September 30, 2019 • 42 mins
As promised in July, we have some Unearthed this fall! We've got past episode updates, cannonballs, things that are oldests and firsts, textiles, edibles and potables, and a little bit of creepy and eerie stuff at the end.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying.
As we brought us back in July, we have some
Unearthed for the fall because we were so overwhelmed with
(00:23):
cool finds in that first half of the year. Our
July episode of Unearthed, which was a two parter, covered
things that had been literally or figuratively unearthed between January
and the end of May, or at least that's when
we heard about those findings. Today we are mostly looking
at June, July, August. There are a couple of exceptions,
(00:45):
and Unearthed for this fall is just one part this
time around that's going to tide us over until our
year end Unearthed installments. And since this is coming out
just on the cusp of our favorite month on the podcast,
which is like were we have saved most of the
more creepy, scary, eerie stuff for the end of this episode.
(01:07):
Hooray creepy and eerie. So first, we're going to kick
off with past episode updates, and this is more recent
than the June July August time frame that Tracy just mentioned,
but since it is all over the news. Uh, we
talked about the financial struggles of travel agency Thomas Cook
this past July, and on September, just three days before
(01:28):
we went into the studio to record this, the company
collapsed and very abruptly ceased operations, leaving hundreds of thousands
of travelers stranded. Obviously, Uh, the effects of that are
still ongoing. I know some other airlines had stepped up
and offered to get people back to their homes in
some locations, depending on where they lived, and hopefully everybody
(01:49):
at this point is home safe. Yeah. What an ordeal. Uh. Yeah,
there was something like a hundred and fifty thousand people
just from Britain and it was being called the guest
peacetime repatriation effort in British history. That's not technically an
unearthed thing, but it's been such a huge news story
(02:09):
and we have gotten so many have you seen this
links that I thought we'd mentioned it. Yeah. I had
friends pinging me within minutes of the news hitting. They
were like, didn't you just talk about this? Yeah? Yeah,
I got to my desk. In our Twitter mentions, we're
all links to the news story moving on the National
Sound Library of Mexico has announced the discovery of what
(02:33):
maybe the only recording of fried To Carlo's voice. That's
from the pilot episode of a Mexican radio show called
El Bacier, and archivists found it while they were digitizing
recordings earlier this year. In the recording, the speaker is
identified only as a painter who is no longer living.
Calo died on July thirteenth, nineteen fifty four, and the
(02:55):
radio episode came out the following year. The speaker reads
part of an s a called Portrait of Diego, which
Carlo wrote about her husband, Diego Rivera. One of Diego
Rivera's daughters has also said that she recognizes the voice
as Callos, so it seems likely that this is Carlo's voice,
but there is still some work that has to be
done to confirm it. Previous hosts two parter on Free
(03:17):
to Carlo came out in and another find what's been
described as a sorcerer's treasure trove was unearthed at Pompeii.
This is a trunk that contains things like crystals, amber dolls, amulets, beatles,
and a tiny skull. The sites director masamo Asana described
this trunk is containing lots of objects that are meant
(03:39):
to bring good luck along with ones that were meant
to drive out bad luck. What the trunk did not
include with a lot of gold, jewelry or other expensive items,
so it might have belonged to someone employed or enslaved
by the household rather than the owners of the home.
The Pompeii episode in the archive dates back to two
thousand nine, and it has come up in previous Unearthed
(04:00):
episodes as well. In Stonehenge news. Researchers have long known
about traces of animal fat on fragments of pottery found
at the Stonehenge site, and the general conclusion had been
that this was fat used for cooking and that maybe
it was connected to some kind of festival or religious observance.
But new research suggests that these pottery vessels, I mean
(04:23):
these are little pieces of them, not whole pots. So
the research suggests that they were not the size of
cooking pots or dishes used for eating or serving. That
they were much bigger, more like great big buckets. So
the new hypothesis is that perhaps these buckets were filled
with large amounts of fat which was used to help
transport the stones themselves from where they were quarried to
(04:45):
the Stonehenge site. The basic idea is that the blue
stones used as part of the Hinges construction were loaded
onto sledges which were pulled along a track made of logs,
and to make all of that effort easier, the logs
were greased with animals that that was stored in these
big pottery buckets. We did a whole on Earth episode
just on Stonehenge. Yeah, there had been big Stonehenge discoveries
(05:09):
that year and I planned to include them. And I
was like, wait, we've never talked about Stonehenge in general
at all. I vaguely recall you sending me a message
and going, have we really never had a Stonehenge episode?
In fact, we had not. We did an episode on
the Nascal Lines, and earlier this year researchers studying them
(05:30):
looked at sixteen geoglyphs of birds to try to conclude
which specific birds they represent, and, in the words of
Massaki Eta of the Hokkaido University Museum, quote, until now,
the birds and these drawings have been identified based on
general impressions or a few more phoological traits present in
each figure, we closely noted the shapes and relative sizes
(05:54):
of the birds beaks, heads, next bodies, wings, tails, and feet,
and compared them with those of modern birds in Peru.
As a result, they have reclassified a hummingbird glyph as
a hermit and both a guano bird and a previously
unidentified bird as pelicans. They also noted several birds that
were previously described as condors don't actually match up to
(06:16):
condor physiology, but they weren't able to determine what bird
they might more accurately represent. Interestingly, these newly identified birds
are birds that live in Peru, but not in the
same area where the Nascal lines are, and that's bolstered
the hypothesis that the people who made these glyphs were
representing birds that were very special or unusual or rare.
(06:40):
Archaeologists at Bradgate Park in Leicester, England, believe they may
have found the remains of the home of Lady Jane Gray.
We talked about her in our episode called Lady Jane Gray.
The Nine Day Queen excavations in this area have been
ongoing since and earlier this year they uncovered previously unknown
(07:00):
stone structures that were underneath still standing buildings. So it
had already been established that Bradgate House was Lady Jane
Gray's original home, but this finding suggests that when she
was actually living, it was in these recently unearthed structures,
not in the buildings that are still standing. Barcelona City
Hall has issued a work permit for the completion of
(07:22):
last Familia Basilica, which we talked about in our parter
on Antony Goudy. Uh Goudy designed the Basilica almost a
hundred and forty years ago, but it has never been finished.
It's been an ongoing projects throughout that time. Builders now
have a license to work on it through which they
hope will be enough time to actually complete it. I
(07:45):
was telling someone about this the other day and I
was like, I feel like all of these should have
but we mean it this time at the end of it,
which I understand, like a construction project of that scale
comes with challenges I do not even understand, so that
it's not meant to be insulting to anyone. It's just
been going on for a long time. Yeah, well, and
(08:05):
then let's sag out of Familia has its own special
difficulties as far as like what they're having to work
from because the original plans like are are no longer exists,
so like they're having to piece together knowledge of what
it was supposed to look like. There's a whole, huge
debate about whether it should be ever completed at all.
It's a whole saga. We talked about it more in
(08:27):
those episodes. Um. I think there's also an episode of
Invisible about it. Anyway. During Unearthed in we spent a
fair amount of time talking about discoveries at must Farm
because there were a lot of them. The site is
home to a settlement that was destroyed by fire about
three thousand years ago, and so when we talked about
(08:49):
it previously, teams had just finished a massive excavation, and
that excavation had yielded about a hundred and eighty textile items,
more than a hundred and fifty wooden artifact acts, pottery,
metalwork and beads, along with the remains of the structures themselves.
It was a lot of stuff, and a lot of
it very well preserved, and headlines at the time called
(09:10):
this site things like the Pompeii of the Fens. In June,
archaeologists from Cambridge Archaeological Unit published a timeline of Must Farm.
In the words of site director Mark Knight, quote, it
is likely that the settlement existed for only one year
prior to its destruction in a catastrophic fire. The short
(09:31):
history of Must Farm, combined with the excellent preservation of
the settlement, means that we have an unparalleled opportunity to
explore the daily life of its inhabitants. I thought that
was a really cool update to something that had been
just a huge find, uh with so much research back
when we talked about it a couple of years ago,
and then too for it to turn out that the
(09:51):
settlement itself probably only existed for a year before the
fire happened. In Unearthed in twenty eighteen, we talked about
the return of some objects that had been illegally acquired
and sold by art dealers Toubash Kapoor, not to be
confused with the film director of the same name. In July,
it was announced that prosecutors in New York have charged
(10:13):
Kapoor with trafficking more than a hundred and forty million
dollars and stolen antiquities. He's currently on trial in India,
so officials in the United States have requested that he
be extradited after that trial is complete to face these
new charges. This has been an enormous case that has
spanned more than thirty years and involved thousands of artifacts,
(10:34):
some of which wound up in the collections of some
of the world's most prestigious museums. A statue of the
Egyptian god Amun with features of King Chutton Common was
sold to an unknown buyer for roughly six million dollars
on July four. This was over the objection of Egyptian authorities,
who believed the statue was illegally looted in the nineteen seventies.
(10:55):
They demanded that Christie's auction House canceled that auction and
returned the Artifact Act, and also contacted the British government
and UNESCO to try to stop the sale. Protesters demonstrated
outside the auction itself. Christie's went ahead with the auction, though,
and afterward Egyptian officials announced their intention to file a lawsuit.
(11:15):
The Egyptian Foreign Ministry also called for the auction house
to remove all Egyptian artifacts from their auctions until they
could prove that they had valid certificates of ownership for
each one. A spokesperson from Christie's responded quote, it is
hugely important to establish recent ownership and legal right to sell,
which we have clearly done. We would not offer for
(11:36):
sale any object where there was concern over ownership or export.
The episodes we have in the archive about King Tutt
are from two thousand and eight and and now we're
moving into the segment that Tracy titles Cannonballs and other stuff.
Our last episode update is a bit of a segue
(11:58):
into several cannonball related finds. There is an old and
very brief episode on Lad Tepis a cave Lad the
Impaler or Vlad Dracula in our archives circa two thousand eight,
and earlier this year, archaeologists in Bulgaria announced that they
believe they have found some of his cannonballs, specifically the
cannonballs he fired at Jashtova Fortress while laying siege to
(12:21):
it in fourteen sixty one. In the words of lead
archaeologist Nicolay av Sharov, quote, what's really interesting is that
from the early Ottoman period we have found cannonballs. We
rejoice at these small cannonballs because they are from culverins.
These were the earliest cannons which were for the fifteenth century.
Up until the sixteenth century, they weren't in use. After that,
(12:43):
these were still very imperfect cannons. That was precisely the
time of vlad Dracula. There is no doubt that they
are connected with the siege and then parenthetically and the
conquest of the Zishchova Fortress by vlad Dracula in fourteen
sixty one. The study at this fortress has also unearthed
a lot of non Dracula findings, including an inscription that
(13:06):
dates back to the fourth century CE and coins dating
back to and fourteen centuries. All of us was technically
reported at the end of May, but I really could
not resist talking about Jacula's cannonballs. In other cannonball news,
a team of archaeologists in Scotland have found a number
of artifacts at Glen Shield in the Highlands of Scotland,
(13:28):
and this includes musket balls and mortar shells that government
forces fired at Jacobite forces at the Battle of Glen
Shield on June tenth, seventeen nineteen. This battle happened between
two Jacobite uprisings that we talked about in our episode
on that subject. Yeah, I went back and looked to
see if we had mentioned this one at all, and
it appears that we did not. Cannonballs, musket balls, and
(13:50):
other similar items are also being unearthed at the side
of a field hospital from the Battle of Waterloo. Most
Saint John Field Hospital treated at least x thousand wounded
soldiers during the battle that included William the Second of
the Netherlands, the Prince of Orange, and Lieutenant Colonel Lord
Fitzroy Somerset, who was the Duke of Wellington's military secretary.
(14:12):
This team has also a nursed a number of bones
from amputated limbs, and we're going to take a quick
break before we move on to some oldest and first finds. Okay,
we have a few things that are the oldest or
(14:33):
the first of their kind to be found. First up,
a mace head is the first bronze age object to
be found in Poland, but originating from a culture that
wasn't already living in the place where it was found,
So not the oldest thing ever found in Poland, but
the oldest thing that was from a culture that wasn't
living there at the time. This mace head is made
(14:55):
of bronze, It dates back to about one thousand b C.
And The team that found it does not no precisely
which culture it did come from, just that it was
not from Poland. They said that it may have come
from somewhere in the Middle East. A ten thousand year
old stone found south of Rome in two thousand seven
might be the world's oldest lunar calendar, according to research
(15:16):
published this year. It's a small stone that fits in
the palm of a person's hand, and it's marked with
a series of notches along three of its edges. There
are twenty seven or twenty eight notches. One of them
is a little unclear, and their distribution does seem to
align with the phases of the moon. Moving on, A
canoe found in Kinnebunkport, Maine, as being described as a
(15:39):
major find in Native American history. This canoe was made
from a hollowed out birch tree and it was found
in the Cape Porpoise Harbor onto and First. It's believed
to be the oldest dugout canoe ever found in Maine.
Archaeologist temps Far spotted the canoe thinking out of the
mud during low tide while he was doing a routine survey.
(16:00):
Other dugout canoes have been found in Maine before, but
all of them were created after the arrival of Europeans
in the area. This one appears to be at least
seven hundred years old, and if that's the case, it
was made hundreds of years before Europeans tried to colonize
the area. Archaeologists planned to preserve, restore, and study the canoe,
which is a process expected to take at least two years. Yeah,
(16:24):
anytime there's a wooden thing like this found in the seawater,
there's a whole process to make sure that it just
doesn't fall apart once it's taken out of the water.
This is an important fine not only for the study
of how canoes like this were made, but also of
the ongoing research into the native settlements of Algonquin speaking
people's in Cape Porpoise. Before we move on, we talk
(16:47):
about oldests and first a lot on Earth, but we
also have some archaeological work that illustrates how the field
isn't only about studying stuff from the distant past. Binghamton
University's Public Archaeology Facility and the Museum at Bethel Wood
Center for the Arts have worked together on an archaeological
dig at the site of Woodstock whose fiftieth anniversary was
(17:08):
earlier this summer. Last year, archaeologists pinpointed the location of
the stage, and this year they found the locations of
twenty four vendor booths and other features in the area
known as the Bindy Bazaar. Interestingly, they found that the
position and layout of these booths did not quite match
up to maps that were produced fifty years ago. The
Bendy Bazaar trail system was also restored and open to
(17:31):
the public earlier this year, but an unrelated fiftieth anniversary
concert scheduled to be in another site was just canceled
abruptly two weeks before it was supposed to happen. That
is a whole story of its own outside the scope
of this podcast. In fifty years we could talk about
that um next year. Moving on to one of my
favorite things, which is textile finds, uh we and we
(17:54):
have just a couple of them. Back in our brief
history of Colors, we talked about the dinos to kell It,
which was is likely made from the glands of maritime
snails of the Murex family. That is the most common
description at this point, though there are still some other
possibilities as to the source. Of that color that have
been proposed, and this was a blue to purple dye
(18:14):
that has religious significance in Judaism and is repeatedly mentioned
in scripture. We also talked about it very briefly in
Our Lives show The Mysteries of the Color Blue. That
live show has already happened at this point, but the
episode that we were publishing using that audio has not
come out yet. So hang tight, it's coming. Yeah it is.
That's the one of the magical mysteries of doing live
(18:37):
shows and then having them be podcasts later. So evidence
of a tech hel it Die factory dating back to
at least the first millennium BC has been found at
Tell Shakmona near Haifa and what's now Israel, and at
first archaeologists thought that this site had been home to
a settlement, but it seemed like a really weird place
(18:58):
for a settlement to be. It way out on a
rocky promontory, it was inaccessible by boat, and it was
far away from any major land route. But it turns
out this location gave it very easy access to cliffs
where those marine snails would have been very plentiful. Also
among the team's findings when they were excavating the site
(19:19):
where lots of pottery vessels stained with blue and purple dye,
engineers from Northern Power Grid in York, England found a
decorated piece of leather showing what looks like a dragon
with a long body, four limbs, and a pair of wings.
And the crew found this piece while they were working
on the electrical system, and they handed it over to
York Archaeological Trust and it was believed to date back
(19:41):
to the medieval period. But that particular little textile find
has not received conclusive results on any of their their
research yet. And if you want to see what it
looked like, I recommend googling something like, uh, Northern Power
Grid dragon leather or something's similar to that, but then
(20:02):
kind of scroll through the image results a little bit,
because the most widely published pictures of it have the
outline of the dragon kind of drawn over digitally in
a way that looks kind of like clip art. It's
doofy looking redly and the actual piece without that overlay
looks a lot cooler. Uh. Now we will move on
(20:23):
to something that's always just one of my favorite things,
which is the edibles and potables. Starting with something that
was made from edible ingredients but maybe not meant to
be eaten. Researchers studying a Bronze Age hillfort in Austria
found a collection of strange ring shaped objects which looked
like they were made from clay, but were really made
from cereals. They were made from finely ground barley and
(20:47):
wheat that was mixed with water and kneaded into a
dough and then shaped into rings and dried. I mean,
it just sounds like old cheerios to me, but the
fair cheerios. No, that's not what they are. The team
has not conclusively determined what these rings were for. These
cereal rings would have been time and labor intensive to make,
(21:09):
and they don't really resemble foods that have been discovered
at the site. They do resemble other objects found at
the site that are believed to be loom weights, leading
to the hypothesis that they were look alikes made for
some kind of ritual purpose, but it is still not
entirely clear though what they are. Yeah's they're sort of
the question of if it took this much effort and
time and also food product that you're not going to
(21:32):
eat to make these like it has to be for
something moving on. As documented in a widely shared Twitter thread,
Shamus Blackly traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston
and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard
to try to collect yeast samples from Egyptian pottery. These samples,
(21:54):
if they are really yeast from when the things were created,
would be about forty years old. They were collected with
the help of Dr Serena Love and PhD student Richard Bowman.
These samples were collected from vessels used to make beer
and bread, and they were taken in a sterile, noninvasive way.
In August, Blackly baked bread, with some of it using fresh, milled,
(22:16):
organic ancient grains. So as of August five, there was
still work to be done to confirm that what came
through this whole process really did include ancient strains of yeast.
I mean, there's yeast everywhere all the time. You can
ferment things using just wild yeast that's around in the air,
So it's possible that that what was at work was
(22:38):
not ancient yeast. But according to the Twitter thread, the
bread itself was delicious. That's really all that matters. Yeah,
we We've had a number of things that people made
with ancient ingredients that did not turn out to be delicious,
So I'm glad that this bread was apparently very good. Yes.
According to research published in the Proceedings of the National
(22:59):
Acco out of Me of Sciences, people in northern China
developed two distinctly different methods of trying to make beer.
This conclusion comes from the analysis of seven thousand to
eight thousand year old pottery fragments at two different sites,
and at both of the sites, the pottery fragments had
granules of cereal starches that showed evidence that they had
(23:19):
been fermented. One of the sites is called Linkou, and
it appears that people living there just let the grains sprout,
and then, three thousand kilometers away, at a site called Guatau,
young people seem to have used sort of a starter
to start the process of breaking down the starches in
these grains. The starter seems similar to a fermentation starter
(23:42):
called coup, which is still made today from molded grains
and used to produce alcoholic beverages from cereals in some
parts of the world. Patrick McGovern at the University of
Pennsylvania Museum of archaeology and anthropology also suggested that because
it would have taken such large quantities of grain to
do this, beer making might have inspired people to start
(24:03):
cultivating grains, an idea that has come up on Unearthed
before both beer and bread. Did people start making bread
because they had figured out how to cultivate grains? Or
did they figure out how to cultivate grains because they
wanted to eat bread? I mean, I can't fault them
to me neither. Researchers in France have discovered a nine
(24:23):
hundred year old grape seed that is genetically identical to
Savoyon blanc grapes that are grown today. That means that
today's Savoyon blanc has been growing for at least nine
hundred years, all tracing back to this one ancestral plant.
And to be clear, this is a particular regional wine,
not the more commonly known and widely distributed sauvignon blanc,
(24:47):
so very similar sounding, not the similar sounding. The identically
genetic seed is uh spelled s A V A G
N I N rather than what you would be more
likely to see on the shelf at the wine store.
And this team was looking at the seeds from several
(25:08):
varieties of wine grapes, and while they found other connections
between species, this was the only one that was an
identical genetic match. We also had some unearthings that were
more about where to get your food and beverage than
the food and beverage itself. An eighteenth century Scottish pub
was unearthed in the Scottish Highlands, and that site included
lots of drinking vessels like goblets and tankards. And then
(25:30):
a completely different eighteenth century pub was unearthed in eastern
North Carolina, also filled with things like mugs and goblets.
The North Carolina find also included a brass tap from
a wine barrel. Now we're shifting gears to a little
bit of medical history. For the first time, researchers have
found genetic evidence that the Justinianic plague a k a.
(25:50):
The Justinian Plague reached Britain and Ireland. The plague started
in the year five forty one and it continued to
circulate for about two hundred years after that. We already
had plenty of written records documenting this plague, which killed
as much as of the Roman world at the time,
and researchers had already concluded that the plague was caused
(26:12):
by your Cinea pestis, but we didn't have direct genetic
evidence of the plague everywhere that we thought it probably struck,
and records detailing some kind of pestilence in Britain and
Ireland in the year five forty four were also a
little ambiguous in their descriptions, so it wasn't totally clear
that the illness that struck there was the same illness
(26:33):
that was striking in other places. Not only did this
research lead to conclusive evidence of the plague in Britain
and Ireland, but it also unearthed a lot more diversity
in the disease itself than was previously known. After studying
remains from twenty one sites in Austria, Britain, Germany, France
and Spain, the team documented eight new your Cinea Pestis genomes.
(26:55):
According to research published in the June nineteen edition of
the journal Land Equity, a midden in the prehistoric village
of chata Huke and what's now Turkey has provided the
oldest archaeological evidence of un intestinal parasite infection in humans. Yeah,
we love middens. These are basically trash heaps and they
(27:17):
can provide a wealth of information about the society that
was dumping their rubbish there. In the case of Chata Huke,
people also used the midden as a toilet, either going
directly into the midden or perhaps carrying their waste from
their homes to the midden in something kind of similar
to a chamber pot. This team studied both the midden
and burial sites the waste that may have been expelled
(27:40):
from a body after it was buried. They retrieved samples
from each of them, and then confirmed that the samples
from the midden were of human origin, since it's also
likely that animals might have relieved themselves in the midden.
Then they looked for evidence of whipworm infection, which they
found in two of the samples from the midden. To
quote from a press release quote, it was a special
(28:02):
moment to identify parasite eggs over eight thousand years old,
said the study co author Evelina Anastasio in a separate
paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
An international team of archaeologists has published findings from an
extensive study of this same site, and, in the words
of lead author Clark Spencer Larson. This nine thousand year
(28:24):
old community was quote one of the first proto urban
communities in the world, and the residents experienced what happens
when you put many people together in a small area
for an extended time. Many things that happened include overcrowding,
infectious disease, crime, and environmental issues. Here's some other toilet
(28:46):
related history. We've got some new findings from Vindolanda, near
Hadrian's Wall, including a two thousand year old gaming board
meant to be played in a bathhouse, as well as
some gemstones that had all in down a toilet. The
gemstones date back about one eight hundred years and they
were carved with symbols. It was a common practice to
(29:08):
wear these as rings, but it was also common for
the adhesive that held the gem into the ring setting
to fail. So probably whoever was wearing these rings lost
the stone while they were on the toilet. And uh,
that means they're gone. Not going after that? No, apparently not.
And in one last bit of toilet news, a team
(29:31):
in Bulgaria found an ancient chamber pot which seems to
have been sized for children, or perhaps for small adults,
or maybe for very careful use by typically adult sized adults.
We're gonna take one more little sponsor break and then
we will get to the various scary and creepy and
(29:51):
more HALLOWEENI stuff that that is is more characteristic of
our our October time. Okay, since we're leading into October.
Here in a random bit of alarming news, a cube
of uranium was delivered to Timothy Cothe at the University
(30:15):
of Maryland College Park In This cube of uranium came
with a note that said it was from a reactor
that Hitler had tried to build. Based on their study
of this cube, coach and PhD candidate Miriam Hybrid traced
the origins of this cube, and they published their work
in Physics Today in May. Didn't cross that radars until June. No.
(30:39):
One of their conclusions was that the German scientists did
indeed have the capability to build a working nuclear reactor
during World War Two. What had gotten the way was
that two different teams making uranium cubes to power that
reactor were competing rather than working together. One team made
about six hundred cubes and another team made about four hundred,
(31:00):
neither of which was enough to power a reactor, but
together if they had combined their efforts, it could have worked. Yes,
So the basic general idea of uranium cubes tied to
Hitler's nuclear reactor like, that's inherently kind of alarming, But
just to put people's mind at ease, the cube is
made from natural uranium. It's not radioactive enough to be
(31:23):
especially dangerous by itself. But there are also hundreds of
similar cubes dating back to this era that are still
unaccounted for. Uh. Cute, lots of fun theories that make
great ghost stories for late at night. Um. Moving on
to an inherently maccab topic but much beloved exhumations. On
(31:46):
September twenty four, Spain's Supreme Court announced that the remains
of Francisco Franco can be exhumed from the Valley of
the Fallen, something that we have been talking about since
our episode on Franco came out in The court also
rejected the family's requests to have him buried at a
cathedral in central Madrid, instead ruling that he will be
reinterred next to his wife in a cemetery in El Pardo,
(32:09):
which is a ward of Madrid farther out to the
north of the city. Proper. This is one of those
things where I had finished the whole rest of this
outline and I just had this page open on my
screen waiting for the announcement of of what they were
going to rule, which I knew was due on September
twenty four. That was just like, come on now, I
need I need the Franco news. Uh. Even with that
(32:32):
court ruling, though, it is not clear when the exhumation
might take place, or whether that will be before Spain's
November ten election, we'll see. I want to somehow make
a jokey way to tie it to the Sagrada Familia,
but that seems wrong. Uh. In other exhamation news, though,
there has been a lot of talk this summer about
(32:52):
the potential exhamation of John Dillinger. Also, this is technically
an update prior hosts did an episode on Dillinger in
twenty evan two relatives said they had evidence that the
body in Dillinger's grave is not really his. They planned
to exhume it and have it tested, and to have
all of that featured on a History Channel documentary. So
(33:13):
the basic idea here as that perhaps the FBI really
killed someone else in thirty four, and then buried that
person and the notorious gangster's place. The FBI did not
give this a lot of credence, though, saying that they
had fingerprint evidence and other indicators that the body was
really yes John Dillinger. In July, the Indiana State Department
(33:33):
of Health approved a permit for the exhumation, but Crown
Hill Cemetery, where the body is buried, objected. The cemetery
issued a statement that read, in part quote, we also
have concerns that the complex and commercial nature of this
exhumation could cause disruption to the peaceful tranquility of the
cemetery and those who are visiting to remember their loved ones.
(33:54):
This has been kind of a theme and very high
profile exhumations that have also been plans to be covered
as television specials, where the cemetery has been like, we
kind of would like to have a respectful environment here
for the other people who have loved ones buried, rather
than having a giant TV spectacle tied to this. This
(34:15):
exhamation was supposed to happen on September six, but instead
everyone went to court. Marion County Superior Court Judge Timothy
Oaks set a hearing date of October tenth, which was,
of course after the date when the exhimation was supposed
to have happened, and that led History Channel to announced
it wasn't going to do this TV documentary after all,
(34:36):
That was still not the end of the saga, though,
Dillinger's nephew, Michael Thompson, announced that he still wanted to
go ahead with the exhimation, even if without the History
Channel's involvement, because quote, I simply wish to confirm that
the body in the grave is that of my uncle.
The family applied for a new permit, this time requesting
an exhamation date of December three, with the remains being
(34:57):
reinterred on the seventeenth, so two weeks eater. And at
this point it's an ongoing story that will continue to
unfold after we have recorded this episode, so see in
November or December. Rather, it would not surprise me at
all if we walk out of the studio today and
there's some new news about this whole exhamation saga. Moving
(35:18):
away from exhamations, we have more than one lake full
of bones to talk about. Sure, About seven hundred years ago,
bodies were buried in a lake in Levan Uta in
southwest of Finland, and this was a practice that went
on for at least four hundred years, but it was
only discovered when people started digging trenches in the area
(35:39):
in the nineteenth century. It started unearthing skulls and other
human remains that they did not expect to find their water.
Burials like this are unique, and researchers speculated that this
may have been a sacrificial spring. An excavation in unearthed
about seventy five of bone material, making up the remains
of people, which appeared to be mostly women and children.
(36:03):
The team analyzed these remains using DNA sequencing, hoping to
figure out who these people were and why they were
buried under water relatively far from the nearest known settlement,
so it didn't find any clear answers as to why
these remains were buried in this way, but the DNA
analysis suggests that these people were Sami, people whose descendants
(36:24):
live in northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia today. This
is the first conclusive evidence of their presence this far
south in Finland. Another study at the same site looked
at the jewelry the deceased were wearing when they were
buried in the lake. These were arm rings and necklaces
made from copper alloy, bronze or brass, and the findings
(36:45):
suggests that these were locally made with imported materials from
as far away as Greece and Bavaria and in the
other lake of bones. Rup Kund Lake in the Himalayan
Mountain Range has been nicknamed Skeleton Lake thanks to the
skeletal remains of at least eight hundred people in and
around it, and based on DNA studies that were conducted
(37:05):
in the early two thousands, researchers thought these were the
remains of people who were all native to South Asia
and had all died in one catastrophic event, which happened
sometime around the year eight hundred. Research published in the
journal Nature Communications in August calls all of that into question.
The team studied the DNA of thirty eight skeletons from
(37:27):
the lake and found that they fell into three distinct groups.
One group, containing twenty three sets of remains, was of
South Asian origin, as expected, but another group of fourteen
skeletons had Mediterranean ancestry from Greece and Crete. The one
skeleton not accounted for in those two groups seems to
have come from Southeast Asia. Also, it no longer appears
(37:50):
that all the bodies in and around this lake wound
up there around the year eight hundred. That does seem
to be the case for the bodies that were of
South Asian origin, but as for the rest, they are
more recent, dating back to about eighteen hundred, and there
are still lots of unanswered questions about how these remains
came to be there, whether there were perhaps two different groups,
(38:11):
each caught in some kind of epidemic or natural disaster.
Local folklore attributed to the goddess Nanda Davie who struck
down a royal retinue visiting her shrine during a pilgrimage
called the raj Jat because they were not behaving appropriately.
And it is a mystery how people from the Mediterranean
came there. Yeah, there's a total unknown. Were they on
(38:33):
a pilgrimage also, was it some kind of expedition? Not clear?
And we have one last eerie unearthing to close out on.
A so called vampire burial in the early nineteenth century
in Connecticut has been tentatively identified as a farmer named
John Barber. Thanks to DNA evidence This person probably died
(38:53):
from tuberculosis, and then, in the middle of a vampire
panic brought on by fears of the disease, his family
zoomed the body and attempted to take out his heart.
It had been long enough since he had been buried
that the heart itself was decomposed, so instead they rearranged
his head and limbs to form a skull and crossbones shape,
and the confident that he was buried in was found
(39:16):
in a quarry was marked JB, likely standing for his
initials and his age when he died. We've talked about
vampire panics on the show before, but this is a
different one. So many vampire panics to go around? There
are there have been many? Uh, do you have some
listener mail to go around? And do you have some
(39:39):
listener mail? It came from Mike. Mike says hello, thanks
to my sister. I recently learned that Wisconsin lawmakers are
proposing legislation to prevent plant based products from being labeled
as meat or milk in the state. I pointed out
our state's history of laws to promote butter over margarine.
Of course, my sister asked if I had learned that
(39:59):
from stuff you miss in history class. Sadly I had not,
but our discussion led me to your podcast archives. While
listening to your Butter versus Margarine episode, I alternated between
laughing and shaking my head and disbelief. Here's a link
to the story about the proposals in Wisconsin. There are
already laws and other states that restrict plant based foods
(40:19):
from using terms like meat or milk in their labeling.
At least nobody is claiming that plant based foods are
made from inedible substances, and there do not appear to
be any plans to require the products to be dyed
pink Love the podcast. Thanks for the work you do, Mike.
Thank you so much Mike for this email. So in
addition to this proposed Wisconsin law about plant based products,
(40:43):
there's also a thing that I had seen float across
my Twitter feed that was a very similar to the
Butter Versus Margarine episode fourteenth amendment argument about the legality
of calling things like impossible burghers meet on their lay
billing and like my whole I tweeted something to the
(41:03):
effect of this is the exact same story as Butter
Versus Margarine, which, if you have not heard that episode
is a previous episode where we talk about the development
of margarine and then the legal war to try to
keep it from being sold. Uh. Anyway, very similar stuff
going on now, involving things like soy milk and almond
(41:24):
milk and rice milk, and then impossible burgers and other
things that are called milk or burger or whatever but
aren't actually made out of animal products um, which I
find very hilarious. As far as I know, there's nowhere
that's tried to outlaw these places yet, so we don't
have like impossible burger smuggling as happened with Margarine. I'm
(41:48):
ready for it, ready for it. So thank you, Thank
you Mike for this note. If you would like to
write to us about this or any other podcast, where
at history Podcasts at how stuff Works dot com, and
then we are all over social media at Missed in History.
That's where you will find our Facebook, Twitter, Interest, and Instagram.
You can also come and subscribe to our show on
(42:08):
Apple Podcasts, I Heart Radio app and wherever else you
get your podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is
a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For
more podcasts for my Heart Radio visit the I heart
Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying.
As we brought us back in July, we have some
Unearthed for the fall because we were so overwhelmed with
(00:23):
cool finds in that first half of the year. Our
July episode of Unearthed, which was a two parter, covered
things that had been literally or figuratively unearthed between January
and the end of May, or at least that's when
we heard about those findings. Today we are mostly looking
at June, July, August. There are a couple of exceptions,
(00:45):
and Unearthed for this fall is just one part this
time around that's going to tide us over until our
year end Unearthed installments. And since this is coming out
just on the cusp of our favorite month on the podcast,
which is like were we have saved most of the
more creepy, scary, eerie stuff for the end of this episode.
(01:07):
Hooray creepy and eerie. So first, we're going to kick
off with past episode updates, and this is more recent
than the June July August time frame that Tracy just mentioned,
but since it is all over the news. Uh, we
talked about the financial struggles of travel agency Thomas Cook
this past July, and on September, just three days before
(01:28):
we went into the studio to record this, the company
collapsed and very abruptly ceased operations, leaving hundreds of thousands
of travelers stranded. Obviously, Uh, the effects of that are
still ongoing. I know some other airlines had stepped up
and offered to get people back to their homes in
some locations, depending on where they lived, and hopefully everybody
(01:49):
at this point is home safe. Yeah. What an ordeal. Uh. Yeah,
there was something like a hundred and fifty thousand people
just from Britain and it was being called the guest
peacetime repatriation effort in British history. That's not technically an
unearthed thing, but it's been such a huge news story
(02:09):
and we have gotten so many have you seen this
links that I thought we'd mentioned it. Yeah. I had
friends pinging me within minutes of the news hitting. They
were like, didn't you just talk about this? Yeah? Yeah,
I got to my desk. In our Twitter mentions, we're
all links to the news story moving on the National
Sound Library of Mexico has announced the discovery of what
(02:33):
maybe the only recording of fried To Carlo's voice. That's
from the pilot episode of a Mexican radio show called
El Bacier, and archivists found it while they were digitizing
recordings earlier this year. In the recording, the speaker is
identified only as a painter who is no longer living.
Calo died on July thirteenth, nineteen fifty four, and the
(02:55):
radio episode came out the following year. The speaker reads
part of an s a called Portrait of Diego, which
Carlo wrote about her husband, Diego Rivera. One of Diego
Rivera's daughters has also said that she recognizes the voice
as Callos, so it seems likely that this is Carlo's voice,
but there is still some work that has to be
done to confirm it. Previous hosts two parter on Free
(03:17):
to Carlo came out in and another find what's been
described as a sorcerer's treasure trove was unearthed at Pompeii.
This is a trunk that contains things like crystals, amber dolls, amulets, beatles,
and a tiny skull. The sites director masamo Asana described
this trunk is containing lots of objects that are meant
(03:39):
to bring good luck along with ones that were meant
to drive out bad luck. What the trunk did not
include with a lot of gold, jewelry or other expensive items,
so it might have belonged to someone employed or enslaved
by the household rather than the owners of the home.
The Pompeii episode in the archive dates back to two
thousand nine, and it has come up in previous Unearthed
(04:00):
episodes as well. In Stonehenge news. Researchers have long known
about traces of animal fat on fragments of pottery found
at the Stonehenge site, and the general conclusion had been
that this was fat used for cooking and that maybe
it was connected to some kind of festival or religious observance.
But new research suggests that these pottery vessels, I mean
(04:23):
these are little pieces of them, not whole pots. So
the research suggests that they were not the size of
cooking pots or dishes used for eating or serving. That
they were much bigger, more like great big buckets. So
the new hypothesis is that perhaps these buckets were filled
with large amounts of fat which was used to help
transport the stones themselves from where they were quarried to
(04:45):
the Stonehenge site. The basic idea is that the blue
stones used as part of the Hinges construction were loaded
onto sledges which were pulled along a track made of logs,
and to make all of that effort easier, the logs
were greased with animals that that was stored in these
big pottery buckets. We did a whole on Earth episode
just on Stonehenge. Yeah, there had been big Stonehenge discoveries
(05:09):
that year and I planned to include them. And I
was like, wait, we've never talked about Stonehenge in general
at all. I vaguely recall you sending me a message
and going, have we really never had a Stonehenge episode?
In fact, we had not. We did an episode on
the Nascal Lines, and earlier this year researchers studying them
(05:30):
looked at sixteen geoglyphs of birds to try to conclude
which specific birds they represent, and, in the words of
Massaki Eta of the Hokkaido University Museum, quote, until now,
the birds and these drawings have been identified based on
general impressions or a few more phoological traits present in
each figure, we closely noted the shapes and relative sizes
(05:54):
of the birds beaks, heads, next bodies, wings, tails, and feet,
and compared them with those of modern birds in Peru.
As a result, they have reclassified a hummingbird glyph as
a hermit and both a guano bird and a previously
unidentified bird as pelicans. They also noted several birds that
were previously described as condors don't actually match up to
(06:16):
condor physiology, but they weren't able to determine what bird
they might more accurately represent. Interestingly, these newly identified birds
are birds that live in Peru, but not in the
same area where the Nascal lines are, and that's bolstered
the hypothesis that the people who made these glyphs were
representing birds that were very special or unusual or rare.
(06:40):
Archaeologists at Bradgate Park in Leicester, England, believe they may
have found the remains of the home of Lady Jane Gray.
We talked about her in our episode called Lady Jane Gray.
The Nine Day Queen excavations in this area have been
ongoing since and earlier this year they uncovered previously unknown
(07:00):
stone structures that were underneath still standing buildings. So it
had already been established that Bradgate House was Lady Jane
Gray's original home, but this finding suggests that when she
was actually living, it was in these recently unearthed structures,
not in the buildings that are still standing. Barcelona City
Hall has issued a work permit for the completion of
(07:22):
last Familia Basilica, which we talked about in our parter
on Antony Goudy. Uh Goudy designed the Basilica almost a
hundred and forty years ago, but it has never been finished.
It's been an ongoing projects throughout that time. Builders now
have a license to work on it through which they
hope will be enough time to actually complete it. I
(07:45):
was telling someone about this the other day and I
was like, I feel like all of these should have
but we mean it this time at the end of it,
which I understand, like a construction project of that scale
comes with challenges I do not even understand, so that
it's not meant to be insulting to anyone. It's just
been going on for a long time. Yeah, well, and
(08:05):
then let's sag out of Familia has its own special
difficulties as far as like what they're having to work
from because the original plans like are are no longer exists,
so like they're having to piece together knowledge of what
it was supposed to look like. There's a whole, huge
debate about whether it should be ever completed at all.
It's a whole saga. We talked about it more in
(08:27):
those episodes. Um. I think there's also an episode of
Invisible about it. Anyway. During Unearthed in we spent a
fair amount of time talking about discoveries at must Farm
because there were a lot of them. The site is
home to a settlement that was destroyed by fire about
three thousand years ago, and so when we talked about
(08:49):
it previously, teams had just finished a massive excavation, and
that excavation had yielded about a hundred and eighty textile items,
more than a hundred and fifty wooden artifact acts, pottery,
metalwork and beads, along with the remains of the structures themselves.
It was a lot of stuff, and a lot of
it very well preserved, and headlines at the time called
(09:10):
this site things like the Pompeii of the Fens. In June,
archaeologists from Cambridge Archaeological Unit published a timeline of Must Farm.
In the words of site director Mark Knight, quote, it
is likely that the settlement existed for only one year
prior to its destruction in a catastrophic fire. The short
(09:31):
history of Must Farm, combined with the excellent preservation of
the settlement, means that we have an unparalleled opportunity to
explore the daily life of its inhabitants. I thought that
was a really cool update to something that had been
just a huge find, uh with so much research back
when we talked about it a couple of years ago,
and then too for it to turn out that the
(09:51):
settlement itself probably only existed for a year before the
fire happened. In Unearthed in twenty eighteen, we talked about
the return of some objects that had been illegally acquired
and sold by art dealers Toubash Kapoor, not to be
confused with the film director of the same name. In July,
it was announced that prosecutors in New York have charged
(10:13):
Kapoor with trafficking more than a hundred and forty million
dollars and stolen antiquities. He's currently on trial in India,
so officials in the United States have requested that he
be extradited after that trial is complete to face these
new charges. This has been an enormous case that has
spanned more than thirty years and involved thousands of artifacts,
(10:34):
some of which wound up in the collections of some
of the world's most prestigious museums. A statue of the
Egyptian god Amun with features of King Chutton Common was
sold to an unknown buyer for roughly six million dollars
on July four. This was over the objection of Egyptian authorities,
who believed the statue was illegally looted in the nineteen seventies.
(10:55):
They demanded that Christie's auction House canceled that auction and
returned the Artifact Act, and also contacted the British government
and UNESCO to try to stop the sale. Protesters demonstrated
outside the auction itself. Christie's went ahead with the auction, though,
and afterward Egyptian officials announced their intention to file a lawsuit.
(11:15):
The Egyptian Foreign Ministry also called for the auction house
to remove all Egyptian artifacts from their auctions until they
could prove that they had valid certificates of ownership for
each one. A spokesperson from Christie's responded quote, it is
hugely important to establish recent ownership and legal right to sell,
which we have clearly done. We would not offer for
(11:36):
sale any object where there was concern over ownership or export.
The episodes we have in the archive about King Tutt
are from two thousand and eight and and now we're
moving into the segment that Tracy titles Cannonballs and other stuff.
Our last episode update is a bit of a segue
(11:58):
into several cannonball related finds. There is an old and
very brief episode on Lad Tepis a cave Lad the
Impaler or Vlad Dracula in our archives circa two thousand eight,
and earlier this year, archaeologists in Bulgaria announced that they
believe they have found some of his cannonballs, specifically the
cannonballs he fired at Jashtova Fortress while laying siege to
(12:21):
it in fourteen sixty one. In the words of lead
archaeologist Nicolay av Sharov, quote, what's really interesting is that
from the early Ottoman period we have found cannonballs. We
rejoice at these small cannonballs because they are from culverins.
These were the earliest cannons which were for the fifteenth century.
Up until the sixteenth century, they weren't in use. After that,
(12:43):
these were still very imperfect cannons. That was precisely the
time of vlad Dracula. There is no doubt that they
are connected with the siege and then parenthetically and the
conquest of the Zishchova Fortress by vlad Dracula in fourteen
sixty one. The study at this fortress has also unearthed
a lot of non Dracula findings, including an inscription that
(13:06):
dates back to the fourth century CE and coins dating
back to and fourteen centuries. All of us was technically
reported at the end of May, but I really could
not resist talking about Jacula's cannonballs. In other cannonball news,
a team of archaeologists in Scotland have found a number
of artifacts at Glen Shield in the Highlands of Scotland,
(13:28):
and this includes musket balls and mortar shells that government
forces fired at Jacobite forces at the Battle of Glen
Shield on June tenth, seventeen nineteen. This battle happened between
two Jacobite uprisings that we talked about in our episode
on that subject. Yeah, I went back and looked to
see if we had mentioned this one at all, and
it appears that we did not. Cannonballs, musket balls, and
(13:50):
other similar items are also being unearthed at the side
of a field hospital from the Battle of Waterloo. Most
Saint John Field Hospital treated at least x thousand wounded
soldiers during the battle that included William the Second of
the Netherlands, the Prince of Orange, and Lieutenant Colonel Lord
Fitzroy Somerset, who was the Duke of Wellington's military secretary.
(14:12):
This team has also a nursed a number of bones
from amputated limbs, and we're going to take a quick
break before we move on to some oldest and first finds. Okay,
we have a few things that are the oldest or
(14:33):
the first of their kind to be found. First up,
a mace head is the first bronze age object to
be found in Poland, but originating from a culture that
wasn't already living in the place where it was found,
So not the oldest thing ever found in Poland, but
the oldest thing that was from a culture that wasn't
living there at the time. This mace head is made
(14:55):
of bronze, It dates back to about one thousand b C.
And The team that found it does not no precisely
which culture it did come from, just that it was
not from Poland. They said that it may have come
from somewhere in the Middle East. A ten thousand year
old stone found south of Rome in two thousand seven
might be the world's oldest lunar calendar, according to research
(15:16):
published this year. It's a small stone that fits in
the palm of a person's hand, and it's marked with
a series of notches along three of its edges. There
are twenty seven or twenty eight notches. One of them
is a little unclear, and their distribution does seem to
align with the phases of the moon. Moving on, A
canoe found in Kinnebunkport, Maine, as being described as a
(15:39):
major find in Native American history. This canoe was made
from a hollowed out birch tree and it was found
in the Cape Porpoise Harbor onto and First. It's believed
to be the oldest dugout canoe ever found in Maine.
Archaeologist temps Far spotted the canoe thinking out of the
mud during low tide while he was doing a routine survey.
(16:00):
Other dugout canoes have been found in Maine before, but
all of them were created after the arrival of Europeans
in the area. This one appears to be at least
seven hundred years old, and if that's the case, it
was made hundreds of years before Europeans tried to colonize
the area. Archaeologists planned to preserve, restore, and study the canoe,
which is a process expected to take at least two years. Yeah,
(16:24):
anytime there's a wooden thing like this found in the seawater,
there's a whole process to make sure that it just
doesn't fall apart once it's taken out of the water.
This is an important fine not only for the study
of how canoes like this were made, but also of
the ongoing research into the native settlements of Algonquin speaking
people's in Cape Porpoise. Before we move on, we talk
(16:47):
about oldests and first a lot on Earth, but we
also have some archaeological work that illustrates how the field
isn't only about studying stuff from the distant past. Binghamton
University's Public Archaeology Facility and the Museum at Bethel Wood
Center for the Arts have worked together on an archaeological
dig at the site of Woodstock whose fiftieth anniversary was
(17:08):
earlier this summer. Last year, archaeologists pinpointed the location of
the stage, and this year they found the locations of
twenty four vendor booths and other features in the area
known as the Bindy Bazaar. Interestingly, they found that the
position and layout of these booths did not quite match
up to maps that were produced fifty years ago. The
Bendy Bazaar trail system was also restored and open to
(17:31):
the public earlier this year, but an unrelated fiftieth anniversary
concert scheduled to be in another site was just canceled
abruptly two weeks before it was supposed to happen. That
is a whole story of its own outside the scope
of this podcast. In fifty years we could talk about
that um next year. Moving on to one of my
favorite things, which is textile finds, uh we and we
(17:54):
have just a couple of them. Back in our brief
history of Colors, we talked about the dinos to kell It,
which was is likely made from the glands of maritime
snails of the Murex family. That is the most common
description at this point, though there are still some other
possibilities as to the source. Of that color that have
been proposed, and this was a blue to purple dye
(18:14):
that has religious significance in Judaism and is repeatedly mentioned
in scripture. We also talked about it very briefly in
Our Lives show The Mysteries of the Color Blue. That
live show has already happened at this point, but the
episode that we were publishing using that audio has not
come out yet. So hang tight, it's coming. Yeah it is.
That's the one of the magical mysteries of doing live
(18:37):
shows and then having them be podcasts later. So evidence
of a tech hel it Die factory dating back to
at least the first millennium BC has been found at
Tell Shakmona near Haifa and what's now Israel, and at
first archaeologists thought that this site had been home to
a settlement, but it seemed like a really weird place
(18:58):
for a settlement to be. It way out on a
rocky promontory, it was inaccessible by boat, and it was
far away from any major land route. But it turns
out this location gave it very easy access to cliffs
where those marine snails would have been very plentiful. Also
among the team's findings when they were excavating the site
(19:19):
where lots of pottery vessels stained with blue and purple dye,
engineers from Northern Power Grid in York, England found a
decorated piece of leather showing what looks like a dragon
with a long body, four limbs, and a pair of wings.
And the crew found this piece while they were working
on the electrical system, and they handed it over to
York Archaeological Trust and it was believed to date back
(19:41):
to the medieval period. But that particular little textile find
has not received conclusive results on any of their their
research yet. And if you want to see what it
looked like, I recommend googling something like, uh, Northern Power
Grid dragon leather or something's similar to that, but then
(20:02):
kind of scroll through the image results a little bit,
because the most widely published pictures of it have the
outline of the dragon kind of drawn over digitally in
a way that looks kind of like clip art. It's
doofy looking redly and the actual piece without that overlay
looks a lot cooler. Uh. Now we will move on
(20:23):
to something that's always just one of my favorite things,
which is the edibles and potables. Starting with something that
was made from edible ingredients but maybe not meant to
be eaten. Researchers studying a Bronze Age hillfort in Austria
found a collection of strange ring shaped objects which looked
like they were made from clay, but were really made
from cereals. They were made from finely ground barley and
(20:47):
wheat that was mixed with water and kneaded into a
dough and then shaped into rings and dried. I mean,
it just sounds like old cheerios to me, but the
fair cheerios. No, that's not what they are. The team
has not conclusively determined what these rings were for. These
cereal rings would have been time and labor intensive to make,
(21:09):
and they don't really resemble foods that have been discovered
at the site. They do resemble other objects found at
the site that are believed to be loom weights, leading
to the hypothesis that they were look alikes made for
some kind of ritual purpose, but it is still not
entirely clear though what they are. Yeah's they're sort of
the question of if it took this much effort and
time and also food product that you're not going to
(21:32):
eat to make these like it has to be for
something moving on. As documented in a widely shared Twitter thread,
Shamus Blackly traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston
and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard
to try to collect yeast samples from Egyptian pottery. These samples,
(21:54):
if they are really yeast from when the things were created,
would be about forty years old. They were collected with
the help of Dr Serena Love and PhD student Richard Bowman.
These samples were collected from vessels used to make beer
and bread, and they were taken in a sterile, noninvasive way.
In August, Blackly baked bread, with some of it using fresh, milled,
(22:16):
organic ancient grains. So as of August five, there was
still work to be done to confirm that what came
through this whole process really did include ancient strains of yeast.
I mean, there's yeast everywhere all the time. You can
ferment things using just wild yeast that's around in the air,
So it's possible that that what was at work was
(22:38):
not ancient yeast. But according to the Twitter thread, the
bread itself was delicious. That's really all that matters. Yeah,
we We've had a number of things that people made
with ancient ingredients that did not turn out to be delicious,
So I'm glad that this bread was apparently very good. Yes.
According to research published in the Proceedings of the National
(22:59):
Acco out of Me of Sciences, people in northern China
developed two distinctly different methods of trying to make beer.
This conclusion comes from the analysis of seven thousand to
eight thousand year old pottery fragments at two different sites,
and at both of the sites, the pottery fragments had
granules of cereal starches that showed evidence that they had
(23:19):
been fermented. One of the sites is called Linkou, and
it appears that people living there just let the grains sprout,
and then, three thousand kilometers away, at a site called Guatau,
young people seem to have used sort of a starter
to start the process of breaking down the starches in
these grains. The starter seems similar to a fermentation starter
(23:42):
called coup, which is still made today from molded grains
and used to produce alcoholic beverages from cereals in some
parts of the world. Patrick McGovern at the University of
Pennsylvania Museum of archaeology and anthropology also suggested that because
it would have taken such large quantities of grain to
do this, beer making might have inspired people to start
(24:03):
cultivating grains, an idea that has come up on Unearthed
before both beer and bread. Did people start making bread
because they had figured out how to cultivate grains? Or
did they figure out how to cultivate grains because they
wanted to eat bread? I mean, I can't fault them
to me neither. Researchers in France have discovered a nine
(24:23):
hundred year old grape seed that is genetically identical to
Savoyon blanc grapes that are grown today. That means that
today's Savoyon blanc has been growing for at least nine
hundred years, all tracing back to this one ancestral plant.
And to be clear, this is a particular regional wine,
not the more commonly known and widely distributed sauvignon blanc,
(24:47):
so very similar sounding, not the similar sounding. The identically
genetic seed is uh spelled s A V A G
N I N rather than what you would be more
likely to see on the shelf at the wine store.
And this team was looking at the seeds from several
(25:08):
varieties of wine grapes, and while they found other connections
between species, this was the only one that was an
identical genetic match. We also had some unearthings that were
more about where to get your food and beverage than
the food and beverage itself. An eighteenth century Scottish pub
was unearthed in the Scottish Highlands, and that site included
lots of drinking vessels like goblets and tankards. And then
(25:30):
a completely different eighteenth century pub was unearthed in eastern
North Carolina, also filled with things like mugs and goblets.
The North Carolina find also included a brass tap from
a wine barrel. Now we're shifting gears to a little
bit of medical history. For the first time, researchers have
found genetic evidence that the Justinianic plague a k a.
(25:50):
The Justinian Plague reached Britain and Ireland. The plague started
in the year five forty one and it continued to
circulate for about two hundred years after that. We already
had plenty of written records documenting this plague, which killed
as much as of the Roman world at the time,
and researchers had already concluded that the plague was caused
(26:12):
by your Cinea pestis, but we didn't have direct genetic
evidence of the plague everywhere that we thought it probably struck,
and records detailing some kind of pestilence in Britain and
Ireland in the year five forty four were also a
little ambiguous in their descriptions, so it wasn't totally clear
that the illness that struck there was the same illness
(26:33):
that was striking in other places. Not only did this
research lead to conclusive evidence of the plague in Britain
and Ireland, but it also unearthed a lot more diversity
in the disease itself than was previously known. After studying
remains from twenty one sites in Austria, Britain, Germany, France
and Spain, the team documented eight new your Cinea Pestis genomes.
(26:55):
According to research published in the June nineteen edition of
the journal Land Equity, a midden in the prehistoric village
of chata Huke and what's now Turkey has provided the
oldest archaeological evidence of un intestinal parasite infection in humans. Yeah,
we love middens. These are basically trash heaps and they
(27:17):
can provide a wealth of information about the society that
was dumping their rubbish there. In the case of Chata Huke,
people also used the midden as a toilet, either going
directly into the midden or perhaps carrying their waste from
their homes to the midden in something kind of similar
to a chamber pot. This team studied both the midden
and burial sites the waste that may have been expelled
(27:40):
from a body after it was buried. They retrieved samples
from each of them, and then confirmed that the samples
from the midden were of human origin, since it's also
likely that animals might have relieved themselves in the midden.
Then they looked for evidence of whipworm infection, which they
found in two of the samples from the midden. To
quote from a press release quote, it was a special
(28:02):
moment to identify parasite eggs over eight thousand years old,
said the study co author Evelina Anastasio in a separate
paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
An international team of archaeologists has published findings from an
extensive study of this same site, and, in the words
of lead author Clark Spencer Larson. This nine thousand year
(28:24):
old community was quote one of the first proto urban
communities in the world, and the residents experienced what happens
when you put many people together in a small area
for an extended time. Many things that happened include overcrowding,
infectious disease, crime, and environmental issues. Here's some other toilet
(28:46):
related history. We've got some new findings from Vindolanda, near
Hadrian's Wall, including a two thousand year old gaming board
meant to be played in a bathhouse, as well as
some gemstones that had all in down a toilet. The
gemstones date back about one eight hundred years and they
were carved with symbols. It was a common practice to
(29:08):
wear these as rings, but it was also common for
the adhesive that held the gem into the ring setting
to fail. So probably whoever was wearing these rings lost
the stone while they were on the toilet. And uh,
that means they're gone. Not going after that? No, apparently not.
And in one last bit of toilet news, a team
(29:31):
in Bulgaria found an ancient chamber pot which seems to
have been sized for children, or perhaps for small adults,
or maybe for very careful use by typically adult sized adults.
We're gonna take one more little sponsor break and then
we will get to the various scary and creepy and
(29:51):
more HALLOWEENI stuff that that is is more characteristic of
our our October time. Okay, since we're leading into October.
Here in a random bit of alarming news, a cube
of uranium was delivered to Timothy Cothe at the University
(30:15):
of Maryland College Park In This cube of uranium came
with a note that said it was from a reactor
that Hitler had tried to build. Based on their study
of this cube, coach and PhD candidate Miriam Hybrid traced
the origins of this cube, and they published their work
in Physics Today in May. Didn't cross that radars until June. No.
(30:39):
One of their conclusions was that the German scientists did
indeed have the capability to build a working nuclear reactor
during World War Two. What had gotten the way was
that two different teams making uranium cubes to power that
reactor were competing rather than working together. One team made
about six hundred cubes and another team made about four hundred,
(31:00):
neither of which was enough to power a reactor, but
together if they had combined their efforts, it could have worked. Yes,
So the basic general idea of uranium cubes tied to
Hitler's nuclear reactor like, that's inherently kind of alarming, But
just to put people's mind at ease, the cube is
made from natural uranium. It's not radioactive enough to be
(31:23):
especially dangerous by itself. But there are also hundreds of
similar cubes dating back to this era that are still
unaccounted for. Uh. Cute, lots of fun theories that make
great ghost stories for late at night. Um. Moving on
to an inherently maccab topic but much beloved exhumations. On
(31:46):
September twenty four, Spain's Supreme Court announced that the remains
of Francisco Franco can be exhumed from the Valley of
the Fallen, something that we have been talking about since
our episode on Franco came out in The court also
rejected the family's requests to have him buried at a
cathedral in central Madrid, instead ruling that he will be
reinterred next to his wife in a cemetery in El Pardo,
(32:09):
which is a ward of Madrid farther out to the
north of the city. Proper. This is one of those
things where I had finished the whole rest of this
outline and I just had this page open on my
screen waiting for the announcement of of what they were
going to rule, which I knew was due on September
twenty four. That was just like, come on now, I
need I need the Franco news. Uh. Even with that
(32:32):
court ruling, though, it is not clear when the exhumation
might take place, or whether that will be before Spain's
November ten election, we'll see. I want to somehow make
a jokey way to tie it to the Sagrada Familia,
but that seems wrong. Uh. In other exhamation news, though,
there has been a lot of talk this summer about
(32:52):
the potential exhamation of John Dillinger. Also, this is technically
an update prior hosts did an episode on Dillinger in
twenty evan two relatives said they had evidence that the
body in Dillinger's grave is not really his. They planned
to exhume it and have it tested, and to have
all of that featured on a History Channel documentary. So
(33:13):
the basic idea here as that perhaps the FBI really
killed someone else in thirty four, and then buried that
person and the notorious gangster's place. The FBI did not
give this a lot of credence, though, saying that they
had fingerprint evidence and other indicators that the body was
really yes John Dillinger. In July, the Indiana State Department
(33:33):
of Health approved a permit for the exhumation, but Crown
Hill Cemetery, where the body is buried, objected. The cemetery
issued a statement that read, in part quote, we also
have concerns that the complex and commercial nature of this
exhumation could cause disruption to the peaceful tranquility of the
cemetery and those who are visiting to remember their loved ones.
(33:54):
This has been kind of a theme and very high
profile exhumations that have also been plans to be covered
as television specials, where the cemetery has been like, we
kind of would like to have a respectful environment here
for the other people who have loved ones buried, rather
than having a giant TV spectacle tied to this. This
(34:15):
exhamation was supposed to happen on September six, but instead
everyone went to court. Marion County Superior Court Judge Timothy
Oaks set a hearing date of October tenth, which was,
of course after the date when the exhimation was supposed
to have happened, and that led History Channel to announced
it wasn't going to do this TV documentary after all,
(34:36):
That was still not the end of the saga, though,
Dillinger's nephew, Michael Thompson, announced that he still wanted to
go ahead with the exhimation, even if without the History
Channel's involvement, because quote, I simply wish to confirm that
the body in the grave is that of my uncle.
The family applied for a new permit, this time requesting
an exhamation date of December three, with the remains being
(34:57):
reinterred on the seventeenth, so two weeks eater. And at
this point it's an ongoing story that will continue to
unfold after we have recorded this episode, so see in
November or December. Rather, it would not surprise me at
all if we walk out of the studio today and
there's some new news about this whole exhamation saga. Moving
(35:18):
away from exhamations, we have more than one lake full
of bones to talk about. Sure, About seven hundred years ago,
bodies were buried in a lake in Levan Uta in
southwest of Finland, and this was a practice that went
on for at least four hundred years, but it was
only discovered when people started digging trenches in the area
(35:39):
in the nineteenth century. It started unearthing skulls and other
human remains that they did not expect to find their water.
Burials like this are unique, and researchers speculated that this
may have been a sacrificial spring. An excavation in unearthed
about seventy five of bone material, making up the remains
of people, which appeared to be mostly women and children.
(36:03):
The team analyzed these remains using DNA sequencing, hoping to
figure out who these people were and why they were
buried under water relatively far from the nearest known settlement,
so it didn't find any clear answers as to why
these remains were buried in this way, but the DNA
analysis suggests that these people were Sami, people whose descendants
(36:24):
live in northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia today. This
is the first conclusive evidence of their presence this far
south in Finland. Another study at the same site looked
at the jewelry the deceased were wearing when they were
buried in the lake. These were arm rings and necklaces
made from copper alloy, bronze or brass, and the findings
(36:45):
suggests that these were locally made with imported materials from
as far away as Greece and Bavaria and in the
other lake of bones. Rup Kund Lake in the Himalayan
Mountain Range has been nicknamed Skeleton Lake thanks to the
skeletal remains of at least eight hundred people in and
around it, and based on DNA studies that were conducted
(37:05):
in the early two thousands, researchers thought these were the
remains of people who were all native to South Asia
and had all died in one catastrophic event, which happened
sometime around the year eight hundred. Research published in the
journal Nature Communications in August calls all of that into question.
The team studied the DNA of thirty eight skeletons from
(37:27):
the lake and found that they fell into three distinct groups.
One group, containing twenty three sets of remains, was of
South Asian origin, as expected, but another group of fourteen
skeletons had Mediterranean ancestry from Greece and Crete. The one
skeleton not accounted for in those two groups seems to
have come from Southeast Asia. Also, it no longer appears
(37:50):
that all the bodies in and around this lake wound
up there around the year eight hundred. That does seem
to be the case for the bodies that were of
South Asian origin, but as for the rest, they are
more recent, dating back to about eighteen hundred, and there
are still lots of unanswered questions about how these remains
came to be there, whether there were perhaps two different groups,
(38:11):
each caught in some kind of epidemic or natural disaster.
Local folklore attributed to the goddess Nanda Davie who struck
down a royal retinue visiting her shrine during a pilgrimage
called the raj Jat because they were not behaving appropriately.
And it is a mystery how people from the Mediterranean
came there. Yeah, there's a total unknown. Were they on
(38:33):
a pilgrimage also, was it some kind of expedition? Not clear?
And we have one last eerie unearthing to close out on.
A so called vampire burial in the early nineteenth century
in Connecticut has been tentatively identified as a farmer named
John Barber. Thanks to DNA evidence This person probably died
(38:53):
from tuberculosis, and then, in the middle of a vampire
panic brought on by fears of the disease, his family
zoomed the body and attempted to take out his heart.
It had been long enough since he had been buried
that the heart itself was decomposed, so instead they rearranged
his head and limbs to form a skull and crossbones shape,
and the confident that he was buried in was found
(39:16):
in a quarry was marked JB, likely standing for his
initials and his age when he died. We've talked about
vampire panics on the show before, but this is a
different one. So many vampire panics to go around? There
are there have been many? Uh, do you have some
listener mail to go around? And do you have some
(39:39):
listener mail? It came from Mike. Mike says hello, thanks
to my sister. I recently learned that Wisconsin lawmakers are
proposing legislation to prevent plant based products from being labeled
as meat or milk in the state. I pointed out
our state's history of laws to promote butter over margarine.
Of course, my sister asked if I had learned that
(39:59):
from stuff you miss in history class. Sadly I had not,
but our discussion led me to your podcast archives. While
listening to your Butter versus Margarine episode, I alternated between
laughing and shaking my head and disbelief. Here's a link
to the story about the proposals in Wisconsin. There are
already laws and other states that restrict plant based foods
(40:19):
from using terms like meat or milk in their labeling.
At least nobody is claiming that plant based foods are
made from inedible substances, and there do not appear to
be any plans to require the products to be dyed
pink Love the podcast. Thanks for the work you do, Mike.
Thank you so much Mike for this email. So in
addition to this proposed Wisconsin law about plant based products,
(40:43):
there's also a thing that I had seen float across
my Twitter feed that was a very similar to the
Butter Versus Margarine episode fourteenth amendment argument about the legality
of calling things like impossible burghers meet on their lay
billing and like my whole I tweeted something to the
(41:03):
effect of this is the exact same story as Butter
Versus Margarine, which, if you have not heard that episode
is a previous episode where we talk about the development
of margarine and then the legal war to try to
keep it from being sold. Uh. Anyway, very similar stuff
going on now, involving things like soy milk and almond
(41:24):
milk and rice milk, and then impossible burgers and other
things that are called milk or burger or whatever but
aren't actually made out of animal products um, which I
find very hilarious. As far as I know, there's nowhere
that's tried to outlaw these places yet, so we don't
have like impossible burger smuggling as happened with Margarine. I'm
(41:48):
ready for it, ready for it. So thank you, Thank
you Mike for this note. If you would like to
write to us about this or any other podcast, where
at history Podcasts at how stuff Works dot com, and
then we are all over social media at Missed in History.
That's where you will find our Facebook, Twitter, Interest, and Instagram.
You can also come and subscribe to our show on
(42:08):
Apple Podcasts, I Heart Radio app and wherever else you
get your podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is
a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For
more podcasts for my Heart Radio visit the I heart
Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
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