Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, the 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 Fry.
Speaker 1: It's time for Unearthed. Here at the end of the year.
Speaker 1: Our most recent previous installment of Unearthed left off approximately
Speaker 1: in August, so for folks that are new to the show,
Speaker 1: this is the time of year when we talk about
Speaker 1: things that were literally or figuratively unearthed over the past
Speaker 1: however many months, and in this case to day, it's
Speaker 1: from approximately September until mid December, or at least that's
Speaker 1: when we found out about them. I think this episode
Speaker 1: is coming out at the very end of December beginning
Speaker 1: of January, so there's going to be just a week
Speaker 1: and a half or so gap between when we record
Speaker 1: and when it's actually coming out. If any gigantic news
Speaker 1: breaks and that time, it'll just go on the next
Speaker 1: one to late to like to get in there. So
Speaker 1: today we have a lot of different stuff, including updates
Speaker 1: to previous episodes, some books and letters, shipwrecks which are
Speaker 1: a big favorite, and some animal finds, along with some
Speaker 1: a few other categories. And then next time, we will
Speaker 1: have the edibles and potables and the clothing and accessories
Speaker 1: and the exclamations as examples of what we'll have next time.
Speaker 1: So first up, we're gonna talk about some episode updates,
Speaker 1: starting with a recent headline. On December sixteenth, officials in
Speaker 1: Oklahoma announced the results of ground penetrating radar scans that
Speaker 1: were used to look for signs of mass graves associated
Speaker 1: with the massacre in Greenwood, also known as the Tulsa
Speaker 1: Race Riot. The team had focused on areas that were
Speaker 1: mentioned as possible mass grave sites in the two thousand
Speaker 1: one report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa
Speaker 1: Race Riot, and this included Oaklawn Cemetery, New Block Park,
Speaker 1: and an area near the Arkansas River known as the Canes.
Speaker 1: So nothing is official yet from this survey. This was
Speaker 1: one of those things that they were doing to see
Speaker 1: where they should look closer, and they did find two
Speaker 1: areas in Oaklawn Cemetery and one in the Canes that
Speaker 1: they said, we're consistent with a possible mass burial site
Speaker 1: on these sites warranted a closer look. Negotiations are also
Speaker 1: still ongoing with another cemetery that had been mentioned in
Speaker 1: that report that cemetery hadn't yet given permission for the
Speaker 1: work to take place, and this announcement was made just
Speaker 1: a couple of days before we recorded this episode, so
Speaker 1: this is still ongoing. I was driving back on a
Speaker 1: road trip from Florida to Atlanta when this news broke
Speaker 1: and my phone would not stop going off. Our episode
Speaker 1: on the Tulsa Massacre came out in and we re
Speaker 1: aired it as a Saturday Classic in November of this year,
Speaker 1: after it was featured in the opening episode of the
Speaker 1: HBO show Watchman. Yeah, if you have not watched the
Speaker 1: show Watchman, it sort of becomes uh part of the
Speaker 1: whole thread of the season, which I thought was really interesting. Um.
Speaker 1: This is also one where I first heard that the
Speaker 1: announcement was coming before the announcement had actually been made.
Speaker 1: But the article that I was reading about it made
Speaker 1: it sound like it wasn't coming out until the following Monday,
Speaker 1: rather than the Monday that it came out on, and
Speaker 1: I was like, Oh, I really wish we could talk
Speaker 1: about this, And then it turned out it was exactly
Speaker 1: the right time to get it into the episode. Previous
Speaker 1: hosts of our show to move on to something else
Speaker 1: talked about the Bayou Tapestry in July and that tapestry
Speaker 1: tells the story of the Norman conquest of England, but
Speaker 1: there's been some debate about where exactly it was made,
Speaker 1: who made it, and who they made it for. According
Speaker 1: to research published in the Journal of the British Archaeological Association,
Speaker 1: the Baioux Tapestry was specifically designed to be displayed in
Speaker 1: the Baiou Cathedral in Normandy, France, on the north, south,
Speaker 1: and west walls of the cathedral's nave. We already knew
Speaker 1: that's where it hung in the fifteenth century, but according
Speaker 1: to this research, that wasn't just a place that someone
Speaker 1: figured out to put it where it would fit. That
Speaker 1: is where it was always supposed to go. So this
Speaker 1: doesn't answer ongoing questions about who exactly commissioned or made
Speaker 1: this piece, but it does suggest that whoever designed it
Speaker 1: and planned out its construction had at least visited this
Speaker 1: cathedral and either took measurements or had access to the
Speaker 1: dimensions of the nave. The cathedral as it stands today
Speaker 1: is very different from the way it looked when the
Speaker 1: Biou Tapestry was created, so this research required Christopher Norton
Speaker 1: from the University of York to figure out the naves
Speaker 1: earlier dimensions, including where the choir screen would have gone
Speaker 1: based on written documents and surviving architectural features, and another find.
Speaker 1: A team at Yama Gotta University in Japan studied the
Speaker 1: Nasca Lines between eighteen and in November of this year,
Speaker 1: they announced their findings, which included the presence of a
Speaker 1: hundred and forty three previously undocumented petroglyphs on the west
Speaker 1: inside of the Nasca plateau. One of them was detected
Speaker 1: through artificial intelligence and then confirmed by a human that
Speaker 1: particular petroglyph is about five meters tall and seems to
Speaker 1: represent a person. In addition to these discoveries, the team
Speaker 1: used artificial intelligence to analyze aerial footage and in the
Speaker 1: process they spotted at least another five hundred potential petroglyphs,
Speaker 1: which need to be evaluated by a human being before
Speaker 1: they can be confirmed. Our episode on the Nasca Lines
Speaker 1: came out in September, and there have been a few
Speaker 1: Unearthed episode updates on the line since then. In an
Speaker 1: update to a previous unearthed in the autumn of this year,
Speaker 1: and onearthed we talked about new evidence about the extent
Speaker 1: of the plague of Justinian, also called the justiniac plague,
Speaker 1: and according to research that was published in the December
Speaker 1: second issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
Speaker 1: it turns out that plague might not have been such
Speaker 1: a big deal. Actually, Researchers from the University of Maryland's
Speaker 1: nash nl Socio Environmental Synthesis Center concluded that reports of
Speaker 1: the plague's effects might have been exaggerated. Basically, it's long
Speaker 1: been described as a pandemic that killed between a third
Speaker 1: and a half of the population of the Mediterranean, but
Speaker 1: there's no evidence of that scale of death. For example,
Speaker 1: such a huge death toll would have affected agricultural output,
Speaker 1: which would have affected pollen levels, but that doesn't seem
Speaker 1: to be reflected in the physical records. They also couldn't
Speaker 1: see any shifts in burial practices, which often come about
Speaker 1: after a plague because of the huge numbers of bodies
Speaker 1: that need to be buried. So between these two uh
Speaker 1: findings that we've talked about, it seems like maybe this
Speaker 1: plague reached farther than was previously believed, but might not
Speaker 1: have been as lethal as it has been reported. According
Speaker 1: to a different paper in the journal Current Biology, DNA
Speaker 1: research has confirmed that the Carolina parakeet became extinct due
Speaker 1: to human activity. Researchers sequenced the parakeets full genome along
Speaker 1: with the DNA of the sun parakeet, which is a
Speaker 1: related bird that still lives today, and they wanted to
Speaker 1: figure out when these two species diverged from each other
Speaker 1: and also look for evidence of what caused the Carolina
Speaker 1: parakeets extinction. When they sequenced the Carolina parakeets DNA, they
Speaker 1: didn't find evidence of inbreeding or population decline that would
Speaker 1: be expected if the bird had been threatened or endangered
Speaker 1: for some time before going extinct, so they concluded that
Speaker 1: the extinction was sudden and abrupt, which means it was
Speaker 1: probably caused by humans. We talked about the Carolina parakeet
Speaker 1: and its extinction in our episode on end Lings, and
Speaker 1: then to finish out the updates just last week, we
Speaker 1: talked about Ethiopia's rock hewn churches and the introduction of
Speaker 1: Christianity to Ethiopia during the time of the Oxymite Empire,
Speaker 1: and then the exact same day as we recorded that episode,
Speaker 1: a paper was published in the journal Antiquity that detail
Speaker 1: the excavation of the oximate town of Beta Somati. I
Speaker 1: feel like sometimes all we need to invoke a study
Speaker 1: publishing is to record an episode about a topic that
Speaker 1: does feel that way sometimes. Uh. This excavation unearthed a
Speaker 1: part of the city that showed signs of both domestic
Speaker 1: life and commercial activities like manufacturing and trade. It also
Speaker 1: on earth a basilica that shows evidence of both religious
Speaker 1: and administrative activities, along with some blending of pagan and
Speaker 1: early Christian traditions. Various items at the basilica date back
Speaker 1: to between the years two d fifty eight and sixty five,
Speaker 1: and archaeologists who worked on the excavation believe that it
Speaker 1: may be one of the first churches constructed outside the
Speaker 1: capital of Axum after the introduction of Christianity. Another notable
Speaker 1: find at this site is a gold and Carnelian ring.
Speaker 1: The rings design is described as really Roman, but the
Speaker 1: insignia that is carved into it is a bull's head
Speaker 1: that looks a lot more African. This paper was published,
Speaker 1: as Tracy had said, in the journal Antiquity, and the
Speaker 1: authors noted that there is still a lot more research
Speaker 1: to be done at the site, but that so far
Speaker 1: it suggests a lot of blending and overlap between Oxomite
Speaker 1: and Preoxomite culture and pagan and Christian religions, rather than
Speaker 1: a sudden shift that followed changes in the ruling dynasty
Speaker 1: of the region. To move on to the books and
Speaker 1: letters in this edition of Unearthed, Murasaki Shikibu's eleventh century
Speaker 1: The Tale of Ganji is a classic in Japanese literature,
Speaker 1: but there aren't any copies of it that date back
Speaker 1: to her lifetime. The oldest and most complete surviving version
Speaker 1: of it that we have today is called the Aobyoshiban
Speaker 1: or Blue Cover Book, and that has become the standard
Speaker 1: text for most translations of her work. Four of its
Speaker 1: chapters are confirmed to have been handwritten by the man
Speaker 1: who compiled it in the thirteenth century. That was the
Speaker 1: poet Fujiwara no Taka. Now there is a fifth chapter
Speaker 1: thanks to a newly unearthed manuscript. Apart from so minor
Speaker 1: copying errors, the other four chapters seemed to be identical
Speaker 1: to previously known copies, and this newly confirmed fifth chapter
Speaker 1: details Genji's meeting his future wife, a character named Mourasaki.
Speaker 1: The manuscript that this chapter was found in had been
Speaker 1: passed down through the Okochee family, who were descended from
Speaker 1: a Japanese feudal lord. This manuscript had been in the
Speaker 1: family's possession since seventeen forty three, so the manuscript itself
Speaker 1: wasn't something that was previously unknown. In April, though, the
Speaker 1: family asked for experts to evaluate the manuscript, and the
Speaker 1: announcement that it contained this fifth chapter of the Tale
Speaker 1: of Genji came in October. So if you're thinking I
Speaker 1: wish I knew more about this Murasaki Shikibu person and
Speaker 1: the Tale of Genji, just stay tuned. Yeah, stay tuned
Speaker 1: pretty soon. Actually. Uh. Chris Rolston at the Columbian College
Speaker 1: of Arts and Sciences at George Washington University to move
Speaker 1: on to another story, is using advanced imaging to study
Speaker 1: notes that were on two thousand year old pottery fragments.
Speaker 1: So pottery fragments that contain some kind of inscriptions are
Speaker 1: writing on them are called ostrica, and these ostrica in
Speaker 1: particular were excavated in Jordan's in Night, but they were
Speaker 1: thought to have been subsequently lost until more recently in
Speaker 1: Ralston's own words. These were like the post it notes
Speaker 1: of antiquity. When a useful pot or vessel broke, people
Speaker 1: would keep the pieces and then use them to jot
Speaker 1: down things they needed to remember temporarily, like ancient shopping
Speaker 1: lists or reminders of errands that they needed to run.
Speaker 1: The notes on these fragments were made with an ash
Speaker 1: based ink that is largely faded now, so multi spectral
Speaker 1: imaging is being used to try to get a better look.
Speaker 1: Even though these fragments of pottery don't contain what we
Speaker 1: might really think of as important information, there's still a
Speaker 1: potential source of new knowledge about the past, so called
Speaker 1: important official documents. At the time, we're mostly written down
Speaker 1: on things like papyrus and animal skin, so thanks to
Speaker 1: climate conditions and the passage of time, a lot of
Speaker 1: them have not survived until the present. The site where
Speaker 1: the fragments were found is also associated with a lot
Speaker 1: of historical figures like King Herod and John the Baptists,
Speaker 1: so who knows. It may turn out that even though
Speaker 1: these are sort of jotted down personal notes, they may
Speaker 1: actually wind up containing some references to people or events
Speaker 1: that are still more known about today. Moving on, Dr
Speaker 1: John Mark Philo, an honorary fellow in English Studies at
Speaker 1: the University of East Anglia, has unearthed Queen Elizabeth the
Speaker 1: first translations of the Annals of the Roman historian Tacitus.
Speaker 1: At least there is a lot of evidence to suggest
Speaker 1: that that's what he found. It's written on paper that
Speaker 1: Elizabeth's secretaries were fond of using, and it has corrections
Speaker 1: in what looks to be the Queen's handwriting and Filo's
Speaker 1: words quote. The corrections made to the translation are a
Speaker 1: match for Elizabeth's late hand which was, to put it
Speaker 1: mildly idiosyncratic. The higher you are in the social hierarchy
Speaker 1: of Tutor England, the messier you can let your handwriting become.
Speaker 1: For the queen. Comprehension is somebody else's problem. A paper
Speaker 1: published on November twenty nine in the Review of English
Speaker 1: Studies details some other clues as to why this is
Speaker 1: believed to be Elizabeth's work. This includes water marks in
Speaker 1: the paper and some comparisons to the handwriting of people
Speaker 1: who were known to have worked as scribes for the Queen.
Speaker 1: And after we take a quick sponsor break, we're gonna
Speaker 1: move on to shipwrecks. And there are a lot of them,
Speaker 1: so to move on to the shipwrecks. The remains of
Speaker 1: the schooner's Pestigo and St. Andrew's have been found in
Speaker 1: northern Lake Michigan. These two vessels collided and sank in
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy eight. They were basically headed in opposite directions,
Speaker 1: with the Pastigo loaded with coal and the St. Andrew's
Speaker 1: loaded with corn, and the two of them apparently collided
Speaker 1: due to misunderstood torch signals. Bernie Hellstrom first spotted the
Speaker 1: find in June using a bottom sounder and then took
Speaker 1: pictures of it with a submersible camera, but it wasn't
Speaker 1: immediately clear what vessels these were because they were about
Speaker 1: fifty miles from where the Pestigo and the St. Andrews
Speaker 1: were believed to have collided. Divers has since been to
Speaker 1: the site with cameras and the schooners are described as
Speaker 1: being in an amazing state of preservation. In other news,
Speaker 1: maritime archaeologists in Sweden have discovered two wrecks that they
Speaker 1: think date back to the seventeenth century. Both of them
Speaker 1: are warships, and one of them maybe the sister ship
Speaker 1: to the Vassa which sank on its maiden voyage and
Speaker 1: was also covered in our previous episode More Shipwrecked Stories Battleships.
Speaker 1: Back in twleven, three four hundred year old shipwrecks have
Speaker 1: been unearthed in central Gothenburg, Sweden, during construction work on
Speaker 1: a new railway line. It wasn't an altogether surprising find.
Speaker 1: The area that they were discovered used to be a
Speaker 1: harbor in the sixteen hundreds, but it was filled in
Speaker 1: in the eighteen hundreds. What is not known is whether
Speaker 1: these ships were wrecked accidentally or if they were deliberately
Speaker 1: scuttled for some reason. They were made of oak and
Speaker 1: measured fifteen to twenty meters in length, and based on
Speaker 1: their size, they are believed to have been cargo ships.
Speaker 1: In other news, four Japanese aircraft carriers were sunk at
Speaker 1: the Battle of Midway in nineteen forty two, and in
Speaker 1: October it was announced that two of them have been found,
Speaker 1: the Kaga and the Akagi. Until this point, the only
Speaker 1: sunken vessel from the Battle of Midway to be discovered
Speaker 1: was the Yorktown, which was found in nine and as
Speaker 1: was the case with some of the other shipwrecks we
Speaker 1: have talked about, on the show. The Kaga and the
Speaker 1: Akagi were found by researchers using the research vessel Petrol,
Speaker 1: which was owned by the late Paul Allen, and they
Speaker 1: were working in conjunction with the U. S. Navy. Uh,
Speaker 1: it seems like we somehow missed this one, But the
Speaker 1: r V Petrol also found the wreck of the USS
Speaker 1: Hornet in late January. The Hornet was part of the
Speaker 1: Doolittle Raid, which we talked about on the show in
Speaker 1: February of sixteen, and it sank during the Battle of
Speaker 1: Santa Cruz Island in nineteen forty two. When we were
Speaker 1: on tour in Texas, one of my lift drivers asked
Speaker 1: me about this fine, and I felt silly because I
Speaker 1: didn't know what to tell him. Yeah, it's like I
Speaker 1: don't recall, but that doesn't mean anything. Yeah, we have
Speaker 1: a lot of different ways of trying to keep track
Speaker 1: with all of these different fines during the year. But
Speaker 1: I really think we somehow just missed this one, Maybe
Speaker 1: because it was in January and there's kind of a
Speaker 1: lot going on at the very start of the year.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Yeah, that was a case where I
Speaker 1: had mentioned to this driver. I don't even know how
Speaker 1: we got on it that I had grown up in
Speaker 1: northwest Florida for part of my life, and we talked
Speaker 1: about Hurlbert Field and he said, oh, and then he
Speaker 1: wanted to talk about Jimmy Doolittle a lot, and that's
Speaker 1: how we landed. So Ken, should you be listening? Thank you?
Speaker 1: That was a lovely riding conversation. Oh good. Another nineteen
Speaker 1: forty two shipwrecks the HMS Urge, which was part of
Speaker 1: the British tenth submarine Floortill. It departed from Malta on
Speaker 1: April seven, nineteen forty two, but then it never made
Speaker 1: it to Alexandria, Egypt, and its fate was unknown until
Speaker 1: this year's discovery. Off the coast of Malta. They found
Speaker 1: the Urge in about four hundred feet of water. That
Speaker 1: discovery was announced in November, and it appears that the
Speaker 1: vessel was sunk by a mine. In a somewhat similar mystery,
Speaker 1: the USS gray Back left Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on January
Speaker 1: for a combat patrol, but it never made it back.
Speaker 1: And before that point, the gray Back had been regarded
Speaker 1: as one of the most successful submarines in the U. S. Navy,
Speaker 1: based on Japanese war records. US officials thought they had
Speaker 1: an approximate idea of where this vessel might have been sunk,
Speaker 1: but it turned out that the translation of the longitude
Speaker 1: and latitude in those Japanese documents wasn't correct. When officials
Speaker 1: began going back through old records last year, they found
Speaker 1: a reference to a Japanese bomber striking a submarine on February.
Speaker 1: It turns out that this was the Gray Back, more
Speaker 1: than one hundred miles from where the U s had
Speaker 1: previously thought that it had gone down. Private explorers with
Speaker 1: the Lost fifty two project, which was founded to try
Speaker 1: to find missing US World War two submarines, made the discovery.
Speaker 1: Based on that new information, a team from Bournemouth University
Speaker 1: and the Marine Archaeology c Trust, supported by the National
Speaker 1: Museum of the Royal Navy, has been excavating the wreck
Speaker 1: of the h M S Invincible. This was originally a
Speaker 1: French ship called Love on Ceb and it was captured
Speaker 1: by the British Navy in seventeen forty seven before running
Speaker 1: aground and sinking in seventeen fifty eight. Fines from this
Speaker 1: excavation included a lot of objects that point to everyday
Speaker 1: life on the ship, including wig curler's clay pipes, bottles,
Speaker 1: and a mop head and bucket. Many of these items
Speaker 1: will ultimately go on display at the National Museum of
Speaker 1: the Royal Navy. The water level markers that had been
Speaker 1: hand cut into the side of the ship are still
Speaker 1: also visible more than two hundred sixty years after it
Speaker 1: went down. And in our last shipwreck of this edition,
Speaker 1: a team of divers from Sweden has salvaged hundreds of
Speaker 1: bottles of liquor from a World War One era shipwreck.
Speaker 1: The Cryos, was in route to Russia when it was
Speaker 1: sunk by a German submarine in nineteen seventeen, carrying all
Speaker 1: that liquor. The salvage group that did this work is
Speaker 1: known as Ocean X and specializes in salvaging alcohol from shipwrecks.
Speaker 1: It's a very niche career, uh. They brought up six
Speaker 1: hundred bottles of Kognac and three hundred bottles of an
Speaker 1: herbal liqueur known as benedictine. According to the rite up,
Speaker 1: they planned to have the salvage tested to see if
Speaker 1: it was still fit to drink. That amuses me because
Speaker 1: sometimes we have updates where people there was. The test
Speaker 1: was they tried to drink it de termined that it
Speaker 1: was undrinkable. I'm I it's not an appeal for me,
Speaker 1: which may surprise people since we do history for a living.
Speaker 1: But like, there's plenty of perfectly fine alcohol if you
Speaker 1: would like a cocktail available to you, Like, I don't
Speaker 1: necessarily understand the draw of a historical liquor that may
Speaker 1: or may not hurt you yet and also may or
Speaker 1: may not be any good anymore. Um. Yeah, So to
Speaker 1: move on to our next subject, we have lots of
Speaker 1: fines related to animals. Thanks to a combination of DNA
Speaker 1: analysis and carbon fourteen dating, an interdisciplinary team of scientists
Speaker 1: in Iceland has confirmed that Iceland's now extinct population of
Speaker 1: walruses was genetically distinct, and that they went extinct not
Speaker 1: long after the North first settled Iceland. It was already known,
Speaker 1: or at least strongly suggested that there were once walruses
Speaker 1: in Iceland. Aside from the remains that were studied in
Speaker 1: this research, the Icelandic sagas and other literature include references
Speaker 1: to walrus hunting, and there are also places that are
Speaker 1: named for walruses. In other news researchers in Junan Province,
Speaker 1: China have looked at fishbones to determine that people there
Speaker 1: have been practicing aquaculture for eight thousand years, specifically with
Speaker 1: car farming dating all the way back to between sixty
Speaker 1: two d and fifty hundred BC. There were already known
Speaker 1: written references to carp farming going back to the first
Speaker 1: millennium b C, but it wasn't clear how long before
Speaker 1: that it had existed, and it is still unclear exactly
Speaker 1: when and where aquaculture first started. For this research, the
Speaker 1: team looked at fish remains, specifically the remains of five
Speaker 1: hundred and eighty eight fish. They studied how old and
Speaker 1: how large these carp were when they died, and their
Speaker 1: findings suggested that the majority of them were at their
Speaker 1: peak in terms of maturity, which would be a really
Speaker 1: unusual age for them to have all died naturally in
Speaker 1: the wild. They also found areas where the concentration of
Speaker 1: carp versus other fish was a lot higher than would
Speaker 1: occur naturally in the wild. After examining all of this,
Speaker 1: an international team put together a three phase model of
Speaker 1: the development of aquaculture in Hunan Province. First, people fished
Speaker 1: in marshy areas during the carp spawning season. Then they
Speaker 1: started digging channels and employing other water management techniques to
Speaker 1: encourage the carp to spawn in certain places, and then
Speaker 1: in the last phase, people started managing carp spawning from
Speaker 1: beginning to end, with humans caring for both spawning beds
Speaker 1: and ponds for growing fish or fish habitats in patty fields.
Speaker 1: Researchers in Egypt have been studying the sacred mummified ibises
Speaker 1: that are found in Egyptian catacombs, and there are a
Speaker 1: lot of these mummified birds. That's led to questions about
Speaker 1: how exactly Egyptians got so many of them. Some ancient
Speaker 1: texts suggest that they might have been domesticated and raised
Speaker 1: specifically so that they could be sacrificed and mummified, but
Speaker 1: like that wasn't completely certain. According to DNA studies of
Speaker 1: birds from six Egyptian catacombs, these mummified birds were really diverse,
Speaker 1: far more diverse than might be expected from an ongoing
Speaker 1: captive breeding population and comparable to what would be expected
Speaker 1: in the wild. So it's possible at these birds were
Speaker 1: captured rather than farmed, or that they were farmed for
Speaker 1: brief periods when they were needed for these mummifications, and
Speaker 1: in our last animal update, the ARC Center of Excellence
Speaker 1: for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage has been trying to determine
Speaker 1: what exactly caused Australia's mega fauna to go extinct. Their
Speaker 1: research included mathematical models, climate research, fossil studies and archaeological records,
Speaker 1: and their conclusion was that human activity was a big
Speaker 1: part of this. Not all that surprisingly that comes up
Speaker 1: a lot, but there was also probably a connection to
Speaker 1: the reduced availability of drinking water because of a shifting climate.
Speaker 1: The lead author of the paper noted that this is
Speaker 1: particularly important work because this is one of the oldest
Speaker 1: extinctions to begin after the spread of modern humans out
Speaker 1: of Africa. We're gonna have a little bit more on Unearthed.
Speaker 1: After we first paused for a little sponsor break. We
Speaker 1: have a few a sort of random medieval era finds. Next. First,
Speaker 1: the Archbishop of London has donated a handbell known as
Speaker 1: the Naka Temple Handbell to the National Museum of Ireland.
Speaker 1: That bell is believed to date back to the eighth
Speaker 1: or ninth century, and it's been in possession of the
Speaker 1: archdiocese since the nineteen twenties. It is not clear how
Speaker 1: this bell came to be in the possession of the archdiocese,
Speaker 1: but it's believed that a priest bought it at an auction.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifteen. Cormack Bork, a curator of medieval antiquities
Speaker 1: at the Ulster Museum of Belfast, managed to track down
Speaker 1: the bell by going through archival records. Once the archdiocese
Speaker 1: released what they had, they offered to donate it. In
Speaker 1: a totally different story, thieves broke into a medieval cathedral
Speaker 1: in all Aron Samarine in southern France by tying a
Speaker 1: log to the roof of their car and then ramming
Speaker 1: the door with it. This cathedral was previously named a
Speaker 1: UNESCO World Heritage Site. That happened in and the things
Speaker 1: that the thieves stole from it included gold and silver
Speaker 1: chalices and crosses, a Nativity scene, and a sixteenth century
Speaker 1: cape that had been donated by King Francis the First
Speaker 1: along with other artifacts. That makes me real mad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it made a lot of people really mad. Like I
Speaker 1: saw so many outraged tweets about the ramming with the
Speaker 1: log car. Yeah, that's just jerkery. We are moving on
Speaker 1: to medieval Japan. Large parts of Shouty Castle in Okinawa
Speaker 1: were destroyed in a fire in October. This complex of
Speaker 1: buildings was actually a reconstruction, as the original fourteenth century
Speaker 1: buildings had been destroyed in World War Two during the
Speaker 1: Battle of Okinawa, but the reconstruction was determined to be
Speaker 1: authentic enough that it was named a UNESCO World Heritage
Speaker 1: Site in two thousand. As of the day of the fire,
Speaker 1: the plan was to rebuild the site again. And our
Speaker 1: last grouping of topics for this first part of Unearthed
Speaker 1: is historical inequality. Several papers published over the last few
Speaker 1: months have looked at the historical roots of social and
Speaker 1: economic inequality, and we're going to just hit some of
Speaker 1: the highlights. First up. Researchers from the Santa Fe Institute
Speaker 1: are challenging the long held idea that social and economic
Speaker 1: inequality started to evolve really as soon as societies started
Speaker 1: transitioning from hunting and gathering to agriculture. In this research,
Speaker 1: the team studied information from a hundred and fifty different
Speaker 1: archaeological sites, and they looked at different types of wealth
Speaker 1: across different societies. They concluded that economic inequality didn't really
Speaker 1: develop until several millennia after the development of agriculture. They
Speaker 1: concluded that the likely shift was the introduction of the
Speaker 1: ox drawn plow, which was used mostly or exclusively for
Speaker 1: plowing and similar work, rather than people cultivating their land
Speaker 1: by hand with hose or occasionally by using a milk
Speaker 1: cow or other cattle to try to plow. In addition
Speaker 1: to the fact that only the more affluent could afford
Speaker 1: the cost associated with an and a plow, the ox
Speaker 1: also replaced human labor, and that made land more valuable
Speaker 1: than the human labor that was needed to work it.
Speaker 1: Samuel Bowls, who co authored this study, compared neolithic oxen
Speaker 1: to today's robots, saying quote the effect was the same
Speaker 1: as today, growing economic disparities between those who owned the
Speaker 1: robots and those who's worked the robots displaced moving on.
Speaker 1: According to a paper published in the Journal of Political
Speaker 1: Economy called the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution and the Origins of
Speaker 1: Private Property, the establishment of private property may have been
Speaker 1: connected to the rise of agriculture in Mesopotamia. The papers
Speaker 1: authors cited a number of studies suggesting that the first
Speaker 1: farmers actually had a harder time than hunter gatherers, with
Speaker 1: a day's work in agriculture initially yielding fewer calories than
Speaker 1: a day of hunting or foraging, So then why do it.
Speaker 1: Their interpretation is that private property might have encouraged people
Speaker 1: who had the means to have that private property to
Speaker 1: make that ship. With the idea of private property established,
Speaker 1: it was easier to also establish who had the right
Speaker 1: to harvest and benefit from a cultivated crop, or who
Speaker 1: had the rights to the meat, milk, and other products
Speaker 1: from domestic animals that were raised on that property. A
Speaker 1: paper published in the journal Science also looks at inequality,
Speaker 1: this time within the same household. This team studied grave
Speaker 1: goods in grave sites in southern Germany dating back to
Speaker 1: about four thousand years ago. These were small burial areas
Speaker 1: associated with single homesteads, and they found that the people
Speaker 1: buried in each homestead often included three groups. Biologically related
Speaker 1: people of a high social status, women who were not
Speaker 1: related to that family, and we're not local to the area,
Speaker 1: but we're also high status and local people also unrelated
Speaker 1: to the family, who were not as well off. So
Speaker 1: the team noted that they could only speculate as to
Speaker 1: whether the households, unrelated people were servants or enslaved, but
Speaker 1: that there was this path and of inequality within the households.
Speaker 1: In the words of one of the authors of the paper,
Speaker 1: quote wealth was correlated with either biological kinship or foreign origin.
Speaker 1: The nuclear family passed on their property and status over generations,
Speaker 1: but at every farm we also found poorly equipped people
Speaker 1: of local origin. Based on the genetic analysis of more
Speaker 1: than one skeletons, it also appears that these farms were
Speaker 1: passed out through generations through the mail line, with adult
Speaker 1: women leaving the household and the remaining men marrying women
Speaker 1: who had moved in from elsewhere. So that's a wrap
Speaker 1: on our first part of our two part Unearthed this
Speaker 1: winter time. We'll have more next time. I also have
Speaker 1: a little listener mail fabulous that is particularly apt as
Speaker 1: related to Unearthed. This is actually a Facebook comment from
Speaker 1: Tim tim is Uh. The comment was on our post
Speaker 1: about um the episode about the Italian Hall disaster, and
Speaker 1: Tim said thanks for mentioning the role that our theology
Speaker 1: played in the process of installing the new monument and
Speaker 1: improving the memorials landscape. Here are some articles and essays
Speaker 1: about the survey. Please understand that the idea was to
Speaker 1: map and identify the layers and features, but then to
Speaker 1: avoid digging into them. We were essentially identifying the depth
Speaker 1: of the soil and the sediment brought in to cover
Speaker 1: the rubble after the building was demolished in the late
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties. So thanks so much for that, Tim. If
Speaker 1: you go to our Facebook page and you scroll down
Speaker 1: until you get to the post that is um that
Speaker 1: episode about the Italian Hall disaster, uh Tim provided us
Speaker 1: with i think three different links to blog posts that
Speaker 1: were all about this archaeology work, as well as a
Speaker 1: video of a local newscast about it. So thanks so much, Tim.
Speaker 1: If you would like to write to us about this
Speaker 1: or any other podcast, we're at History Podcast at iHeart
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