Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Tracy Biebelson and I'm Holly Frying. Hey, it's time
Speaker 1: for Unearthed. Ye hey this spring. In our previous installment
Speaker 1: of Unearthed, we speculated on whether the COVID Night Team
Speaker 1: pandemic would thwart our plans to do Unearthed in July.
Speaker 1: If you have just started listening to the podcast. Between
Speaker 1: I guess April ish and now, this is when we
Speaker 1: periodically talk about things that have been literally and figuratively unearthed,
Speaker 1: and we kind of wondered whether the there would be
Speaker 1: a pause on unearthing because of the pandemic. There has
Speaker 1: not been. I actually saved about as many articles over April,
Speaker 1: May and June as I did in the first three
Speaker 1: months of the year, but a lot of what I
Speaker 1: call did was a little bit repetitive or sounded really
Speaker 1: similar to a find that we just talked about recently,
Speaker 1: um things like that. So we just have a one
Speaker 1: part Unearthed this time around instead of two parts. Also,
Speaker 1: just a note, there's a little thunder happening off at
Speaker 1: the distance at my house. I don't know if the
Speaker 1: microphone is going to pick any of it up. But
Speaker 1: if you're listening or like, what was that, it was
Speaker 1: probably rumbling. Those girls should eat lunch. I mean that
Speaker 1: happens sometimes too. In un Earth seventeen, we talked about
Speaker 1: arts and crafts retail chain Hobby Lobby agreeing to pay
Speaker 1: a three million dollar fine and forfeit thousands of artifacts
Speaker 1: that have been smuggled into the United States. Then in
Speaker 1: Unearthed in July, we discussed the repatriation of those artifacts.
Speaker 1: Well back. Hobby Lobby also purchased a tablet known as
Speaker 1: the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet for more than one point six
Speaker 1: million dollars. That tablet is three thousand, six hundred years old.
Speaker 1: As its name suggests, it contains a portion of the
Speaker 1: epic of Gilgamesh. After this purchase, the tablet went on
Speaker 1: display at the Museum of the Bible, which was funded
Speaker 1: by Hobby Lobby founder Steve Green. Officials from the Department
Speaker 1: of Homeland Security seized the tablet from the museum in
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, and this May, federal authorities started formally pursuing
Speaker 1: a forfeiture order to return the tablet to a rock.
Speaker 1: According to authorities, Hobby Lobby representatives did ask about the
Speaker 1: tablets providence before making the purchase, but a major auction house,
Speaker 1: which remains nameless in the paperwork, obfuscated its origins. However,
Speaker 1: Hobby Lobby also filed a lawsuit against the auction house, Christie's,
Speaker 1: which accused the auction house of quote deceitful and fraudulent
Speaker 1: conduct in connection to a Gilgamesh tablet. Seems likely it
Speaker 1: might be the same one. Probably Also, we did not
Speaker 1: include this little tidbit in our springtime Unearthed addition, which
Speaker 1: is when it happened. But back in March, it was
Speaker 1: also reported that none of the Dead Sea scrolls in
Speaker 1: the Museum of the Bible's collection are actually authentic. Vindor
Speaker 1: Landa has come up on a couple of previous installments
Speaker 1: of an Earth that's a Roman fort just south of
Speaker 1: Hadrian's Wall. This time, curators at the vindor Landa Museum
Speaker 1: have found a toy mouse cut from leather in a
Speaker 1: bag of scraps, and it dates back to somewhere between
Speaker 1: the years one oh five and one thirty. This mouse
Speaker 1: is flat, about twelve point two centimeters or four point
Speaker 1: eight inches long. It's cut from a single piece of leather,
Speaker 1: and it has little marks on it that seemed to
Speaker 1: indicate hair on the mouse's body and the tail, as
Speaker 1: well as marks for the eyes. This discovery came as
Speaker 1: a result of the COVID nineteen pandemic. Excavations at Vindolanda
Speaker 1: had to be postponed, so the curatorial staff at the
Speaker 1: museum spent their time, among other things, going through all
Speaker 1: of the leather pieces in the museum's collection. This collection
Speaker 1: contains more than seven thousand objects, some of them things
Speaker 1: like shoes, boots, and horse gear, but there are also
Speaker 1: lots and lots of patches and scraps and off cuts.
Speaker 1: I kind of love the idea of somebody being like, well,
Speaker 1: we can't have visitors, we can't do that. Dig I'm
Speaker 1: gonna go through this bag of scraps, see what's in here. Um.
Speaker 1: This mouse may have been made specifically as a child's toy.
Speaker 1: There is plenty of evidence that there were children at
Speaker 1: vendor Landa, or somebody may have made it as a
Speaker 1: practical joke or just because they were bored. The plan
Speaker 1: is to put this mouse on display at the vendor
Speaker 1: Landa museum. Maybe someone was trying to entertain a cat.
Speaker 1: Maybe so it does seem like a good kick toy
Speaker 1: for a cat. Right in our Springtime on Earth this year,
Speaker 1: we talked about the theft of a painting by Vincent
Speaker 1: van Gogh from the Singer Laren Museum, which is in Laren, Netherlands,
Speaker 1: not in the Hague, as we said in the episode earlier.
Speaker 1: This spring, art detective Arthur Brand received proof of life
Speaker 1: photos of the painting. He released those on June. The
Speaker 1: photo shows the painting a copy of the international edition
Speaker 1: of the May New York Times and the book Master Thief.
Speaker 1: Brand received a photo of the back of the painting
Speaker 1: as well. At this point, there's some speculation that this
Speaker 1: theft is a copycat crime. There's also like security footage,
Speaker 1: the footage that became available after we recorded that earlier
Speaker 1: episode that shows being like a pretty much fast paced
Speaker 1: smash and grab. The book that is shown in that
Speaker 1: proof of life picture is about the two thousand two
Speaker 1: theft of two different Vincent van go works from an
Speaker 1: Amsterdam museum. The newspaper that's shown in the picture has
Speaker 1: a story on the front page titled notes on an
Speaker 1: Art Heist from one who has done it, and it's
Speaker 1: about the Singer Lare and theft, but it quotes extensively
Speaker 1: one of the men who was convicted of that earlier
Speaker 1: two thousand and two heist. This sounds like such a
Speaker 1: good movie. It's like the way that serial killers in
Speaker 1: fiction movies are portrayed as taunting the police and the
Speaker 1: except this one would be about art theft. M hmm,
Speaker 1: I'd go to that movie. A veterinarian in England stumbled
Speaker 1: across a stone memorializing a previous outbreak of render Pest.
Speaker 1: An image of the stone was posted on the Nantwitch
Speaker 1: Farm Vets facebook page in May, and that stone read
Speaker 1: quote near this place were buried forty three cows, seven
Speaker 1: calving heifers, five yearling heifers, one bowl, twenty calves that
Speaker 1: died in the months of February and March eighteen sixty
Speaker 1: six of the render pest then raging in Cheshire, belonging
Speaker 1: to John Sutton of Most in Manner. Our episode on
Speaker 1: the eradication of Render Pest came out in April of
Speaker 1: this year, So that's just another piece of that puzzle. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think all of those numbers that highly just read
Speaker 1: are correct. I was reading them off of a picture
Speaker 1: of you know, a stone dating back to the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: There were a couple where I was like, is that
Speaker 1: a seven or a one? Uh? In a different update,
Speaker 1: just related to multiple past episodes, including Red Summer and
Speaker 1: our one on IBB Wells Barnet. According to a new
Speaker 1: report that was issued by the Equal Justice Initiative in June,
Speaker 1: more than six thousand, five hundred Black Americans were lynched
Speaker 1: between eighteen sixty five and nineteen fifty. This report included
Speaker 1: two thousands that took place during reconstruction, but we're not
Speaker 1: included in the organization's earlier reports. So whenever we have
Speaker 1: talked about numbers of lynchings that have taken to place
Speaker 1: in the past, like these numbers are much larger than that.
Speaker 1: In our previous installment of On Earth, we talked about
Speaker 1: a decision by the U S Secretary of the Interior,
Speaker 1: David Bernhardt, ruling that the mashp Wampanog's three hundred acres
Speaker 1: of reservation land on Cape Cod would be taken out
Speaker 1: of trust and the reservation disestablished. We noted in that
Speaker 1: discussion that the tribe had a previously filed lawsuit that
Speaker 1: was still pending when that decision was announced. That lawsuit
Speaker 1: was related to a Department of the Interior decision that
Speaker 1: the tribe had not been under federal jurisdiction in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty four. Yeah, that decision about nineteen thirty four jurisdiction
Speaker 1: ties back into this whole disestablishment question. So a forty
Speaker 1: five day halt was placed on the order to disestablish
Speaker 1: the reservation, and on the last day of that order,
Speaker 1: Federal Judge Paul L. Freedman issued a ruling in that
Speaker 1: earlier lawsuit. Freedman ruled that the Department of the Interiors
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen decision was faulty, calling it quote arbitrary, capricious,
Speaker 1: an abuse of discretion, and contrary to law. The overall
Speaker 1: issue is still a little unsettled at this point, though,
Speaker 1: because now the Department of the Interior has to go
Speaker 1: back and reevaluate that twenty eighteen decision. This isn't an
Speaker 1: update exactly, but it is on a similar theme and
Speaker 1: it happened literally as Tracy was writing this paragraph. On
Speaker 1: July nine, the U. S. Supreme Court issued a decision
Speaker 1: in mcgart versus Oklahoma, which also applies to another case,
Speaker 1: Sharp versus Murphy, that the eastern half of Oklahoma is
Speaker 1: Native American land for the purpose of federal criminal law.
Speaker 1: This is a way bigger story than we can get
Speaker 1: into here, but the podcast This Land, which is hosted
Speaker 1: by Rebecca Nagle, is an excellent resource on it if
Speaker 1: you want to follow up and get some more details. Yes,
Speaker 1: I mean in general, even before the ruling was announced,
Speaker 1: like it had already formed an extensive body of very
Speaker 1: useful work on the context for that. There is an
Speaker 1: episode that I think will be out by the time
Speaker 1: this episode of On Earth comes out, but it doesn't
Speaker 1: exist as of when we are recording it. That it
Speaker 1: is specifically about the decision and the impact that it
Speaker 1: is going to have. Um moving on, bones have been
Speaker 1: found in the walls of the Chapelle Expertoire in Paris.
Speaker 1: This is a memorial chapel that was built in the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century on the site of the former Madeline Cemetery.
Speaker 1: That cemetery is where Louis the sixteenth and Marie Antoinette
Speaker 1: were buried after being executed during the French Revolution. When
Speaker 1: this chapel was built, there remains, or at least the remains.
Speaker 1: People were pretty sure we're there's had been exhumed and reinterred.
Speaker 1: At the Basilica of Sandinis. Madeline Cemetery was one of
Speaker 1: the ones established to hold the remains of people who
Speaker 1: were guillotine during the French Revolution in the Reign of Terror.
Speaker 1: It closed in seventeen ninety four, and before the bones
Speaker 1: were discovered in the chapel walls, it was believed that
Speaker 1: all the remains had been removed and ultimately placed in
Speaker 1: the ossuary in the Paris Catacombs. We covered the Catacombs
Speaker 1: on the show in October, but it turns out there
Speaker 1: actually four ossuaries in the walls of the lower chapel.
Speaker 1: They may contain the remains of as many as five
Speaker 1: hundred people. Some of them are among the most prominent
Speaker 1: people to be guillotined, including Madame DuBarry and Olimpe de Gouge.
Speaker 1: As a super quick note and changing gears quite a bit.
Speaker 1: In June, NASA announced that its head quarters building in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. Would be named after engineer Mary Winston Jackson,
Speaker 1: who we covered on the show in February of nineteen
Speaker 1: and in our last update for this edition of On Earth,
Speaker 1: here's the headline from the art newspaper that has dated
Speaker 1: June eighteen, uote has Yale's mysterious voyage manuscript finally been deciphered.
Speaker 1: Every time someone writes that headline, I just want to
Speaker 1: call their office and go, no, baby no. What follows
Speaker 1: reads pretty much like every other voyage manuscript update we
Speaker 1: have talked about over the years, of which there have
Speaker 1: been many, which is why I say that we could
Speaker 1: say that so it seems safe to say it is
Speaker 1: not no, baby no. To answer your question. This one
Speaker 1: also seems to get a lot less traction than a
Speaker 1: lot of the previous You know, outsider says that they
Speaker 1: have cracked the code based on apparently specious reasoning. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I I my very favorite to the ones like board
Speaker 1: hobbyist cracks Voytage manuscript in ten days, and I'm always like,
Speaker 1: this reads like a quick weight loss ad. Like it's
Speaker 1: just no, no, no, Yeah. Do you want to take
Speaker 1: a quick break before we get into some scientific stuff.
Speaker 1: Let's do next. That's Holly alluded to. Before the break,
Speaker 1: we have a few things that sit at the intersection
Speaker 1: between science and history. First, according to various headlines, you
Speaker 1: can see the twelfth century murder of Thomas Beckett, Archbishop
Speaker 1: of Canterbury, in a seventy two meter long ice core
Speaker 1: from this s with Italian Alps. That sentence, it might
Speaker 1: seem like kind of a stretch sensational. Yeah, that does
Speaker 1: kind of skip a step. Um Beckett was killed by
Speaker 1: four of King Henry the Seconds nine in eleven seventy
Speaker 1: after a long dispute between the archbishop and the monarch
Speaker 1: over the interplay between ecclesiastical and secular law. The king
Speaker 1: later performed an act of public penance for his role
Speaker 1: in all of this, and he also arranged and funded
Speaker 1: the construction of several monasteries. Those monasteries are really where
Speaker 1: this ice core comes in. The ice core shows an
Speaker 1: increase in lead pollution towards the end of the twelfth century,
Speaker 1: and then tax records from that same period show an
Speaker 1: uptick in English lead and silver production. So the conclusion
Speaker 1: here as that both the production and the pollution traced
Speaker 1: back to the materials that were needed for the roofs
Speaker 1: of those monasteries that were built after the murder of
Speaker 1: Thomas Beckett. These researchers also traced correlations between lead production,
Speaker 1: atmospheric lead, and other political events, wars and crusades between
Speaker 1: eleven seventy and twelve twenty. They concluded that Britain was
Speaker 1: the major source of lead pollution during this period and
Speaker 1: other Thomas Beckett news There is now a three D
Speaker 1: rendering of the original shrine of Thomas Beckett, which was
Speaker 1: destroyed during the Protestant Reformation. This recreates what the shrine
Speaker 1: would have looked like in the year fourteen o eight,
Speaker 1: and it was released to the public for the anniversary
Speaker 1: of the translation of Beckett's remains from the crypt in
Speaker 1: Canterbury Cathedral to this shrine. Jumping tracks once again. In
Speaker 1: what has been described as a real breakthrough, a team
Speaker 1: publishing in the journal Nature has developed a new way
Speaker 1: to determine the age of pottery. Radio carbon dating only
Speaker 1: works on organic material but pottery is mostly inorganic, and
Speaker 1: this means that a lot of the time people have
Speaker 1: to figure out the age of pottery by comparing it
Speaker 1: to organic materials from the same site, rather than being
Speaker 1: able to test the pottery itself. In the words of
Speaker 1: Professor Richard Evershed from the University of Bristol, who led
Speaker 1: the research team, quote, being able to directly date archaeological
Speaker 1: pots is one of the holy grails of our geology.
Speaker 1: The method described in the paper accurate compounds. Specific fourteen
Speaker 1: seed dating of archaeological pottery vessels doesn't exactly date the
Speaker 1: pottery itself. It tests the lipid residues left behind when
Speaker 1: the pottery was used in food preparation. To do this,
Speaker 1: researchers have to use high resolution nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy
Speaker 1: and mass spectrometry to pinpoint the residues and thence to
Speaker 1: confirm that they are pure enough to provide an accurate date.
Speaker 1: The team used their method on pottery fragments that had
Speaker 1: already been precisely dated through other methods, and they found
Speaker 1: that it was extremely accurate. It's possible that this method
Speaker 1: could narrow the date range for a piece of pottery
Speaker 1: down to a human lifespan. This is something that was
Speaker 1: um It was actually announced before our most recent unearthed
Speaker 1: installment came out, but it was more heavily promoted just afterward,
Speaker 1: and a lot of very excited people tagged us into
Speaker 1: things on Twitter that we're like, here's something you can
Speaker 1: talk about on the next on Earth Moving on forestry
Speaker 1: and land, Scotland has been using drone surveys conducted by
Speaker 1: a company called Skyscape Survey to create three D models
Speaker 1: of terrain, and in May they announced that they had
Speaker 1: completed a survey of an earthen rampart that's known as
Speaker 1: Wallace's House. The resulting contour model roughly matches a survey
Speaker 1: map of that same area that was published in eighteen
Speaker 1: fifty seven. Headlines about this work read along the lines
Speaker 1: of William Wallace's Hill Fort discovered. But this was really
Speaker 1: an aerial survey and modeling of an area that was
Speaker 1: already known and previously mapped. And though it's long been
Speaker 1: associated with William Wallace, he died in thirteen oh five,
Speaker 1: so centuries passed between his death in the creation of
Speaker 1: that eighteen fifty seven survey map. In the words of
Speaker 1: Forestry and Land Scotland archaeologist Matt Ritchie quote, could the
Speaker 1: fort really have been built by William Wallace and his men?
Speaker 1: I'd like to think so. And either way, the survey
Speaker 1: has added a new chapter to an old story. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's sort of the popular lures that it was Wallace's,
Speaker 1: but like I haven't quite substantiated that at this point.
Speaker 1: Researchers from UC Davis have concluded that Neanderthals preferred to
Speaker 1: use the bones of specific animals when making leather working
Speaker 1: tools known as lessoire. According to the analysis, the tools
Speaker 1: were mostly made from bovine bones, so things like bison
Speaker 1: and rox, but based on the other bones that were
Speaker 1: part of the same deposit, reindeer were actually the ones
Speaker 1: that were more commonly used as a food source, so
Speaker 1: the use of bovine bones seems to have been intentional.
Speaker 1: Reindeer bone would have been a lot more plentiful and
Speaker 1: easy to come by, but bovine bones, specifically the ribs,
Speaker 1: would have been larger and more rigid for making these tools.
Speaker 1: Maybe the coolest part of all of this, the team
Speaker 1: didn't want to damage the bones to collect samples to analyze,
Speaker 1: so they used residues from inside of the plastic containers
Speaker 1: where the bones had been stored, and that was enough
Speaker 1: material to analyze through a mass spectrometer. Now we're gonna
Speaker 1: move on to a few unearth things related to books
Speaker 1: and letters. Four fragments of the Dead Sea scrolls that
Speaker 1: were believed until now to be blank have been discovered
Speaker 1: to actually contain text, just not texts that's visible to
Speaker 1: the naked eye. The government of Jordan's had given these
Speaker 1: fragments to a leather expert back in the nineteen fifties
Speaker 1: to study their composition. It seemed like good candidates to
Speaker 1: do that work because everyone thought they were blank. After
Speaker 1: that work was complete, the fragments were placed in storage,
Speaker 1: and then they eventually made their way to the University
Speaker 1: of Manchester. Professor Joan Taylor was looking through the collection
Speaker 1: for items that might warrant for their study and discovered
Speaker 1: a mark that looked like a possible letter. That fine
Speaker 1: led a team to image fifty one scroll fragments using
Speaker 1: multi spectral imaging. Based on that work, four of the
Speaker 1: fragments do contain readable text. The largest of them contains
Speaker 1: fifteen or sixteen letters, including the word Shabat or sabbath.
Speaker 1: In other Dead Sea scroll news, After the scrolls were
Speaker 1: first discovered in caves in ninety six, they weren't really
Speaker 1: excavated in a methodical way, and many of them passed
Speaker 1: through an assortment of traders and dealers before being gathered
Speaker 1: for studying. Plus, the scrolls have disintegrated over the last
Speaker 1: two thousand years, meaning that what we describe as the
Speaker 1: Dead Sea Scrolls is really about twenty five thou fragments
Speaker 1: that don't necessarily carry any indication of which pieces go
Speaker 1: together or what order they were written in. Sometimes there
Speaker 1: are newer copies of a text that can serve as
Speaker 1: a guide, but that is not always the case. So
Speaker 1: one team is trying to resolve some of this by
Speaker 1: using DNA fingerprinting to match up fragments that were written
Speaker 1: on skins that all came from the same animal. Logically,
Speaker 1: they probably go together, and it's also possible that fragments
Speaker 1: that came from close sleeve related animals, like say two
Speaker 1: different cows from the same herd, they might be connected
Speaker 1: as well. The team has made some surprising discoveries, one
Speaker 1: being that fragments, including the Biblical Book of Jeremiah, actually
Speaker 1: came from two completely different animals, when a sheep and
Speaker 1: one a cow, suggesting that these might actually be two
Speaker 1: different copies of the same book that have been merged
Speaker 1: together during the research process. And now we'll move on
Speaker 1: to something that's sort of book adjacent. Archaeologists in London
Speaker 1: may have found the remains of the Red Lion Theater,
Speaker 1: which was the first known purpose built theater of the
Speaker 1: Elizabethan era. The theater was built around fifteen sixty seven,
Speaker 1: although its exact location has been the subject of debate.
Speaker 1: This excavation took place in advance of construction work, and
Speaker 1: it unearthed a building that roughly matches the dimensions of
Speaker 1: the Red Lion, which we know because of its being
Speaker 1: mentioned in two lawsuits in fifteen sixty seven. In fifteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine, the excavation also found the remains of other
Speaker 1: buildings built over the century or so that followed, including
Speaker 1: what may have been the Red Lion. In that find
Speaker 1: included two beer sellers, complete with bottles and tankards. I know,
Speaker 1: I love the fact that we know the dimensions of
Speaker 1: this theater because of lawsuits. It makes me um feel
Speaker 1: less crabby about litigious people. I'm like, well, they're creating
Speaker 1: a historical record. I also didn't go down the rabbit
Speaker 1: hole of figuring out exactly what the lawsuits were about,
Speaker 1: but I'm imagining it was the neighbors being crabby about
Speaker 1: the theater noise. And now we can just on that note,
Speaker 1: take a little quick break for a sponsor. Whenever I
Speaker 1: work on these unearthed episodes, I always wind up with
Speaker 1: some random discoveries that seem pretty cool, but they don't
Speaker 1: really fit together into a category, and I just throw
Speaker 1: them into a pile that I call potpourri like on Jeopardy.
Speaker 1: This is where we are. Researchers have tried to resolve
Speaker 1: the question of whether bronze swords that have been found
Speaker 1: in various parts of Europe were made for decorative or
Speaker 1: ceremonial purposes or if they were used as weapons, and
Speaker 1: they did this by making replicas of them and fighting
Speaker 1: with them. This is part of a bigger project known
Speaker 1: as the Bronze Age Combat Project. I feel like this
Speaker 1: is the dream for so many people. It's not the
Speaker 1: first time we've talked about doing stuff with replica weapons,
Speaker 1: Like there was one where there were javelin throwers that
Speaker 1: were throwing, But this one, to me is more delightful
Speaker 1: to fighting with the bronze swords. Oh yeah. For this research,
Speaker 1: Raphael Herman of the University of Goodeen commissioned seven cast
Speaker 1: bronze swords and then struck them against one another in
Speaker 1: a methodical way and recorded the results. Since that's not
Speaker 1: actually like combat, he also worked with some medieval that
Speaker 1: enthusiasts who dueled with the replicas while being recorded with
Speaker 1: high speed cameras, and then the team compared the wear
Speaker 1: marks from these duels to more than two thousand, five
Speaker 1: hundred wear marks found on one hundred and ten actual
Speaker 1: bronze age swords. So what they found was that, yes,
Speaker 1: it appears that even though bronze is a pretty soft
Speaker 1: material that doesn't necessarily seem ideal for making swords out
Speaker 1: of these swords were actually used for fighting. The team
Speaker 1: also found that the wear patterns on those hundred and
Speaker 1: ten bronze age swords were connected to the swords age
Speaker 1: and where it was found, so that suggests that there
Speaker 1: were very specific and precise fighting techniques that arose in
Speaker 1: different areas and evolved over time. The team used similar
Speaker 1: methods to study bronze age spears and shields as well.
Speaker 1: They published their results in the Journal of Archaeological method
Speaker 1: and Theory in April under the title Bronze Age Swordsmanship
Speaker 1: New Insights from Experiments and Wear Analysis Moving on. A
Speaker 1: clay pipe found by an amateur bottle hunter in Tasmania
Speaker 1: in twenty sixteen has turned out to be one of
Speaker 1: the oldest known depictions of the now extinct thil A
Speaker 1: sign also called the Tasmanian Tiger. It is also the
Speaker 1: first clay pipe known to have been made locally in Tasmania.
Speaker 1: Rather than imported to the island from somewhere else. The
Speaker 1: pipes age and origins are a bit of a mystery,
Speaker 1: though the bottles it was found with date back to
Speaker 1: about eighteen thirty, suggesting it's almost two hundred years old,
Speaker 1: but the pipe stem is decorated with a kuka burra,
Speaker 1: and cuka burras were not introduced into Tasmania until nineteen
Speaker 1: oh three. It is possible that whoever made the pipe
Speaker 1: had lived in Australia or New Guinea, or that it
Speaker 1: actually depicts some other bird. I learned as I was
Speaker 1: reading about this there's a whole organization that's specifically dedicated
Speaker 1: to tracking down depictions and other evidence of um of thil,
Speaker 1: a sign which I just was like, that's great, it's
Speaker 1: great interest for somebody to have and pursue so excitedly.
Speaker 1: Archaeologist near Verona, Italy, have been unearthing the floor mosaics
Speaker 1: and foundations of a Roman villa dating back to the
Speaker 1: third century. This is not actually a new discovery. The
Speaker 1: villa was first found back in the nineteen twenties, but
Speaker 1: it wasn't excavated at that time. Um it did take
Speaker 1: some hunting to find it again in more recent years, though.
Speaker 1: Excavation work started in October of nineteen and it continued
Speaker 1: to tell February, and then that had to be suspended
Speaker 1: until May because of the pandemic. A lot of people
Speaker 1: tagged us into a Twitter thread about uh that that
Speaker 1: described it as what could be the year's biggest discovery.
Speaker 1: But really, all the information that there is to share
Speaker 1: about it at this point is what we just said.
Speaker 1: And then like a handful of pictures. That's like five pictures.
Speaker 1: I think they are really pretty. I don't want to
Speaker 1: take away from the fact that it does look like
Speaker 1: a very beautiful floor mosaic, but like, at this point,
Speaker 1: it's it's not clear if there's something that's clearly setting
Speaker 1: it apart from the many other Roman era floor mosaics
Speaker 1: that have survived until the day. I don't really know yet,
Speaker 1: all very preliminary. In other news, archaeologists excavating a Song
Speaker 1: dynasty tomb and China's Hunan Province have unearthed a burial
Speaker 1: side of a married couple. It was pretty common for
Speaker 1: spouses to be buried together, but what makes this to
Speaker 1: more unique is an element that was described as a
Speaker 1: fairy bridge is a small window connecting the two sections
Speaker 1: of the tomb, which is an indicator that this couple
Speaker 1: would continue their marriage in the afterlife. I love this
Speaker 1: story so much, too so sweet. I want a fairy bridge,
Speaker 1: except that I don't want to be buried. Uh we have.
Speaker 1: We've only got one Edibles and Potables discovery to talk
Speaker 1: about this time around, so we're putting that one here.
Speaker 1: Research at three sites in eastern Ethiopia has revealed that
Speaker 1: halal butchering practices and Islamic dietary standards pre date the
Speaker 1: first major mosques and Muslim burial sites that are there
Speaker 1: by four hundred years. Those major religious sites were built
Speaker 1: around the twelfth century, although it is possible that there
Speaker 1: were smaller mosques built earlier than that which have not
Speaker 1: yet been discovered. In addition to that find, they found
Speaker 1: evidence at Harlaw, which is one of the three sites
Speaker 1: that was studied, of imported fish that had been brought
Speaker 1: in from the Red Sea. Since they did not find
Speaker 1: the fish heads, this suggests that the fish were being
Speaker 1: processed and preserved when they were caught before being transported
Speaker 1: into the region. Came from Canary Row. Uh. Switching gears again,
Speaker 1: we have got a couple of studies related to the Amazon.
Speaker 1: According to a paper published in the journal Nature, people
Speaker 1: in southwest Amazonia about ten thousand years ago created what
Speaker 1: is described as artificial forest islands. Today the area is
Speaker 1: covered by forested areas surrounded by savannah, and the savannah
Speaker 1: is flooded from December through March, but people built mounds
Speaker 1: that would have stayed above the water level during the
Speaker 1: rainy season, allowing trees to grow, thus the forest islands.
Speaker 1: This conclusion followed remote sensing of sixty one archaeological sites
Speaker 1: in northern Bolivia. This adds to just a growing body
Speaker 1: of knowledge about how much people influenced the forest itself
Speaker 1: before Europeans arrived there. Um research in the same area
Speaker 1: also suggests that people in the Amazon started started domesticating
Speaker 1: maniac about eleven thousand years ago, meaning that this region
Speaker 1: is one of the places on Earth where people started
Speaker 1: domesticating plants all at roughly the same time. It lines
Speaker 1: up with rice domestication in what's now China, grain domestication
Speaker 1: in the Middle East, mean and squashed domestication in Mesoamerica,
Speaker 1: and potato and keen wad domestication in the Andes. According
Speaker 1: to a study published in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography,
Speaker 1: soil enrichment techniques used in eastern and southern Amazonia before
Speaker 1: the arrival of Europeans continues to influence the region's biodiversity today. Specifically,
Speaker 1: they compared flora growing in Amazonian dark earth that's usually
Speaker 1: uh shortened as a D E, and they compared it
Speaker 1: with flora in non a D soil. The dark earth
Speaker 1: was created as the region's early inhabitants used charcoal and
Speaker 1: food waste to enrich the soil, so the researchers found
Speaker 1: that these areas with dark earth still have richer plant
Speaker 1: diversity than areas without it. Areas with dark earth also
Speaker 1: had a higher pH and more nutrients present in the soil.
Speaker 1: There are definitely some dark earth areas that are still
Speaker 1: being used by local and indigenous populations, but the soil
Speaker 1: also continued to be richer, with more diverse plant life
Speaker 1: and places where it hasn't been actively used in centuries.
Speaker 1: Shipwrecked time, which will make some of our listeners happy.
Speaker 1: The remains of a shipwreck in York, Maine have been
Speaker 1: tentatively identified as the Defiance, which was originally built in
Speaker 1: seventeen fifty four. Studying this wreck has been pretty tricky.
Speaker 1: It's position on the beach means that it's continually being
Speaker 1: uncovered and reburied by the sea, especially after storms. Its
Speaker 1: first documented appearance was in nineteen fifty eight. After that
Speaker 1: it vanished again before re emerging in nineteen seventy eight,
Speaker 1: two thousand, seven, thirteen, and twenty eighteen. Marine archaeologist Stephen
Speaker 1: Clayson worked to i d the find by sending a
Speaker 1: sample of one of the timbers to the Cornell University
Speaker 1: Tree Ring Laboratory, which suggested that it came from a
Speaker 1: tree that had been cut down in seventeen fifty three.
Speaker 1: With that starting point, Clayson dug through notary records for
Speaker 1: a match. The Defiance wrecked on York Beach in a
Speaker 1: storm in seventeen sixty nine, and it had initially been
Speaker 1: built in Massachusetts in seventeen fifty four. All four of
Speaker 1: the crew that were aboard survived the wreck and interviews
Speaker 1: plays and stressed the need to try to conserve what
Speaker 1: is left of this wreckage because every time it re
Speaker 1: emerges from the sand, people flocked to the area to
Speaker 1: look at it and take pictures, and some of them
Speaker 1: go home with pieces of the wreck that they have
Speaker 1: taken as souvenirs. That happens all the time for various things.
Speaker 1: In another piece of news, a two thousand year old
Speaker 1: boat has been found under the waterfront in Porridge, Croatia.
Speaker 1: This is one of three similar boats that have been
Speaker 1: found on land in Croatia rather than as part of
Speaker 1: an underwater survey. So this find has been described as
Speaker 1: a particularly well preserved example of a sown ship. The
Speaker 1: wood itself has been preserved, as well as the wooden
Speaker 1: nails and the rope that was used to actually sow
Speaker 1: the vessel together. Although this seems to be a Roman ship,
Speaker 1: the sewing technique that was used to build it as older.
Speaker 1: The battleship USS Nevada was struck when Japanese forces attacked
Speaker 1: Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December seven. The vessel managed to
Speaker 1: get under way before being hit again, and its crew
Speaker 1: had to beach it After it was repaired. It survived
Speaker 1: the Battle of Attu, the d D Invasion, and the
Speaker 1: invasion of Iwajima and Okinawa before serving as a target
Speaker 1: during atomic bomb tests after the war was over. It
Speaker 1: survived nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll, and although it was
Speaker 1: radioactive At that point, it was towed to a point
Speaker 1: off the Hawaiian Islands, where it continued to be used
Speaker 1: for target practice, which it continued to survive before being
Speaker 1: scuttled by an aerial torpedo in The Navy knew its
Speaker 1: approximate location, but teams from private firms Search Incorporated and
Speaker 1: Ocean Infinity discovered the actual wreckage in May of this year.
Speaker 1: Their ships had stayed at sea due to the coronavirus pandemic,
Speaker 1: which also put a pause on some of their other
Speaker 1: commercial work. Yeah. I interpreted their statements about it. It's
Speaker 1: basically saying, well, we're out here on the ocean. Let's
Speaker 1: look around, y'all want to go look for a shipwreck.
Speaker 1: We have one repatriation to talk about this time around.
Speaker 1: The Exeter City Council in England has voted to return
Speaker 1: a collection of items that belonged to six SCA First
Speaker 1: Nation Chief Crowfoot to the six SA First Nation in Alberta, Canada.
Speaker 1: These items had been at the Royal albert Memorial Museum.
Speaker 1: That acquisition had dated back to the signing of Treaty
Speaker 1: seven between the Government of Canada and five First Nations,
Speaker 1: one of those first Nations being the Six Sica, who
Speaker 1: are also known as the Blackfoot. Formal negotiations for the
Speaker 1: return of the items started back in with visits from
Speaker 1: six Sicca Nation to Exeter and vice versa in but
Speaker 1: then the negotiations stalled for years. A climate controlled room
Speaker 1: had already been prepared to house the regalia at Blackfoot
Speaker 1: Crossing Historical Park, but the actual return has been delayed,
Speaker 1: like so many things we've talked about on this on Earth,
Speaker 1: due to COVID nineteen travel restrictions. As of when we
Speaker 1: are recording this, it is uncertain when this may happen.
Speaker 1: The Sixa First Nation is in the middle of a
Speaker 1: spike in COVID cases. Yea, Like so many indigenous and
Speaker 1: First Nations communities, like things seem treacherous. Yeah. At this
Speaker 1: moment um, we have two exhimations to talk about, both
Speaker 1: of which also could have been updates. We have talked
Speaker 1: about the extimation of Salvador Deli for praternity testing and
Speaker 1: previous installments of Unearthed. In May, a Spanish court ordered
Speaker 1: pillar Abell, who had requested the exlimation in order to
Speaker 1: prove whether she was Salvador Dolly's daughter, to pay all
Speaker 1: the costs associated with it. It's an estimated seven thousand euros.
Speaker 1: Our previous updates included the fact that the DNA tests
Speaker 1: revealed that Dolly was not her father, but not that
Speaker 1: polar Abell had been filed an additional suit contending that
Speaker 1: the chain of custody had been interrupted when the remains
Speaker 1: were gathered and analyzed. So she's contesting that whole thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the judge did not find that to be substantiated. In April,
Speaker 1: the Texas Historical Commission approved a plan to exhume four
Speaker 1: sets of remains from the Alamo to allow for ongoing
Speaker 1: preservation work there. The plan was to temporarily keep the
Speaker 1: remains in a collection's fault and then, once the work
Speaker 1: is complete, to re enter them on Alamo grounds. There
Speaker 1: have been several controversies connected to this exhimation, as different
Speaker 1: groups of people whose ancestors are buried at the Alamo
Speaker 1: have disagreed on how to proceed. One issue is DNA testing.
Speaker 1: The committee that established a protocol for how human remains
Speaker 1: should be handled at the Alamo included representatives from several
Speaker 1: federally recognized Indigenous peoples, many of whom do not agree
Speaker 1: with conducting DNA testing of remains for religious or cultural reasons,
Speaker 1: but those representatives do not in lude the tap Peelam
Speaker 1: quae tech In nation, which is not federally recognized, and
Speaker 1: it is possible that a third or more of the
Speaker 1: people buried at the Alamo were quae tech In speaking
Speaker 1: people's Unlike many of the other nations involved, tap pe
Speaker 1: lam is in favor of DNA testing. In June, the
Speaker 1: Texas Historical Commission also recognized the Alamo's church as a
Speaker 1: verified cemetery, but denied request to have the area surrounding
Speaker 1: the church recognized as an unverified cemetery that would have
Speaker 1: affected ongoing work at the Alamo Plaza. That work is
Speaker 1: also highly controversial. I learned that there is a whole
Speaker 1: world of controversy about the Alamo and the restoration projects
Speaker 1: and the plaza projects that is all going on right now. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then our final thing, this, according to Tracy, gets
Speaker 1: the best headline award. It wouldn't for me because of
Speaker 1: subject matter, but it is the origin of feces copro
Speaker 1: I d reliably predict sources of ancient poop. So we
Speaker 1: have talked about various discoveries that have been made through
Speaker 1: analyzing copper lights or fossilized feces on a show before.
Speaker 1: One of the challenges in this work is figuring out
Speaker 1: exactly which species the feces came from. This can be
Speaker 1: especially challenging for researchers when they're trying to distinguish human
Speaker 1: feces from dog feces because they tend to have a
Speaker 1: similar size and composition. Prehistoric humans and dogs also often
Speaker 1: lived in the same place in eight similar food. They
Speaker 1: can even be tricky to tell them apart using DNA analysis,
Speaker 1: because some ancient cultures used dogs as a food source,
Speaker 1: and dogs current dogs would still do this. I'm sure
Speaker 1: have also scavenged human feces for food. Current dogs will
Speaker 1: scavenge any animals feces for any any feces. Yeah. Copro
Speaker 1: I d tackles this problem, combining analysis of the host
Speaker 1: DNA with machine learning predictions based on analysis of modern
Speaker 1: gut microbiomes to accurately determine the source of the feces.
Speaker 1: In the words of Christina we're In, her senior author
Speaker 1: of the study, quote, one unexpected finding of our study
Speaker 1: is the realization that the archaeological record is full of
Speaker 1: dog poop. I just felt like that was I could
Speaker 1: not end on any other story than that one. Although
Speaker 1: you know, as an animal person, that just does not
Speaker 1: surprise me. Of course I interpreted that as meaning there
Speaker 1: is poop that we thought was human that it's not,
Speaker 1: which is hilarious. Yeah. Um uh, Tracy, you had mentioned
Speaker 1: to me before we started that we're not doing listener
Speaker 1: mail for this one, not exactly. Rather than trying to
Speaker 1: read any one particular email, we have gotten several emails
Speaker 1: and notes on Facebook and tweets and whatnot over the
Speaker 1: last few weeks um asking about our website. Uh. And
Speaker 1: we've talked about it previously on the show, but since
Speaker 1: it's been a while and since clearly folks are still like, hey,
Speaker 1: what happened to your website, I thought we would recap
Speaker 1: it again and also give folks some tips for finding
Speaker 1: stuff like finding on episodes of the show. So basically
Speaker 1: our old website, which was full of pictures and tags
Speaker 1: and show notes and whatnot that was custom made when
Speaker 1: we were part of a website called how Stuff Works. UM.
Speaker 1: It had a bunch of features that had been cobbled
Speaker 1: together over many many years from a bunch of sources.
Speaker 1: Like the tags were a carryover from when our podcast
Speaker 1: website used to be on WordPress, and when we stopped
Speaker 1: using WordPress, the how stuff Works team like custom made
Speaker 1: a tag feature to carry all that over. So in
Speaker 1: the How Stuff Works podcasts spun off into our own business,
Speaker 1: and then I Heart Radio bought that business in September,
Speaker 1: and then for more than a year after that, the
Speaker 1: remaining how Stuff Works team kept maintaining the old website
Speaker 1: that just could not continue forever. At some point we
Speaker 1: had to move on to the infrastructure of the company
Speaker 1: that actually owns our podcast. Uh And so that happened.
Speaker 1: I think that was that was at the beginning of
Speaker 1: this year at this point. Does that sound right? No?
Speaker 1: I think it was earlier than that, But maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 1: I think I feel like it was at the beginning
Speaker 1: of this year because I have a spreadsheet that has
Speaker 1: all the old tags on it and it ends December.
Speaker 1: I mean that who knows, though it's it's all kind
Speaker 1: of blurring together. Things that happened in January of this
Speaker 1: year feel like they happened before I was born. At
Speaker 1: this point. Uh, So, we were working on a solution
Speaker 1: at least for the show notes, because we both feel
Speaker 1: like the show notes are really important to show people
Speaker 1: what the sources are for all of our episode and
Speaker 1: to give credit to everybody who has worked on those
Speaker 1: sources for doing their work. Um, we were working on
Speaker 1: a solution for that, and then a pandemic happened and
Speaker 1: that just totally upended both the like the logistical and
Speaker 1: the working like the people and the financial resources, like
Speaker 1: all of that just got like somebody just just just
Speaker 1: shook the picnic blanket with all of that stuff on it. Um,
Speaker 1: So I don't we don't know at this point when
Speaker 1: we will have a show note resources so are a
Speaker 1: show note thing that people can access. So easiest way
Speaker 1: to find old episodes of the show on the internet
Speaker 1: is to google the topic you're looking for and the
Speaker 1: words missed in history, all as part of the same search.
Speaker 1: Um that's actually how I was doing it with the
Speaker 1: old website. Yea all the time. Yeah, it works ninety
Speaker 1: tocent of the time. There's a tiny number of episodes
Speaker 1: that for some reason Google just hasn't indexed, and there
Speaker 1: are a few things that are named weirdly that don't
Speaker 1: come up. But of the time that will work. The
Speaker 1: easiest way to scroll through a whole list of the episodes.
Speaker 1: Is actually to just use an app like for example,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts. UM like that that if you are subscribed
Speaker 1: to the show, will show you the entire archive that
Speaker 1: you can just scroll on through if you need specific
Speaker 1: show notes for something. UM Like let's say you're working
Speaker 1: on a school project and it would really help you
Speaker 1: out to be able to see the sources for an episode. UH,
Speaker 1: email us within reason, we will try to help you out. UM.
Speaker 1: We did not have transcripts of all the old episodes,
Speaker 1: which is something that like we we have really wanted
Speaker 1: to have for a long time, and we don't for
Speaker 1: a lot of reasons that are outside of our control individually.
Speaker 1: But for this the episodes that we did have transcripts of,
Speaker 1: I still have those transcripts. So if you need one,
Speaker 1: email and and if we have it, I will send
Speaker 1: it to you. UM. Our email address is History Podcast
Speaker 1: at I Heart radio dot com. Our previous how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works email address is now officially finally no longer delivering
Speaker 1: emails to us anymore. UM that continued to work for
Speaker 1: many months, So if you want to email us, that's
Speaker 1: the the one to use it as History Podcast at
Speaker 1: I Heart radio dot com. Uh, I don't do you
Speaker 1: have anything to add to all of the Well, I
Speaker 1: had a question for you because I thought Apple only
Speaker 1: had three hundred episodes. Apple only has three hundred episodes
Speaker 1: in the store. So if you're in the Apple podcast store, uh,
Speaker 1: pretty much any podcast that doesn't have a lower limit
Speaker 1: manually set. It's a maximum of three hundred episodes. But
Speaker 1: if you are subscribed to the show and you look
Speaker 1: in your library, it should have all of it. Do
Speaker 1: you like how I staged that question so that we
Speaker 1: would know, because I know it comes up all the time.
Speaker 1: It does come up all of the uh. And I
Speaker 1: mean that I I can't speak to how every single
Speaker 1: podcast app works because there's so many of them, and
Speaker 1: most of them are free, and you can try as
Speaker 1: many as you want to find one that that suits
Speaker 1: your needs. But that also means that, like we usually
Speaker 1: usually can't answer individual questions about how anything besides Apple
Speaker 1: podcast works because that's the one that's like been around
Speaker 1: the longest, um and as you know, that's the that's
Speaker 1: the app that's on my phone. Although I listen to
Speaker 1: podcasts like a caveman by manually sinking a click wheel
Speaker 1: iPod to a computer, I'm still somewhat befuddled by this practice.
Speaker 1: But it's not even that, it's just that I've been
Speaker 1: doing it for so long, and I especially because because
Speaker 1: of the pandemic, I'm no longer walking to go on
Speaker 1: errands nearly as much. Also, to be frank, I'm not
Speaker 1: cleaning as much, and those are the times that I
Speaker 1: usually listen to podcasts. So I have this giant backlog
Speaker 1: of podcasts and like trying to recreate that on my
Speaker 1: phone to listen to like a more up to date
Speaker 1: human person is just like it's one thing I don't
Speaker 1: have time. I have plenty of time, I don't have
Speaker 1: the mental space to do it right now. Fair, uh
Speaker 1: don't have the middle space for a lot of things.
Speaker 1: I'm sure that's like everyone. Again. We hope everyone is
Speaker 1: uh being able to take as as good a care
Speaker 1: of themselves as possible. I know things are incredibly hard
Speaker 1: right now for most people in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: So anyway, if you'd like to write to us about
Speaker 1: this or any other podcast or history podcasts at I
Speaker 1: heart radio dot com and then you'll also find us
Speaker 1: on social media at miss in history real like for example,
Speaker 1: that's our Twitter name as miss in History our website,
Speaker 1: as we have said, is missed in History dot com,
Speaker 1: and you can subscribe to our show on the I
Speaker 1: heart radio app and Apple podcasts and anywhere else you
Speaker 1: get a podcast. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
Speaker 1: a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
Speaker 1: I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.