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 Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It is
Speaker 1: time for Unearthed. If you're new to the show, this
Speaker 1: is when we talk about things that were figuratively or
Speaker 1: literally unearthed. This one covers basically the last quarter of Normally,
Speaker 1: when we record our year in Unearthed episodes, it's one
Speaker 1: of the last things that we do before we take
Speaker 1: a break. Uh. But in we started our break early
Speaker 1: because we were tired. Uh that wasn't the only reason
Speaker 1: I was tired. Uh So I finished up these episodes
Speaker 1: as the very first thing I meant to do list
Speaker 1: in one. So unlike normal, there's not just a gap
Speaker 1: of a couple of weeks where we just are never
Speaker 1: going to talk about those things. Um. So today we
Speaker 1: have a lot of updates to previous episodes, and some
Speaker 1: books and letters, some stuff about vikings and Money's and
Speaker 1: some other things too. And then part two has some
Speaker 1: of the other listener favorites and favorites of ours also,
Speaker 1: including the edibles and potables and the exclamations, so stuff
Speaker 1: to look forward next time. Also so we're going to
Speaker 1: start out with something that is not entirely typical for
Speaker 1: our Unearthed episodes. But it was really big news at
Speaker 1: the end of and so big that it would seem like,
Speaker 1: if we don't talk about it right out of the gates,
Speaker 1: some folks are going to spend the whole episode wondering
Speaker 1: if we will ever get to it. That's that monolith. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I wrote most of the stuff about the monolith before
Speaker 1: I went on break, and when I got back, I
Speaker 1: was like, does anybody even remember that monolith? At this point?
Speaker 1: It seems like it's been eons ago. It was not
Speaker 1: eons ago. It was in November and November the Utah
Speaker 1: Department of Public Safety and Utah Division of Wildlife Resources
Speaker 1: we're conducting a sheep count by helicopter, and as they
Speaker 1: were doing that, somebody noticed something strange. Upon closer investigation,
Speaker 1: it was a triangular prism that was ten or twelve
Speaker 1: feet high, made of metal held together with rivets and
Speaker 1: securely anchored into the rock. And since this thing kind
Speaker 1: of resembled the monolith from the film two thousand and
Speaker 1: one A Space Odyssey, a lot of people started talking
Speaker 1: about aliens, and although authorities tried to keep the location
Speaker 1: of this monolith's secret. It didn't take very long for
Speaker 1: people to figure out exactly where it was, and they
Speaker 1: found it on Google or satellite imagery, and soon it
Speaker 1: became clear that it was a lot newer than the
Speaker 1: things that we would usually cover on an Unearthed episodes,
Speaker 1: not an ancient historical thing. Uh. It wasn't there in August,
Speaker 1: but it was as of October of twenty six. And
Speaker 1: one hypothesis was that it was a work art, possibly
Speaker 1: by sculptor John McCracken, whose son said he liked to
Speaker 1: install his artwork in remote and unexpected places, but that
Speaker 1: doesn't really add up because McCracken died in eleven. A
Speaker 1: representative for McCracken's estate later said that it was not
Speaker 1: his work. So this announcement that this monolith had been
Speaker 1: spotted came on November twenty three, and then on the
Speaker 1: twenty eight the Bureau of Land Management reported that this
Speaker 1: quote illegally installed structure had been removed. The day before,
Speaker 1: photographer Ross Bernard's of Colorado reported that he had gone
Speaker 1: to the site with some friends to check out this monument,
Speaker 1: and that while they were there, four other people arrived,
Speaker 1: they knocked the monolith down and took the pieces away
Speaker 1: in a wheelbarrow. One of those four people reportedly said
Speaker 1: this is why you don't leave trash in the desert,
Speaker 1: and then on their way out another one of them said,
Speaker 1: leave no trace. Michael James Newlands took photos of this
Speaker 1: whole removal on his phone. People who have taken credit
Speaker 1: for this removal include Andy L. Lewis and Sylvan Christensen.
Speaker 1: Christensen sent a statement to The New York Times that
Speaker 1: they had removed the monolith to protect the area from
Speaker 1: the sightseers who had started flocking to the site pretty
Speaker 1: much as soon as people figured out where it was. Then,
Speaker 1: a similar monolith appeared in Romania on November, only to
Speaker 1: vanish on December one, and then on the second one
Speaker 1: appeared in southern California and disappeared again the next day.
Speaker 1: Four men took credit for that one on the fifth,
Speaker 1: and that was also the day that another one appeared
Speaker 1: in Joshua Tree National Park in California. Still more monoliths
Speaker 1: came and went around California. There was also one on
Speaker 1: the Isle of Wight and one outside of El Paso, Texas,
Speaker 1: and one in Finland. Matty Mo, who's the founder of
Speaker 1: the collective known as the Most Famous Artist, gave some
Speaker 1: pretty cag interviews in which he didn't exactly take credit
Speaker 1: for the monolith but did not deny being involved with
Speaker 1: them either, and the Most Famous Artist websites been listing
Speaker 1: monolithts for sale for the price of forty dollars. As
Speaker 1: of when we are recording this, that listing says that
Speaker 1: it is sold out. I mean, who doesn't want a
Speaker 1: dollar monoliths? I have that d i y thing where
Speaker 1: I'm like, if I wanted it, I just make it
Speaker 1: myself skod. Honestly, this whole thing has become increasingly silly
Speaker 1: since then. A gingerbread monolith, my personal favorite, appeared in
Speaker 1: San Francisco on Christmas Day, among other things. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: may not know the true nature of that first one
Speaker 1: that was cited and who was responsible for it, but
Speaker 1: I liked that people took the idea and ran with
Speaker 1: it in cookie form. Yeah, when it initially showed up,
Speaker 1: before people figured out how recently it had appeared, I
Speaker 1: was thinking it might turn out to be like some
Speaker 1: piece of a movie set from some classical film. We
Speaker 1: would get to talk about that, and no it was
Speaker 1: not that. Uh. And then when I got back to
Speaker 1: my desk on January fourth and was like, any updates
Speaker 1: on that modelith in the time that I was not
Speaker 1: at work, Well, there was a gingerbread one. Um, it's
Speaker 1: the whole thing, and that that's This is not the
Speaker 1: only disappearing and reappearing object that happened at the end
Speaker 1: of last year, and other news have disappearing and reappearing things.
Speaker 1: A few years ago, someone put a two meter or
Speaker 1: seven foot tall wooden sculpture on the ridge of Grutten
Speaker 1: Mountain in southern Bavaria. The sculpture was of a fallust.
Speaker 1: There's no real documentation of how it came to be there,
Speaker 1: but the local story is that somebody got this gigantic
Speaker 1: statue of a pallast as a gag gift and did
Speaker 1: not want it, so they hauled it up the mountain
Speaker 1: and just left it there. Then in late November, without
Speaker 1: ex planation, someone chopped it down and took it away.
Speaker 1: As was the case with the Utah Monolith. It is
Speaker 1: not clear who this sculpture actually belonged to, so that
Speaker 1: means it's also not clear whether an actual crime was committed,
Speaker 1: but authorities were investigating. Yeah, earlier I said this was
Speaker 1: a disappearing and reappearing thing, but it's really it's just
Speaker 1: appearing and then disappearing. There was no reappearance of it
Speaker 1: yet yet. See we see moving on to things that
Speaker 1: are a little more typical of of Unearthed. We have
Speaker 1: lots of fines that are related to past episodes of
Speaker 1: this show. So we've had some previous updates on Unearthed
Speaker 1: about efforts to find mass graves that are connected to
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenty one massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We covered
Speaker 1: that massacre on the show in We also replayed it
Speaker 1: as a Saturday Classic. More recently, I think in October,
Speaker 1: Oklahoma state Archaeologist Carrie Stackleback and now that a team
Speaker 1: had found human remains at Oaklawn Cemetery. It was one
Speaker 1: of the sites they were investigating at that time. They
Speaker 1: found the remains of one or possibly two people at
Speaker 1: a site where it's believed that eighteen victims of the
Speaker 1: massacre had been buried. In October, Peru's Culture Ministry announced
Speaker 1: the discovery and conservation of a thirty seven meter that's
Speaker 1: about a hundred and twenty foot long gia glyph in
Speaker 1: the Nasca Desert. It's about two thousand years old and
Speaker 1: in the shape of a cat. It was discovered during
Speaker 1: planning for a new path that would lead up to
Speaker 1: an observation tower. So Peru's chief archaeologist for the Nasca
Speaker 1: Lines told reporters that this glyph actually pre dates the
Speaker 1: Nasca culture that is credited with creating the other glyphs
Speaker 1: in the area. This cat glyph dates back to the
Speaker 1: late Paracas era, which is between five hundred b c
Speaker 1: E and two hundred c E, while the Nasca culture
Speaker 1: that is associated with the other lines spans from two
Speaker 1: hundred to seven hundred C. Because of its age and
Speaker 1: its position on the slope, this cat glyph had eroded
Speaker 1: to the point that was just barely visible. And if
Speaker 1: you look at pictures of this glyph, it seems stylistically
Speaker 1: much different from many of the other Nasca lines. I
Speaker 1: will confess that when I first saw pictures, I said,
Speaker 1: that's one of hoax. Someone went into pure um. It
Speaker 1: is not clear whether that difference in style is because
Speaker 1: of its origins in an earlier era or because of
Speaker 1: that recent cleaning and restoration. Our episode on the Nasca lines,
Speaker 1: so you can get more context for all of this
Speaker 1: came out in Moving On. According to research that was
Speaker 1: published in December, analysis of mummified baboons that were found
Speaker 1: in ancient Egyptian temples might help pinpoint the location of
Speaker 1: the Kingdom of Poot. A team from Dartmouth College analyzed
Speaker 1: isotope composition of these mummies and that analysis suggested that
Speaker 1: their origins were from a region that includes parts of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti,
Speaker 1: Somalia and Yamen. So kind of a narrowing down into
Speaker 1: that general region we talked about had Schepsu and the
Speaker 1: expeditions to put on the show in July of next up,
Speaker 1: three metal detectorists have found a shipment of arms that
Speaker 1: was meant for the Jacobite uprising of seventeen forty five,
Speaker 1: which we covered on the show in twos sixteen. This
Speaker 1: find was on the shores of Lockerberlock, near a ruined
Speaker 1: croft house that had belonged to Bonnie Prince Charlie's tutor.
Speaker 1: It included at least two hundred musket balls and it's
Speaker 1: believed that they are part of a shipment that arrived
Speaker 1: not long after the Battle of Colloden. These metal detectorists
Speaker 1: had the permission of the landowner to be there and
Speaker 1: they reported their find to Treasure Trove in Scotland and
Speaker 1: that's the official organization for handling finds that might have
Speaker 1: some kind of archaeological or historical important in Scotland. Next up,
Speaker 1: divers in the Baltic Sea have found a German Enigma
Speaker 1: machine from World War Two. Divers on assignment from environmental
Speaker 1: group with WWF found it while looking for abandoned fishing nets.
Speaker 1: The person who spotted it actually first thought it was
Speaker 1: an old typewriter. The Enigma machine is expected to undergo
Speaker 1: a year long restoration process before being put on display
Speaker 1: in a museum. Prior Hosts did a series of episodes
Speaker 1: on cryptography during World War Two. In September, we have
Speaker 1: a couple of updates to previous Unearthed episodes. In our
Speaker 1: Fall Unearthed last year, we talked about the discovery of
Speaker 1: thirteen unopened coffins that were found in a burial well
Speaker 1: in Sakara, Egypt. These were estimated to be years old.
Speaker 1: Their wooden coffins found in very good condition, with much
Speaker 1: of the original painting on the exterior still very clearly visible.
Speaker 1: Work on these is of course still ongoing, and in
Speaker 1: October Greg Lewis, New Zealand's ambassador to Egypt, shared a
Speaker 1: video of one of them being opened for the first time.
Speaker 1: This was part of an unveiling of that earlier find,
Speaker 1: which is actually much larger than that was originally reported
Speaker 1: as thirteen coffins. As of October, fifty nine coffins had
Speaker 1: been discovered, which were believed to belong to priests and
Speaker 1: senior officials. By November, that number of discovered coffins had
Speaker 1: risen to a hundred, and they had also found funerary
Speaker 1: masks and forty gilded statues. Officials had also started x
Speaker 1: raying the mummies to try to visualize their structures and
Speaker 1: figure out how they had been preserved. Some of the
Speaker 1: openings of these coffins and the x raying processes that
Speaker 1: have gone along along the way, have been carried out
Speaker 1: publicly to try to help offset the pandemics impact on
Speaker 1: the Egyptian tourism industry. In Unearthed in March, we talked
Speaker 1: about some glassy matter that was found at the site
Speaker 1: of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year seventy nine,
Speaker 1: and that glassy matter was believed to be part of
Speaker 1: a person's brain. Further research into this find has actually
Speaker 1: uncovered the fact that there are intact neurons preserved in
Speaker 1: that glassy material. According to a paper published in October,
Speaker 1: the rapid cooling of the volcanic material allowed those neurons
Speaker 1: to be preserved in this way. So cool. Yeah. When
Speaker 1: I was looking at this, I was like, is this
Speaker 1: the same brain? Yes. We will move on to the
Speaker 1: books and letters after we take a quick sponsor break.
Speaker 1: Next up we have the category of books and letters,
Speaker 1: and first up. In November of the correspondence between authors J. M.
Speaker 1: Berry and Robert Louis Stevenson was published in a book
Speaker 1: titled A Friendship Letters Robert Louis Stevenson and J. M. Barry.
Speaker 1: Most of Stevenson's letters in this correspondence had already been published,
Speaker 1: so they were not really new, but Barry's side of
Speaker 1: the conversation had not been published. A lot of the
Speaker 1: chatter about this described Barry's letters as having been lost,
Speaker 1: but as is so often the case in these episodes,
Speaker 1: that is not really the right way to describe this situation.
Speaker 1: The letters were in the Boneke Library at Yale University,
Speaker 1: and they were cataloged there. But somehow people didn't make
Speaker 1: the connection between that catalog box of letters and Berry's
Speaker 1: unpublished correspondents. Dr Michael Shaw, who realized what they were
Speaker 1: after being unable to buy a copy, was quoted by
Speaker 1: The Guardian is saying when I first saw them, I
Speaker 1: didn't realize that these were lost letters. I just assumed
Speaker 1: they had been published and I didn't know about them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the letters were there the whole time. Folks just didn't
Speaker 1: quite realize that they were not ones that were widely
Speaker 1: publicly available. Of course they were published, I just never
Speaker 1: stumbled across them. So these letters chronicle not only the
Speaker 1: two writers intense affection and even love for each other,
Speaker 1: but also Stevenson's influence on Barry's work, with phrases and
Speaker 1: images making their way into various stories and his novel
Speaker 1: Peter Pan next up. In December, the US Federal Bureau
Speaker 1: of Investigation released a statement that the three hundred forty
Speaker 1: character cipher attributed to the Zodiac Killer, which was sent
Speaker 1: to the San Francisco Chronicle in November of nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 1: has been cracked. This cipher is one of four attributed
Speaker 1: to the killer, and it was the first one to
Speaker 1: be submitted to the FBI. Before this point, only one
Speaker 1: of the other cipher's had been solved. Five murders from
Speaker 1: the late nineteen sixties are attributed to the Zodiac Killer,
Speaker 1: whose identity is still not known. So this solution to
Speaker 1: the cipher was the work of three private citizens. Software
Speaker 1: developer David ore in Check, applied mathematicians Sam Blake, and
Speaker 1: warehouse operator and computer programmer Yarl von Ikey, who used
Speaker 1: a code breaking program to test more than six fifty
Speaker 1: thousand possible solutions. They're decoding found some of the same
Speaker 1: themes as the killers other communications, including this idea that
Speaker 1: these murders were about collecting slaves to take to the afterlife.
Speaker 1: The decoded cipher also misspelled the word paradise, and it
Speaker 1: had some rather convoluted phrasing. I feel like this would
Speaker 1: have been way bigger news if there were less going
Speaker 1: on in the world. You would think, right, Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was one of those things that I saw a brief
Speaker 1: headline of same, saw nothing further about. Uh, forgot totally
Speaker 1: about it. Then heard somebody mention it on a podcast
Speaker 1: while I was out on break and I emailed myself
Speaker 1: like Zodiac Killer cipher, so I would remember to put
Speaker 1: it in here. In September, to move on to another subject,
Speaker 1: thieves stole a scroll of poetry that had been written
Speaker 1: by Mao Zandong. They stole this from the Hong Kong
Speaker 1: apartment of art collector Fush and Shao. This was part
Speaker 1: of a really enormous heist, with an estimated value in
Speaker 1: the Hong Kong Press as being worth four billion Hong
Speaker 1: Kong dollars. The US Press estimated the value of the
Speaker 1: stolen items as five hundred million U S dollars. At
Speaker 1: the time, Fush and Shaw was away from Hong Kong
Speaker 1: because of the pandemic. The scroll was sold for just
Speaker 1: five hundred dollars in Hong Kong currency, with the buyer
Speaker 1: believing that it was a forgery. It was recovered in October,
Speaker 1: by which point it had been cut in half. It
Speaker 1: originally measured about nine feet that's about two point eight
Speaker 1: meters long, and the buyer, who was arrested for handling
Speaker 1: stolen property, reportedly found it too long to display the
Speaker 1: way they wanted. And in our last find Underbooks and Letters,
Speaker 1: research at the European Synchrotron radiation facility has looked at
Speaker 1: the composition of inks that were used to write on
Speaker 1: Egyptian papyrus. These papyride date back to the years one
Speaker 1: hundred to two hundred, and most of the writing on
Speaker 1: them is in black, but red ink is used for
Speaker 1: things like the heading or words that require some kind
Speaker 1: of special emphasis. They discovered that the inks contained lead,
Speaker 1: but not as a pigment. Instead, lead seems to have
Speaker 1: acted as a drying agent, encircling particles of ochre and
Speaker 1: adhering them to the papyrus. This pre day to similar
Speaker 1: technique used to dry oil paints during the Renaissance in
Speaker 1: Europe by hundreds of years. Moving on, in this installment
Speaker 1: of unearthed, we once again have a few finds related
Speaker 1: to Vikings. The first is that DNA testing has solved
Speaker 1: some mysteries about a Viking era burial site known as
Speaker 1: the Gerdrip Grave near russ Killed, Denmark. This burial site
Speaker 1: was discovered about forty years ago and it was not
Speaker 1: clear whose remains they were or why they were buried together.
Speaker 1: The remains seems to belong to a man and a woman,
Speaker 1: and for a time it was believed that the man
Speaker 1: was enslaved and had been killed as a sacrifice, because
Speaker 1: he seems to have been hanged and bound. The woman's
Speaker 1: remains had been covered in large stones. Based on that
Speaker 1: DNA analysis their mother and son, and while a lot
Speaker 1: about their deaths and their burials is still unclear, one
Speaker 1: hypothesis is that they are figures described in the Icelandic
Speaker 1: Sagas the sorceress Katla and her son Odd. In the Sagas,
Speaker 1: Kotla was stoned to death and Odd was hanged. To
Speaker 1: be clear, the female remains in this grave were covered
Speaker 1: in heavy stones, but the remains themselves do not show
Speaker 1: evidence of being stoned or pressed to death. Yet. The
Speaker 1: Sagas are sort of like epic accounts of the settlement
Speaker 1: of Iceland, which are both um. They're both literary and historical,
Speaker 1: so there are elements of them that are rooted in
Speaker 1: factual accuracy and then parts of them that are more mythologized.
Speaker 1: And this burial site also includes a weapon, which was
Speaker 1: a lance, and this was one of the first examples
Speaker 1: of a weapon being included in a grave that was
Speaker 1: identified as belonging to a set of female remains. But
Speaker 1: based on this idea that the bodies may belong to
Speaker 1: Catala and odd There's another idea that has arisen, which
Speaker 1: is that maybe is it a it is a sorceress's staff.
Speaker 1: Next up, the remains of a twelve year old temple
Speaker 1: known as a God House have been found in Norway.
Speaker 1: This was a temple that would have been dedicated to
Speaker 1: old Norse gods, and while other examples had previously been
Speaker 1: unearthed in Sweden and Denmark, this is the first such
Speaker 1: find in Norway. This find includes the temples foundations, and
Speaker 1: it seems to have been a later addition to a
Speaker 1: settlement that included at least two long houses that were
Speaker 1: first built between two thousand and years ago. Other finds
Speaker 1: that the site that were related to the Godhouse include
Speaker 1: remains of animal sacrifices and cooking pits that would have
Speaker 1: been used for religious feasts. Ground penetrating radar studies and
Speaker 1: yellowstad in southeastern Norway have discovered that there is a
Speaker 1: lot of other stuff surrounding a Viking burial ship. There.
Speaker 1: Viking burial ships have, if you listen, come up on
Speaker 1: on Earth before this one was discovered. In In addition
Speaker 1: to the ship, there are a buried feast hall and
Speaker 1: a cult temple, along with at least thirteen burial mounds.
Speaker 1: These are close to Yell Mound, which is a burial
Speaker 1: mound that had already been excavated and studied, So it
Speaker 1: is possible that this whole area was an important ritual
Speaker 1: and burial site, and that the ship was placed there
Speaker 1: because of its established use for burial mounds. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: tried to figure out whether we had ACKed about this
Speaker 1: specific ship before. I'm not actually sure. I'm not either.
Speaker 1: I can't remember if it came up in our Yelling
Speaker 1: Stones episode. Yeah. Yeah, we've definitely talked about burial ships before,
Speaker 1: but whether whether this specific one has come up is
Speaker 1: not as clear. Over the summer, there was also a
Speaker 1: team of archaeologists who were really racing to excavate this
Speaker 1: ship because it was being destroyed by a fungus. And
Speaker 1: in our last bit of Viking news, a team in
Speaker 1: central Norway has excavated the grave of a woman dating
Speaker 1: back to the Viking era. This find was unexpected because
Speaker 1: there aren't any other graves nearby. Some of the items
Speaker 1: buried with the woman include a three lobed brooch and
Speaker 1: hundreds of tiny beads so small that the team had
Speaker 1: to buy mosquito netting to have something fine enough to
Speaker 1: sift them out from the soil. Although the beads were
Speaker 1: mostly found around the body's right shoulder, it isn't clear
Speaker 1: if they were part of a necklace or a piece
Speaker 1: of clothing or something else entirely. Just like the idea
Speaker 1: of like needing to go get some mosquito netting to
Speaker 1: get these tiny, tiny, tiny beads, We're going to shift
Speaker 1: gears now and talk about some mummies. According to research
Speaker 1: that was reported in the journal Analytical Chemistry, researchers have
Speaker 1: found a new, non destructive technique that uses electron paramagnetic
Speaker 1: resonance to analyze bitumen in ancient Egyptian mummies. Before this point,
Speaker 1: most methods that were used to study bet uman required
Speaker 1: researchers to collect a small sample of it and then
Speaker 1: that sample was destroyed over the course of the tests.
Speaker 1: This process doesn't destroy anything, and rather than examining the
Speaker 1: bitumen itself as a whole, this technique analyzes some of
Speaker 1: its components, which are byproducts of the decomposition of plant matter.
Speaker 1: But tuman is the compound that gives mummies their dark color,
Speaker 1: and it can be found in natural deposits, or it
Speaker 1: can be made from subs is like bees, wax, fat,
Speaker 1: and resin, and this analysis can help determine exactly where
Speaker 1: the bitumen came from and how old it is because
Speaker 1: of the specific byproducts used in the tests, It can
Speaker 1: also confirm whether they came from a marine source like
Speaker 1: the Dead Sea or a land source like a tar pit.
Speaker 1: It can also help researchers confirm whether a mummy has
Speaker 1: been restored at some point during its history. In other news,
Speaker 1: during the Roman Era in Egypt, which spanned from about
Speaker 1: the first century b c e To the third century CE,
Speaker 1: that was common for members of the upper class to
Speaker 1: have a mummy portrait. That was the portrait of the
Speaker 1: person on a wooden board that would be attached to
Speaker 1: their mummy. Many of these have been found in the
Speaker 1: Phyume basin and are described as the Phyume Mommy portraits.
Speaker 1: This find isn't a mummy portrait, though, it's an earring
Speaker 1: found in the Roman city of Daletem in southeast Bulgaria.
Speaker 1: Archaeologists found the earring while excavating the remains of the
Speaker 1: city's public baths, wedged between two tiles, and the earring
Speaker 1: is identical or at least extremely similar to one depicted
Speaker 1: on Phayu mummy portraits of at least two women. I
Speaker 1: loved this. I loved the lost earring and the fact
Speaker 1: that it's in these two different portraits and just sort
Speaker 1: of the wondering like, is this the exact same earring?
Speaker 1: Is it just a really similar earring? Was this just
Speaker 1: a really popular earring line that everyone was it the
Speaker 1: hot earring of the season and other Fiume portrait News
Speaker 1: Researchers at the University of Utah have analyzed a tiny, tiny,
Speaker 1: tiny speck of pigments on the portrait known as Portrait
Speaker 1: of a Bearded Man. In this portrait, the pigment was
Speaker 1: used for the clay vey or the purple stripes that
Speaker 1: indicated a person's high status. This particle, I said tiny
Speaker 1: so many times. It's because it was only fifty krons
Speaker 1: in diameter, and it was sent to the team at
Speaker 1: the College of Minds and Earth Sciences at the University
Speaker 1: of Utah between two glass slides. In transit, this particle
Speaker 1: shifted by about a millimeter, so it took a while
Speaker 1: for them to actually find it in the slides to
Speaker 1: analyze it because it was so small shifted this tiny amount.
Speaker 1: After analysis using energy dispersive X ray fluorescence analysis, electron
Speaker 1: microscopy diffraction, and ADAM probe tomography, they concluded that the
Speaker 1: pigment was made with dye mixed with clay or silica,
Speaker 1: known as a lake pigment. They also found evidence of
Speaker 1: beeswax binder, and there's still some uncertainty about how the
Speaker 1: dye was made. Although they did conclude that the purple
Speaker 1: pigment had been synthesized in a lead container and it
Speaker 1: was not made from the purple dye that came from
Speaker 1: your X snails, it's not clear whether cro meum in
Speaker 1: the sample was intentionally included there or if it was
Speaker 1: a byproduct of some other ingredients. Now we're just going
Speaker 1: to take a quick break before we moved on to
Speaker 1: some other unearth things. Next up, we have a few
Speaker 1: finds that I have loosely grouped together as prehistory. They
Speaker 1: are not all from the exact same time period, but
Speaker 1: they're from before the start of the written record in
Speaker 1: the areas where they were found. First up, a local
Speaker 1: resident named Roman Novac was out picking mushrooms in northern
Speaker 1: Morabia when he stumbled upon a Bronze age sword along
Speaker 1: with an x Both of these have been dated to
Speaker 1: about and even though the region where they were found
Speaker 1: was really sparsely populated at that time, they do appear
Speaker 1: to be local rather than something that was ought in by, say,
Speaker 1: an army that was just passing through the area. In
Speaker 1: other news, according to research published in the Proceedings of
Speaker 1: the National Academy of Sciences in October, the first human
Speaker 1: arrival in the Bahamas may have led to the extinction
Speaker 1: of several species of birds through the newly arrived humans
Speaker 1: hunting them directly because of habitat loss related to that
Speaker 1: human arrival, or, in the case of a giant barn
Speaker 1: owl and a giant eagle, because their prey species disappeared
Speaker 1: or became harder to find. These conclusions came from a
Speaker 1: ten year study of more than seven thousand fossils. In
Speaker 1: many cases, there was about a hundred year overlap between
Speaker 1: the arrival of the humans and the disappearance of the birds,
Speaker 1: disappearances not really explained by any other changes to the
Speaker 1: environment that the researchers could find. In some cases, the
Speaker 1: birds did survive, but only on some of the islands.
Speaker 1: For example, the Abaco parrot lives only on two islands
Speaker 1: in the Bahama Us, and there are islands in between
Speaker 1: them that also would have supported similar habitats. The team
Speaker 1: were able to find fossils of those parrots on islands
Speaker 1: where that species currently does not live and other news.
Speaker 1: According to research published in the Journal of Human Evolution,
Speaker 1: Homo sapiens did not, as was previously believed, invent the
Speaker 1: first barbed bone point that inventor was probably really Homo
Speaker 1: orectus about eight hundred thousand years ago. This came from
Speaker 1: a study of a set of fifty two different animal
Speaker 1: bones from East Africa's al du Gorge. One of these
Speaker 1: was carved with three barbs and a curved tip, and
Speaker 1: it doesn't seem to have been made to attached to
Speaker 1: any kind of a handle or a shaft, so it's
Speaker 1: unclear how this point would have been used Before this.
Speaker 1: The oldest known barbed bone points were much younger, only
Speaker 1: about ninety thousand years ago. These points were attached to
Speaker 1: shafts and probably used to fish or to hunt other prey.
Speaker 1: It is one of those parts that I wrote before
Speaker 1: going out a break, and when I came back to
Speaker 1: my desk, I was like is this right. Are these
Speaker 1: numbers are right? That I put an extra zero somewhere,
Speaker 1: because that's a huge difference. Note that is it's correct. Uh,
Speaker 1: we have recapped this next thing we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about a little bit before, but it's been a while,
Speaker 1: so to touch on it again. Anytime archaeologists are trying
Speaker 1: to draw conclusions about human remains based on the things
Speaker 1: that were buried with them, there are layers of assumptions
Speaker 1: at work, like how sex and gender worked in that
Speaker 1: particular society and why that society chose to bury specific
Speaker 1: items with specific people. As one example, it's pretty easy
Speaker 1: to conclude that a person who was buried with a
Speaker 1: sword was a warrior, but it's also possible that a
Speaker 1: sword had a ceremonial or a symbolic purpose that didn't
Speaker 1: have anything to do with combat. So, no matter how
Speaker 1: careful and thoughtful we are when we try to think
Speaker 1: about these things, our own experiences and our own societies
Speaker 1: and our own perspectives influence how we interpret these kinds
Speaker 1: of fines. Sometimes there is other information that we can
Speaker 1: use to back up these assumptions and conclusions, for example,
Speaker 1: written records or artwork, or in the case of that
Speaker 1: sword where patterns in the person's remains that suggest that
Speaker 1: they saw a lot of combat while they were alive,
Speaker 1: but sometimes it's just a lot more nebulous. All of
Speaker 1: that said, research published in the journal Science Advances suggests
Speaker 1: that gender roles and hunter gatherer societies and the America's
Speaker 1: might not have been strictly delineated along the lines of
Speaker 1: men hunted and women gathered, which I know is a
Speaker 1: thing that I learned and many other people learned in school.
Speaker 1: The three start started with the discovery of what appeared
Speaker 1: to be the burial site of a female hunter, which
Speaker 1: dated back about nine thousand years. This find was unearthed
Speaker 1: in Peru, and researchers started trying to figure out whether
Speaker 1: they was a relatively unique situation or whether there were
Speaker 1: other similar burial sites. They looked at four hundred twenty
Speaker 1: nine skeletons from one hundred seven late Pleistocene in early
Speaker 1: Holocene burial sites across the America's Twenty seven of those
Speaker 1: one d seven skeletons were buried with tools that would
Speaker 1: have been used to hunt big game. Of those, eleven
Speaker 1: were female and sixteen were male. The eleven female skeletons
Speaker 1: came from ten different burial sites, and the sixteen males
Speaker 1: came from fifteen sites, so this pattern wasn't confined to
Speaker 1: one particular time in place. The sex of the skeletons
Speaker 1: was determined by both the morphology of the bones and
Speaker 1: analysis of dental enamel proteins. So this is adding to
Speaker 1: an increasing body of work that suggests that the whole
Speaker 1: men hunted, women gathered binary doesn't exactly hold up, and
Speaker 1: a lot of that binary idea really came from the
Speaker 1: assumptions of eighteenth and nineteenth century archaeologists and anthropole lologists
Speaker 1: who didn't have very robust methods of figuring out the
Speaker 1: sex of skeletons, but could draw conclusions about what sex
Speaker 1: the skeletons were based on what was buried with them.
Speaker 1: I love when science evolves me too. Uh. There's a
Speaker 1: whole podcast about this whole idea UM from the podcast
Speaker 1: seen on radio. They did a series. One of their
Speaker 1: seasons was called Men, and it was basically about where
Speaker 1: patriarchy came from UM and this idea that it's really
Speaker 1: reductive to imagine that men hunted and when women gathered,
Speaker 1: like they talk about that being way more reductive than
Speaker 1: could really have worked in Prehistoric Society's A team from
Speaker 1: the National Museum of Natural History in France, the University
Speaker 1: of the Bosque Country in Spain, and other institutions has
Speaker 1: published a study in the journal Scientific Reports that concludes
Speaker 1: that Neanderthal's intentionally buried they're dead. That's a conclusion that
Speaker 1: has been suggested in earlier work, but it wasn't considered
Speaker 1: a conclusive conclusion. So this research involved forty seven bones,
Speaker 1: all belonging to the same Neanderthal child who was approximately
Speaker 1: two years old when they died and who lived about
Speaker 1: forty one thousand years ago, and there are several pieces
Speaker 1: of evidence at this burial site that added up to
Speaker 1: the conclusion that this child had been intentionally buried very
Speaker 1: soon after their death. The stratification layers in the soil
Speaker 1: in the area are inclined to the northeast, but the
Speaker 1: child's remains were oriented to the west, so it's not
Speaker 1: a matter of like the child's body being covered in
Speaker 1: sediment gradually with the other material in the area. The
Speaker 1: bones themselves were also all together still in about the
Speaker 1: same position that they would have been at the time
Speaker 1: of burial, while animal bones in the same area from
Speaker 1: the same time are just a lot more scattered. They
Speaker 1: confirmed that the bones were Neanderthal using mitochondrial DNA analysis,
Speaker 1: and they dated them using carbon fourteen dating. While they're
Speaker 1: published findings described this as conclusive proof that Neanderthals buried
Speaker 1: they're dead. The team does also note that quote further
Speaker 1: discoveries will be necessary to understand the chronology and geographical
Speaker 1: extension of Neanderthal burial practices. And that's where we are
Speaker 1: going to leave things for part one of our Unearthed.
Speaker 1: We have lots more stuff to talk about in our
Speaker 1: next episode. Yay, do you want to talk about listener mail?
Speaker 1: I do. I also want to say we're recording this
Speaker 1: on January five. We have many days of not looking
Speaker 1: at email, So if you send us an email during
Speaker 1: like the last three weeks of December. Uh, there's just
Speaker 1: a lot of email to go through. Um So we're
Speaker 1: not trying to ignore anyone, there's just there's just a
Speaker 1: lot of it to catch up on having come back
Speaker 1: from the holidays. Um. So this one is from Laura
Speaker 1: and it is about our episode on Jim Thorpe, and
Speaker 1: Laura says, Holly and Tracy, I'm a little behind on
Speaker 1: all my podcasts at the moment, but I was elated
Speaker 1: to see a three part series on jim Thorpe. When
Speaker 1: I went looking through my yet to be downloaded list,
Speaker 1: I wrote to you guys years ago were requesting one
Speaker 1: on him right after you covered the Fort Show Indians School.
Speaker 1: Immediately downloaded them this morning and listened to while I worked,
Speaker 1: which is something I don't often do. Laura then goes
Speaker 1: on to talk about growing up pretty near jim Thorpe
Speaker 1: and says, quote, I managed one of the major tourist
Speaker 1: operations in town from two thousand seven to fourteen. Growing
Speaker 1: up in the eighties and nineties, the town of jim
Speaker 1: Thorpe was a bit of a mess. Buildings were being neglected,
Speaker 1: tourism was minimal, and yes, even the jim Thorpe Memorial,
Speaker 1: which is unfortunately a bit of a trek outside the
Speaker 1: historic tourist part of town, was greatly neglected. At the
Speaker 1: time I graduated college, moved back to the area, and
Speaker 1: started working in town. However, most of these neglected buildings
Speaker 1: were fixed up and filled with unique little galleries, restaurants,
Speaker 1: and gift shops. The sidewalks were fixed and the building
Speaker 1: facades were well on their way to being restored to
Speaker 1: their late nineteenth century glory. The Jim Thorpe tomb and
Speaker 1: memorial were restored and added on too as well, partly
Speaker 1: due to projects by students at jim Thorpe School District
Speaker 1: known as the Olympians. Having grown up in the area,
Speaker 1: everyone knew the story of Jim Thorpe and why he
Speaker 1: was buried in a town he never stepped foot in,
Speaker 1: or at least most knew the story through my interactions
Speaker 1: with tourists though, who were coming to town for a
Speaker 1: variety of reasons. I was shocked to have to continuously
Speaker 1: answer questions like who was Jim Thorpe and why does
Speaker 1: your town have a man's name, not that so many
Speaker 1: people not even recognized the name of the greatest athlete
Speaker 1: in the world. Everyone in the area closely followed all
Speaker 1: the legal battles of the past decade, with the people
Speaker 1: of the town torn between the two sides. Some felt
Speaker 1: the town deserve to keep his body, others felt he
Speaker 1: should be sent back to his family. Back when the
Speaker 1: area buried Jim Thorpe and changed its name, they were
Speaker 1: expecting at least a hospital in the National Football Hall
Speaker 1: of Fame to come out of the deal. They also
Speaker 1: helped that having the athlete would bring back tourism to
Speaker 1: an area that had been at one point one of
Speaker 1: the most popular tourists and nations of the United States,
Speaker 1: second only to Niagara Falls. But none of these things happened. Then,
Speaker 1: Lara goes on to give some topic suggestions for the
Speaker 1: podcast uh and says, anyway, I love listening to you guys.
Speaker 1: As a student, I hated history class, but I've always
Speaker 1: loved learning about local histories of locations I visited, and
Speaker 1: I'm a sucker for any museum. I've learned so much
Speaker 1: from your podcast over the past several years, and I'm
Speaker 1: looking forward to several more years to come. Laura. Thank you, Laura.
Speaker 1: Um that that description of sort of how the the
Speaker 1: tourism industry of jim Thorpe evolved over the years really
Speaker 1: matches up to what I had read previously from other
Speaker 1: folks that like did not live in the area, but
Speaker 1: knew about it and had visited it. Um having seen
Speaker 1: pictures of the town, like it looks like a super cute,
Speaker 1: little um kind of touristy place to visit when the
Speaker 1: weather is good and traveling is safe. UM. So Thank
Speaker 1: you so much Laura for sending that email. If you
Speaker 1: would like to write to us about this or any
Speaker 1: other podcast or history podcast at iHeart radio dot com
Speaker 1: and we are all over social media at miss in History.
Speaker 1: That is where you will find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
Speaker 1: and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show and
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Speaker 1: is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
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