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. Here is some behind the scenes about
Speaker 1: our Unearthed at the end of of twenty nineteen, which
Speaker 1: as I'm sitting here, it just occurred to me. Usually
Speaker 1: when I do these episodes, especially as we started doing
Speaker 1: them uh more frequently than once a year, what I
Speaker 1: have typically done is had the previous outline open, just
Speaker 1: to make sure we don't accidentally talk about something we
Speaker 1: talked about last time. And I just realized I didn't
Speaker 1: do that this time, So hopefully I haven't talked about
Speaker 1: something that we talked about in October and then forgot
Speaker 1: that we talked about. Because it's a lot. Here's what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, If this is your greatest crime, Tracy Willison,
Speaker 1: really like nothing to worry about. So I think some
Speaker 1: folks have sort of the basics of how this, uh
Speaker 1: this works in terms of our Unearthed episodes. But what
Speaker 1: happens is I have a Pinterest board where all through
Speaker 1: the year, ideally on a regular basis, I look at
Speaker 1: all of these RSS feeds that I have in an
Speaker 1: RSS reader, and I have various Google alerts like I
Speaker 1: have an exhumation Google alert and various other stuff, um,
Speaker 1: and so I keep track of that on this Pinterest
Speaker 1: board all year long, and then when it's time to
Speaker 1: do Unearthed, I used that to go back through all
Speaker 1: of the things, like all of the stories that I
Speaker 1: that I pinned over that particular time. UM. And the
Speaker 1: the Unearthed in twenty nineteen board has eight hundred and
Speaker 1: eighty six pins on it, which is actually less than
Speaker 1: the twenty eighteen board, which shocked me because earlier in
Speaker 1: the year it was pacing to like way out strip
Speaker 1: the teen totals. So I'm not or if at the
Speaker 1: end of the year, as you and I traveled for
Speaker 1: tour or something, if I became more selective about what
Speaker 1: I was pinning, or if there was just kind of
Speaker 1: a drop off in stories. I don't know, it's mystery.
Speaker 1: Maybe everybody hustled to publish earlier in the year, people
Speaker 1: had way more findings to report much earlier on Maybe
Speaker 1: one of the things that has sort of become clearer.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is the first year that we have
Speaker 1: done Unearthed four times. Last year we did it twice,
Speaker 1: and earlier, Uh, in the history of Holly's in my
Speaker 1: time on the show. It was just one two part
Speaker 1: episode at the end of the year. But as we've
Speaker 1: been working on these, one of one of the things
Speaker 1: that has become really interesting to me is the patterns
Speaker 1: that will show up in what kind of things that
Speaker 1: we have to talk about. Like we pretty much always
Speaker 1: have exhumations, shipwrecks, edibles and potables and books and letters
Speaker 1: and UTSI, uh, that's pretty much every time. Most times
Speaker 1: there's also Amelia Earhart news that may or may not
Speaker 1: be completely specious, right, But then some of the other
Speaker 1: patterns are just totally different every time. Like I was
Speaker 1: surprised to have so many papers that came across my
Speaker 1: desk that were related to either the extinction of the
Speaker 1: Neanderthals or the historical roots of inequality. Like those aren't
Speaker 1: uh categories that I would have immediately thought might be
Speaker 1: a thing in this particular unearthed. Yeah, it makes me
Speaker 1: wonder about like how different things trend in academia at
Speaker 1: different times. Um. And it makes me think almost of
Speaker 1: like if you've ever seen video of like a traffic
Speaker 1: what's called sometimes a traffic shock wave, where there's not
Speaker 1: really a clear reason that like traffic bunches up and
Speaker 1: then spreads back out, and it will, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of keep happening that way over and over on kind
Speaker 1: of an un um, a non repeating pattern. And I
Speaker 1: suspect the same thing happens in in academic circles at
Speaker 1: various points in time, or some small thing that someone
Speaker 1: maybe discovers some years back, kind of the tendrils of
Speaker 1: it reach out and they become different things to to
Speaker 1: different projects for several different groups at once. But those happened,
Speaker 1: I mean the we we talked all the time in
Speaker 1: these unearthed ones about the coincidences of us talking about
Speaker 1: a thing and it being mentioned later in the news,
Speaker 1: like sometimes within hours of us recording. So I don't
Speaker 1: know if the universe just likes to group things or what.
Speaker 1: There's also one thing that I kind of wish I
Speaker 1: had said in the episode, but I definitely want to
Speaker 1: take a moment to say now, is that when we're
Speaker 1: talking about things like what happened to the Neanderthals, and
Speaker 1: we wind up with five or six or however many
Speaker 1: different ideas, uh Like, I don't want people to interpret
Speaker 1: that as meaning scientists don't know what they're talking about,
Speaker 1: Like the way that science works is that people propose
Speaker 1: hypotheses for things, and then they go and test those hypotheses,
Speaker 1: and there's a whole process of whether their results can
Speaker 1: be replicated and whether other people come to the same conclusions,
Speaker 1: whether other people interpret their data the same way. Uh.
Speaker 1: And none of that means that the first people who
Speaker 1: were doing the research didn't know what they were doing. Like,
Speaker 1: it's all part of the process of asking questions and
Speaker 1: exploring things and eventually coming to a scientific consensus. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which can also shift. I mean our understanding of the
Speaker 1: world is and the universe is forever evolving because we're
Speaker 1: getting better technologies, or some new piece of evidences is
Speaker 1: uneartheden comes to light that shifts the way we thought
Speaker 1: about previous evidence Like those those are natural progressions of
Speaker 1: information for us to believe something is true and for
Speaker 1: there to even be scientific consensus, and then down the
Speaker 1: road something else comes up and it shifts that and
Speaker 1: makes that not not the consensus any longer. But it
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that the reasoning of the work getting to
Speaker 1: that consensus was unsound, right, Just so we know new
Speaker 1: things now, Yeah, we're always learning. I'm also very excited.
Speaker 1: We hope we're always learning. Um. I'm also excited that
Speaker 1: this particular collection of unearthed stuff not only spawned episodes,
Speaker 1: because that has happened before, Like we have had unearthed
Speaker 1: episodes that came specifically from a fine that happened, like
Speaker 1: when the USS Indianapolis shipwreck was found in that kind
Speaker 1: of thing. But just because of the way our production
Speaker 1: calendar has shaped up here at the end of the
Speaker 1: year um slash beginning of the year when this is
Speaker 1: actually coming out, the fact that I have two outlines
Speaker 1: in the works based on things that we talked about
Speaker 1: in Unearth that will be coming out in the future.
Speaker 1: I found that to be fun. It's a fun little
Speaker 1: side effect of working on this this time around. Yea, yea.
Speaker 1: So I hope folks are still enjoying these little behind
Speaker 1: the scenes looks that we have started doing. And I've
Speaker 1: said this in the episode and I'll say it again.
Speaker 1: Happy New Year everyone, Yes, indeed, I hope whatever you
Speaker 1: wish for when it comes to fruition and you have
Speaker 1: much joy and peace. Stuff you missed in History Class
Speaker 1: is a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works.
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