July 29, 2020 • 45 mins
This edition of Unearthed! covers episode updates, science and history discoveries, books and letters, and potpourri. And yes, there's (brief) talk about the Verona, Italy floor mosaics.
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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 Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Biebelson and I'm Holly Frying. Hey, it's time
for Unearthed. Ye hey this spring. In our previous installment
(00:24):
of Unearthed, we speculated on whether the COVID Night Team
pandemic would thwart our plans to do Unearthed in July.
If you have just started listening to the podcast. Between
I guess April ish and now, this is when we
periodically talk about things that have been literally and figuratively unearthed,
(00:44):
and we kind of wondered whether the there would be
a pause on unearthing because of the pandemic. There has
not been. I actually saved about as many articles over April,
May and June as I did in the first three
months of the year, but a lot of what I
call did was a little bit repetitive or sounded really
similar to a find that we just talked about recently,
(01:06):
um things like that. So we just have a one
part Unearthed this time around instead of two parts. Also,
just a note, there's a little thunder happening off at
the distance at my house. I don't know if the
microphone is going to pick any of it up. But
if you're listening or like, what was that, it was
probably rumbling. Those girls should eat lunch. I mean that
happens sometimes too. In un Earth seventeen, we talked about
(01:31):
arts and crafts retail chain Hobby Lobby agreeing to pay
a three million dollar fine and forfeit thousands of artifacts
that have been smuggled into the United States. Then in
Unearthed in July, we discussed the repatriation of those artifacts.
Well back. Hobby Lobby also purchased a tablet known as
(01:51):
the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet for more than one point six
million dollars. That tablet is three thousand, six hundred years old.
As its name suggests, it contains a portion of the
epic of Gilgamesh. After this purchase, the tablet went on
display at the Museum of the Bible, which was funded
by Hobby Lobby founder Steve Green. Officials from the Department
(02:13):
of Homeland Security seized the tablet from the museum in
twenty nineteen, and this May, federal authorities started formally pursuing
a forfeiture order to return the tablet to a rock.
According to authorities, Hobby Lobby representatives did ask about the
tablets providence before making the purchase, but a major auction house,
which remains nameless in the paperwork, obfuscated its origins. However,
(02:38):
Hobby Lobby also filed a lawsuit against the auction house, Christie's,
which accused the auction house of quote deceitful and fraudulent
conduct in connection to a Gilgamesh tablet. Seems likely it
might be the same one. Probably Also, we did not
include this little tidbit in our springtime Unearthed addition, which
(03:00):
is when it happened. But back in March, it was
also reported that none of the Dead Sea scrolls in
the Museum of the Bible's collection are actually authentic. Vindor
Landa has come up on a couple of previous installments
of an Earth that's a Roman fort just south of
Hadrian's Wall. This time, curators at the vindor Landa Museum
have found a toy mouse cut from leather in a
(03:21):
bag of scraps, and it dates back to somewhere between
the years one oh five and one thirty. This mouse
is flat, about twelve point two centimeters or four point
eight inches long. It's cut from a single piece of leather,
and it has little marks on it that seemed to
indicate hair on the mouse's body and the tail, as
well as marks for the eyes. This discovery came as
(03:43):
a result of the COVID nineteen pandemic. Excavations at Vindolanda
had to be postponed, so the curatorial staff at the
museum spent their time, among other things, going through all
of the leather pieces in the museum's collection. This collection
contains more than seven thousand objects, some of them things
like shoes, boots, and horse gear, but there are also
(04:03):
lots and lots of patches and scraps and off cuts.
I kind of love the idea of somebody being like, well,
we can't have visitors, we can't do that. Dig I'm
gonna go through this bag of scraps, see what's in here. Um.
This mouse may have been made specifically as a child's toy.
There is plenty of evidence that there were children at
(04:24):
vendor Landa, or somebody may have made it as a
practical joke or just because they were bored. The plan
is to put this mouse on display at the vendor
Landa museum. Maybe someone was trying to entertain a cat.
Maybe so it does seem like a good kick toy
for a cat. Right in our Springtime on Earth this year,
(04:45):
we talked about the theft of a painting by Vincent
van Gogh from the Singer Laren Museum, which is in Laren, Netherlands,
not in the Hague, as we said in the episode earlier.
This spring, art detective Arthur Brand received proof of life
photos of the painting. He released those on June. The
photo shows the painting a copy of the international edition
(05:06):
of the May New York Times and the book Master Thief.
Brand received a photo of the back of the painting
as well. At this point, there's some speculation that this
theft is a copycat crime. There's also like security footage,
the footage that became available after we recorded that earlier
episode that shows being like a pretty much fast paced
(05:26):
smash and grab. The book that is shown in that
proof of life picture is about the two thousand two
theft of two different Vincent van go works from an
Amsterdam museum. The newspaper that's shown in the picture has
a story on the front page titled notes on an
Art Heist from one who has done it, and it's
about the Singer Lare and theft, but it quotes extensively
(05:48):
one of the men who was convicted of that earlier
two thousand and two heist. This sounds like such a
good movie. It's like the way that serial killers in
fiction movies are portrayed as taunting the police and the
except this one would be about art theft. M hmm,
I'd go to that movie. A veterinarian in England stumbled
across a stone memorializing a previous outbreak of render Pest.
(06:12):
An image of the stone was posted on the Nantwitch
Farm Vets facebook page in May, and that stone read
quote near this place were buried forty three cows, seven
calving heifers, five yearling heifers, one bowl, twenty calves that
died in the months of February and March eighteen sixty
six of the render pest then raging in Cheshire, belonging
(06:34):
to John Sutton of Most in Manner. Our episode on
the eradication of Render Pest came out in April of
this year, So that's just another piece of that puzzle. Yeah.
I think all of those numbers that highly just read
are correct. I was reading them off of a picture
of you know, a stone dating back to the nineteenth century.
(06:55):
There were a couple where I was like, is that
a seven or a one? Uh? In a different update,
just related to multiple past episodes, including Red Summer and
our one on IBB Wells Barnet. According to a new
report that was issued by the Equal Justice Initiative in June,
more than six thousand, five hundred Black Americans were lynched
(07:15):
between eighteen sixty five and nineteen fifty. This report included
two thousands that took place during reconstruction, but we're not
included in the organization's earlier reports. So whenever we have
talked about numbers of lynchings that have taken to place
in the past, like these numbers are much larger than that.
In our previous installment of On Earth, we talked about
(07:37):
a decision by the U S Secretary of the Interior,
David Bernhardt, ruling that the mashp Wampanog's three hundred acres
of reservation land on Cape Cod would be taken out
of trust and the reservation disestablished. We noted in that
discussion that the tribe had a previously filed lawsuit that
was still pending when that decision was announced. That lawsuit
(07:57):
was related to a Department of the Interior decision that
the tribe had not been under federal jurisdiction in nineteen
thirty four. Yeah, that decision about nineteen thirty four jurisdiction
ties back into this whole disestablishment question. So a forty
five day halt was placed on the order to disestablish
the reservation, and on the last day of that order,
(08:19):
Federal Judge Paul L. Freedman issued a ruling in that
earlier lawsuit. Freedman ruled that the Department of the Interiors
twenty eighteen decision was faulty, calling it quote arbitrary, capricious,
an abuse of discretion, and contrary to law. The overall
issue is still a little unsettled at this point, though,
(08:39):
because now the Department of the Interior has to go
back and reevaluate that twenty eighteen decision. This isn't an
update exactly, but it is on a similar theme and
it happened literally as Tracy was writing this paragraph. On
July nine, the U. S. Supreme Court issued a decision
in mcgart versus Oklahoma, which also applies to another case,
(08:59):
Sharp versus Murphy, that the eastern half of Oklahoma is
Native American land for the purpose of federal criminal law.
This is a way bigger story than we can get
into here, but the podcast This Land, which is hosted
by Rebecca Nagle, is an excellent resource on it if
you want to follow up and get some more details. Yes,
I mean in general, even before the ruling was announced,
(09:22):
like it had already formed an extensive body of very
useful work on the context for that. There is an
episode that I think will be out by the time
this episode of On Earth comes out, but it doesn't
exist as of when we are recording it. That it
is specifically about the decision and the impact that it
is going to have. Um moving on, bones have been
(09:47):
found in the walls of the Chapelle Expertoire in Paris.
This is a memorial chapel that was built in the
nineteenth century on the site of the former Madeline Cemetery.
That cemetery is where Louis the sixteenth and Marie Antoinette
were buried after being executed during the French Revolution. When
this chapel was built, there remains, or at least the remains.
(10:09):
People were pretty sure we're there's had been exhumed and reinterred.
At the Basilica of Sandinis. Madeline Cemetery was one of
the ones established to hold the remains of people who
were guillotine during the French Revolution in the Reign of Terror.
It closed in seventeen ninety four, and before the bones
were discovered in the chapel walls, it was believed that
all the remains had been removed and ultimately placed in
(10:31):
the ossuary in the Paris Catacombs. We covered the Catacombs
on the show in October, but it turns out there
actually four ossuaries in the walls of the lower chapel.
They may contain the remains of as many as five
hundred people. Some of them are among the most prominent
people to be guillotined, including Madame DuBarry and Olimpe de Gouge.
(10:54):
As a super quick note and changing gears quite a bit.
In June, NASA announced that its head quarters building in Washington,
d C. Would be named after engineer Mary Winston Jackson,
who we covered on the show in February of nineteen
and in our last update for this edition of On Earth,
here's the headline from the art newspaper that has dated
(11:15):
June eighteen, uote has Yale's mysterious voyage manuscript finally been deciphered.
Every time someone writes that headline, I just want to
call their office and go, no, baby no. What follows
reads pretty much like every other voyage manuscript update we
have talked about over the years, of which there have
(11:36):
been many, which is why I say that we could
say that so it seems safe to say it is
not no, baby no. To answer your question. This one
also seems to get a lot less traction than a
lot of the previous You know, outsider says that they
have cracked the code based on apparently specious reasoning. Yeah,
(11:57):
I I my very favorite to the ones like board
hobbyist cracks Voytage manuscript in ten days, and I'm always like,
this reads like a quick weight loss ad. Like it's
just no, no, no, Yeah. Do you want to take
a quick break before we get into some scientific stuff.
(12:19):
Let's do next. That's Holly alluded to. Before the break,
we have a few things that sit at the intersection
between science and history. First, according to various headlines, you
can see the twelfth century murder of Thomas Beckett, Archbishop
(12:43):
of Canterbury, in a seventy two meter long ice core
from this s with Italian Alps. That sentence, it might
seem like kind of a stretch sensational. Yeah, that does
kind of skip a step. Um Beckett was killed by
four of King Henry the Seconds nine in eleven seventy
after a long dispute between the archbishop and the monarch
(13:04):
over the interplay between ecclesiastical and secular law. The king
later performed an act of public penance for his role
in all of this, and he also arranged and funded
the construction of several monasteries. Those monasteries are really where
this ice core comes in. The ice core shows an
increase in lead pollution towards the end of the twelfth century,
(13:26):
and then tax records from that same period show an
uptick in English lead and silver production. So the conclusion
here as that both the production and the pollution traced
back to the materials that were needed for the roofs
of those monasteries that were built after the murder of
Thomas Beckett. These researchers also traced correlations between lead production,
(13:48):
atmospheric lead, and other political events, wars and crusades between
eleven seventy and twelve twenty. They concluded that Britain was
the major source of lead pollution during this period and
other Thomas Beckett news There is now a three D
rendering of the original shrine of Thomas Beckett, which was
destroyed during the Protestant Reformation. This recreates what the shrine
(14:10):
would have looked like in the year fourteen o eight,
and it was released to the public for the anniversary
of the translation of Beckett's remains from the crypt in
Canterbury Cathedral to this shrine. Jumping tracks once again. In
what has been described as a real breakthrough, a team
publishing in the journal Nature has developed a new way
(14:31):
to determine the age of pottery. Radio carbon dating only
works on organic material but pottery is mostly inorganic, and
this means that a lot of the time people have
to figure out the age of pottery by comparing it
to organic materials from the same site, rather than being
able to test the pottery itself. In the words of
Professor Richard Evershed from the University of Bristol, who led
(14:53):
the research team, quote, being able to directly date archaeological
pots is one of the holy grails of our geology.
The method described in the paper accurate compounds. Specific fourteen
seed dating of archaeological pottery vessels doesn't exactly date the
pottery itself. It tests the lipid residues left behind when
(15:14):
the pottery was used in food preparation. To do this,
researchers have to use high resolution nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy
and mass spectrometry to pinpoint the residues and thence to
confirm that they are pure enough to provide an accurate date.
The team used their method on pottery fragments that had
already been precisely dated through other methods, and they found
(15:36):
that it was extremely accurate. It's possible that this method
could narrow the date range for a piece of pottery
down to a human lifespan. This is something that was
um It was actually announced before our most recent unearthed
installment came out, but it was more heavily promoted just afterward,
and a lot of very excited people tagged us into
(16:00):
things on Twitter that we're like, here's something you can
talk about on the next on Earth Moving on forestry
and land, Scotland has been using drone surveys conducted by
a company called Skyscape Survey to create three D models
of terrain, and in May they announced that they had
completed a survey of an earthen rampart that's known as
(16:20):
Wallace's House. The resulting contour model roughly matches a survey
map of that same area that was published in eighteen
fifty seven. Headlines about this work read along the lines
of William Wallace's Hill Fort discovered. But this was really
an aerial survey and modeling of an area that was
already known and previously mapped. And though it's long been
(16:41):
associated with William Wallace, he died in thirteen oh five,
so centuries passed between his death in the creation of
that eighteen fifty seven survey map. In the words of
Forestry and Land Scotland archaeologist Matt Ritchie quote, could the
fort really have been built by William Wallace and his men?
I'd like to think so. And either way, the survey
(17:02):
has added a new chapter to an old story. Yeah,
it's sort of the popular lures that it was Wallace's,
but like I haven't quite substantiated that at this point.
Researchers from UC Davis have concluded that Neanderthals preferred to
use the bones of specific animals when making leather working
tools known as lessoire. According to the analysis, the tools
(17:24):
were mostly made from bovine bones, so things like bison
and rox, but based on the other bones that were
part of the same deposit, reindeer were actually the ones
that were more commonly used as a food source, so
the use of bovine bones seems to have been intentional.
Reindeer bone would have been a lot more plentiful and
easy to come by, but bovine bones, specifically the ribs,
(17:47):
would have been larger and more rigid for making these tools.
Maybe the coolest part of all of this, the team
didn't want to damage the bones to collect samples to analyze,
so they used residues from inside of the plastic containers
where the bones had been stored, and that was enough
material to analyze through a mass spectrometer. Now we're gonna
(18:08):
move on to a few unearth things related to books
and letters. Four fragments of the Dead Sea scrolls that
were believed until now to be blank have been discovered
to actually contain text, just not texts that's visible to
the naked eye. The government of Jordan's had given these
fragments to a leather expert back in the nineteen fifties
(18:30):
to study their composition. It seemed like good candidates to
do that work because everyone thought they were blank. After
that work was complete, the fragments were placed in storage,
and then they eventually made their way to the University
of Manchester. Professor Joan Taylor was looking through the collection
for items that might warrant for their study and discovered
a mark that looked like a possible letter. That fine
(18:52):
led a team to image fifty one scroll fragments using
multi spectral imaging. Based on that work, four of the
fragments do contain readable text. The largest of them contains
fifteen or sixteen letters, including the word Shabat or sabbath.
In other Dead Sea scroll news, After the scrolls were
first discovered in caves in ninety six, they weren't really
(19:14):
excavated in a methodical way, and many of them passed
through an assortment of traders and dealers before being gathered
for studying. Plus, the scrolls have disintegrated over the last
two thousand years, meaning that what we describe as the
Dead Sea Scrolls is really about twenty five thou fragments
that don't necessarily carry any indication of which pieces go
(19:35):
together or what order they were written in. Sometimes there
are newer copies of a text that can serve as
a guide, but that is not always the case. So
one team is trying to resolve some of this by
using DNA fingerprinting to match up fragments that were written
on skins that all came from the same animal. Logically,
they probably go together, and it's also possible that fragments
(19:59):
that came from close sleeve related animals, like say two
different cows from the same herd, they might be connected
as well. The team has made some surprising discoveries, one
being that fragments, including the Biblical Book of Jeremiah, actually
came from two completely different animals, when a sheep and
one a cow, suggesting that these might actually be two
(20:20):
different copies of the same book that have been merged
together during the research process. And now we'll move on
to something that's sort of book adjacent. Archaeologists in London
may have found the remains of the Red Lion Theater,
which was the first known purpose built theater of the
Elizabethan era. The theater was built around fifteen sixty seven,
(20:40):
although its exact location has been the subject of debate.
This excavation took place in advance of construction work, and
it unearthed a building that roughly matches the dimensions of
the Red Lion, which we know because of its being
mentioned in two lawsuits in fifteen sixty seven. In fifteen
sixty nine, the excavation also found the remains of other
(21:00):
buildings built over the century or so that followed, including
what may have been the Red Lion. In that find
included two beer sellers, complete with bottles and tankards. I know,
I love the fact that we know the dimensions of
this theater because of lawsuits. It makes me um feel
(21:21):
less crabby about litigious people. I'm like, well, they're creating
a historical record. I also didn't go down the rabbit
hole of figuring out exactly what the lawsuits were about,
but I'm imagining it was the neighbors being crabby about
the theater noise. And now we can just on that note,
take a little quick break for a sponsor. Whenever I
(21:48):
work on these unearthed episodes, I always wind up with
some random discoveries that seem pretty cool, but they don't
really fit together into a category, and I just throw
them into a pile that I call potpourri like on Jeopardy.
This is where we are. Researchers have tried to resolve
the question of whether bronze swords that have been found
(22:10):
in various parts of Europe were made for decorative or
ceremonial purposes or if they were used as weapons, and
they did this by making replicas of them and fighting
with them. This is part of a bigger project known
as the Bronze Age Combat Project. I feel like this
is the dream for so many people. It's not the
(22:33):
first time we've talked about doing stuff with replica weapons,
Like there was one where there were javelin throwers that
were throwing, But this one, to me is more delightful
to fighting with the bronze swords. Oh yeah. For this research,
Raphael Herman of the University of Goodeen commissioned seven cast
bronze swords and then struck them against one another in
a methodical way and recorded the results. Since that's not
(22:57):
actually like combat, he also worked with some medieval that
enthusiasts who dueled with the replicas while being recorded with
high speed cameras, and then the team compared the wear
marks from these duels to more than two thousand, five
hundred wear marks found on one hundred and ten actual
bronze age swords. So what they found was that, yes,
(23:17):
it appears that even though bronze is a pretty soft
material that doesn't necessarily seem ideal for making swords out
of these swords were actually used for fighting. The team
also found that the wear patterns on those hundred and
ten bronze age swords were connected to the swords age
and where it was found, so that suggests that there
(23:38):
were very specific and precise fighting techniques that arose in
different areas and evolved over time. The team used similar
methods to study bronze age spears and shields as well.
They published their results in the Journal of Archaeological method
and Theory in April under the title Bronze Age Swordsmanship
New Insights from Experiments and Wear Analysis Moving on. A
(24:01):
clay pipe found by an amateur bottle hunter in Tasmania
in twenty sixteen has turned out to be one of
the oldest known depictions of the now extinct thil A
sign also called the Tasmanian Tiger. It is also the
first clay pipe known to have been made locally in Tasmania.
(24:22):
Rather than imported to the island from somewhere else. The
pipes age and origins are a bit of a mystery,
though the bottles it was found with date back to
about eighteen thirty, suggesting it's almost two hundred years old,
but the pipe stem is decorated with a kuka burra,
and cuka burras were not introduced into Tasmania until nineteen
oh three. It is possible that whoever made the pipe
(24:44):
had lived in Australia or New Guinea, or that it
actually depicts some other bird. I learned as I was
reading about this there's a whole organization that's specifically dedicated
to tracking down depictions and other evidence of um of thil,
a sign which I just was like, that's great, it's
(25:05):
great interest for somebody to have and pursue so excitedly.
Archaeologist near Verona, Italy, have been unearthing the floor mosaics
and foundations of a Roman villa dating back to the
third century. This is not actually a new discovery. The
villa was first found back in the nineteen twenties, but
it wasn't excavated at that time. Um it did take
(25:27):
some hunting to find it again in more recent years, though.
Excavation work started in October of nineteen and it continued
to tell February, and then that had to be suspended
until May because of the pandemic. A lot of people
tagged us into a Twitter thread about uh that that
described it as what could be the year's biggest discovery.
(25:48):
But really, all the information that there is to share
about it at this point is what we just said.
And then like a handful of pictures. That's like five pictures.
I think they are really pretty. I don't want to
take away from the fact that it does look like
a very beautiful floor mosaic, but like, at this point,
it's it's not clear if there's something that's clearly setting
it apart from the many other Roman era floor mosaics
(26:10):
that have survived until the day. I don't really know yet,
all very preliminary. In other news, archaeologists excavating a Song
dynasty tomb and China's Hunan Province have unearthed a burial
side of a married couple. It was pretty common for
spouses to be buried together, but what makes this to
more unique is an element that was described as a
fairy bridge is a small window connecting the two sections
(26:33):
of the tomb, which is an indicator that this couple
would continue their marriage in the afterlife. I love this
story so much, too so sweet. I want a fairy bridge,
except that I don't want to be buried. Uh we have.
We've only got one Edibles and Potables discovery to talk
about this time around, so we're putting that one here.
(26:54):
Research at three sites in eastern Ethiopia has revealed that
halal butchering practices and Islamic dietary standards pre date the
first major mosques and Muslim burial sites that are there
by four hundred years. Those major religious sites were built
around the twelfth century, although it is possible that there
were smaller mosques built earlier than that which have not
(27:15):
yet been discovered. In addition to that find, they found
evidence at Harlaw, which is one of the three sites
that was studied, of imported fish that had been brought
in from the Red Sea. Since they did not find
the fish heads, this suggests that the fish were being
processed and preserved when they were caught before being transported
into the region. Came from Canary Row. Uh. Switching gears again,
(27:41):
we have got a couple of studies related to the Amazon.
According to a paper published in the journal Nature, people
in southwest Amazonia about ten thousand years ago created what
is described as artificial forest islands. Today the area is
covered by forested areas surrounded by savannah, and the savannah
is flooded from December through March, but people built mounds
(28:05):
that would have stayed above the water level during the
rainy season, allowing trees to grow, thus the forest islands.
This conclusion followed remote sensing of sixty one archaeological sites
in northern Bolivia. This adds to just a growing body
of knowledge about how much people influenced the forest itself
(28:25):
before Europeans arrived there. Um research in the same area
also suggests that people in the Amazon started started domesticating
maniac about eleven thousand years ago, meaning that this region
is one of the places on Earth where people started
domesticating plants all at roughly the same time. It lines
(28:47):
up with rice domestication in what's now China, grain domestication
in the Middle East, mean and squashed domestication in Mesoamerica,
and potato and keen wad domestication in the Andes. According
to a study published in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography,
soil enrichment techniques used in eastern and southern Amazonia before
(29:08):
the arrival of Europeans continues to influence the region's biodiversity today. Specifically,
they compared flora growing in Amazonian dark earth that's usually
uh shortened as a D E, and they compared it
with flora in non a D soil. The dark earth
was created as the region's early inhabitants used charcoal and
(29:29):
food waste to enrich the soil, so the researchers found
that these areas with dark earth still have richer plant
diversity than areas without it. Areas with dark earth also
had a higher pH and more nutrients present in the soil.
There are definitely some dark earth areas that are still
being used by local and indigenous populations, but the soil
(29:51):
also continued to be richer, with more diverse plant life
and places where it hasn't been actively used in centuries.
Shipwrecked time, which will make some of our listeners happy.
The remains of a shipwreck in York, Maine have been
tentatively identified as the Defiance, which was originally built in
seventeen fifty four. Studying this wreck has been pretty tricky.
(30:13):
It's position on the beach means that it's continually being
uncovered and reburied by the sea, especially after storms. Its
first documented appearance was in nineteen fifty eight. After that
it vanished again before re emerging in nineteen seventy eight,
two thousand, seven, thirteen, and twenty eighteen. Marine archaeologist Stephen
Clayson worked to i d the find by sending a
(30:35):
sample of one of the timbers to the Cornell University
Tree Ring Laboratory, which suggested that it came from a
tree that had been cut down in seventeen fifty three.
With that starting point, Clayson dug through notary records for
a match. The Defiance wrecked on York Beach in a
storm in seventeen sixty nine, and it had initially been
(30:56):
built in Massachusetts in seventeen fifty four. All four of
the crew that were aboard survived the wreck and interviews
plays and stressed the need to try to conserve what
is left of this wreckage because every time it re
emerges from the sand, people flocked to the area to
look at it and take pictures, and some of them
go home with pieces of the wreck that they have
taken as souvenirs. That happens all the time for various things.
(31:21):
In another piece of news, a two thousand year old
boat has been found under the waterfront in Porridge, Croatia.
This is one of three similar boats that have been
found on land in Croatia rather than as part of
an underwater survey. So this find has been described as
a particularly well preserved example of a sown ship. The
(31:41):
wood itself has been preserved, as well as the wooden
nails and the rope that was used to actually sow
the vessel together. Although this seems to be a Roman ship,
the sewing technique that was used to build it as older.
The battleship USS Nevada was struck when Japanese forces attacked
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December seven. The vessel managed to
(32:05):
get under way before being hit again, and its crew
had to beach it After it was repaired. It survived
the Battle of Attu, the d D Invasion, and the
invasion of Iwajima and Okinawa before serving as a target
during atomic bomb tests after the war was over. It
survived nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll, and although it was
radioactive At that point, it was towed to a point
(32:27):
off the Hawaiian Islands, where it continued to be used
for target practice, which it continued to survive before being
scuttled by an aerial torpedo in The Navy knew its
approximate location, but teams from private firms Search Incorporated and
Ocean Infinity discovered the actual wreckage in May of this year.
(32:48):
Their ships had stayed at sea due to the coronavirus pandemic,
which also put a pause on some of their other
commercial work. Yeah. I interpreted their statements about it. It's
basically saying, well, we're out here on the ocean. Let's
look around, y'all want to go look for a shipwreck.
We have one repatriation to talk about this time around.
The Exeter City Council in England has voted to return
(33:11):
a collection of items that belonged to six SCA First
Nation Chief Crowfoot to the six SA First Nation in Alberta, Canada.
These items had been at the Royal albert Memorial Museum.
That acquisition had dated back to the signing of Treaty
seven between the Government of Canada and five First Nations,
one of those first Nations being the Six Sica, who
(33:33):
are also known as the Blackfoot. Formal negotiations for the
return of the items started back in with visits from
six Sicca Nation to Exeter and vice versa in but
then the negotiations stalled for years. A climate controlled room
had already been prepared to house the regalia at Blackfoot
Crossing Historical Park, but the actual return has been delayed,
(33:57):
like so many things we've talked about on this on Earth,
due to COVID nineteen travel restrictions. As of when we
are recording this, it is uncertain when this may happen.
The Sixa First Nation is in the middle of a
spike in COVID cases. Yea, Like so many indigenous and
First Nations communities, like things seem treacherous. Yeah. At this
(34:18):
moment um, we have two exhimations to talk about, both
of which also could have been updates. We have talked
about the extimation of Salvador Deli for praternity testing and
previous installments of Unearthed. In May, a Spanish court ordered
pillar Abell, who had requested the exlimation in order to
(34:38):
prove whether she was Salvador Dolly's daughter, to pay all
the costs associated with it. It's an estimated seven thousand euros.
Our previous updates included the fact that the DNA tests
revealed that Dolly was not her father, but not that
polar Abell had been filed an additional suit contending that
the chain of custody had been interrupted when the remains
(35:00):
were gathered and analyzed. So she's contesting that whole thing. Yeah,
the judge did not find that to be substantiated. In April,
the Texas Historical Commission approved a plan to exhume four
sets of remains from the Alamo to allow for ongoing
preservation work there. The plan was to temporarily keep the
(35:22):
remains in a collection's fault and then, once the work
is complete, to re enter them on Alamo grounds. There
have been several controversies connected to this exhimation, as different
groups of people whose ancestors are buried at the Alamo
have disagreed on how to proceed. One issue is DNA testing.
The committee that established a protocol for how human remains
(35:44):
should be handled at the Alamo included representatives from several
federally recognized Indigenous peoples, many of whom do not agree
with conducting DNA testing of remains for religious or cultural reasons,
but those representatives do not in lude the tap Peelam
quae tech In nation, which is not federally recognized, and
(36:05):
it is possible that a third or more of the
people buried at the Alamo were quae tech In speaking
people's Unlike many of the other nations involved, tap pe
lam is in favor of DNA testing. In June, the
Texas Historical Commission also recognized the Alamo's church as a
verified cemetery, but denied request to have the area surrounding
(36:26):
the church recognized as an unverified cemetery that would have
affected ongoing work at the Alamo Plaza. That work is
also highly controversial. I learned that there is a whole
world of controversy about the Alamo and the restoration projects
and the plaza projects that is all going on right now. Uh.
And then our final thing, this, according to Tracy, gets
(36:51):
the best headline award. It wouldn't for me because of
subject matter, but it is the origin of feces copro
I d reliably predict sources of ancient poop. So we
have talked about various discoveries that have been made through
analyzing copper lights or fossilized feces on a show before.
One of the challenges in this work is figuring out
(37:12):
exactly which species the feces came from. This can be
especially challenging for researchers when they're trying to distinguish human
feces from dog feces because they tend to have a
similar size and composition. Prehistoric humans and dogs also often
lived in the same place in eight similar food. They
can even be tricky to tell them apart using DNA analysis,
(37:33):
because some ancient cultures used dogs as a food source,
and dogs current dogs would still do this. I'm sure
have also scavenged human feces for food. Current dogs will
scavenge any animals feces for any any feces. Yeah. Copro
I d tackles this problem, combining analysis of the host
(37:54):
DNA with machine learning predictions based on analysis of modern
gut microbiomes to accurately determine the source of the feces.
In the words of Christina we're In, her senior author
of the study, quote, one unexpected finding of our study
is the realization that the archaeological record is full of
dog poop. I just felt like that was I could
(38:15):
not end on any other story than that one. Although
you know, as an animal person, that just does not
surprise me. Of course I interpreted that as meaning there
is poop that we thought was human that it's not,
which is hilarious. Yeah. Um uh, Tracy, you had mentioned
(38:37):
to me before we started that we're not doing listener
mail for this one, not exactly. Rather than trying to
read any one particular email, we have gotten several emails
and notes on Facebook and tweets and whatnot over the
last few weeks um asking about our website. Uh. And
we've talked about it previously on the show, but since
(38:58):
it's been a while and since clearly folks are still like, hey,
what happened to your website, I thought we would recap
it again and also give folks some tips for finding
stuff like finding on episodes of the show. So basically
our old website, which was full of pictures and tags
and show notes and whatnot that was custom made when
(39:21):
we were part of a website called how Stuff Works. UM.
It had a bunch of features that had been cobbled
together over many many years from a bunch of sources.
Like the tags were a carryover from when our podcast
website used to be on WordPress, and when we stopped
using WordPress, the how stuff Works team like custom made
(39:42):
a tag feature to carry all that over. So in
the How Stuff Works podcasts spun off into our own business,
and then I Heart Radio bought that business in September,
and then for more than a year after that, the
remaining how Stuff Works team kept maintaining the old website
(40:02):
that just could not continue forever. At some point we
had to move on to the infrastructure of the company
that actually owns our podcast. Uh And so that happened.
I think that was that was at the beginning of
this year at this point. Does that sound right? No?
I think it was earlier than that, But maybe I'm wrong.
I think I feel like it was at the beginning
(40:22):
of this year because I have a spreadsheet that has
all the old tags on it and it ends December.
I mean that who knows, though it's it's all kind
of blurring together. Things that happened in January of this
year feel like they happened before I was born. At
this point. Uh, So, we were working on a solution
(40:43):
at least for the show notes, because we both feel
like the show notes are really important to show people
what the sources are for all of our episode and
to give credit to everybody who has worked on those
sources for doing their work. Um, we were working on
a solution for that, and then a pandemic happened and
that just totally upended both the like the logistical and
(41:04):
the working like the people and the financial resources, like
all of that just got like somebody just just just
shook the picnic blanket with all of that stuff on it. Um,
So I don't we don't know at this point when
we will have a show note resources so are a
show note thing that people can access. So easiest way
(41:27):
to find old episodes of the show on the internet
is to google the topic you're looking for and the
words missed in history, all as part of the same search.
Um that's actually how I was doing it with the
old website. Yea all the time. Yeah, it works ninety
tocent of the time. There's a tiny number of episodes
(41:48):
that for some reason Google just hasn't indexed, and there
are a few things that are named weirdly that don't
come up. But of the time that will work. The
easiest way to scroll through a whole list of the episodes.
Is actually to just use an app like for example,
Apple Podcasts. UM like that that if you are subscribed
(42:09):
to the show, will show you the entire archive that
you can just scroll on through if you need specific
show notes for something. UM Like let's say you're working
on a school project and it would really help you
out to be able to see the sources for an episode. UH,
email us within reason, we will try to help you out. UM.
We did not have transcripts of all the old episodes,
(42:30):
which is something that like we we have really wanted
to have for a long time, and we don't for
a lot of reasons that are outside of our control individually.
But for this the episodes that we did have transcripts of,
I still have those transcripts. So if you need one,
email and and if we have it, I will send
it to you. UM. Our email address is History Podcast
at I Heart radio dot com. Our previous how Stuff
(42:53):
Works email address is now officially finally no longer delivering
emails to us anymore. UM that continued to work for
many months, So if you want to email us, that's
the the one to use it as History Podcast at
I Heart radio dot com. Uh, I don't do you
have anything to add to all of the Well, I
had a question for you because I thought Apple only
had three hundred episodes. Apple only has three hundred episodes
(43:17):
in the store. So if you're in the Apple podcast store, uh,
pretty much any podcast that doesn't have a lower limit
manually set. It's a maximum of three hundred episodes. But
if you are subscribed to the show and you look
in your library, it should have all of it. Do
you like how I staged that question so that we
(43:38):
would know, because I know it comes up all the time.
It does come up all of the uh. And I
mean that I I can't speak to how every single
podcast app works because there's so many of them, and
most of them are free, and you can try as
many as you want to find one that that suits
your needs. But that also means that, like we usually
usually can't answer individual questions about how anything besides Apple
(44:01):
podcast works because that's the one that's like been around
the longest, um and as you know, that's the that's
the app that's on my phone. Although I listen to
podcasts like a caveman by manually sinking a click wheel
iPod to a computer, I'm still somewhat befuddled by this practice.
But it's not even that, it's just that I've been
(44:26):
doing it for so long, and I especially because because
of the pandemic, I'm no longer walking to go on
errands nearly as much. Also, to be frank, I'm not
cleaning as much, and those are the times that I
usually listen to podcasts. So I have this giant backlog
of podcasts and like trying to recreate that on my
(44:48):
phone to listen to like a more up to date
human person is just like it's one thing I don't
have time. I have plenty of time, I don't have
the mental space to do it right now. Fair, uh
don't have the middle space for a lot of things.
I'm sure that's like everyone. Again. We hope everyone is
uh being able to take as as good a care
(45:08):
of themselves as possible. I know things are incredibly hard
right now for most people in a lot of ways.
So anyway, if you'd like to write to us about
this or any other podcast or history podcasts at I
heart radio dot com and then you'll also find us
on social media at miss in history real like for example,
that's our Twitter name as miss in History our website,
(45:30):
as we have said, is missed in History dot com,
and you can subscribe to our show on the I
heart radio app and Apple podcasts and anywhere else you
get a podcast. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(45:51):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Biebelson and I'm Holly Frying. Hey, it's time
for Unearthed. Ye hey this spring. In our previous installment
(00:24):
of Unearthed, we speculated on whether the COVID Night Team
pandemic would thwart our plans to do Unearthed in July.
If you have just started listening to the podcast. Between
I guess April ish and now, this is when we
periodically talk about things that have been literally and figuratively unearthed,
(00:44):
and we kind of wondered whether the there would be
a pause on unearthing because of the pandemic. There has
not been. I actually saved about as many articles over April,
May and June as I did in the first three
months of the year, but a lot of what I
call did was a little bit repetitive or sounded really
similar to a find that we just talked about recently,
(01:06):
um things like that. So we just have a one
part Unearthed this time around instead of two parts. Also,
just a note, there's a little thunder happening off at
the distance at my house. I don't know if the
microphone is going to pick any of it up. But
if you're listening or like, what was that, it was
probably rumbling. Those girls should eat lunch. I mean that
happens sometimes too. In un Earth seventeen, we talked about
(01:31):
arts and crafts retail chain Hobby Lobby agreeing to pay
a three million dollar fine and forfeit thousands of artifacts
that have been smuggled into the United States. Then in
Unearthed in July, we discussed the repatriation of those artifacts.
Well back. Hobby Lobby also purchased a tablet known as
(01:51):
the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet for more than one point six
million dollars. That tablet is three thousand, six hundred years old.
As its name suggests, it contains a portion of the
epic of Gilgamesh. After this purchase, the tablet went on
display at the Museum of the Bible, which was funded
by Hobby Lobby founder Steve Green. Officials from the Department
(02:13):
of Homeland Security seized the tablet from the museum in
twenty nineteen, and this May, federal authorities started formally pursuing
a forfeiture order to return the tablet to a rock.
According to authorities, Hobby Lobby representatives did ask about the
tablets providence before making the purchase, but a major auction house,
which remains nameless in the paperwork, obfuscated its origins. However,
(02:38):
Hobby Lobby also filed a lawsuit against the auction house, Christie's,
which accused the auction house of quote deceitful and fraudulent
conduct in connection to a Gilgamesh tablet. Seems likely it
might be the same one. Probably Also, we did not
include this little tidbit in our springtime Unearthed addition, which
(03:00):
is when it happened. But back in March, it was
also reported that none of the Dead Sea scrolls in
the Museum of the Bible's collection are actually authentic. Vindor
Landa has come up on a couple of previous installments
of an Earth that's a Roman fort just south of
Hadrian's Wall. This time, curators at the vindor Landa Museum
have found a toy mouse cut from leather in a
(03:21):
bag of scraps, and it dates back to somewhere between
the years one oh five and one thirty. This mouse
is flat, about twelve point two centimeters or four point
eight inches long. It's cut from a single piece of leather,
and it has little marks on it that seemed to
indicate hair on the mouse's body and the tail, as
well as marks for the eyes. This discovery came as
(03:43):
a result of the COVID nineteen pandemic. Excavations at Vindolanda
had to be postponed, so the curatorial staff at the
museum spent their time, among other things, going through all
of the leather pieces in the museum's collection. This collection
contains more than seven thousand objects, some of them things
like shoes, boots, and horse gear, but there are also
(04:03):
lots and lots of patches and scraps and off cuts.
I kind of love the idea of somebody being like, well,
we can't have visitors, we can't do that. Dig I'm
gonna go through this bag of scraps, see what's in here. Um.
This mouse may have been made specifically as a child's toy.
There is plenty of evidence that there were children at
(04:24):
vendor Landa, or somebody may have made it as a
practical joke or just because they were bored. The plan
is to put this mouse on display at the vendor
Landa museum. Maybe someone was trying to entertain a cat.
Maybe so it does seem like a good kick toy
for a cat. Right in our Springtime on Earth this year,
(04:45):
we talked about the theft of a painting by Vincent
van Gogh from the Singer Laren Museum, which is in Laren, Netherlands,
not in the Hague, as we said in the episode earlier.
This spring, art detective Arthur Brand received proof of life
photos of the painting. He released those on June. The
photo shows the painting a copy of the international edition
(05:06):
of the May New York Times and the book Master Thief.
Brand received a photo of the back of the painting
as well. At this point, there's some speculation that this
theft is a copycat crime. There's also like security footage,
the footage that became available after we recorded that earlier
episode that shows being like a pretty much fast paced
(05:26):
smash and grab. The book that is shown in that
proof of life picture is about the two thousand two
theft of two different Vincent van go works from an
Amsterdam museum. The newspaper that's shown in the picture has
a story on the front page titled notes on an
Art Heist from one who has done it, and it's
about the Singer Lare and theft, but it quotes extensively
(05:48):
one of the men who was convicted of that earlier
two thousand and two heist. This sounds like such a
good movie. It's like the way that serial killers in
fiction movies are portrayed as taunting the police and the
except this one would be about art theft. M hmm,
I'd go to that movie. A veterinarian in England stumbled
across a stone memorializing a previous outbreak of render Pest.
(06:12):
An image of the stone was posted on the Nantwitch
Farm Vets facebook page in May, and that stone read
quote near this place were buried forty three cows, seven
calving heifers, five yearling heifers, one bowl, twenty calves that
died in the months of February and March eighteen sixty
six of the render pest then raging in Cheshire, belonging
(06:34):
to John Sutton of Most in Manner. Our episode on
the eradication of Render Pest came out in April of
this year, So that's just another piece of that puzzle. Yeah.
I think all of those numbers that highly just read
are correct. I was reading them off of a picture
of you know, a stone dating back to the nineteenth century.
(06:55):
There were a couple where I was like, is that
a seven or a one? Uh? In a different update,
just related to multiple past episodes, including Red Summer and
our one on IBB Wells Barnet. According to a new
report that was issued by the Equal Justice Initiative in June,
more than six thousand, five hundred Black Americans were lynched
(07:15):
between eighteen sixty five and nineteen fifty. This report included
two thousands that took place during reconstruction, but we're not
included in the organization's earlier reports. So whenever we have
talked about numbers of lynchings that have taken to place
in the past, like these numbers are much larger than that.
In our previous installment of On Earth, we talked about
(07:37):
a decision by the U S Secretary of the Interior,
David Bernhardt, ruling that the mashp Wampanog's three hundred acres
of reservation land on Cape Cod would be taken out
of trust and the reservation disestablished. We noted in that
discussion that the tribe had a previously filed lawsuit that
was still pending when that decision was announced. That lawsuit
(07:57):
was related to a Department of the Interior decision that
the tribe had not been under federal jurisdiction in nineteen
thirty four. Yeah, that decision about nineteen thirty four jurisdiction
ties back into this whole disestablishment question. So a forty
five day halt was placed on the order to disestablish
the reservation, and on the last day of that order,
(08:19):
Federal Judge Paul L. Freedman issued a ruling in that
earlier lawsuit. Freedman ruled that the Department of the Interiors
twenty eighteen decision was faulty, calling it quote arbitrary, capricious,
an abuse of discretion, and contrary to law. The overall
issue is still a little unsettled at this point, though,
(08:39):
because now the Department of the Interior has to go
back and reevaluate that twenty eighteen decision. This isn't an
update exactly, but it is on a similar theme and
it happened literally as Tracy was writing this paragraph. On
July nine, the U. S. Supreme Court issued a decision
in mcgart versus Oklahoma, which also applies to another case,
(08:59):
Sharp versus Murphy, that the eastern half of Oklahoma is
Native American land for the purpose of federal criminal law.
This is a way bigger story than we can get
into here, but the podcast This Land, which is hosted
by Rebecca Nagle, is an excellent resource on it if
you want to follow up and get some more details. Yes,
I mean in general, even before the ruling was announced,
(09:22):
like it had already formed an extensive body of very
useful work on the context for that. There is an
episode that I think will be out by the time
this episode of On Earth comes out, but it doesn't
exist as of when we are recording it. That it
is specifically about the decision and the impact that it
is going to have. Um moving on, bones have been
(09:47):
found in the walls of the Chapelle Expertoire in Paris.
This is a memorial chapel that was built in the
nineteenth century on the site of the former Madeline Cemetery.
That cemetery is where Louis the sixteenth and Marie Antoinette
were buried after being executed during the French Revolution. When
this chapel was built, there remains, or at least the remains.
(10:09):
People were pretty sure we're there's had been exhumed and reinterred.
At the Basilica of Sandinis. Madeline Cemetery was one of
the ones established to hold the remains of people who
were guillotine during the French Revolution in the Reign of Terror.
It closed in seventeen ninety four, and before the bones
were discovered in the chapel walls, it was believed that
all the remains had been removed and ultimately placed in
(10:31):
the ossuary in the Paris Catacombs. We covered the Catacombs
on the show in October, but it turns out there
actually four ossuaries in the walls of the lower chapel.
They may contain the remains of as many as five
hundred people. Some of them are among the most prominent
people to be guillotined, including Madame DuBarry and Olimpe de Gouge.
(10:54):
As a super quick note and changing gears quite a bit.
In June, NASA announced that its head quarters building in Washington,
d C. Would be named after engineer Mary Winston Jackson,
who we covered on the show in February of nineteen
and in our last update for this edition of On Earth,
here's the headline from the art newspaper that has dated
(11:15):
June eighteen, uote has Yale's mysterious voyage manuscript finally been deciphered.
Every time someone writes that headline, I just want to
call their office and go, no, baby no. What follows
reads pretty much like every other voyage manuscript update we
have talked about over the years, of which there have
(11:36):
been many, which is why I say that we could
say that so it seems safe to say it is
not no, baby no. To answer your question. This one
also seems to get a lot less traction than a
lot of the previous You know, outsider says that they
have cracked the code based on apparently specious reasoning. Yeah,
(11:57):
I I my very favorite to the ones like board
hobbyist cracks Voytage manuscript in ten days, and I'm always like,
this reads like a quick weight loss ad. Like it's
just no, no, no, Yeah. Do you want to take
a quick break before we get into some scientific stuff.
(12:19):
Let's do next. That's Holly alluded to. Before the break,
we have a few things that sit at the intersection
between science and history. First, according to various headlines, you
can see the twelfth century murder of Thomas Beckett, Archbishop
(12:43):
of Canterbury, in a seventy two meter long ice core
from this s with Italian Alps. That sentence, it might
seem like kind of a stretch sensational. Yeah, that does
kind of skip a step. Um Beckett was killed by
four of King Henry the Seconds nine in eleven seventy
after a long dispute between the archbishop and the monarch
(13:04):
over the interplay between ecclesiastical and secular law. The king
later performed an act of public penance for his role
in all of this, and he also arranged and funded
the construction of several monasteries. Those monasteries are really where
this ice core comes in. The ice core shows an
increase in lead pollution towards the end of the twelfth century,
(13:26):
and then tax records from that same period show an
uptick in English lead and silver production. So the conclusion
here as that both the production and the pollution traced
back to the materials that were needed for the roofs
of those monasteries that were built after the murder of
Thomas Beckett. These researchers also traced correlations between lead production,
(13:48):
atmospheric lead, and other political events, wars and crusades between
eleven seventy and twelve twenty. They concluded that Britain was
the major source of lead pollution during this period and
other Thomas Beckett news There is now a three D
rendering of the original shrine of Thomas Beckett, which was
destroyed during the Protestant Reformation. This recreates what the shrine
(14:10):
would have looked like in the year fourteen o eight,
and it was released to the public for the anniversary
of the translation of Beckett's remains from the crypt in
Canterbury Cathedral to this shrine. Jumping tracks once again. In
what has been described as a real breakthrough, a team
publishing in the journal Nature has developed a new way
(14:31):
to determine the age of pottery. Radio carbon dating only
works on organic material but pottery is mostly inorganic, and
this means that a lot of the time people have
to figure out the age of pottery by comparing it
to organic materials from the same site, rather than being
able to test the pottery itself. In the words of
Professor Richard Evershed from the University of Bristol, who led
(14:53):
the research team, quote, being able to directly date archaeological
pots is one of the holy grails of our geology.
The method described in the paper accurate compounds. Specific fourteen
seed dating of archaeological pottery vessels doesn't exactly date the
pottery itself. It tests the lipid residues left behind when
(15:14):
the pottery was used in food preparation. To do this,
researchers have to use high resolution nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy
and mass spectrometry to pinpoint the residues and thence to
confirm that they are pure enough to provide an accurate date.
The team used their method on pottery fragments that had
already been precisely dated through other methods, and they found
(15:36):
that it was extremely accurate. It's possible that this method
could narrow the date range for a piece of pottery
down to a human lifespan. This is something that was
um It was actually announced before our most recent unearthed
installment came out, but it was more heavily promoted just afterward,
and a lot of very excited people tagged us into
(16:00):
things on Twitter that we're like, here's something you can
talk about on the next on Earth Moving on forestry
and land, Scotland has been using drone surveys conducted by
a company called Skyscape Survey to create three D models
of terrain, and in May they announced that they had
completed a survey of an earthen rampart that's known as
(16:20):
Wallace's House. The resulting contour model roughly matches a survey
map of that same area that was published in eighteen
fifty seven. Headlines about this work read along the lines
of William Wallace's Hill Fort discovered. But this was really
an aerial survey and modeling of an area that was
already known and previously mapped. And though it's long been
(16:41):
associated with William Wallace, he died in thirteen oh five,
so centuries passed between his death in the creation of
that eighteen fifty seven survey map. In the words of
Forestry and Land Scotland archaeologist Matt Ritchie quote, could the
fort really have been built by William Wallace and his men?
I'd like to think so. And either way, the survey
(17:02):
has added a new chapter to an old story. Yeah,
it's sort of the popular lures that it was Wallace's,
but like I haven't quite substantiated that at this point.
Researchers from UC Davis have concluded that Neanderthals preferred to
use the bones of specific animals when making leather working
tools known as lessoire. According to the analysis, the tools
(17:24):
were mostly made from bovine bones, so things like bison
and rox, but based on the other bones that were
part of the same deposit, reindeer were actually the ones
that were more commonly used as a food source, so
the use of bovine bones seems to have been intentional.
Reindeer bone would have been a lot more plentiful and
easy to come by, but bovine bones, specifically the ribs,
(17:47):
would have been larger and more rigid for making these tools.
Maybe the coolest part of all of this, the team
didn't want to damage the bones to collect samples to analyze,
so they used residues from inside of the plastic containers
where the bones had been stored, and that was enough
material to analyze through a mass spectrometer. Now we're gonna
(18:08):
move on to a few unearth things related to books
and letters. Four fragments of the Dead Sea scrolls that
were believed until now to be blank have been discovered
to actually contain text, just not texts that's visible to
the naked eye. The government of Jordan's had given these
fragments to a leather expert back in the nineteen fifties
(18:30):
to study their composition. It seemed like good candidates to
do that work because everyone thought they were blank. After
that work was complete, the fragments were placed in storage,
and then they eventually made their way to the University
of Manchester. Professor Joan Taylor was looking through the collection
for items that might warrant for their study and discovered
a mark that looked like a possible letter. That fine
(18:52):
led a team to image fifty one scroll fragments using
multi spectral imaging. Based on that work, four of the
fragments do contain readable text. The largest of them contains
fifteen or sixteen letters, including the word Shabat or sabbath.
In other Dead Sea scroll news, After the scrolls were
first discovered in caves in ninety six, they weren't really
(19:14):
excavated in a methodical way, and many of them passed
through an assortment of traders and dealers before being gathered
for studying. Plus, the scrolls have disintegrated over the last
two thousand years, meaning that what we describe as the
Dead Sea Scrolls is really about twenty five thou fragments
that don't necessarily carry any indication of which pieces go
(19:35):
together or what order they were written in. Sometimes there
are newer copies of a text that can serve as
a guide, but that is not always the case. So
one team is trying to resolve some of this by
using DNA fingerprinting to match up fragments that were written
on skins that all came from the same animal. Logically,
they probably go together, and it's also possible that fragments
(19:59):
that came from close sleeve related animals, like say two
different cows from the same herd, they might be connected
as well. The team has made some surprising discoveries, one
being that fragments, including the Biblical Book of Jeremiah, actually
came from two completely different animals, when a sheep and
one a cow, suggesting that these might actually be two
(20:20):
different copies of the same book that have been merged
together during the research process. And now we'll move on
to something that's sort of book adjacent. Archaeologists in London
may have found the remains of the Red Lion Theater,
which was the first known purpose built theater of the
Elizabethan era. The theater was built around fifteen sixty seven,
(20:40):
although its exact location has been the subject of debate.
This excavation took place in advance of construction work, and
it unearthed a building that roughly matches the dimensions of
the Red Lion, which we know because of its being
mentioned in two lawsuits in fifteen sixty seven. In fifteen
sixty nine, the excavation also found the remains of other
(21:00):
buildings built over the century or so that followed, including
what may have been the Red Lion. In that find
included two beer sellers, complete with bottles and tankards. I know,
I love the fact that we know the dimensions of
this theater because of lawsuits. It makes me um feel
(21:21):
less crabby about litigious people. I'm like, well, they're creating
a historical record. I also didn't go down the rabbit
hole of figuring out exactly what the lawsuits were about,
but I'm imagining it was the neighbors being crabby about
the theater noise. And now we can just on that note,
take a little quick break for a sponsor. Whenever I
(21:48):
work on these unearthed episodes, I always wind up with
some random discoveries that seem pretty cool, but they don't
really fit together into a category, and I just throw
them into a pile that I call potpourri like on Jeopardy.
This is where we are. Researchers have tried to resolve
the question of whether bronze swords that have been found
(22:10):
in various parts of Europe were made for decorative or
ceremonial purposes or if they were used as weapons, and
they did this by making replicas of them and fighting
with them. This is part of a bigger project known
as the Bronze Age Combat Project. I feel like this
is the dream for so many people. It's not the
(22:33):
first time we've talked about doing stuff with replica weapons,
Like there was one where there were javelin throwers that
were throwing, But this one, to me is more delightful
to fighting with the bronze swords. Oh yeah. For this research,
Raphael Herman of the University of Goodeen commissioned seven cast
bronze swords and then struck them against one another in
a methodical way and recorded the results. Since that's not
(22:57):
actually like combat, he also worked with some medieval that
enthusiasts who dueled with the replicas while being recorded with
high speed cameras, and then the team compared the wear
marks from these duels to more than two thousand, five
hundred wear marks found on one hundred and ten actual
bronze age swords. So what they found was that, yes,
(23:17):
it appears that even though bronze is a pretty soft
material that doesn't necessarily seem ideal for making swords out
of these swords were actually used for fighting. The team
also found that the wear patterns on those hundred and
ten bronze age swords were connected to the swords age
and where it was found, so that suggests that there
(23:38):
were very specific and precise fighting techniques that arose in
different areas and evolved over time. The team used similar
methods to study bronze age spears and shields as well.
They published their results in the Journal of Archaeological method
and Theory in April under the title Bronze Age Swordsmanship
New Insights from Experiments and Wear Analysis Moving on. A
(24:01):
clay pipe found by an amateur bottle hunter in Tasmania
in twenty sixteen has turned out to be one of
the oldest known depictions of the now extinct thil A
sign also called the Tasmanian Tiger. It is also the
first clay pipe known to have been made locally in Tasmania.
(24:22):
Rather than imported to the island from somewhere else. The
pipes age and origins are a bit of a mystery,
though the bottles it was found with date back to
about eighteen thirty, suggesting it's almost two hundred years old,
but the pipe stem is decorated with a kuka burra,
and cuka burras were not introduced into Tasmania until nineteen
oh three. It is possible that whoever made the pipe
(24:44):
had lived in Australia or New Guinea, or that it
actually depicts some other bird. I learned as I was
reading about this there's a whole organization that's specifically dedicated
to tracking down depictions and other evidence of um of thil,
a sign which I just was like, that's great, it's
(25:05):
great interest for somebody to have and pursue so excitedly.
Archaeologist near Verona, Italy, have been unearthing the floor mosaics
and foundations of a Roman villa dating back to the
third century. This is not actually a new discovery. The
villa was first found back in the nineteen twenties, but
it wasn't excavated at that time. Um it did take
(25:27):
some hunting to find it again in more recent years, though.
Excavation work started in October of nineteen and it continued
to tell February, and then that had to be suspended
until May because of the pandemic. A lot of people
tagged us into a Twitter thread about uh that that
described it as what could be the year's biggest discovery.
(25:48):
But really, all the information that there is to share
about it at this point is what we just said.
And then like a handful of pictures. That's like five pictures.
I think they are really pretty. I don't want to
take away from the fact that it does look like
a very beautiful floor mosaic, but like, at this point,
it's it's not clear if there's something that's clearly setting
it apart from the many other Roman era floor mosaics
(26:10):
that have survived until the day. I don't really know yet,
all very preliminary. In other news, archaeologists excavating a Song
dynasty tomb and China's Hunan Province have unearthed a burial
side of a married couple. It was pretty common for
spouses to be buried together, but what makes this to
more unique is an element that was described as a
fairy bridge is a small window connecting the two sections
(26:33):
of the tomb, which is an indicator that this couple
would continue their marriage in the afterlife. I love this
story so much, too so sweet. I want a fairy bridge,
except that I don't want to be buried. Uh we have.
We've only got one Edibles and Potables discovery to talk
about this time around, so we're putting that one here.
(26:54):
Research at three sites in eastern Ethiopia has revealed that
halal butchering practices and Islamic dietary standards pre date the
first major mosques and Muslim burial sites that are there
by four hundred years. Those major religious sites were built
around the twelfth century, although it is possible that there
were smaller mosques built earlier than that which have not
(27:15):
yet been discovered. In addition to that find, they found
evidence at Harlaw, which is one of the three sites
that was studied, of imported fish that had been brought
in from the Red Sea. Since they did not find
the fish heads, this suggests that the fish were being
processed and preserved when they were caught before being transported
into the region. Came from Canary Row. Uh. Switching gears again,
(27:41):
we have got a couple of studies related to the Amazon.
According to a paper published in the journal Nature, people
in southwest Amazonia about ten thousand years ago created what
is described as artificial forest islands. Today the area is
covered by forested areas surrounded by savannah, and the savannah
is flooded from December through March, but people built mounds
(28:05):
that would have stayed above the water level during the
rainy season, allowing trees to grow, thus the forest islands.
This conclusion followed remote sensing of sixty one archaeological sites
in northern Bolivia. This adds to just a growing body
of knowledge about how much people influenced the forest itself
(28:25):
before Europeans arrived there. Um research in the same area
also suggests that people in the Amazon started started domesticating
maniac about eleven thousand years ago, meaning that this region
is one of the places on Earth where people started
domesticating plants all at roughly the same time. It lines
(28:47):
up with rice domestication in what's now China, grain domestication
in the Middle East, mean and squashed domestication in Mesoamerica,
and potato and keen wad domestication in the Andes. According
to a study published in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography,
soil enrichment techniques used in eastern and southern Amazonia before
(29:08):
the arrival of Europeans continues to influence the region's biodiversity today. Specifically,
they compared flora growing in Amazonian dark earth that's usually
uh shortened as a D E, and they compared it
with flora in non a D soil. The dark earth
was created as the region's early inhabitants used charcoal and
(29:29):
food waste to enrich the soil, so the researchers found
that these areas with dark earth still have richer plant
diversity than areas without it. Areas with dark earth also
had a higher pH and more nutrients present in the soil.
There are definitely some dark earth areas that are still
being used by local and indigenous populations, but the soil
(29:51):
also continued to be richer, with more diverse plant life
and places where it hasn't been actively used in centuries.
Shipwrecked time, which will make some of our listeners happy.
The remains of a shipwreck in York, Maine have been
tentatively identified as the Defiance, which was originally built in
seventeen fifty four. Studying this wreck has been pretty tricky.
(30:13):
It's position on the beach means that it's continually being
uncovered and reburied by the sea, especially after storms. Its
first documented appearance was in nineteen fifty eight. After that
it vanished again before re emerging in nineteen seventy eight,
two thousand, seven, thirteen, and twenty eighteen. Marine archaeologist Stephen
Clayson worked to i d the find by sending a
(30:35):
sample of one of the timbers to the Cornell University
Tree Ring Laboratory, which suggested that it came from a
tree that had been cut down in seventeen fifty three.
With that starting point, Clayson dug through notary records for
a match. The Defiance wrecked on York Beach in a
storm in seventeen sixty nine, and it had initially been
(30:56):
built in Massachusetts in seventeen fifty four. All four of
the crew that were aboard survived the wreck and interviews
plays and stressed the need to try to conserve what
is left of this wreckage because every time it re
emerges from the sand, people flocked to the area to
look at it and take pictures, and some of them
go home with pieces of the wreck that they have
taken as souvenirs. That happens all the time for various things.
(31:21):
In another piece of news, a two thousand year old
boat has been found under the waterfront in Porridge, Croatia.
This is one of three similar boats that have been
found on land in Croatia rather than as part of
an underwater survey. So this find has been described as
a particularly well preserved example of a sown ship. The
(31:41):
wood itself has been preserved, as well as the wooden
nails and the rope that was used to actually sow
the vessel together. Although this seems to be a Roman ship,
the sewing technique that was used to build it as older.
The battleship USS Nevada was struck when Japanese forces attacked
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December seven. The vessel managed to
(32:05):
get under way before being hit again, and its crew
had to beach it After it was repaired. It survived
the Battle of Attu, the d D Invasion, and the
invasion of Iwajima and Okinawa before serving as a target
during atomic bomb tests after the war was over. It
survived nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll, and although it was
radioactive At that point, it was towed to a point
(32:27):
off the Hawaiian Islands, where it continued to be used
for target practice, which it continued to survive before being
scuttled by an aerial torpedo in The Navy knew its
approximate location, but teams from private firms Search Incorporated and
Ocean Infinity discovered the actual wreckage in May of this year.
(32:48):
Their ships had stayed at sea due to the coronavirus pandemic,
which also put a pause on some of their other
commercial work. Yeah. I interpreted their statements about it. It's
basically saying, well, we're out here on the ocean. Let's
look around, y'all want to go look for a shipwreck.
We have one repatriation to talk about this time around.
The Exeter City Council in England has voted to return
(33:11):
a collection of items that belonged to six SCA First
Nation Chief Crowfoot to the six SA First Nation in Alberta, Canada.
These items had been at the Royal albert Memorial Museum.
That acquisition had dated back to the signing of Treaty
seven between the Government of Canada and five First Nations,
one of those first Nations being the Six Sica, who
(33:33):
are also known as the Blackfoot. Formal negotiations for the
return of the items started back in with visits from
six Sicca Nation to Exeter and vice versa in but
then the negotiations stalled for years. A climate controlled room
had already been prepared to house the regalia at Blackfoot
Crossing Historical Park, but the actual return has been delayed,
(33:57):
like so many things we've talked about on this on Earth,
due to COVID nineteen travel restrictions. As of when we
are recording this, it is uncertain when this may happen.
The Sixa First Nation is in the middle of a
spike in COVID cases. Yea, Like so many indigenous and
First Nations communities, like things seem treacherous. Yeah. At this
(34:18):
moment um, we have two exhimations to talk about, both
of which also could have been updates. We have talked
about the extimation of Salvador Deli for praternity testing and
previous installments of Unearthed. In May, a Spanish court ordered
pillar Abell, who had requested the exlimation in order to
(34:38):
prove whether she was Salvador Dolly's daughter, to pay all
the costs associated with it. It's an estimated seven thousand euros.
Our previous updates included the fact that the DNA tests
revealed that Dolly was not her father, but not that
polar Abell had been filed an additional suit contending that
the chain of custody had been interrupted when the remains
(35:00):
were gathered and analyzed. So she's contesting that whole thing. Yeah,
the judge did not find that to be substantiated. In April,
the Texas Historical Commission approved a plan to exhume four
sets of remains from the Alamo to allow for ongoing
preservation work there. The plan was to temporarily keep the
(35:22):
remains in a collection's fault and then, once the work
is complete, to re enter them on Alamo grounds. There
have been several controversies connected to this exhimation, as different
groups of people whose ancestors are buried at the Alamo
have disagreed on how to proceed. One issue is DNA testing.
The committee that established a protocol for how human remains
(35:44):
should be handled at the Alamo included representatives from several
federally recognized Indigenous peoples, many of whom do not agree
with conducting DNA testing of remains for religious or cultural reasons,
but those representatives do not in lude the tap Peelam
quae tech In nation, which is not federally recognized, and
(36:05):
it is possible that a third or more of the
people buried at the Alamo were quae tech In speaking
people's Unlike many of the other nations involved, tap pe
lam is in favor of DNA testing. In June, the
Texas Historical Commission also recognized the Alamo's church as a
verified cemetery, but denied request to have the area surrounding
(36:26):
the church recognized as an unverified cemetery that would have
affected ongoing work at the Alamo Plaza. That work is
also highly controversial. I learned that there is a whole
world of controversy about the Alamo and the restoration projects
and the plaza projects that is all going on right now. Uh.
And then our final thing, this, according to Tracy, gets
(36:51):
the best headline award. It wouldn't for me because of
subject matter, but it is the origin of feces copro
I d reliably predict sources of ancient poop. So we
have talked about various discoveries that have been made through
analyzing copper lights or fossilized feces on a show before.
One of the challenges in this work is figuring out
(37:12):
exactly which species the feces came from. This can be
especially challenging for researchers when they're trying to distinguish human
feces from dog feces because they tend to have a
similar size and composition. Prehistoric humans and dogs also often
lived in the same place in eight similar food. They
can even be tricky to tell them apart using DNA analysis,
(37:33):
because some ancient cultures used dogs as a food source,
and dogs current dogs would still do this. I'm sure
have also scavenged human feces for food. Current dogs will
scavenge any animals feces for any any feces. Yeah. Copro
I d tackles this problem, combining analysis of the host
(37:54):
DNA with machine learning predictions based on analysis of modern
gut microbiomes to accurately determine the source of the feces.
In the words of Christina we're In, her senior author
of the study, quote, one unexpected finding of our study
is the realization that the archaeological record is full of
dog poop. I just felt like that was I could
(38:15):
not end on any other story than that one. Although
you know, as an animal person, that just does not
surprise me. Of course I interpreted that as meaning there
is poop that we thought was human that it's not,
which is hilarious. Yeah. Um uh, Tracy, you had mentioned
(38:37):
to me before we started that we're not doing listener
mail for this one, not exactly. Rather than trying to
read any one particular email, we have gotten several emails
and notes on Facebook and tweets and whatnot over the
last few weeks um asking about our website. Uh. And
we've talked about it previously on the show, but since
(38:58):
it's been a while and since clearly folks are still like, hey,
what happened to your website, I thought we would recap
it again and also give folks some tips for finding
stuff like finding on episodes of the show. So basically
our old website, which was full of pictures and tags
and show notes and whatnot that was custom made when
(39:21):
we were part of a website called how Stuff Works. UM.
It had a bunch of features that had been cobbled
together over many many years from a bunch of sources.
Like the tags were a carryover from when our podcast
website used to be on WordPress, and when we stopped
using WordPress, the how stuff Works team like custom made
(39:42):
a tag feature to carry all that over. So in
the How Stuff Works podcasts spun off into our own business,
and then I Heart Radio bought that business in September,
and then for more than a year after that, the
remaining how Stuff Works team kept maintaining the old website
(40:02):
that just could not continue forever. At some point we
had to move on to the infrastructure of the company
that actually owns our podcast. Uh And so that happened.
I think that was that was at the beginning of
this year at this point. Does that sound right? No?
I think it was earlier than that, But maybe I'm wrong.
I think I feel like it was at the beginning
(40:22):
of this year because I have a spreadsheet that has
all the old tags on it and it ends December.
I mean that who knows, though it's it's all kind
of blurring together. Things that happened in January of this
year feel like they happened before I was born. At
this point. Uh, So, we were working on a solution
(40:43):
at least for the show notes, because we both feel
like the show notes are really important to show people
what the sources are for all of our episode and
to give credit to everybody who has worked on those
sources for doing their work. Um, we were working on
a solution for that, and then a pandemic happened and
that just totally upended both the like the logistical and
(41:04):
the working like the people and the financial resources, like
all of that just got like somebody just just just
shook the picnic blanket with all of that stuff on it. Um,
So I don't we don't know at this point when
we will have a show note resources so are a
show note thing that people can access. So easiest way
(41:27):
to find old episodes of the show on the internet
is to google the topic you're looking for and the
words missed in history, all as part of the same search.
Um that's actually how I was doing it with the
old website. Yea all the time. Yeah, it works ninety
tocent of the time. There's a tiny number of episodes
(41:48):
that for some reason Google just hasn't indexed, and there
are a few things that are named weirdly that don't
come up. But of the time that will work. The
easiest way to scroll through a whole list of the episodes.
Is actually to just use an app like for example,
Apple Podcasts. UM like that that if you are subscribed
(42:09):
to the show, will show you the entire archive that
you can just scroll on through if you need specific
show notes for something. UM Like let's say you're working
on a school project and it would really help you
out to be able to see the sources for an episode. UH,
email us within reason, we will try to help you out. UM.
We did not have transcripts of all the old episodes,
(42:30):
which is something that like we we have really wanted
to have for a long time, and we don't for
a lot of reasons that are outside of our control individually.
But for this the episodes that we did have transcripts of,
I still have those transcripts. So if you need one,
email and and if we have it, I will send
it to you. UM. Our email address is History Podcast
at I Heart radio dot com. Our previous how Stuff
(42:53):
Works email address is now officially finally no longer delivering
emails to us anymore. UM that continued to work for
many months, So if you want to email us, that's
the the one to use it as History Podcast at
I Heart radio dot com. Uh, I don't do you
have anything to add to all of the Well, I
had a question for you because I thought Apple only
had three hundred episodes. Apple only has three hundred episodes
(43:17):
in the store. So if you're in the Apple podcast store, uh,
pretty much any podcast that doesn't have a lower limit
manually set. It's a maximum of three hundred episodes. But
if you are subscribed to the show and you look
in your library, it should have all of it. Do
you like how I staged that question so that we
(43:38):
would know, because I know it comes up all the time.
It does come up all of the uh. And I
mean that I I can't speak to how every single
podcast app works because there's so many of them, and
most of them are free, and you can try as
many as you want to find one that that suits
your needs. But that also means that, like we usually
usually can't answer individual questions about how anything besides Apple
(44:01):
podcast works because that's the one that's like been around
the longest, um and as you know, that's the that's
the app that's on my phone. Although I listen to
podcasts like a caveman by manually sinking a click wheel
iPod to a computer, I'm still somewhat befuddled by this practice.
But it's not even that, it's just that I've been
(44:26):
doing it for so long, and I especially because because
of the pandemic, I'm no longer walking to go on
errands nearly as much. Also, to be frank, I'm not
cleaning as much, and those are the times that I
usually listen to podcasts. So I have this giant backlog
of podcasts and like trying to recreate that on my
(44:48):
phone to listen to like a more up to date
human person is just like it's one thing I don't
have time. I have plenty of time, I don't have
the mental space to do it right now. Fair, uh
don't have the middle space for a lot of things.
I'm sure that's like everyone. Again. We hope everyone is
uh being able to take as as good a care
(45:08):
of themselves as possible. I know things are incredibly hard
right now for most people in a lot of ways.
So anyway, if you'd like to write to us about
this or any other podcast or history podcasts at I
heart radio dot com and then you'll also find us
on social media at miss in history real like for example,
that's our Twitter name as miss in History our website,
(45:30):
as we have said, is missed in History dot com,
and you can subscribe to our show on the I
heart radio app and Apple podcasts and anywhere else you
get a podcast. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(45:51):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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