all
over the British aisles. And we have one more serendipitous slash.
Oh this was in the museum's collection. The whole time story.
Researchers at the Pen Museum rediscovered a complete six thousand,
five hundred year old skeleton in their own collection. The
(17:32):
skeleton had been in storage in the museum for eighty
five years, and it was found again by chance while
the museum was working to digitize all of its old documentation.
So everyone knew that the box was there, they just
didn't know what was in it. Since it had no
catalog card or number, it wasn't matched up with any documentation.
They finally managed to match the mystery box to a
(17:55):
skeleton that had been labeled quote not accounted for during
a previous look through the archive in nine, and the
records and the skeleton both existed all of that time.
It wasn't until they were trying to digitize all the
records that they were able to match up the skeleton
with its paperwork. A complete skeleton from this long ago
(18:18):
is extremely rare, and this one was dug up in
what's now Iraq and was from one of forty eight
graves that were excavated there between ninety nine and nineteen thirty.
And now moving on to a listener favorite shipwrecks, So
a new year's low tide revealed the remains of a
shipwreck in ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. Five of the ship's
(18:40):
iron ribs had actually been uncovered way back in two
thousand eight during another low tide, and this time the
low tide revealed forty two of the ship's ribs, which
gave researchers a lot more to go on in figuring
out its identity. The Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program, and that's
an organization that researches the maritime history and our geology
(19:00):
of the St. Augustine area started combing through old records
to try to find out what this was. By checking
the wreckage that had been revealed against a list of
shipwrecks that had happened in the area between eighteen sixty
six and nineteen seventy four, they figured out that it
was the British Flag Deliverance, which was a motorized sailing
ship that wrecked in December of nineteen forty seven. Also
(19:24):
this year, a team of Russian excavators who were working
underwater off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt found a collection
of French artillery that belonged to Napoleon's fleet. These had
been on board a French vessel known as La Patoyal,
which had been part of a French expeditionary fleet in seventeen.
This collection included guns, pistols and cannons, which were all
(19:48):
sent to the Grand Egyptian Museum for restoration and further study.
Noah's Office of National Marine Sanctuaries released three D images
of the wreck of the s s City of Rio
de jan Niro, which sunk off San Francisco, California, in
February of nineteen o one. One. Twenty eight of the
two and ten people aboard were killed in that sinking,
(20:10):
most of them immigrants from China and Japan, and now
the wreck lies just outside the Golden Gate Bridge. The
mapping project revealed that the wreck is in very poor
condition and it's encased in sediment. The team also mapped
another nearby wreck, the SS City of Chester as well.
And moving away from shipwrecks, we have a couple of
(20:31):
things that are related to the Holocaust. So before going
into hiding with her family and Frank gave her marbles,
a book and a tea set to her playmate, Tusia
Cooper's who I hope I'm saying her name correctly. She
gave them to Tusia for safekeeping and her friend was
supposed to hold onto them until Anne came home again,
(20:53):
but as we probably all know, and died of typhus
in a concentration camp just weeks before it was liberated
after the end of the Holocaust, when only Ann's father
Otto had survived among the family, Tusia offered to return
Ann's belongings to him and he told her to keep them,
so she did, and eventually she sort of forgot that
(21:14):
she had them. She found them when she was moving
in and this year the marbles went on display at
a museum in Rotterdam for the first time. Also Holocaust related,
the Memorial and Museum at Auschwitz ber can Now announced
in March that a tool that was used to tattoo
prisoners had been added to its collection. It's a set
(21:35):
of removable plates and needles that could be put into
a stamp in order to fashion a specific number. And
it's not a whole set of tools. It's just a zero,
two threes, and two stamps that could be sixes or nines.
But there's only one other known tattooing device from the camp,
so this newly discovered one was found along the evacuation
route at auschwitzber can Now. Auschwitz is the only one
(21:57):
of the camps that tattooed its prisoners, which is a
practice that started in At first those numbers were tattooed
onto prisoners chest and then in two they moved the
numbers to the forearm. I think that's probably the most
distressing find that we are talking about this year, at
least in this episode. It is. It's it's one of
(22:19):
those pieces of history that's troubling but important. Yeah, And
this particular article that talked about the Fine discussed how
many of the surviving Holocaust prisoners who were tattooed as
they're getting older, starting to die because it was that
long ago, and how important it is that they were
able to find this piece of evidence to put into
(22:41):
the collection so that people do not forget that that
was part of what was going on. Uh. We have
a lot of things that have been dug up that
are purportedly the oldest of their kind, and we are
going to talk about that after another brief word from
a sponsor. So we are going to conclude this, uh,
(23:02):
this half of our Unearthed with several things that are
purported to be the oldest of their particular item. Another
announcement from way back in January was the discovery that
a collection of calligrapheed bamboo strips was really the world's
oldest base ten multiplication table. These strips themselves were actually
(23:25):
found about five years ago. There were twenty five hundred
of them that had most likely been illegally removed from
a tomb, and they were sold at a market in
Hong Kong. The person who bought them donated them to
a university in Beijing, and at that point they were filthy,
they were covered with mold, and they were all kind
of jumbled together. So after restoring them and studying them
(23:49):
and putting them all back together like a puzzle, researchers
determined that they were from sixty five different ancient texts.
Twenty one of the strips only contained numbers, and these,
when assembled in the right order, reveala times table that
dates back to about two hundred five b C and
looks just like a times table from today. The researchers
(24:11):
think that this multiplication table was used to calculate everything
from land area to tax collection at the time that
it was made. Researchers at the Naturalists Museum in the
Netherlands have found a five hundred forty thousand year old
shell marked with zigzag markings. It's part of a collection
of one hundred and sixty six shells excavated in Java
(24:33):
in the eight nineties. Sentiment within the markings is about
the same age as the shell, making it possibly the
world's oldest geometric carving. This would have made it the
work of human ancestor Homo erectus. Archaeologists in Rome found
the foundations of what's believed to be the oldest temple
from Roman antiquity. The temple when it was built, was
(24:55):
situated at a bend in the Tiber River, which is
now farther away the It was at that point the
stig was particularly challenging because the ruins themselves are deep
enough and close enough to the river that they're actually
below the waterline, so they had to work to make
sure that it didn't just fill up with water. In
addition to the foundation of the temple, the team found
(25:17):
offerings from foreign traders that included miniature drinking vessels, and
for this reason they believed that the temple was specifically
to the goddess Fortuna. Unfortunately, the depth of the pit
and the fact that it was seven and a half
feet below the water table means that they couldn't leave
it open. They had to fill the trench back in
(25:38):
once they were done looking at what was down there.
I would almost hate to be the guy that says, Okay,
we're done looking at this amazing ancient find, fill in
the dirt, which I break my heart to make that call.
I think some of them were actually relieved because working
down there was apparently extremely claustrophobic. That I can believe. Uh.
In other news of fishermen found a one d one
(26:00):
year old message in a bottle, believed to be the
oldest ever found, or at least the oldest found with
the message inside still intact, and that was in the
Baltic Sea off the city of Kiel. While the postcard
itself is intact, the message is largely illegible. Richard Platts
had written the message in while in a nature hike
and then tossed the bottle into the sea. Researchers found
(26:23):
his granddaughter and presented her with the message inside. The
message and the bottle were set for a museum display.
As of this recording, they were also hoping to be
able to piece together with the message actually said I
I'm not sure if they've been able to do that yet.
The oldest known figurative cave painting was reported in the
(26:43):
journal Nature this year. The painting, which was found on
the Indonesian island of Sulawaisti, depicts up batarusa, which is
a very large tusked pig that eats fruit and is
also called a pig deer, which I find kind of charming.
This cave painting is about forty thousand years old, making
(27:03):
it about the same age as the other previously known
oldest figurative paintings in Europe. This is notable because a
lot of archaeologists previously thought that decorative and figurative painting
really started in Europe, but this finding makes it seem
like it was really happening at roughly opposite ends of
(27:24):
the prehistoric world at about the same time. So now
the theory is that perhaps this was something that started
much earlier with early Man in Africa and was taken
with uh the migration out into the rest of the world.
In this same Indonesian cave are a series of handprints
that were made by putting h the hand against the
(27:45):
wall and then blowing ochre over it like a stencil
from your mouth with the ochre in your mouth, which
just to me, I imagine that that is a lot
like having just a mouthful of dirt. So I just
want to applaud the prehistorian artists who did this. I
know it makes me want to refreshing beverage. Real bad uh.
(28:05):
And then to wrap up, archaeologists found the oldest known
pants or trousers depending on where you're from, and two
tombs in China. I love this fine. They date back
to roughly one thousand BC, and they're between three hundred
and five hundred years older than the previous record holder
for the oldest pants. The garments are made of wool,
(28:25):
and they have a three piece construction made of two
straight cut legs and then a crotch piece that connects them.
As an aside, it was most likely domesticating horses and
riding that prompted the construction of pants with separate crotches
so that it would protect your sitting parts. I'm glad
you got to do that one me too, because I remember, um,
I think I posted a link to that on our
(28:47):
Facebook page when it first came up, and uh, there
was much discussion about whether or not I should try
to make a pair, which I never got around to.
But I love that it would But I, um one,
I couldn't wear them like just the a Those kind
of style of panther cut are not for my um
body shape. So it would have been like, these are
neat and then fold them and put them somewhere, and
(29:09):
then we would trick later archaeologists who are like, but no,
we found a bear in Atlanta, how strange. So we
have lots more stuff in our next episode that came
out of the dirt, either literally or figuratively this year. Uh.
Before we close out for the day, though, I have
(29:31):
a little bit of a listener mail. This mail is
from Keith, who says, Hello, Tracy and Holly love the podcast.
I just finished listening to your installment about the Iroquois
theater disaster. He might have come across this in your research,
but in case you didn't, here's an interesting factoid. Frank
Lloyd Right, America's most famous and infinite infamous architect, has
(29:53):
a connection with the theater disaster too. If his sons
were there when it happened. Lloyd Wright and John Lloyd Right,
we're there with their grandmother. Lloyd was thirteen, John was eleven.
John writes about it in his book entitled My Father
Frank Lloyd Wright, which is sometimes published as My Father
Who Is on Earth. He describes the account just like
(30:14):
you did, though with a few extra details. He says,
there was a Christmas extravaganza going on and a double
arctette was singing in the pale moonlight when quote balls
of cotton on fire dropped on the stage. This was
followed by an explosion than the scenery caught fire. That's
the end of the quote. He goes on to describe
Boyd running onto the stage half costumed and half made up,
(30:37):
how we tried to keep the crowd quiet, etcetera. He
said they were sitting in the third row center on
the main floor, which is probably why they made it out.
The three of them got separated in the crowd, but
John found his father, franklod Right when he got out.
He had an office nearby and probably heard the commotion,
he claims. Frank Lloyd Right then ran into the burning
(30:58):
theater to look for Lloyd and their grandmother. All were fine,
but the account obviously affected them. The incident was definitely
a harbinger for Frank Lloyd Right, as he did lose
his ment, his mistress, and her family in a terrible
fire at their home in Spring Green, Wisconsin. A disgruntled
servant let the house on fire only after bolting all
(31:19):
the windows and doors so no one could escape. John
was with Frank Lloyd Right in Chicago when they got
the news. Lloyd Wright had a successful career as an architect,
designing many houses and structures in California and periodically assisting
his father. John Lloyd Wright had a career as an architect,
though he was significantly less successful. He is, however, the
(31:39):
inventor of that ever popular toy, Lincoln Logs. Since Frank
Woyd Wright and his disciples so shaped modern American architecture,
one wonders if the Iroquois theater fire affected their thought
process about design and safety. I can't imagine it, didn't
love the podcast. Keep it up, Keith. So for the record,
I did not time that when I was researching the
(32:01):
theater fire. Uh, this is a great story though, And
I did actually know about, um the fire that was
started by a disfrontled servant. That is a thing that
I have thought about doing an episode on at various
points a couple of times when we've asked people, Hey,
we're looking for some cheery or subject matter. People have
(32:23):
talked to Frank Lloyd Wright and I kind of go
actually so much with the cheery. It just happened. Yeah,
So thank you so much Keith for writing to us.
If you would like to write to us, We're at
History Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com. We're also
on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in history
and on Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler is
(32:45):
miss in history dot tumbler dot com, and we're on
Pinterest at pinterest dot com slash missed in History. If
you would like to learn a little more about what
we've talked about today, you can come to our web website.
Put the word Lad in the search bar. You will
find who was the you'll count Dracula. We can do
that at our parent company's website, which is called stuffworks
(33:05):
dot com. Or could you can come to our website,
which is missing history dot com to find show notes
and an archive of every single episode ever. You can
do all that and a whole lot more at how
stuffworks dot com or mimson history dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics because it has
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