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