January 7, 2015 • 26 mins
More of the 2014 history news roundup! This time out: We've got several assorted things that didn't really fit any other category, followed by medical unearthings, food and drinks, literature and letters, and everyone's favorite category, EXHUMATIONS.
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Episode Transcript
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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 Training. We are now into part two of our
now traditional Unearthed episode where we talk about all of
(00:22):
the things that were brought up literally and figuratively in
We know that you all are listening at the earliest,
but we are recording it in ten So when we
say this year, that's what we mean. Uh this installment,
we're starting with a random assortment of things that didn't
(00:42):
really fit into any other category, followed by some medical
unearth things, food and drinks, literature and letters, and we're
going to end with so many people's favorite category exhumations.
So starting off the random stuff, a probable Rembrandt, which
(01:03):
was stolen from a French museum during a Bastille Day
celebration in was recovered this year when the man who
had stolen it confessed, so when the robbery happened, the
alarm went off when the thief entered the museum through
a library door, but the authorities did not arrive in
time to catch him. The painting is called lanfant labou
(01:24):
de savant or Child with a soap bubble. There's some
debate about whether it's actually a Rembrandt or just something
that was painted after Rembrant style, but maybe it's recovery
means that we will finally get to find out. On April,
a man named Paul Unyaki un earth of Viking age
figuring in Denmark while using a metal detector. He immediately
(01:45):
contacted a museum. So good on you, Paul for contacting
authorities after finding something that seemed significant. Uh. The museum
confirmed the age of the figure and started conservation measures
on it. The figuring is really small, just four point
six centimeters high, and it's notable because it has very
(02:06):
detailed clothing. This basically makes it a new source of
information about what the Vikings actually wore, and it's also
kind of visually and visually interesting because it has a
three dimensional head on a two dimensional body. The figuring
is wearing an ankle length dress with long sleeves, and
the dress itself has several different textures that are possibly
(02:27):
meant to represent different fabrics. Her hair is pulled back
in a very tight bun, and she has a piece
of jewelry in the front of her dress that might
indicate she's meant to represent the fertility goddess Freya. Aerial
photography help researchers find the remains of two ancient Mayan
cities in the Yucatan Peninsula. For one of the cities,
it was actually a rediscovery archaeologist Eric von You visited
(02:50):
in the nineteen seventies and dubbed it Lagunita, but given
the density of the jungle and the remoteness of the location,
as well as the vagueness of a youth documentation, it
couldn't be found again until more recently. That Lagunita is
a facade with an entryway that's made to look as
though it's a monster's mouth, which I find so sort
of fabulous. Uh. This is a common theme and architecture
(03:13):
of the time in this particular example is very well preserved.
The other city, known as tom Chin, probably existed at
about the same time as Lagunita. Also this year, archaeologists
working at Hadrian's Wall found a two thousand year old
wooden toilet seat perfectly preserved in a muddy trench. Although
(03:33):
other digs have unearthed plenty of Roman latrines and other
toilet artifacts. Dr Andrew Burley, who's the director of excavations there,
said he had never seen a perfectly preserved wooden toilet
seat before. He said that it looked pretty comfortable. He
was also hopeful that they would be able to find
the latrine that went with it, since, in his words,
(03:54):
as reported to the BBC, quote Roman lose are fascinating
places to excavate their drain often contain astonishing artifacts. Dr
Burley also said that he was looking forward to reading
the text of a Roman stylist wax tablet that was
also found at Hadrian's Wall this year. In this case,
he told the BBC, if we're really lucky, the person
(04:16):
using the seat will have had verbal diarrhea and we
will be able to get their personal thoughts about life
years ago. So I'd really like to meet this doctor Burley,
because he sounds like a character that's like the thing
that was on earth. That's more, that's most exciting to
Tracy is that we now know about this. It's that's
(04:36):
a gentleman who does research and sounds hilarious. Uh. In
other poop News, archaeologists in Odense, on the island of
shune In in Denmark found several latrine barrels dating back
to the thirteen hundreds. More notable than the barrels themselves,
is that they still contain what latrines are built to contain.
(04:56):
So the team hopes that the contents of these barrels
will help shed some light on the dietary habits of
fourteen century Danes and for people local to the area,
at least at that point, you could take a free
tour of the dig site on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In April,
a documentary film crew dug up a landfill in New
Mexico where Atari had purportedly dumped millions of copies of
(05:19):
the overwhelmingly unsuccessful video game Et the Extraterrestrial in nineteen
eighty three. The film crew did find many copies of
the game, but not quite the millions rumored to be
buried there. They also found various other Atari video game detritus.
I included that mostly because the long held et lore
(05:40):
that video game kind of tickles me. Yeah, And it's
one of those things that I think the number has
grown over the years, you know, I think it used
to be I remember hearing it once very early on,
is like hundreds of thousands, and it has slowly ballooned
up to millions of cartridges. It balloons to the point
that there's a page about it at snopes dot com.
(06:02):
So we're going to take a brief break for a
word from a sponsor, and then talk about some medical
things that were unearthed this year. Now we will get
back to our lovely unearthing. So the first of our
medical unearth things is only tangentially medical. While testing the
area in preparation for building a new parking facility, the
(06:23):
University of Mississippi Medical Center found that the site contained
at least a thousand bodies. This wasn't at all the
first time that a burial site has been found on
the University of Mississippi campus. Anthropological study is ongoing on
other remains that have already been unearthed before this discovery.
These particular bodies are believed to have been patients at
(06:46):
the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum. The asylum opened in eighteen
fifty five and housed a hundred and fifty people. The
school considered reburying the bodies elsewhere to make room for
the parking facility, but they estimated that it would cost
about three thousand dollars per body, or three million dollars total,
so expansion plans were put on hold uh, and I
(07:09):
could not find an update about exactly where things stood
with that discovery as of right now at whether they've
decided to continue and rebody the but rebury the bodies elsewhere,
or change their construction plans, or exactly what. And it's
entirely possible that that whole thing is bogged down in
paperwork somewhere and there is nothing to discover. Um Scientists
(07:31):
extracted DNA from the tooth of someone who died in
the Justinian plague in the year five forty one. Unlike
several other historical plagues, there really hadn't been very much
medical or biological research on the Justinian plague. But then
housing developers found a burial site near Munich, and as
they examined the evidence, the team figured out that many
(07:52):
of the peoples in the burial site had been buried together,
which was of course very common during plague events, and
they eventually narrowed it down the Justinian plague. A team
led by evolutionary biologist David Wagner at Northern Arizona University
determined that the plague had jumped from rodents to people
and that it was in fact different from the Black
Death during a rehabilitation project at New York City Hall,
(08:16):
a team unearthed artifact that archaeologist thought was maybe a
needle holder or perhaps a spice grinder at first. It's
about a three inch long cylinder with holes in the top,
made from a mammal bone, and it dates sometime back
to the early eighteen hundreds. It was actually found back
in but it wasn't until this year that anthropology student
(08:39):
Lisa Geiger published her findings identifying what it actually was.
She drew her conclusions thanks to a stint as a
docent at the famous Muder Museum. It turns out that
this was not a needle holder or a spice grinder.
It was quote a vaginal syringe which was used for doucing.
Given that this item was found in a big garbage
(09:00):
pile that also included the remnants of what looked like
a giant celebration, so there was lots of food and
lots of liquor, the suspicion is that this was likely
brought with a guest and used as a contraceptive or
for STD prevention and just as a heads up that
would not have been effective. Do not rely on such
a thing for birth control or std prevent race these
(09:24):
public service announcement. Yeah, I'm just taking a page from
stuff mom never told you for a moment that would
not work. In March, researchers announced that they'd revived a
giant virus from the Siberian perma frost, and that it
was still infectious. You may remember seeing these headlines and
people uh saying that this is how the zombie apocalypse
(09:45):
was going to start. So the virus is much larger
than normal, almost as large as a small bacterium, and
it affects amba. They named it Pythovirus sabaricum, with pytho
coming from the Greek word for a large container that's
used to store food or wine. Normally, viruses are extremely compact,
but this one contains lots of empty space, which prompted
(10:06):
evolutionary biologist Jean Michelle Clavery to say, quote, we don't
understand anything anymore. The quotes from the researchers are some
of my favorite things. They're pretty fabulous. So now we
have three things that are in the realm of food
and drink. Divers brought up a bottle marked Seltzer's from
a shipwreck that is known as F thirty three thirty one,
(10:28):
and this is a cargo vessel that sank not far
off the Polish coast, so in the original reports this
was believed to have been a German luxury mineral water
Seltzers was a known brand of exactly that thing in
the early eighteen hundreds, but later on they figured out
that what was in the bottle was actually alcohol, probably
(10:49):
vodka or gin, which was reported to be drinkable but
not necessarily good in Egypt. While doing a routine cleaning
in another team, a Japanese team led by Giro Condo
of Waseda University, stumbled across a completely different, previously unknown
burial place, that of conso Imheb, the head of beer
(11:11):
production for the Court of a Menhotep. The third the
t shaped tomb with a burial chamber in two halls,
and it also includes a painting showing the whole process
of grain fermentation and presenting the finished product to the
mother goddess Moot. It's more than three thousand years old.
U s archaeologists also found what they believed to be
(11:32):
a precursor to Chianti while doing an excavation in Tuscany,
down at the bottom of a hundred and five ft
deep well. They found bronze vessels, cups, coins, and all
kinds of other stuff. The various depths of the well
include artifacts that spanned a fifteen hundred year time span,
so really lots of different layers of things going down
(11:53):
deeply into this well. Included at three different levels are
some very well preserved degree seeds. The findings confirmed that
there were at least three kinds of grapes in use
during Roman and Etruscan times in the area, and researchers
are looking into whether the way they are used might
be similar to the proportions of candy, which is a
(12:14):
seventy fifteen fifteen mix of three different types of grape.
And now we are moving on to the arena of
unearthed elements in literature and letters. So this first one
is not really a discovery, but it is a release.
The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston
released a number of letters from the personal papers of
(12:36):
Jacqueline Kennedy on Nassis this year, and that's a collection
of about twenty two thousand letters, postcards, and other pieces
of mail. In particular, the newly released documents include condolence
letters after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Also included
were the responses sent to each letter, which were handled
by the First Ladies personal secretaries. One particularly sweet note
(12:59):
is from a and You're old Louisian, a girl who said,
I think you're the nicest lady in the whole world.
I mean it too. It's so sweet. It's particularly sweet
because your is misspelled is why oh you are? Which
is charming. In a ten year old note, a scrap
of paper with Jane Austen's handwriting on it was found
(13:22):
tucked into a book at the Jane Austen's home museum.
This is probably a fragment of one of her brother's sermons,
and it says quote men may get into a habit
of repeating the words of our prayers by wrote, perhaps
without thoroughly understanding, certainly without thoroughly feeling their full force
and meaning. The scrap is dated eighteen fourteen, which is
(13:44):
when Austin was working on Mansfield Park, and it has
some similar religious themes to some things that are in
the book. There's also some illegible writing on the back
that the discoverers are hoping to be able to restore
fragments of two poems by Sappho were on Earth from
a private collection this year. It was very serendipitous. The
(14:05):
person who owned the papyrus asked Oxford classicist Dirk abbinc
about the Greek writing on the papyrus, and he immediately
recognized its importance. Sappho was a tremendously influential poet in
her time, but only one complete poem by her has
actually survived until today. Sappho lived in the seventh century
b c E. And this piece of papyrus dates to
(14:26):
the second or third century CE. This fine brings the
total known poems by Sappho to six. In February, Dr
Gian Yang visited St John's College, University of Cambridge from China,
and while he was there he discovered that a small
volume of music that had been held in the university's
rare books collection was really a priceless document detailing pre
(14:49):
modern Chinese musical history. This is possibly a completely unique
find in the world. The book was originally purchased in
China in eighteen o four by the Reverend James Inman,
who brought it back home with him to Britain. It's
believed to have been printed in China around seventeen seventy
(15:10):
and and Men donated all of his books to St.
John's College after becoming a fellow there. The book contains
an introduction to three different Chinese instruments, which are a flute,
a lout, and a recorder, as well as thirteen different
pieces of music. Um the entire notation that's used as
something that has not been really well documented or surviving
(15:31):
documentation has not lasted until now, uh so it gives
a huge amount of information about uh Chinese musical history
that we didn't have before. So cool. A previously unknown
Shakespeare First Folio was authenticated in France this year, so
that brings the total number of known first Folios to
(15:51):
two hundred and thirty three. So, for the non Shakespeare
buffs in the crowd, the First Folio is the first
publication of the collected works of Shakespeare. It's considered to
be the most reliable text for many of Shakespeare's plays,
and this one is in excellent condition, which is surprising
considering that until this year librarians at the public library
where it was house thought it was a very old,
(16:13):
but not particularly exceptional Shakespearean edition, and that was in
part because the title page and introductory material were missing. However,
it caught the eye of Remy Cordonier, the director of
the Library's Medieval and Early Modern Collection, who thought that
it could in fact be a first folio. It's planned
that it will be put on display in st Omair
where it was found next year. Before we get into, uh,
(16:36):
the favorite topic of exhumations, let's take another brief moment
for a word from a sponsor. So now we will
wrap things up by talking about some exhamations. And this is,
of course not all of the exhamations. UH. Treatsy had
not yet set up her Google alert for exhamations until
part way through the year, so she's got a pretty
(16:57):
significant list that she's compiled, but not necessarily comprehensive. No
there there. It's similarly with the rest of it. There
would not be room for every single one. So Oliver
Cromwell's body was exhumed in sixteen sixty one for a
quote posthumous execution. They basically after he had died, had
(17:17):
been buried, drew and quartered him and other things to
his body. At that time, a brass plate that had
been placed on his chest was taken by one of
the officials he was present, and then that plate was
passed down through the generations, and then it was sold
at auction in December of this year, which is why
(17:38):
we were talking about it for seventy four thousand, five
hundred pounds or four thousand, nine sixty five euros. Neither
the person it eventually was passed down to, nor the
person who bought it was named, which is common practice
for softies, which is who handled the auction. The plate
itself is inscribed with a code of arm arms, the
(18:00):
dates of Cromwell's birth and death, and his uh his coordination,
and then in Latin quote, here is buried Oliver Cromwell,
Protector of the Republic of England, Scotland and Ireland, which
is a statement that the people of Ireland would buy
and large find issue with. I'm surprised you didn't mention
that his head is elsewhere and we don't know where. Yes,
(18:23):
his head is elsewhere, we don't know where, but the
fate of his body after he was posthumously executed is
kind of hard to substantiate. Yeah, allegedly some people know
where the head is. There has been some back and
forth among the governments of Great Britain, Argentina and the
Falkland Islands in recent weeks about the potential exhamations of
(18:44):
one and twenty three unidentified bodies buried in Darwin Cemetery
in the Falklands. Uh These are the bodies of Argentinian
soldiers who died between April and June of nineteen two
when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, which Britain claimed as
its territory Wry. The result was the Falklands War. The
Independent reported that Argentina was set to exhume one bodies.
(19:07):
Argentina said the decision to exhume was extremely personal and
it would be left to the families and the Falkland
Islands government said that it had not received a request
to actually do any of this, so as of right now,
this whole situation is unresolved as far as our information goes. Yes,
there is clearly still tension between Britain and Argentina on
(19:28):
the subject of the Falkland Islands. In November, Kentucky State
Police exhumed the body of an unidentified nineteen sixty nine
murder victim. The woman's badly decomposed body was found by
a man picking flowers for his wife in June of
that year, officials are hoping to find a match through CODIS,
which is the combined DNA index system. They called the
(19:52):
murder an ongoing cold case, and are particularly interested in
it because no one has come forward to say, this
might be my relative in the time since the murder happened,
which is a little unusual. I mean, they're they're frequently
unidentified bodies, but not as frequently unidentified bodies with literally
(20:12):
no one speculating that that might be their loved one.
Prague announced that it would pay for the exhimation of
Joseph too Far, who was a Roman Catholic priest who
died after being interrogated and tortured. So while too Far
was giving a sermon in December of nine, several witnesses
said they saw an iron cross behind him move on
(20:34):
its own several times, and when word got back to
the government of at that time Czechoslovakia of this purported miracle,
too Far was arrested and tortured until he said that
he had orchestrated it. It then became a tool to
try to discredit the Catholic Church and oppress Roman Catholics
in Czechoslovakia. So this exhamation is in part for the
beatification process and to close things out, and probably the
(21:00):
most weirdly romantic exhumation of the year uh Frederick Chopin's heart.
So when Chopin died, he asked for his heart to
be removed from his body and buried in Poland, and
it was after being sealed in a jar of liquor
which his sister smuggled into Warsaw, probably under her dress. Um.
(21:23):
Since then his heart has been passed from relative to relative, buried,
dug up, buried again, all this while the rest of
his body was at par Lache's cemetery in Paris. So
in April, a number of officials, including the Archbishop of Warsaw,
the culture minister, and to scientists, gathered at Holy Cross
(21:46):
Church in Warsaw, where they removed the heart from its
secret resting place, inspected it, took photos, and sealed the
jar with wax to make sure that it's liquor preserved
contents did not evaporate and dry out. Then they put
the heart back where it was. This was in part
to try to figure out whether Chopin really died of
(22:07):
tuberculosis um. And it happened now because people were afraid
and you know, convinced officials that it was a real
possibility that the liquor might evaporate out of the jar
and destroy the heart. Officials planned to repeat this inspection
in another fifty years. And they also didn't say anything
about it for months. They didn't completely in secret in
(22:27):
the middle of the night. Very hush, hush. That's how
all good exhamations go. Ye. Often they are in the
middle of the night to avoid onlookers, but this one
was particularly secret. So that is our unearthing. So in
uh we can look forward to another Chopin's Heart discussion. Yes,
(22:54):
I wonder what podcasting will be like in four. Do
you also have some listener mail for us? I knew
and this one is just kind of a charming story. Um.
She also has lots of episode suggestions that I'm gonna
I'm gonna stick with the charming story. This is from Genie.
(23:15):
He says, Dear Tracy and Holly, I greatly appreciate your
podcast that I'm a faithful listener. I'm also the mother
of a young daughter in history buff She and I
often listen to your podcast together, and I thought you
might enjoy knowing the extent to which she absorbs and
thinks about your words. We listened to your Good King
winces Last episode last winter, and then several weeks later
(23:36):
she said to me, I think I know who the
stranger was that King WinCE this last wanted to help.
I replied, oh, really who, she said, Let's see imagine
my surprise. I tried to keep a straight face that
she's explained to me that Utsy was walking in the
snow looking for food and fuel, and King Winces Last
and his page were the last to see him alive
(23:58):
before his pursuers found him and killed him. I was
glad to learn that the king survived, because who needs
that kind of political instability. We also greatly enjoyed your
episode on Chinese foot finding, and it has led to
some interesting discussions about sexism, racism, and tradition. That episode
is also to the state, the one I find most
stomach turning, even more than the mommification episode, which my
(24:20):
daughter has practically memorized. That made me laugh so hard
when I read it, and I feel like I should
apologize to this mother having to listen to the scorey
details over and over the Let's the episode and the
good King wins his last episode are from before our time,
but this story is so delightful wanted to share it,
(24:40):
and it also seems like a good close out for
like the year end holiday season episodes for even though
the earliest you could be hearing this is So you
would like to write to us about this or any
other uh things, you can. We're free podcast at how
(25:00):
stuff works dot com. We're also on Facebook at Facebook
dot com slash misson hisstory and on Twitter at miss
in History. Are tumbler is missin history dot tumbler dot com,
and are on Pinterest at Interest dot com slash mist
in History. We also have a sp edshard store in
which we are hoping that we now have an awesome
shirt that says I love exhumations. Really it's a heart exhamations. Yeah,
(25:25):
that is true. It's pretty good. It's pretty great. Uh
So we're hopeful that that's there now. If not, it
will be there soon. Um. If you would like to
learn more about what we have talked about today, you
can come to our parent company's website, that is how
stuff Works dot com and put the words Shakespeare in
the search park. You are going to find tops and
rare books which include the Shakespeare First folio. You can
(25:48):
also come to our website, which is missing history dot
com to find show notes about all of our episodes
and an archive of all of the episodes and occasional
other posts about other stuff. I have recently put one
up that includes all the ways to contact us and
which ones are the most reliable, so we can do
all of that and a whole lot more at how
stuff works dot com and MS industry dot com For
(26:13):
more on this and thousands of other topics, is it
how 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 Training. We are now into part two of our
now traditional Unearthed episode where we talk about all of
(00:22):
the things that were brought up literally and figuratively in
We know that you all are listening at the earliest,
but we are recording it in ten So when we
say this year, that's what we mean. Uh this installment,
we're starting with a random assortment of things that didn't
(00:42):
really fit into any other category, followed by some medical
unearth things, food and drinks, literature and letters, and we're
going to end with so many people's favorite category exhumations.
So starting off the random stuff, a probable Rembrandt, which
(01:03):
was stolen from a French museum during a Bastille Day
celebration in was recovered this year when the man who
had stolen it confessed, so when the robbery happened, the
alarm went off when the thief entered the museum through
a library door, but the authorities did not arrive in
time to catch him. The painting is called lanfant labou
(01:24):
de savant or Child with a soap bubble. There's some
debate about whether it's actually a Rembrandt or just something
that was painted after Rembrant style, but maybe it's recovery
means that we will finally get to find out. On April,
a man named Paul Unyaki un earth of Viking age
figuring in Denmark while using a metal detector. He immediately
(01:45):
contacted a museum. So good on you, Paul for contacting
authorities after finding something that seemed significant. Uh. The museum
confirmed the age of the figure and started conservation measures
on it. The figuring is really small, just four point
six centimeters high, and it's notable because it has very
(02:06):
detailed clothing. This basically makes it a new source of
information about what the Vikings actually wore, and it's also
kind of visually and visually interesting because it has a
three dimensional head on a two dimensional body. The figuring
is wearing an ankle length dress with long sleeves, and
the dress itself has several different textures that are possibly
(02:27):
meant to represent different fabrics. Her hair is pulled back
in a very tight bun, and she has a piece
of jewelry in the front of her dress that might
indicate she's meant to represent the fertility goddess Freya. Aerial
photography help researchers find the remains of two ancient Mayan
cities in the Yucatan Peninsula. For one of the cities,
it was actually a rediscovery archaeologist Eric von You visited
(02:50):
in the nineteen seventies and dubbed it Lagunita, but given
the density of the jungle and the remoteness of the location,
as well as the vagueness of a youth documentation, it
couldn't be found again until more recently. That Lagunita is
a facade with an entryway that's made to look as
though it's a monster's mouth, which I find so sort
of fabulous. Uh. This is a common theme and architecture
(03:13):
of the time in this particular example is very well preserved.
The other city, known as tom Chin, probably existed at
about the same time as Lagunita. Also this year, archaeologists
working at Hadrian's Wall found a two thousand year old
wooden toilet seat perfectly preserved in a muddy trench. Although
(03:33):
other digs have unearthed plenty of Roman latrines and other
toilet artifacts. Dr Andrew Burley, who's the director of excavations there,
said he had never seen a perfectly preserved wooden toilet
seat before. He said that it looked pretty comfortable. He
was also hopeful that they would be able to find
the latrine that went with it, since, in his words,
(03:54):
as reported to the BBC, quote Roman lose are fascinating
places to excavate their drain often contain astonishing artifacts. Dr
Burley also said that he was looking forward to reading
the text of a Roman stylist wax tablet that was
also found at Hadrian's Wall this year. In this case,
he told the BBC, if we're really lucky, the person
(04:16):
using the seat will have had verbal diarrhea and we
will be able to get their personal thoughts about life
years ago. So I'd really like to meet this doctor Burley,
because he sounds like a character that's like the thing
that was on earth. That's more, that's most exciting to
Tracy is that we now know about this. It's that's
(04:36):
a gentleman who does research and sounds hilarious. Uh. In
other poop News, archaeologists in Odense, on the island of
shune In in Denmark found several latrine barrels dating back
to the thirteen hundreds. More notable than the barrels themselves,
is that they still contain what latrines are built to contain.
(04:56):
So the team hopes that the contents of these barrels
will help shed some light on the dietary habits of
fourteen century Danes and for people local to the area,
at least at that point, you could take a free
tour of the dig site on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In April,
a documentary film crew dug up a landfill in New
Mexico where Atari had purportedly dumped millions of copies of
(05:19):
the overwhelmingly unsuccessful video game Et the Extraterrestrial in nineteen
eighty three. The film crew did find many copies of
the game, but not quite the millions rumored to be
buried there. They also found various other Atari video game detritus.
I included that mostly because the long held et lore
(05:40):
that video game kind of tickles me. Yeah, And it's
one of those things that I think the number has
grown over the years, you know, I think it used
to be I remember hearing it once very early on,
is like hundreds of thousands, and it has slowly ballooned
up to millions of cartridges. It balloons to the point
that there's a page about it at snopes dot com.
(06:02):
So we're going to take a brief break for a
word from a sponsor, and then talk about some medical
things that were unearthed this year. Now we will get
back to our lovely unearthing. So the first of our
medical unearth things is only tangentially medical. While testing the
area in preparation for building a new parking facility, the
(06:23):
University of Mississippi Medical Center found that the site contained
at least a thousand bodies. This wasn't at all the
first time that a burial site has been found on
the University of Mississippi campus. Anthropological study is ongoing on
other remains that have already been unearthed before this discovery.
These particular bodies are believed to have been patients at
(06:46):
the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum. The asylum opened in eighteen
fifty five and housed a hundred and fifty people. The
school considered reburying the bodies elsewhere to make room for
the parking facility, but they estimated that it would cost
about three thousand dollars per body, or three million dollars total,
so expansion plans were put on hold uh, and I
(07:09):
could not find an update about exactly where things stood
with that discovery as of right now at whether they've
decided to continue and rebody the but rebury the bodies elsewhere,
or change their construction plans, or exactly what. And it's
entirely possible that that whole thing is bogged down in
paperwork somewhere and there is nothing to discover. Um Scientists
(07:31):
extracted DNA from the tooth of someone who died in
the Justinian plague in the year five forty one. Unlike
several other historical plagues, there really hadn't been very much
medical or biological research on the Justinian plague. But then
housing developers found a burial site near Munich, and as
they examined the evidence, the team figured out that many
(07:52):
of the peoples in the burial site had been buried together,
which was of course very common during plague events, and
they eventually narrowed it down the Justinian plague. A team
led by evolutionary biologist David Wagner at Northern Arizona University
determined that the plague had jumped from rodents to people
and that it was in fact different from the Black
Death during a rehabilitation project at New York City Hall,
(08:16):
a team unearthed artifact that archaeologist thought was maybe a
needle holder or perhaps a spice grinder at first. It's
about a three inch long cylinder with holes in the top,
made from a mammal bone, and it dates sometime back
to the early eighteen hundreds. It was actually found back
in but it wasn't until this year that anthropology student
(08:39):
Lisa Geiger published her findings identifying what it actually was.
She drew her conclusions thanks to a stint as a
docent at the famous Muder Museum. It turns out that
this was not a needle holder or a spice grinder.
It was quote a vaginal syringe which was used for doucing.
Given that this item was found in a big garbage
(09:00):
pile that also included the remnants of what looked like
a giant celebration, so there was lots of food and
lots of liquor, the suspicion is that this was likely
brought with a guest and used as a contraceptive or
for STD prevention and just as a heads up that
would not have been effective. Do not rely on such
a thing for birth control or std prevent race these
(09:24):
public service announcement. Yeah, I'm just taking a page from
stuff mom never told you for a moment that would
not work. In March, researchers announced that they'd revived a
giant virus from the Siberian perma frost, and that it
was still infectious. You may remember seeing these headlines and
people uh saying that this is how the zombie apocalypse
(09:45):
was going to start. So the virus is much larger
than normal, almost as large as a small bacterium, and
it affects amba. They named it Pythovirus sabaricum, with pytho
coming from the Greek word for a large container that's
used to store food or wine. Normally, viruses are extremely compact,
but this one contains lots of empty space, which prompted
(10:06):
evolutionary biologist Jean Michelle Clavery to say, quote, we don't
understand anything anymore. The quotes from the researchers are some
of my favorite things. They're pretty fabulous. So now we
have three things that are in the realm of food
and drink. Divers brought up a bottle marked Seltzer's from
a shipwreck that is known as F thirty three thirty one,
(10:28):
and this is a cargo vessel that sank not far
off the Polish coast, so in the original reports this
was believed to have been a German luxury mineral water
Seltzers was a known brand of exactly that thing in
the early eighteen hundreds, but later on they figured out
that what was in the bottle was actually alcohol, probably
(10:49):
vodka or gin, which was reported to be drinkable but
not necessarily good in Egypt. While doing a routine cleaning
in another team, a Japanese team led by Giro Condo
of Waseda University, stumbled across a completely different, previously unknown
burial place, that of conso Imheb, the head of beer
(11:11):
production for the Court of a Menhotep. The third the
t shaped tomb with a burial chamber in two halls,
and it also includes a painting showing the whole process
of grain fermentation and presenting the finished product to the
mother goddess Moot. It's more than three thousand years old.
U s archaeologists also found what they believed to be
(11:32):
a precursor to Chianti while doing an excavation in Tuscany,
down at the bottom of a hundred and five ft
deep well. They found bronze vessels, cups, coins, and all
kinds of other stuff. The various depths of the well
include artifacts that spanned a fifteen hundred year time span,
so really lots of different layers of things going down
(11:53):
deeply into this well. Included at three different levels are
some very well preserved degree seeds. The findings confirmed that
there were at least three kinds of grapes in use
during Roman and Etruscan times in the area, and researchers
are looking into whether the way they are used might
be similar to the proportions of candy, which is a
(12:14):
seventy fifteen fifteen mix of three different types of grape.
And now we are moving on to the arena of
unearthed elements in literature and letters. So this first one
is not really a discovery, but it is a release.
The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston
released a number of letters from the personal papers of
(12:36):
Jacqueline Kennedy on Nassis this year, and that's a collection
of about twenty two thousand letters, postcards, and other pieces
of mail. In particular, the newly released documents include condolence
letters after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Also included
were the responses sent to each letter, which were handled
by the First Ladies personal secretaries. One particularly sweet note
(12:59):
is from a and You're old Louisian, a girl who said,
I think you're the nicest lady in the whole world.
I mean it too. It's so sweet. It's particularly sweet
because your is misspelled is why oh you are? Which
is charming. In a ten year old note, a scrap
of paper with Jane Austen's handwriting on it was found
(13:22):
tucked into a book at the Jane Austen's home museum.
This is probably a fragment of one of her brother's sermons,
and it says quote men may get into a habit
of repeating the words of our prayers by wrote, perhaps
without thoroughly understanding, certainly without thoroughly feeling their full force
and meaning. The scrap is dated eighteen fourteen, which is
(13:44):
when Austin was working on Mansfield Park, and it has
some similar religious themes to some things that are in
the book. There's also some illegible writing on the back
that the discoverers are hoping to be able to restore
fragments of two poems by Sappho were on Earth from
a private collection this year. It was very serendipitous. The
(14:05):
person who owned the papyrus asked Oxford classicist Dirk abbinc
about the Greek writing on the papyrus, and he immediately
recognized its importance. Sappho was a tremendously influential poet in
her time, but only one complete poem by her has
actually survived until today. Sappho lived in the seventh century
b c E. And this piece of papyrus dates to
(14:26):
the second or third century CE. This fine brings the
total known poems by Sappho to six. In February, Dr
Gian Yang visited St John's College, University of Cambridge from China,
and while he was there he discovered that a small
volume of music that had been held in the university's
rare books collection was really a priceless document detailing pre
(14:49):
modern Chinese musical history. This is possibly a completely unique
find in the world. The book was originally purchased in
China in eighteen o four by the Reverend James Inman,
who brought it back home with him to Britain. It's
believed to have been printed in China around seventeen seventy
(15:10):
and and Men donated all of his books to St.
John's College after becoming a fellow there. The book contains
an introduction to three different Chinese instruments, which are a flute,
a lout, and a recorder, as well as thirteen different
pieces of music. Um the entire notation that's used as
something that has not been really well documented or surviving
(15:31):
documentation has not lasted until now, uh so it gives
a huge amount of information about uh Chinese musical history
that we didn't have before. So cool. A previously unknown
Shakespeare First Folio was authenticated in France this year, so
that brings the total number of known first Folios to
(15:51):
two hundred and thirty three. So, for the non Shakespeare
buffs in the crowd, the First Folio is the first
publication of the collected works of Shakespeare. It's considered to
be the most reliable text for many of Shakespeare's plays,
and this one is in excellent condition, which is surprising
considering that until this year librarians at the public library
where it was house thought it was a very old,
(16:13):
but not particularly exceptional Shakespearean edition, and that was in
part because the title page and introductory material were missing. However,
it caught the eye of Remy Cordonier, the director of
the Library's Medieval and Early Modern Collection, who thought that
it could in fact be a first folio. It's planned
that it will be put on display in st Omair
where it was found next year. Before we get into, uh,
(16:36):
the favorite topic of exhumations, let's take another brief moment
for a word from a sponsor. So now we will
wrap things up by talking about some exhamations. And this is,
of course not all of the exhamations. UH. Treatsy had
not yet set up her Google alert for exhamations until
part way through the year, so she's got a pretty
(16:57):
significant list that she's compiled, but not necessarily comprehensive. No
there there. It's similarly with the rest of it. There
would not be room for every single one. So Oliver
Cromwell's body was exhumed in sixteen sixty one for a
quote posthumous execution. They basically after he had died, had
(17:17):
been buried, drew and quartered him and other things to
his body. At that time, a brass plate that had
been placed on his chest was taken by one of
the officials he was present, and then that plate was
passed down through the generations, and then it was sold
at auction in December of this year, which is why
(17:38):
we were talking about it for seventy four thousand, five
hundred pounds or four thousand, nine sixty five euros. Neither
the person it eventually was passed down to, nor the
person who bought it was named, which is common practice
for softies, which is who handled the auction. The plate
itself is inscribed with a code of arm arms, the
(18:00):
dates of Cromwell's birth and death, and his uh his coordination,
and then in Latin quote, here is buried Oliver Cromwell,
Protector of the Republic of England, Scotland and Ireland, which
is a statement that the people of Ireland would buy
and large find issue with. I'm surprised you didn't mention
that his head is elsewhere and we don't know where. Yes,
(18:23):
his head is elsewhere, we don't know where, but the
fate of his body after he was posthumously executed is
kind of hard to substantiate. Yeah, allegedly some people know
where the head is. There has been some back and
forth among the governments of Great Britain, Argentina and the
Falkland Islands in recent weeks about the potential exhamations of
(18:44):
one and twenty three unidentified bodies buried in Darwin Cemetery
in the Falklands. Uh These are the bodies of Argentinian
soldiers who died between April and June of nineteen two
when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, which Britain claimed as
its territory Wry. The result was the Falklands War. The
Independent reported that Argentina was set to exhume one bodies.
(19:07):
Argentina said the decision to exhume was extremely personal and
it would be left to the families and the Falkland
Islands government said that it had not received a request
to actually do any of this, so as of right now,
this whole situation is unresolved as far as our information goes. Yes,
there is clearly still tension between Britain and Argentina on
(19:28):
the subject of the Falkland Islands. In November, Kentucky State
Police exhumed the body of an unidentified nineteen sixty nine
murder victim. The woman's badly decomposed body was found by
a man picking flowers for his wife in June of
that year, officials are hoping to find a match through CODIS,
which is the combined DNA index system. They called the
(19:52):
murder an ongoing cold case, and are particularly interested in
it because no one has come forward to say, this
might be my relative in the time since the murder happened,
which is a little unusual. I mean, they're they're frequently
unidentified bodies, but not as frequently unidentified bodies with literally
(20:12):
no one speculating that that might be their loved one.
Prague announced that it would pay for the exhimation of
Joseph too Far, who was a Roman Catholic priest who
died after being interrogated and tortured. So while too Far
was giving a sermon in December of nine, several witnesses
said they saw an iron cross behind him move on
(20:34):
its own several times, and when word got back to
the government of at that time Czechoslovakia of this purported miracle,
too Far was arrested and tortured until he said that
he had orchestrated it. It then became a tool to
try to discredit the Catholic Church and oppress Roman Catholics
in Czechoslovakia. So this exhamation is in part for the
beatification process and to close things out, and probably the
(21:00):
most weirdly romantic exhumation of the year uh Frederick Chopin's heart.
So when Chopin died, he asked for his heart to
be removed from his body and buried in Poland, and
it was after being sealed in a jar of liquor
which his sister smuggled into Warsaw, probably under her dress. Um.
(21:23):
Since then his heart has been passed from relative to relative, buried,
dug up, buried again, all this while the rest of
his body was at par Lache's cemetery in Paris. So
in April, a number of officials, including the Archbishop of Warsaw,
the culture minister, and to scientists, gathered at Holy Cross
(21:46):
Church in Warsaw, where they removed the heart from its
secret resting place, inspected it, took photos, and sealed the
jar with wax to make sure that it's liquor preserved
contents did not evaporate and dry out. Then they put
the heart back where it was. This was in part
to try to figure out whether Chopin really died of
(22:07):
tuberculosis um. And it happened now because people were afraid
and you know, convinced officials that it was a real
possibility that the liquor might evaporate out of the jar
and destroy the heart. Officials planned to repeat this inspection
in another fifty years. And they also didn't say anything
about it for months. They didn't completely in secret in
(22:27):
the middle of the night. Very hush, hush. That's how
all good exhamations go. Ye. Often they are in the
middle of the night to avoid onlookers, but this one
was particularly secret. So that is our unearthing. So in
uh we can look forward to another Chopin's Heart discussion. Yes,
(22:54):
I wonder what podcasting will be like in four. Do
you also have some listener mail for us? I knew
and this one is just kind of a charming story. Um.
She also has lots of episode suggestions that I'm gonna
I'm gonna stick with the charming story. This is from Genie.
(23:15):
He says, Dear Tracy and Holly, I greatly appreciate your
podcast that I'm a faithful listener. I'm also the mother
of a young daughter in history buff She and I
often listen to your podcast together, and I thought you
might enjoy knowing the extent to which she absorbs and
thinks about your words. We listened to your Good King
winces Last episode last winter, and then several weeks later
(23:36):
she said to me, I think I know who the
stranger was that King WinCE this last wanted to help.
I replied, oh, really who, she said, Let's see imagine
my surprise. I tried to keep a straight face that
she's explained to me that Utsy was walking in the
snow looking for food and fuel, and King Winces Last
and his page were the last to see him alive
(23:58):
before his pursuers found him and killed him. I was
glad to learn that the king survived, because who needs
that kind of political instability. We also greatly enjoyed your
episode on Chinese foot finding, and it has led to
some interesting discussions about sexism, racism, and tradition. That episode
is also to the state, the one I find most
stomach turning, even more than the mommification episode, which my
(24:20):
daughter has practically memorized. That made me laugh so hard
when I read it, and I feel like I should
apologize to this mother having to listen to the scorey
details over and over the Let's the episode and the
good King wins his last episode are from before our time,
but this story is so delightful wanted to share it,
(24:40):
and it also seems like a good close out for
like the year end holiday season episodes for even though
the earliest you could be hearing this is So you
would like to write to us about this or any
other uh things, you can. We're free podcast at how
(25:00):
stuff works dot com. We're also on Facebook at Facebook
dot com slash misson hisstory and on Twitter at miss
in History. Are tumbler is missin history dot tumbler dot com,
and are on Pinterest at Interest dot com slash mist
in History. We also have a sp edshard store in
which we are hoping that we now have an awesome
shirt that says I love exhumations. Really it's a heart exhamations. Yeah,
(25:25):
that is true. It's pretty good. It's pretty great. Uh
So we're hopeful that that's there now. If not, it
will be there soon. Um. If you would like to
learn more about what we have talked about today, you
can come to our parent company's website, that is how
stuff Works dot com and put the words Shakespeare in
the search park. You are going to find tops and
rare books which include the Shakespeare First folio. You can
(25:48):
also come to our website, which is missing history dot
com to find show notes about all of our episodes
and an archive of all of the episodes and occasional
other posts about other stuff. I have recently put one
up that includes all the ways to contact us and
which ones are the most reliable, so we can do
all of that and a whole lot more at how
stuff works dot com and MS industry dot com For
(26:13):
more on this and thousands of other topics, is it
how stuff works dot com
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Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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