July 24, 2019 • 37 mins
It's time for the July edition of Unearthed! And this one is in two parts! Today, we have updates and connections to previous episodes. Then some things about Neanderthals and early humans, and the unearthed books, letters and works of art.
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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 Fry,
and it's time for some Unearthed in July. Uh. Unearthed
(00:22):
is a perpetually growing beast. It is if you are
new to the show. This used to be once a year,
and then it became twice a year, and it's when
we talk about things that have been literally or figuratively
unearthed over the past whatever black of time period. Uh.
It has been for a bit, uh, first half of
(00:43):
the year, second half of the year. But this July
there were so many cool things to talk about, way
more cool things than even could fit into a two
part episode. So I put up this poll on our
Facebook and Twitter to ask folks how they would feel
about maybe having unearthed four time the year or im
I suppose it could also be three, I don't know. Regardless,
(01:06):
In response to more Unearthed, it was an overwhelming yes.
Like approximately nine were in favor of four times of
the year unearthed, So it will either be quarterly or
thrice Herely, maybe we could coincide it with the number
of times I get my teeth cleaned every years. The
(01:27):
calendar basis well, and I didn't think about the possibility
of doing sort of trimester until literally talking just now
in my head. So everyone's hearing my internal reasoning With
that in mind. These Unearthed episodes are coming out at
the end of July, but they're really covering January through
(01:47):
the end of May because I was just so full
up on it at that point. So June will roll
into next time, sometime in the vicinity of late September
or early October will have another round um and then
in December or the start of January will have the
last part of the year, and then we'll sort of
see how all that goes in regards to next year's scheduling.
(02:08):
They may not all be two partikers. That will just
depend on whether this trend of stuff continues. Because there
was just so much interesting stuff to talk about. So
today we have a whole lot of updates and connections
to previous episodes of the podcast, and then we'll move
on to some things about Neanderthals and early humans and
the unearthed books, letters and works of art, and then
(02:29):
next time we will have some of the long time
listener favorites like the Edibles and Potables, and of course
the shipwrecks. Who doesn't love a good shipwreck. But first
we're going to talk about one of my favorite things, huh,
the Voyage Manuscript. We talked about this one on the
show in and then we updated that in Seen, and
(02:50):
it has appeared on Unearthed previously. And in May of
this year, a flurry of headlines reported that a researcher
from the University of Bristol had cracked the code on
the Voyage Manuscript. The researcher in question, Dr Gerard Cheshire,
published his paper in the journal Romance Studies under the
title The Language and Writing System of m S. Four
(03:11):
oh eight Voyage Explained, and in the paper he said
this work had taken him about two weeks while he
was working on his thesis as kind of the first
red flag. Here in a nutshell from the paper is
what he says. It was all about. Quote. So the
manuscript uses a language that arose from a blend of
spoken Latin or vulgar Latin and other languages across the
(03:34):
Mediterranean during the early medieval period following the collapse of
the Roman Empire, and subsequently evolved into the many Romance languages,
including Italian. For that reason, it is known as proto
Romance prototype Romance. It had long been hypothesized as the
logical link between spoken Latin and the Romance languages, but
(03:56):
no documented evidence had ever been found before. At the
end of the quote, he also concluded that this work
was a resource that was produced by Dominican nuns for
the use of Maria of Castile. In his words from
press releases surrounding the discovery quote, I experienced a series
of Eureka moments followed by a sense of disbelief and
(04:18):
excitement when I realized the magnitude of the achievement, both
in terms of its linguistic importance and the revelation about
the origin and content of the manuscript. What it reveals
is even more amazing than the myths and fantasies it
has generated. It is no exaggeration to say this work
represents one of the most important developments to date in
(04:38):
Romance linguistics. Almost immediately, though, linguists and medievalists got to
work debunking this entire thing, including various people writing essays
and tweets and whatnot about how that's not how Romance
language is developed and proto romance as described at the
paper is not a thing. Various scholars also reported that
(04:58):
they had received unfil lisited copies of a draft of
this paper going back to which is a no no
if you were planning to try to submit something to
Purity Journals. Within two days of that first announcement, the
University of Bristol had withdrawn its own press release about
the paper and distance itself from Cheshire, saying that this
(05:18):
was all his own work and not affiliated with university
or its resources. In a statement, the university also said
that it was going to quote seek further validation and
allow further discussions both internally and with the journal. So
to recap, every time you see a headline that says
someone has decoded the voytage Mandu script, just mentally add
(05:41):
in the words claims to have in there because it
happens with some degree of frequency. Huh. We love the
voytage of manuscript. I honestly don't know at this point
if I want anyone to crack it, because I kind
of like that it's this weird nutty thing. Yeah, but yeah,
but most of the time him it follows this pattern
(06:02):
of like I have figured it out, and other people
go hold on a minute, chief well, especially when somebody's
like I have figured it out and it took me
two weeks, and people casually did it on the side.
So also from the land of claims to have the
latest news on Amelia Earhart, very surprisingly to me, did
(06:24):
not come from the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery,
which is usually who is publicizing various alleged air heart
findings in members of a team known as Project Blue
Angel traveled to Bucca in Papua New Guinea to study
a possible crash site. They conducted a lot of underwater
measurements of what maybe her crashed airplane, and they also
(06:47):
found a flat piece of glass that might be a
lens from a plane. In January of this year, these
findings made news because they launched a go fund me
to pay for another expedition to do further study. As
is pretty much always the case, this story floated around
with a lot of they found it type headlines similar
to the Pointes Vainish script, but this is still unconfirmed
(07:10):
and one of many hypotheses about exactly what happened to
ear Heart. Our episode on her disappearance came out in
two thousand nine and that was updated in and Amelia
has also made lots of unearthed appearances. Yeah, it's almost
an every time thing, or at least it's now for
the Amelia Earhart segment. Previous hosts of this podcast did
(07:33):
episodes on the Bronte family back in and this year,
an unidentified woman at least I have not figured out
who exactly she was, showed up to antiques road show
in North Wales with a ring containing a lock of
Charlotte Bronte's hair. Everybody involved with looking at it was like,
I have no reason to doubt that this is what
(07:54):
it is. It's this tiny lock of braided hair that
fits down into the interior of the ring and the
outer layer of the ring kind of opens up like
a lid on a hinge. The inscription on the inside
of the ring has Charlotte Bronte's name and the year
of her death, and that wast And Densdale, who's the
principal curator of the Bronte Society and Bronte Parsonage Museum,
(08:17):
implied that that museum might be willing to purchase that
ring they had sufficient funds. I think the Antiques Road
show people were like, this is worth maybe five thousand pounds,
but since it's Charlotte Bronte, is it's worth maybe not pounds,
maybe euros. I don't know. I don't remember what the
dollar measurement they're using, right, uh, shifting gears a little bit.
(08:41):
A ram headed sphinx was unearthed in Egypt, dating back
to King Tut's grandfather A Menhotep the third. It is
unfinished and it was found in a carving workshop near Oswan,
and the reasons for its lack of completion are not clear.
It is possible that it was just basically a canceled
order with work on it stopped when a Menhotep die.
Amenhotep the third has come up on previous episodes on
(09:04):
King Tut and hot Chips, it that one, that last
one was really recently to move on. In May, Fulton County, Georgia,
District Attorney Paul Howard announced that he was reopening the
case into the murder of Mary Fagan, which passed so
to the show covered in twenty eleven. Leo Frank was
her supervisor at the National Pencil Company and he was
(09:25):
convicted of the crime. He was then lynched after his
sentence was commuted in nineteen fifteen, and in the years
since then, the general consensus has been that the culprit
was really a man named Jim Conley, who was a
janitor and was the prosecution's key witness. There have been
several attempts to clear Frank's name in the decades since
all this happened. This re examination is thanks to a
(09:48):
newly established Conviction Integrity Unit, which will look at previous
cases with questionable outcomes and make recommendations to the d
A about which may need to be evaluated. District attorne
these around the US have been creating these units to
try to exonerate people who are wrongly convicted and to
try to prevent similarly wrongful convictions in the future. A
(10:09):
ruling on this particular case is expected sometime next year.
In another reopened case, authorities in Russia have reopened the
case into the deat Love Past incident, which we talked
about on the podcast in October. This was a group
of students from your old Polytechnic Institute who died in
nineteen fifty nine under very strange circumstances. Their tent was
(10:31):
sliced open. Several of them had head wounds, and many
of their bodies were found in their underwear and without
any shoes on. An investigation was opened at the time,
but it closed after about three months, with the disaster
attributed to spontaneous power of nature. According to Alexander Curinoi
of the Prosecutor's General Office, the newly reopened investigation is
(10:53):
not totally open ended. It will try to determine whether
their deaths were the result of an avalanche, a snow slab,
or a hurricane. So this case was reopened in February
and an expedition was planned to the site for shortly thereafter.
We haven't gotten updates into any new developments since the
announcement came yet. In one of Unearthed episodes, we talked
(11:15):
about a nineteenth century Winchester rifle that had been found
just leaning on a juniper tree in Great Basin National Park,
where it had been for who knows how long. Authorities
ultimately determined it had been made in February two. Now
they have put it through a conservation process and given
it a new permanent home in the park visitor center.
(11:36):
The juniper tree that it had been leaning on was
later destroyed, unfortunately, in a wildfire, and in our last
update before we take a quick break, there is still
a lot of discussion happening about the proposed exhimation and
reburial of Francisco Franco, who we talked about last December.
Initially this exhimation was scheduled for June tenth of this year,
(11:57):
but in January, the prior at the Valley of the
Fallen where he's buried, said that he would not allow
that to happen. This is a developing story and it
would be weird to just leave it at that. So
here are the latest updates up through the day we're
recording this episode. On June four, Spain's Supreme Tribunal suspended
the exhamation plans, saying that the Franco family had the
(12:19):
right to appeal the decision. Then in July, Renzo Frettini,
who was the Vatican's ambassador to Spain, criticize the exhamation plan, saying, quote, Honestly,
there are so many problems in this world and in Spain,
why resuscitate him? I am saying they have resuscitated Franco.
Leaving him in peace would be better. God will judge him,
(12:40):
remembering something that has provoked a civil war does not
help to live better. This prompted the Spanish government to
formally complain to the Vatican. That's actually the only exhamation
we've got for these mid year Unearthed episodes, apart from
possible exhimations around the Hartford Circus fire, which we recently
talked about on a Saturday Classic. My exhumation Google alert
(13:02):
wasn't particularly productive January through May. Uh, so maybe there
will be more of that later in the year that
We've just talked about a lot of things though, so
we're gonna take a quick sponsor break before we have
even more updates. Not too long ago, we replayed a
(13:28):
past episode on Charles Dickens as a Saturday Classic. That
previous episode referenced him supporting two households, and previous hosts
Sarah and Bablina hinted that they would talk more about
that in a future podcast. Later on, listeners asked us
whatever happened to that future podcast because it did not
apparently exist. It turned out that it had never been
(13:50):
made just because of a basic lack of information, But
we were able to find a few tidbits about Dickens
having a long term affair with another woman while separated
from his wife but not divorce from her, and basically
supporting both of those households. We thought that was probably
what Sarah and Deblina were referring to. Well. University of
York professor John Bowen has combed through a set of
(14:12):
ninety eight documents in the Harvard Theater Collection. It doesn't
appear that anyone had carefully gone through or analyzed these
letters before Bowen got to them, and he wrote about
what he found in February. These were letters from Edward
Dutton Cook, who was a neighbor of Charles's estranged wife, Catherine.
Edward and his wife became friends with her, and she
shared various details about her marriage to Charles Dickens with
(14:35):
Edward toward the end of her life. Edward did not
keep this information, which was pretty personal private, He put
all kinds of details about it in letters to his
friend William moy Thomas. These details included the fact that
Dickens apparently tried to have his wife committed to an
asylum so that he could carry on this relationship with
(14:56):
another woman, and Bowen's words quote this is a stronger
and more damning account of Dickens's behavior than any other.
Their drama lives on UH. An expedition to Antarctica to
try to find the remains of Shackleton's ship and Durrance
set off early this year, but on February fourteenth, the
team announced that they had abandoned the search and they
(15:17):
were headed back home to avoid the risk of being
trapped by ice. The Endurance itself had been crushed by
ice in nineteen fifteen. Our episode on Shackleton's Race to
the South Pole is from way back in Yeah, Holly
and I not part of that episode, no, but it
does exist. Previous hosts also did a podcast on Kahokia
(15:38):
back in twenty eleven, and in a paper published in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this February, researchers
documented the connection between human feces from the site and
the population of Cochia, and environmental changes that were going on,
like droughts and floods. To do this, they studied sediment
layers from Horseshoe Lake, which is adjacent to Kahokia. As
(16:00):
people deficated in Kahokia runoff would have carried their feces
to the lake where they became part of the lake
beds layers of sediment, and they extracted cores of this
sediment to study those layers. What they found was that
the human waste and the products associated with them and
these layers corresponded to known increases and decreases in Kahokias
(16:21):
population and its eventual abandonment around fourteen hundred. And they
also found connections between all these population changes and environmental
factors like droughts and floods. There's also a new book
out on Kahokia this year called Feeding Kahokia, Early Agriculture
in the North American Homeland, and that's written by Gail Fritz,
and in a press release about the book, she was
(16:42):
quoted as saying, it's clear that the vast majority of
Cahokias farmers were women, and it's likely that their critical
knowledge of domesticated crops and wild food plants would have
earned them positions of power and respect at every level
of society. Yeah, that's not the only new book about
Cookia this year, but that one particularly caught my attention
because it really is sort of rethinking what his typically
(17:06):
been understood about, like the stratification of society and in
co Hokia and and who was at what level. Professor
in University College Cork has examined a sixteenth century administrative
manual that's been passed down through a local family and
it turns out that part of the binding of this
book is made from a fifteenth century Irish translation of
(17:29):
the Canon of Medicine by Ibn Sina, who is more
commonly known among English speakers as Avicenna. It was not
at all unusual for book binders to reuse parts of
other books in their bindings because vellum and other bookmaking
materials were very expensive, so book binders reclaimed things from
old books whenever they could. But this particular translation of
(17:50):
the Canon of Medicine is previously unrecorded in Irish medical history.
Our episode from Avicenna is from back in Yes, I
don't know who we've ever talked about it on the show,
but one of my jobs that I used to have
was working in a college library, repairing the book collection
as needed so you could stay in circulation. And I
often encountered things that were made of other books because
(18:13):
they had some piece of the collection that we're very old,
so we were trying to uh protect those and keep
the record of the history. But also again keep it
part of a circulating collection, so just verifying that that
is a accurate. Yeah. When I was when we were
in San Francisco, I went to the Bookbinder's Museum and
had this guided tour of the Bookbinder's Museum, and that
(18:35):
was one of the things they talked about, was how
many things were reclaimed but simultaneously, like if you were
shaving too much off of the edges of your paper
to try to reclaim that and make new paper, you
can get in big trouble because that was a quality issue.
Guid Yeah. Uh, yeah, I legitimately, this sounds like something
(18:56):
I would be saying facetiously legitimately, Like the history of
book binding is fascinating. Even though there's there aren't a
lot of like big moments in it, there are just
a lot of different practices that shifted over the years
that have their own unique flavor an impact on the
way the industry worked going forward. Uh, maybe one day
(19:16):
we'll do an episode on that. It might be tricky, Uh.
Previous hosts of the podcast did an episode of a
rapa Nui also called Easter Island way back in two
thousand and eight, and then that was updated in recent
research there suggests that the island's famous statues may have
been intentionally placed near sources of fresh water, and this
(19:37):
gives a possible reason for why the islands statues and
shrines are in their particular locations. This research was focused
on the western portion of the island, and anthropologists Carl
Lippo reported that this proximity to the water wasn't always obvious,
because fresh water would emerge along the coast when the
tide went out. Was only there sometimes and it was
(19:59):
observing this powd and that they spotted the connection between
when water would emerge and where these statues and shrines were.
The team is hoping to expand their research to include
the rest of the island as well. In other Eastern
Island news, Norway announced a plan to return thousands of artifacts,
including the bones of Rapa Nui people uh those had
been removed from the island in the nineteen fifties by
(20:20):
Sore Higher Doll and higher Doll is most known for
the expedition aboard Contiki, which was meant to demonstrate that
people from South America could have settled the Polynesian islands.
I think I have that that expedition on my ideal
list for some point in the future. But it's also
one of those that every time I get to it,
I kind of go I feel like we've did it already,
(20:41):
but I don't think we did. I have done a
similar thing with it. I haven't scrimbled in a notebook,
And every time I look at it, I'm like, is
this to tell me to go back and look at
what we did? And then I look for it and
I can't find it. And this is one of the
things that comes along with joining a show after it's
been through other hosts and a long archive, sometimes with
things named in a way that aren't immediately obvious. Well,
(21:03):
and to be frank, I mean we have been doing
it long enough that there are episodes that we worked on.
I think it's come up before where I've been like,
I don't remember this at all, and You're like, you
did the research on that one. Yeah, it's easy to
I mean, you can't keep it all in your head.
Unfortunately I can't anyway, I certainly cannot. Back to some unearthings,
this is another previous Unearthed follow up. In Unearthed in
(21:26):
julyen we talked about the discovery in Alabama of a
ship that was believed to be the Clotilda. The Clotilda
was the last known ship to carry enslaved Africans to
the United States, which happened more than fifty years after
the US had outlawed the import of enslaved people from Africa.
The Clotilda was burned and sunk in July of eighteen
(21:47):
sixty after bringing a hundred enslaved Africans to the United
States because its owners wanted to destroy the evidence of
their crimes. It turned out pretty quickly that the ship
in question was not the right size to be the Cloetill.
That was something that we talked about on last year's
Unearthed in July as well, but the potential discovery sparked
a lot of interest in trying to find the ship.
(22:09):
In May, marine archaeologists announced that this time they did
find the Clotilda was located in Alabama's Mobile River. In
that same episode of Unearthed, in the same passage, we
also talked about the publication of Zora Neil Hurston's Barracoon,
which was based on her interview with a man known
as Couldjoe Lewis. He was believed to be the last
(22:32):
living survivor of the Clotilda, but that designation shifted this
year as well. In March, Hannah Durkin of Newcastle University
published a paper in the journal Slavery and Abolition in
which she notes that a woman named Rido she actually
lived until nineteen thirty seven. Lewis died in ninetive. That's
actually somebody that Zora Neil Hurston also knew about and
(22:55):
and wrote about, but it wasn't clear the timeline of
their deaths until now. We talked about bog butter in
our Butter versus Marjarine episode in Please Don't Eat Bog
Butter uh, and it's also come up on previous editions
of unearthed. Now researchers at the University of Bristol and
University College Dublin have dated thirty two bog butters from
(23:15):
the collection of the National Museum of Ireland. They wanted
to find out if this butter was really what we
think of as butter made from milk fat, or if
it was really h fat that had come from animal carcasses,
and turns out it was really dairy butter. This research
also suggests that the practice of putting butter in the
bogs goes back about fifteen hundred years earlier than previously thought.
(23:39):
The oldest sample that they were looking at was from
seventeen hundred BC. It's still not a pent clear whether
people were putting the butter in the bog to try
to preserve it, or if it was some kind of offering.
It is also totally possible that at some points in
history it was about food preservation and in other points
in history it was a more symbolic thing. They do
(24:00):
think that at any given time it was for one
purpose and not both. Still do not eat the bog butter. No,
thank you. We're gonna talk next time about people tasting
some things that had been unearthed. Uh just want to
reiterate that. In we did an episode on the Crescent
(24:22):
Hotel and Norman Baker, and this year excavation work at
the hotel unearthed more than four hundred glass bottles and
other glass vessels that date back to when the property
was Baker Hospital and Health Resort. These bottles appear to
have been used to store tumors and other specimens that
had been removed from patients preserved in alcohol. Mike Evans,
(24:44):
Station assistant archaeologists noted that the bottles that they found
looked identical to one shown in advertisements for the hospital
slash Resort. More than twenty bottles found still contain what
looks like tissue, although it is not clear whether they
are real human specimens or if there's some kind of
prop Yeah, it could have been either. Subsequent owners of
(25:05):
the property after it was this Hospital Slash Resort had
been told that all those old specimens had been taken
to the dump. They interpreted that is meaning some kind
of dump facility elsewhere rather than just being behind the building. Yeah,
(25:26):
there are so many uh uh sort of skin crawley questions. Yeah,
but there it is. We also have a few one
sentence updates of a collection of random episodes, So here
we go. Poems by Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, along
with notebooks and photos, were auctioned off by Heritage Auctions
in Dallas on May fourth. The photo of Harriet Tubman
(25:49):
as a young woman, which we have talked about previously,
went on display at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African
American History and Culture. Uh, producer Casey and I got
to see that earlier this year. Sarah Burningham, executive producer
of the podcast Making Gay History Unearthed, previously unaired audio
of past podcast subject Buyard Ruston, which became part of
(26:10):
the podcast fourth season, and the last survivor of the
Doolittle Raid. Richard Cole, died on April ninth, at the
age of one hundred and three. After all of that,
because that also was a lot, we're going to take
a quick break and then move on to some non
episode update Unearthed. Okay, now we have a collection of things.
(26:37):
They're all related to Neanderthals and early humans. And first off,
archaeologists in Northeast Jordan's have found evidence that Neolithic humans
might have been hunting with dogs. They came to this
conclusion by studying the dog's presence at an archaeological site
known as shoe Bake six and that dates back to
(26:58):
about eleven thousand years ago. The dogs seem to have
been kept in an area mostly around the edges of
the settlement, but also we're just allowed to roam around
through everything. The inhabitants of Shoebake Was six used hares
for food and used their bones to make beads. And
there's an uptick in how many hairs were present at
the site, which coincides with when the dogs got there,
(27:20):
so the team's conclusion is that either people were using
dogs to help them hunt hares, or perhaps the people
and dogs were hunting hairs together, with the people using
the dogs hunting patterns to help their own hunt. And
other news. Modern day javelin throwers have helped a team
of researchers look into whether Neanderthals had the ability to
throw spears to hunt large animals from a distance. The
(27:45):
team from University College London made replicas spears using hand
tools that were modeled after hand tools used at the time.
The models for the spears were a set of ten
well preserved throwing spears that had been excavated in the
ninety nineties. Six avalon athletes took their turns with these
throwing spears and were able to hit a target from
(28:05):
up to twenty meters away, which was twice as far
as the researchers thought they could be thrown. And this
all adds to the growing body of evidence that Neanderthals
were probably a lot smarter and more a depth than
they have generally been given credit for. Now we have
just had a series of Neanderthal related things over the years,
(28:27):
which all kind of contradict the perception that that maybe
they were stereotypical cavemen. Right now, when someone uses that
word as an attempted slurred or insult, someone can come back.
It's like, yes, my javelin skills are on point. On
that same note, according to research that was published in
(28:48):
Science Advances, both Neanderthals and early humans were probably pretty
good at hunting small, fast moving game. They came to
this conclusion by studying animal bones and what is now
southeastern France. It was already pretty well established that these
populations hunted larger, often slower moving animals like deer, bison,
and horse. But it also looks like they were able
(29:09):
to hunt rabbits, which might have helped them survive when
larger game was more scarce. It was kind of connects
back over to the dogs and hairs being are the
dogs helping with the hair hunting, which is more about
early humans than about Neanderthal's. So moving on to the art,
books and letters. In January, The New Yorker reported on
(29:32):
a lost story by Sylvia Plath, which Plath wrote in
nineteen fifty two while attending Smith College. However, the Indiana
University Lily Library had a different take on this report.
In a short Twitter thread, they explained that this story
was in their collections and listed in the finding aid.
(29:53):
This thread ended with quote in parentheses whispers. You know
when materials are in libraries and archives, they are actually
the opposite of lost. Also in the it was there
in the library, but in this case it actually was
kind of lost territory. Michael Richardson of the University of
(30:16):
Bristol Special Collections Library found a set of thirteenth century
Old French parchments tucked into some sixteenth century books. These
texts include lots of names from our thury and legends,
and they're believed to be part of the Vulgate cycle
or Lancelot Grail cycle, which was one of Sir Thomas
Mallory's likely sources for Le Mard d'arthour. So yeah, they
(30:37):
knew about these sixteenth century books, but were surprised at
the thirteenth century inclusion. And the books that the fragments
were found in have their own history as well. They
are a four volume set of works by French poet
and reformer Jean Gerson. The pages were printed in Strasbourg
sometime between fourteen ninety four and fifteen o two, and
then they were bound in England sometime in the sixteenth century.
(30:59):
There's thirteen century fragments were bound in along with them.
In one of the findings that a lot of folks
told us about, researchers studied the remains of an unknown
woman buried in Germany about one thousand years ago and
found flax of lapis lazily pigment in her teeth. Logical conclusion,
she was an artist who worked in manuscript illuminations and
(31:20):
used her mouth to make the tip of her brush
have a fine point. Another logical conclusion, she must have
been very good at her work because lapis lazily pigment,
known as aquamarine, was extremely expensive and really hard to get,
so the people that were illuminating those manuscripts were not
all monks, as has often been popularly imagined. UH and
(31:41):
other news. Leonardo da Vinci's thumb print has been found
on a drawing called the Cardiovascular System and Principal Organs
of a Woman, which was drawn in fifteen o nine.
That work is in Britain's Royal Collection, and the ink
from the thumb print matches the ink from the drawing,
so they think he just picked up the pay age
with inky hands. Alan Donnithorne, who was a former paper
(32:04):
conservator at the collection, called it the collections quote most
convincing candidate for an authentic Leonardo fingerprints. Another gear switch,
the practice of writing in Japan may have developed between
three hundred and four hundred years earlier than previously thought.
This is based on the discovery of inkstones, some of
them unfinished, that date back to the second and first
(32:25):
centuries b CE. Previously, writing was believed to have been
brought to Japan from China in roughly the third century CE.
These ink stones were probably also introduced from China. It's
believed that they were first developed in China around three
d b C before being carried to Japan, and then
the earliest Japanese made ink stones would have probably been
(32:46):
copied from these Chinese stones before Japanese craftspeople developed their
own designs and methods. In May, the conservation charity English
Heritage announced that a painting long believed to be a
fake based on Bodacelli's Madonna of the Pomegranate, it was
actually a real bot of Celli. It was thought to
be a fake because of variations in the painting itself
and in the yellow pigments used to paint it. But
(33:08):
after X ray testing, infrared studies, and a pigment analysis,
researchers have concluded that the painting really was created in
Botticelli's workshop in Florence, although it was not necessarily exclusively
his work. Yeah, it was totally normal for a painter
to create multiple copies of the same thing, especially if
(33:29):
it was a commission. But everybody thought this one was
fake for a long time. We have a random thing
to just close out part one of Unearthed today, and
that's that archaeologists working ahead of a new high speed
rail line have unearthed the burial site of Matthew Flinders,
who was the first Europeans to circumnavigate the continent of Australia.
(33:50):
He died in eighteen fourteen and this line that he
was unearthed to make way for is going to run
from London to Birmingham. The construction has involved just a
math of archaeological project, with sixty different dig sites along
the length of the route. Flinders was known to be
buried at St James's Cemetery behind Houston Station, but the
(34:10):
cemetery also contained forty bodies and only some of the
graves were being excavated, so authorities weren't all that optimistic
that they were going to find his grave site. It
turned out that Flinders coffin was marked with a lead
plate that was still legible. Yeah, I found it pretty quickly,
it turned out. As a side note, there is always
a lot of train line and other construction related unearthing
(34:33):
going on, and so far this year we've also read
reports of a fourth century public fountain being unearthed steering
at rail construction, and the Thessalonici metro and a Roman
cemetery unearthed during work for a tram extension route in Strasbourg.
And we'll have more next time, more things unearthed, whole
other categories. Have you on earthed some mail for us?
(34:56):
I have unearthed some mail. It's from Shannon. Shannon has
written about Marie Lawrenson, and Shannon says, I listened to
your podcast in the car on my daily commute and
when Tracy described her reaction to seeing the Murray Lawrence
paintings at the Music to lawrenz Ury, I knew exactly
what she was talking about because I had the exact
same experience. When I was in Paris in January, I
(35:18):
knew it had to be the same painter. When I
got home, I pulled up my photos. I've attached my
favorite Lawrence m from the Ora Injury portrait Madame paul Yume,
although it's not nearly as good as the professional ones,
and sure enough it was the same painter. I take
photos of items I'm drawn to in museum so I
can go back and learn more about them later, but
I hadn't gotten back to this one yet. I was
(35:40):
fascinated to hear about Marie Lawrence and her life. I
was especially interested to hear that she was part of
the early Cubist movement. I generally don't enjoy Cubism, mostly
because Picasso was a misogynist and the gusto he shows
and breaking women up into pieces always makes me so mad. Anyway,
I found her work really drew me in, and I
stayed there a long time looking at her paintings the
(36:02):
attached in particular. Thank you so much for reminding me
about these paintings and giving me some insight into the artist.
As always love how sassy you ladies are. Shannon, Thank
you so much. Shannon, I just wanted to read this
because I always love when I find a kindred spirit
in our listener mail who similarly it was like, I'm
here for these paintings. Uh. If you would like to
(36:22):
write to us about this or any other podcast where
at History Podcasts that how Stuff Works dot com and
then we're all over social media. Had missed in History
and that was where you'll find our Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram,
and Twitter. You can come to our website, which is
Missed in History dot com, where you will find the
show notes for all the episodes that Holly and I
have ever worked on. The show notes for this episode
(36:43):
includes the links to the original sources for everything we
have talked about this time and next time is a
very long list. Uh. You can also find a searchable
archive at our website for every episode we have ever done,
and if you click on live shows at the top
of the page, all of our upcoming live shows and
tour so you can do all that at our website,
(37:04):
and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcast,
the I heart radio app, or wherever 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 Fry,
and it's time for some Unearthed in July. Uh. Unearthed
(00:22):
is a perpetually growing beast. It is if you are
new to the show. This used to be once a year,
and then it became twice a year, and it's when
we talk about things that have been literally or figuratively
unearthed over the past whatever black of time period. Uh.
It has been for a bit, uh, first half of
(00:43):
the year, second half of the year. But this July
there were so many cool things to talk about, way
more cool things than even could fit into a two
part episode. So I put up this poll on our
Facebook and Twitter to ask folks how they would feel
about maybe having unearthed four time the year or im
I suppose it could also be three, I don't know. Regardless,
(01:06):
In response to more Unearthed, it was an overwhelming yes.
Like approximately nine were in favor of four times of
the year unearthed, So it will either be quarterly or
thrice Herely, maybe we could coincide it with the number
of times I get my teeth cleaned every years. The
(01:27):
calendar basis well, and I didn't think about the possibility
of doing sort of trimester until literally talking just now
in my head. So everyone's hearing my internal reasoning With
that in mind. These Unearthed episodes are coming out at
the end of July, but they're really covering January through
(01:47):
the end of May because I was just so full
up on it at that point. So June will roll
into next time, sometime in the vicinity of late September
or early October will have another round um and then
in December or the start of January will have the
last part of the year, and then we'll sort of
see how all that goes in regards to next year's scheduling.
(02:08):
They may not all be two partikers. That will just
depend on whether this trend of stuff continues. Because there
was just so much interesting stuff to talk about. So
today we have a whole lot of updates and connections
to previous episodes of the podcast, and then we'll move
on to some things about Neanderthals and early humans and
the unearthed books, letters and works of art, and then
(02:29):
next time we will have some of the long time
listener favorites like the Edibles and Potables, and of course
the shipwrecks. Who doesn't love a good shipwreck. But first
we're going to talk about one of my favorite things, huh,
the Voyage Manuscript. We talked about this one on the
show in and then we updated that in Seen, and
(02:50):
it has appeared on Unearthed previously. And in May of
this year, a flurry of headlines reported that a researcher
from the University of Bristol had cracked the code on
the Voyage Manuscript. The researcher in question, Dr Gerard Cheshire,
published his paper in the journal Romance Studies under the
title The Language and Writing System of m S. Four
(03:11):
oh eight Voyage Explained, and in the paper he said
this work had taken him about two weeks while he
was working on his thesis as kind of the first
red flag. Here in a nutshell from the paper is
what he says. It was all about. Quote. So the
manuscript uses a language that arose from a blend of
spoken Latin or vulgar Latin and other languages across the
(03:34):
Mediterranean during the early medieval period following the collapse of
the Roman Empire, and subsequently evolved into the many Romance languages,
including Italian. For that reason, it is known as proto
Romance prototype Romance. It had long been hypothesized as the
logical link between spoken Latin and the Romance languages, but
(03:56):
no documented evidence had ever been found before. At the
end of the quote, he also concluded that this work
was a resource that was produced by Dominican nuns for
the use of Maria of Castile. In his words from
press releases surrounding the discovery quote, I experienced a series
of Eureka moments followed by a sense of disbelief and
(04:18):
excitement when I realized the magnitude of the achievement, both
in terms of its linguistic importance and the revelation about
the origin and content of the manuscript. What it reveals
is even more amazing than the myths and fantasies it
has generated. It is no exaggeration to say this work
represents one of the most important developments to date in
(04:38):
Romance linguistics. Almost immediately, though, linguists and medievalists got to
work debunking this entire thing, including various people writing essays
and tweets and whatnot about how that's not how Romance
language is developed and proto romance as described at the
paper is not a thing. Various scholars also reported that
(04:58):
they had received unfil lisited copies of a draft of
this paper going back to which is a no no
if you were planning to try to submit something to
Purity Journals. Within two days of that first announcement, the
University of Bristol had withdrawn its own press release about
the paper and distance itself from Cheshire, saying that this
(05:18):
was all his own work and not affiliated with university
or its resources. In a statement, the university also said
that it was going to quote seek further validation and
allow further discussions both internally and with the journal. So
to recap, every time you see a headline that says
someone has decoded the voytage Mandu script, just mentally add
(05:41):
in the words claims to have in there because it
happens with some degree of frequency. Huh. We love the
voytage of manuscript. I honestly don't know at this point
if I want anyone to crack it, because I kind
of like that it's this weird nutty thing. Yeah, but yeah,
but most of the time him it follows this pattern
(06:02):
of like I have figured it out, and other people
go hold on a minute, chief well, especially when somebody's
like I have figured it out and it took me
two weeks, and people casually did it on the side.
So also from the land of claims to have the
latest news on Amelia Earhart, very surprisingly to me, did
(06:24):
not come from the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery,
which is usually who is publicizing various alleged air heart
findings in members of a team known as Project Blue
Angel traveled to Bucca in Papua New Guinea to study
a possible crash site. They conducted a lot of underwater
measurements of what maybe her crashed airplane, and they also
(06:47):
found a flat piece of glass that might be a
lens from a plane. In January of this year, these
findings made news because they launched a go fund me
to pay for another expedition to do further study. As
is pretty much always the case, this story floated around
with a lot of they found it type headlines similar
to the Pointes Vainish script, but this is still unconfirmed
(07:10):
and one of many hypotheses about exactly what happened to
ear Heart. Our episode on her disappearance came out in
two thousand nine and that was updated in and Amelia
has also made lots of unearthed appearances. Yeah, it's almost
an every time thing, or at least it's now for
the Amelia Earhart segment. Previous hosts of this podcast did
(07:33):
episodes on the Bronte family back in and this year,
an unidentified woman at least I have not figured out
who exactly she was, showed up to antiques road show
in North Wales with a ring containing a lock of
Charlotte Bronte's hair. Everybody involved with looking at it was like,
I have no reason to doubt that this is what
(07:54):
it is. It's this tiny lock of braided hair that
fits down into the interior of the ring and the
outer layer of the ring kind of opens up like
a lid on a hinge. The inscription on the inside
of the ring has Charlotte Bronte's name and the year
of her death, and that wast And Densdale, who's the
principal curator of the Bronte Society and Bronte Parsonage Museum,
(08:17):
implied that that museum might be willing to purchase that
ring they had sufficient funds. I think the Antiques Road
show people were like, this is worth maybe five thousand pounds,
but since it's Charlotte Bronte, is it's worth maybe not pounds,
maybe euros. I don't know. I don't remember what the
dollar measurement they're using, right, uh, shifting gears a little bit.
(08:41):
A ram headed sphinx was unearthed in Egypt, dating back
to King Tut's grandfather A Menhotep the third. It is
unfinished and it was found in a carving workshop near Oswan,
and the reasons for its lack of completion are not clear.
It is possible that it was just basically a canceled
order with work on it stopped when a Menhotep die.
Amenhotep the third has come up on previous episodes on
(09:04):
King Tut and hot Chips, it that one, that last
one was really recently to move on. In May, Fulton County, Georgia,
District Attorney Paul Howard announced that he was reopening the
case into the murder of Mary Fagan, which passed so
to the show covered in twenty eleven. Leo Frank was
her supervisor at the National Pencil Company and he was
(09:25):
convicted of the crime. He was then lynched after his
sentence was commuted in nineteen fifteen, and in the years
since then, the general consensus has been that the culprit
was really a man named Jim Conley, who was a
janitor and was the prosecution's key witness. There have been
several attempts to clear Frank's name in the decades since
all this happened. This re examination is thanks to a
(09:48):
newly established Conviction Integrity Unit, which will look at previous
cases with questionable outcomes and make recommendations to the d
A about which may need to be evaluated. District attorne
these around the US have been creating these units to
try to exonerate people who are wrongly convicted and to
try to prevent similarly wrongful convictions in the future. A
(10:09):
ruling on this particular case is expected sometime next year.
In another reopened case, authorities in Russia have reopened the
case into the deat Love Past incident, which we talked
about on the podcast in October. This was a group
of students from your old Polytechnic Institute who died in
nineteen fifty nine under very strange circumstances. Their tent was
(10:31):
sliced open. Several of them had head wounds, and many
of their bodies were found in their underwear and without
any shoes on. An investigation was opened at the time,
but it closed after about three months, with the disaster
attributed to spontaneous power of nature. According to Alexander Curinoi
of the Prosecutor's General Office, the newly reopened investigation is
(10:53):
not totally open ended. It will try to determine whether
their deaths were the result of an avalanche, a snow slab,
or a hurricane. So this case was reopened in February
and an expedition was planned to the site for shortly thereafter.
We haven't gotten updates into any new developments since the
announcement came yet. In one of Unearthed episodes, we talked
(11:15):
about a nineteenth century Winchester rifle that had been found
just leaning on a juniper tree in Great Basin National Park,
where it had been for who knows how long. Authorities
ultimately determined it had been made in February two. Now
they have put it through a conservation process and given
it a new permanent home in the park visitor center.
(11:36):
The juniper tree that it had been leaning on was
later destroyed, unfortunately, in a wildfire, and in our last
update before we take a quick break, there is still
a lot of discussion happening about the proposed exhimation and
reburial of Francisco Franco, who we talked about last December.
Initially this exhimation was scheduled for June tenth of this year,
(11:57):
but in January, the prior at the Valley of the
Fallen where he's buried, said that he would not allow
that to happen. This is a developing story and it
would be weird to just leave it at that. So
here are the latest updates up through the day we're
recording this episode. On June four, Spain's Supreme Tribunal suspended
the exhamation plans, saying that the Franco family had the
(12:19):
right to appeal the decision. Then in July, Renzo Frettini,
who was the Vatican's ambassador to Spain, criticize the exhamation plan, saying, quote, Honestly,
there are so many problems in this world and in Spain,
why resuscitate him? I am saying they have resuscitated Franco.
Leaving him in peace would be better. God will judge him,
(12:40):
remembering something that has provoked a civil war does not
help to live better. This prompted the Spanish government to
formally complain to the Vatican. That's actually the only exhamation
we've got for these mid year Unearthed episodes, apart from
possible exhimations around the Hartford Circus fire, which we recently
talked about on a Saturday Classic. My exhumation Google alert
(13:02):
wasn't particularly productive January through May. Uh, so maybe there
will be more of that later in the year that
We've just talked about a lot of things though, so
we're gonna take a quick sponsor break before we have
even more updates. Not too long ago, we replayed a
(13:28):
past episode on Charles Dickens as a Saturday Classic. That
previous episode referenced him supporting two households, and previous hosts
Sarah and Bablina hinted that they would talk more about
that in a future podcast. Later on, listeners asked us
whatever happened to that future podcast because it did not
apparently exist. It turned out that it had never been
(13:50):
made just because of a basic lack of information, But
we were able to find a few tidbits about Dickens
having a long term affair with another woman while separated
from his wife but not divorce from her, and basically
supporting both of those households. We thought that was probably
what Sarah and Deblina were referring to. Well. University of
York professor John Bowen has combed through a set of
(14:12):
ninety eight documents in the Harvard Theater Collection. It doesn't
appear that anyone had carefully gone through or analyzed these
letters before Bowen got to them, and he wrote about
what he found in February. These were letters from Edward
Dutton Cook, who was a neighbor of Charles's estranged wife, Catherine.
Edward and his wife became friends with her, and she
shared various details about her marriage to Charles Dickens with
(14:35):
Edward toward the end of her life. Edward did not
keep this information, which was pretty personal private, He put
all kinds of details about it in letters to his
friend William moy Thomas. These details included the fact that
Dickens apparently tried to have his wife committed to an
asylum so that he could carry on this relationship with
(14:56):
another woman, and Bowen's words quote this is a stronger
and more damning account of Dickens's behavior than any other.
Their drama lives on UH. An expedition to Antarctica to
try to find the remains of Shackleton's ship and Durrance
set off early this year, but on February fourteenth, the
team announced that they had abandoned the search and they
(15:17):
were headed back home to avoid the risk of being
trapped by ice. The Endurance itself had been crushed by
ice in nineteen fifteen. Our episode on Shackleton's Race to
the South Pole is from way back in Yeah, Holly
and I not part of that episode, no, but it
does exist. Previous hosts also did a podcast on Kahokia
(15:38):
back in twenty eleven, and in a paper published in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this February, researchers
documented the connection between human feces from the site and
the population of Cochia, and environmental changes that were going on,
like droughts and floods. To do this, they studied sediment
layers from Horseshoe Lake, which is adjacent to Kahokia. As
(16:00):
people deficated in Kahokia runoff would have carried their feces
to the lake where they became part of the lake
beds layers of sediment, and they extracted cores of this
sediment to study those layers. What they found was that
the human waste and the products associated with them and
these layers corresponded to known increases and decreases in Kahokias
(16:21):
population and its eventual abandonment around fourteen hundred. And they
also found connections between all these population changes and environmental
factors like droughts and floods. There's also a new book
out on Kahokia this year called Feeding Kahokia, Early Agriculture
in the North American Homeland, and that's written by Gail Fritz,
and in a press release about the book, she was
(16:42):
quoted as saying, it's clear that the vast majority of
Cahokias farmers were women, and it's likely that their critical
knowledge of domesticated crops and wild food plants would have
earned them positions of power and respect at every level
of society. Yeah, that's not the only new book about
Cookia this year, but that one particularly caught my attention
because it really is sort of rethinking what his typically
(17:06):
been understood about, like the stratification of society and in
co Hokia and and who was at what level. Professor
in University College Cork has examined a sixteenth century administrative
manual that's been passed down through a local family and
it turns out that part of the binding of this
book is made from a fifteenth century Irish translation of
(17:29):
the Canon of Medicine by Ibn Sina, who is more
commonly known among English speakers as Avicenna. It was not
at all unusual for book binders to reuse parts of
other books in their bindings because vellum and other bookmaking
materials were very expensive, so book binders reclaimed things from
old books whenever they could. But this particular translation of
(17:50):
the Canon of Medicine is previously unrecorded in Irish medical history.
Our episode from Avicenna is from back in Yes, I
don't know who we've ever talked about it on the show,
but one of my jobs that I used to have
was working in a college library, repairing the book collection
as needed so you could stay in circulation. And I
often encountered things that were made of other books because
(18:13):
they had some piece of the collection that we're very old,
so we were trying to uh protect those and keep
the record of the history. But also again keep it
part of a circulating collection, so just verifying that that
is a accurate. Yeah. When I was when we were
in San Francisco, I went to the Bookbinder's Museum and
had this guided tour of the Bookbinder's Museum, and that
(18:35):
was one of the things they talked about, was how
many things were reclaimed but simultaneously, like if you were
shaving too much off of the edges of your paper
to try to reclaim that and make new paper, you
can get in big trouble because that was a quality issue.
Guid Yeah. Uh, yeah, I legitimately, this sounds like something
(18:56):
I would be saying facetiously legitimately, Like the history of
book binding is fascinating. Even though there's there aren't a
lot of like big moments in it, there are just
a lot of different practices that shifted over the years
that have their own unique flavor an impact on the
way the industry worked going forward. Uh, maybe one day
(19:16):
we'll do an episode on that. It might be tricky, Uh.
Previous hosts of the podcast did an episode of a
rapa Nui also called Easter Island way back in two
thousand and eight, and then that was updated in recent
research there suggests that the island's famous statues may have
been intentionally placed near sources of fresh water, and this
(19:37):
gives a possible reason for why the islands statues and
shrines are in their particular locations. This research was focused
on the western portion of the island, and anthropologists Carl
Lippo reported that this proximity to the water wasn't always obvious,
because fresh water would emerge along the coast when the
tide went out. Was only there sometimes and it was
(19:59):
observing this powd and that they spotted the connection between
when water would emerge and where these statues and shrines were.
The team is hoping to expand their research to include
the rest of the island as well. In other Eastern
Island news, Norway announced a plan to return thousands of artifacts,
including the bones of Rapa Nui people uh those had
been removed from the island in the nineteen fifties by
(20:20):
Sore Higher Doll and higher Doll is most known for
the expedition aboard Contiki, which was meant to demonstrate that
people from South America could have settled the Polynesian islands.
I think I have that that expedition on my ideal
list for some point in the future. But it's also
one of those that every time I get to it,
I kind of go I feel like we've did it already,
(20:41):
but I don't think we did. I have done a
similar thing with it. I haven't scrimbled in a notebook,
And every time I look at it, I'm like, is
this to tell me to go back and look at
what we did? And then I look for it and
I can't find it. And this is one of the
things that comes along with joining a show after it's
been through other hosts and a long archive, sometimes with
things named in a way that aren't immediately obvious. Well,
(21:03):
and to be frank, I mean we have been doing
it long enough that there are episodes that we worked on.
I think it's come up before where I've been like,
I don't remember this at all, and You're like, you
did the research on that one. Yeah, it's easy to
I mean, you can't keep it all in your head.
Unfortunately I can't anyway, I certainly cannot. Back to some unearthings,
this is another previous Unearthed follow up. In Unearthed in
(21:26):
julyen we talked about the discovery in Alabama of a
ship that was believed to be the Clotilda. The Clotilda
was the last known ship to carry enslaved Africans to
the United States, which happened more than fifty years after
the US had outlawed the import of enslaved people from Africa.
The Clotilda was burned and sunk in July of eighteen
(21:47):
sixty after bringing a hundred enslaved Africans to the United
States because its owners wanted to destroy the evidence of
their crimes. It turned out pretty quickly that the ship
in question was not the right size to be the Cloetill.
That was something that we talked about on last year's
Unearthed in July as well, but the potential discovery sparked
a lot of interest in trying to find the ship.
(22:09):
In May, marine archaeologists announced that this time they did
find the Clotilda was located in Alabama's Mobile River. In
that same episode of Unearthed, in the same passage, we
also talked about the publication of Zora Neil Hurston's Barracoon,
which was based on her interview with a man known
as Couldjoe Lewis. He was believed to be the last
(22:32):
living survivor of the Clotilda, but that designation shifted this
year as well. In March, Hannah Durkin of Newcastle University
published a paper in the journal Slavery and Abolition in
which she notes that a woman named Rido she actually
lived until nineteen thirty seven. Lewis died in ninetive. That's
actually somebody that Zora Neil Hurston also knew about and
(22:55):
and wrote about, but it wasn't clear the timeline of
their deaths until now. We talked about bog butter in
our Butter versus Marjarine episode in Please Don't Eat Bog
Butter uh, and it's also come up on previous editions
of unearthed. Now researchers at the University of Bristol and
University College Dublin have dated thirty two bog butters from
(23:15):
the collection of the National Museum of Ireland. They wanted
to find out if this butter was really what we
think of as butter made from milk fat, or if
it was really h fat that had come from animal carcasses,
and turns out it was really dairy butter. This research
also suggests that the practice of putting butter in the
bogs goes back about fifteen hundred years earlier than previously thought.
(23:39):
The oldest sample that they were looking at was from
seventeen hundred BC. It's still not a pent clear whether
people were putting the butter in the bog to try
to preserve it, or if it was some kind of offering.
It is also totally possible that at some points in
history it was about food preservation and in other points
in history it was a more symbolic thing. They do
(24:00):
think that at any given time it was for one
purpose and not both. Still do not eat the bog butter. No,
thank you. We're gonna talk next time about people tasting
some things that had been unearthed. Uh just want to
reiterate that. In we did an episode on the Crescent
(24:22):
Hotel and Norman Baker, and this year excavation work at
the hotel unearthed more than four hundred glass bottles and
other glass vessels that date back to when the property
was Baker Hospital and Health Resort. These bottles appear to
have been used to store tumors and other specimens that
had been removed from patients preserved in alcohol. Mike Evans,
(24:44):
Station assistant archaeologists noted that the bottles that they found
looked identical to one shown in advertisements for the hospital
slash Resort. More than twenty bottles found still contain what
looks like tissue, although it is not clear whether they
are real human specimens or if there's some kind of
prop Yeah, it could have been either. Subsequent owners of
(25:05):
the property after it was this Hospital Slash Resort had
been told that all those old specimens had been taken
to the dump. They interpreted that is meaning some kind
of dump facility elsewhere rather than just being behind the building. Yeah,
(25:26):
there are so many uh uh sort of skin crawley questions. Yeah,
but there it is. We also have a few one
sentence updates of a collection of random episodes, So here
we go. Poems by Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, along
with notebooks and photos, were auctioned off by Heritage Auctions
in Dallas on May fourth. The photo of Harriet Tubman
(25:49):
as a young woman, which we have talked about previously,
went on display at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African
American History and Culture. Uh, producer Casey and I got
to see that earlier this year. Sarah Burningham, executive producer
of the podcast Making Gay History Unearthed, previously unaired audio
of past podcast subject Buyard Ruston, which became part of
(26:10):
the podcast fourth season, and the last survivor of the
Doolittle Raid. Richard Cole, died on April ninth, at the
age of one hundred and three. After all of that,
because that also was a lot, we're going to take
a quick break and then move on to some non
episode update Unearthed. Okay, now we have a collection of things.
(26:37):
They're all related to Neanderthals and early humans. And first off,
archaeologists in Northeast Jordan's have found evidence that Neolithic humans
might have been hunting with dogs. They came to this
conclusion by studying the dog's presence at an archaeological site
known as shoe Bake six and that dates back to
(26:58):
about eleven thousand years ago. The dogs seem to have
been kept in an area mostly around the edges of
the settlement, but also we're just allowed to roam around
through everything. The inhabitants of Shoebake Was six used hares
for food and used their bones to make beads. And
there's an uptick in how many hairs were present at
the site, which coincides with when the dogs got there,
(27:20):
so the team's conclusion is that either people were using
dogs to help them hunt hares, or perhaps the people
and dogs were hunting hairs together, with the people using
the dogs hunting patterns to help their own hunt. And
other news. Modern day javelin throwers have helped a team
of researchers look into whether Neanderthals had the ability to
throw spears to hunt large animals from a distance. The
(27:45):
team from University College London made replicas spears using hand
tools that were modeled after hand tools used at the time.
The models for the spears were a set of ten
well preserved throwing spears that had been excavated in the
ninety nineties. Six avalon athletes took their turns with these
throwing spears and were able to hit a target from
(28:05):
up to twenty meters away, which was twice as far
as the researchers thought they could be thrown. And this
all adds to the growing body of evidence that Neanderthals
were probably a lot smarter and more a depth than
they have generally been given credit for. Now we have
just had a series of Neanderthal related things over the years,
(28:27):
which all kind of contradict the perception that that maybe
they were stereotypical cavemen. Right now, when someone uses that
word as an attempted slurred or insult, someone can come back.
It's like, yes, my javelin skills are on point. On
that same note, according to research that was published in
(28:48):
Science Advances, both Neanderthals and early humans were probably pretty
good at hunting small, fast moving game. They came to
this conclusion by studying animal bones and what is now
southeastern France. It was already pretty well established that these
populations hunted larger, often slower moving animals like deer, bison,
and horse. But it also looks like they were able
(29:09):
to hunt rabbits, which might have helped them survive when
larger game was more scarce. It was kind of connects
back over to the dogs and hairs being are the
dogs helping with the hair hunting, which is more about
early humans than about Neanderthal's. So moving on to the art,
books and letters. In January, The New Yorker reported on
(29:32):
a lost story by Sylvia Plath, which Plath wrote in
nineteen fifty two while attending Smith College. However, the Indiana
University Lily Library had a different take on this report.
In a short Twitter thread, they explained that this story
was in their collections and listed in the finding aid.
(29:53):
This thread ended with quote in parentheses whispers. You know
when materials are in libraries and archives, they are actually
the opposite of lost. Also in the it was there
in the library, but in this case it actually was
kind of lost territory. Michael Richardson of the University of
(30:16):
Bristol Special Collections Library found a set of thirteenth century
Old French parchments tucked into some sixteenth century books. These
texts include lots of names from our thury and legends,
and they're believed to be part of the Vulgate cycle
or Lancelot Grail cycle, which was one of Sir Thomas
Mallory's likely sources for Le Mard d'arthour. So yeah, they
(30:37):
knew about these sixteenth century books, but were surprised at
the thirteenth century inclusion. And the books that the fragments
were found in have their own history as well. They
are a four volume set of works by French poet
and reformer Jean Gerson. The pages were printed in Strasbourg
sometime between fourteen ninety four and fifteen o two, and
then they were bound in England sometime in the sixteenth century.
(30:59):
There's thirteen century fragments were bound in along with them.
In one of the findings that a lot of folks
told us about, researchers studied the remains of an unknown
woman buried in Germany about one thousand years ago and
found flax of lapis lazily pigment in her teeth. Logical conclusion,
she was an artist who worked in manuscript illuminations and
(31:20):
used her mouth to make the tip of her brush
have a fine point. Another logical conclusion, she must have
been very good at her work because lapis lazily pigment,
known as aquamarine, was extremely expensive and really hard to get,
so the people that were illuminating those manuscripts were not
all monks, as has often been popularly imagined. UH and
(31:41):
other news. Leonardo da Vinci's thumb print has been found
on a drawing called the Cardiovascular System and Principal Organs
of a Woman, which was drawn in fifteen o nine.
That work is in Britain's Royal Collection, and the ink
from the thumb print matches the ink from the drawing,
so they think he just picked up the pay age
with inky hands. Alan Donnithorne, who was a former paper
(32:04):
conservator at the collection, called it the collections quote most
convincing candidate for an authentic Leonardo fingerprints. Another gear switch,
the practice of writing in Japan may have developed between
three hundred and four hundred years earlier than previously thought.
This is based on the discovery of inkstones, some of
them unfinished, that date back to the second and first
(32:25):
centuries b CE. Previously, writing was believed to have been
brought to Japan from China in roughly the third century CE.
These ink stones were probably also introduced from China. It's
believed that they were first developed in China around three
d b C before being carried to Japan, and then
the earliest Japanese made ink stones would have probably been
(32:46):
copied from these Chinese stones before Japanese craftspeople developed their
own designs and methods. In May, the conservation charity English
Heritage announced that a painting long believed to be a
fake based on Bodacelli's Madonna of the Pomegranate, it was
actually a real bot of Celli. It was thought to
be a fake because of variations in the painting itself
and in the yellow pigments used to paint it. But
(33:08):
after X ray testing, infrared studies, and a pigment analysis,
researchers have concluded that the painting really was created in
Botticelli's workshop in Florence, although it was not necessarily exclusively
his work. Yeah, it was totally normal for a painter
to create multiple copies of the same thing, especially if
(33:29):
it was a commission. But everybody thought this one was
fake for a long time. We have a random thing
to just close out part one of Unearthed today, and
that's that archaeologists working ahead of a new high speed
rail line have unearthed the burial site of Matthew Flinders,
who was the first Europeans to circumnavigate the continent of Australia.
(33:50):
He died in eighteen fourteen and this line that he
was unearthed to make way for is going to run
from London to Birmingham. The construction has involved just a
math of archaeological project, with sixty different dig sites along
the length of the route. Flinders was known to be
buried at St James's Cemetery behind Houston Station, but the
(34:10):
cemetery also contained forty bodies and only some of the
graves were being excavated, so authorities weren't all that optimistic
that they were going to find his grave site. It
turned out that Flinders coffin was marked with a lead
plate that was still legible. Yeah, I found it pretty quickly,
it turned out. As a side note, there is always
a lot of train line and other construction related unearthing
(34:33):
going on, and so far this year we've also read
reports of a fourth century public fountain being unearthed steering
at rail construction, and the Thessalonici metro and a Roman
cemetery unearthed during work for a tram extension route in Strasbourg.
And we'll have more next time, more things unearthed, whole
other categories. Have you on earthed some mail for us?
(34:56):
I have unearthed some mail. It's from Shannon. Shannon has
written about Marie Lawrenson, and Shannon says, I listened to
your podcast in the car on my daily commute and
when Tracy described her reaction to seeing the Murray Lawrence
paintings at the Music to lawrenz Ury, I knew exactly
what she was talking about because I had the exact
same experience. When I was in Paris in January, I
(35:18):
knew it had to be the same painter. When I
got home, I pulled up my photos. I've attached my
favorite Lawrence m from the Ora Injury portrait Madame paul Yume,
although it's not nearly as good as the professional ones,
and sure enough it was the same painter. I take
photos of items I'm drawn to in museum so I
can go back and learn more about them later, but
I hadn't gotten back to this one yet. I was
(35:40):
fascinated to hear about Marie Lawrence and her life. I
was especially interested to hear that she was part of
the early Cubist movement. I generally don't enjoy Cubism, mostly
because Picasso was a misogynist and the gusto he shows
and breaking women up into pieces always makes me so mad. Anyway,
I found her work really drew me in, and I
stayed there a long time looking at her paintings the
(36:02):
attached in particular. Thank you so much for reminding me
about these paintings and giving me some insight into the artist.
As always love how sassy you ladies are. Shannon, Thank
you so much. Shannon, I just wanted to read this
because I always love when I find a kindred spirit
in our listener mail who similarly it was like, I'm
here for these paintings. Uh. If you would like to
(36:22):
write to us about this or any other podcast where
at History Podcasts that how Stuff Works dot com and
then we're all over social media. Had missed in History
and that was where you'll find our Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram,
and Twitter. You can come to our website, which is
Missed in History dot com, where you will find the
show notes for all the episodes that Holly and I
have ever worked on. The show notes for this episode
(36:43):
includes the links to the original sources for everything we
have talked about this time and next time is a
very long list. Uh. You can also find a searchable
archive at our website for every episode we have ever done,
and if you click on live shows at the top
of the page, all of our upcoming live shows and
tour so you can do all that at our website,
(37:04):
and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcast,
the I heart radio app, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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