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 Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It is time
Speaker 1: for part two of our July installment of Unearthed. Once again,
Speaker 1: we're talking about things that have been literally or figuratively
Speaker 1: unearthed in the second quarter of one. I'll just tell
Speaker 1: everybody I wrote in my notes because it's been that
Speaker 1: kind of a eighteen months. In this second installment of
Speaker 1: the episode, we have got exhumations and repatriations, some mysteries
Speaker 1: that have been solved, and other stuff. And as has
Speaker 1: become a tradition, we will kick it off with some
Speaker 1: things that were not easy to categorize, which I've all
Speaker 1: pulled together as potpourri. And for folks who usually uh
Speaker 1: skip listener mail, today's listener mail is another Unearthed specific
Speaker 1: listener mail. So, as Tracy said, we're kicking off with
Speaker 1: some things that don't really fit neatly into categories this time. First,
Speaker 1: a four thousand, four hundred year old wooden staff shaped
Speaker 1: like a life sized snake has been found buried in Pete,
Speaker 1: about seventy five miles northwest of Helsinki, Finland. This piece
Speaker 1: resembles a grass snake or a European adder. It's about
Speaker 1: twenty one or roughly half a meter long, and it's
Speaker 1: made from a single piece of wood, and researchers have
Speaker 1: suggested that it is a staff that was used in
Speaker 1: shamanic rituals. I had a conversation with a friend yesterday
Speaker 1: in which I learned that in a lot of uh,
Speaker 1: sort of northern European areas, there are a very very
Speaker 1: few snake species um, and so there's really only a
Speaker 1: third option in terms of snakes in Finland, so that
Speaker 1: maybe being a European adder or a grass snake isn't
Speaker 1: actually narrowing it down all that much. Uh. In seventeen
Speaker 1: eighty nine, to move on, botanist William James Beal stored
Speaker 1: thousands of seeds that he gathered in the vicinity of
Speaker 1: East Lansing, Michigan, and he buried them in bottles to
Speaker 1: see if they would still be viable years or even
Speaker 1: a century later. This has become known as the Beal
Speaker 1: seed viability Experiment. His plan was that every five years,
Speaker 1: somebody would dig up a bottle and plant the seeds
Speaker 1: that were inside of it to see if they grew.
Speaker 1: But over the years the people who have been managing
Speaker 1: this incredibly long running experiment have stretched out that interval,
Speaker 1: first to ten years and then for twenty years, making
Speaker 1: an experiment that was originally planned to go for a
Speaker 1: hundred years ready to go for much longer. So the
Speaker 1: most recent scheduled digging up was planned for, but of
Speaker 1: course that had to be postponed due to the pandemic,
Speaker 1: and that actually may have happened once before, when the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineteen attempt was postponed, possibly because of the nineteen
Speaker 1: eighteen flu pandemic. In April, Dr David Lowry, Associate professor
Speaker 1: of Botany and Michigan State University, dug up one of
Speaker 1: the bottles under cover of night to protect the remaining
Speaker 1: bottles from sunlight. This is also done with a lot
Speaker 1: of secrecy to protect them in this whole project, and
Speaker 1: some of these seeds started sprouting in May, so yes,
Speaker 1: some of them are still viable as of mid June thirteen.
Speaker 1: Of the seeds that germinated, they all appear to be
Speaker 1: verbascum blataria a k A. Moth mullin. But this phase
Speaker 1: of the experiment is not over yet. There are also
Speaker 1: plans underway to plant more seeds to continue this into
Speaker 1: the future, so it's one of those things that is
Speaker 1: all still ongoing. I love this project. A ceramic jar
Speaker 1: gouge with an iron nail that was found under the
Speaker 1: floor of Agora's classical commercial building in Athens, Greece is
Speaker 1: being described as a curse jar. This jar is more
Speaker 1: than two thousand years old and it contains the head
Speaker 1: and lower limbs of a young chicken. It is also
Speaker 1: inscribed with the names of fifty five people, along with
Speaker 1: what appears to be the Greek words for we bind.
Speaker 1: Researchers speculated that this might have been linked to some
Speaker 1: kind of in fighting or a dispute related to the building,
Speaker 1: or possibly an impending lawsuit, or it might have had
Speaker 1: something to do with the political and social upheaval that
Speaker 1: was going on around the time it was probably made
Speaker 1: because that was right around the time of Alexander the
Speaker 1: greats death in three b c E. This jar was
Speaker 1: discovered in two thousand six, but it was just this
Speaker 1: year that it was translated and the research on it
Speaker 1: was published. An other news. Thieves broke into Arandel Castle
Speaker 1: and they stole various historical items in a heist that
Speaker 1: has been estimated to have a worth of about a
Speaker 1: million pounds. This includes a set of gold Rosa beads
Speaker 1: that Mary, Queen of Scott's carried to her execution in
Speaker 1: fifteen eighties seven. Some of the other items that were
Speaker 1: stolen included coronation mugs, ceremonial items and some silver spoons.
Speaker 1: This theft happened on May twenty one, and on June
Speaker 1: twod authorities released photos of the ladders that were used
Speaker 1: for the people who stole these things to force their
Speaker 1: way into the dining room area of the castle. Their
Speaker 1: hope was that if the thieves also stole these ladders,
Speaker 1: the ladders owners might recognize them in contact authorities and
Speaker 1: that that could potentially lead to a break in the case.
Speaker 1: The castle's insurers also offered a reward. On June three,
Speaker 1: and in other Castle news, archaeologists working at Nottingham Castle
Speaker 1: have found the bones of three Gwennan monkeys, which may
Speaker 1: have been exotic pets belonging to Jane Kirby. Jane Kirby
Speaker 1: lived at the castle from the early seventeen nineties to
Speaker 1: eighteen twenty five, and at that point the castle had
Speaker 1: been converted into apartments. The team has also found the
Speaker 1: bones of European crane and other exotic animals there, suggesting
Speaker 1: that Kirby and maybe some of the other residents essentially
Speaker 1: created a small menagerie there. There are also written documents
Speaker 1: suggesting that Kirby kept a quote large ape as a pet.
Speaker 1: These discoveries were made during a three year restoration of
Speaker 1: the castle, which is just reopen to the public. So, uh,
Speaker 1: like you're probably thinking, we think Jane Kirby sounds like
Speaker 1: a great subject for a podcast episode, but the problem
Speaker 1: is that it really does not seem like there's enough
Speaker 1: publicly available information at this point to do it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's one of those things where I think probably if
Speaker 1: we if we personally went to archives and started digging
Speaker 1: stuff out, that would be possible. But that's not the
Speaker 1: level of research that our show can do. And the
Speaker 1: information I could find about her was basically like a
Speaker 1: paragraph at the Dotingham Castle whip site. Moving on. Stone
Speaker 1: walls dating back to the Edo period have been unearthed
Speaker 1: at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, Japan. These are roughly
Speaker 1: four hundred year old walls that were found at the
Speaker 1: site of restoration work happening at a museum at the palace,
Speaker 1: and it's believed that this wall has not been altered
Speaker 1: or repaired since it was originally built, and that makes
Speaker 1: it a unique opportunity to study building techniques from that time.
Speaker 1: It's believed that this wall originally formed part of a moat.
Speaker 1: Egypt's new National Museum of Egyptian Civilization has been partially
Speaker 1: open for a few years now, but it finally opened
Speaker 1: in full in April of this year. Many of the
Speaker 1: items in its collection were previously held in other Egyptian museums,
Speaker 1: including the mummies of eighteen kings and four queens that
Speaker 1: have been housed at the Egyptian Museum. On April three,
Speaker 1: these mummies were moved via the Pharaoh's Golden Parade, traveling
Speaker 1: about five kilometers that's three point one miles to get there.
Speaker 1: The procession was arranged in chronological order, with the oldest
Speaker 1: of the mummies first, and some of the most famous
Speaker 1: mummies in the procession included that of Ramsey's The Seconds,
Speaker 1: and the one who's believed to be previous podcast subject
Speaker 1: hot cheps It. If you missed this when it happened,
Speaker 1: it was beautiful. There was a lot of spectacle involved,
Speaker 1: with all of the mummies transported in specially designed shock
Speaker 1: absorbing vehicles that look almost like if you try to
Speaker 1: make a tank look like a boat, a nod to
Speaker 1: the way many of the mummies had previously been transported
Speaker 1: by boat. The roads they traveled on were also freshly
Speaker 1: paved to minimize any possible jostling, and once all of
Speaker 1: the mummies were settled in the new Royal Hall of Mummies,
Speaker 1: they were open for public view on April eighteen. So
Speaker 1: at this point in the pandemic, Egypt had lifted a
Speaker 1: lot of the restrictions on outdoor gatherings, but the event
Speaker 1: was still staged to play really well on screen, including
Speaker 1: things like putting up barriers to keep the cameras from
Speaker 1: catching poorer parts of the city. So we've tacked on
Speaker 1: previous installments of An Earth about how the tourism industry
Speaker 1: is a big part of Egypt's economy and that has
Speaker 1: been just devastated during the pandemic. So this broadcast, which
Speaker 1: was aired live on YouTube, was meant to try to
Speaker 1: help bridge that gap, along with a lot of other
Speaker 1: like public openings of mummies and public reveals of things
Speaker 1: that have been found at archaeology digs and things like
Speaker 1: that that have been happening over the course of the pandemic.
Speaker 1: So in our last bit of potpourri before we take
Speaker 1: a break, the paper A Short Scam of Maori Journeys
Speaker 1: to Antarctica, published in the Journal of the Royal Society
Speaker 1: of New Zealand in June, has walked through the history
Speaker 1: of Maori voyages to the waters around Antarctica and the
Speaker 1: continent of Antarctica itself. These voyages began around the seventh
Speaker 1: century with a Polynesian voyager named Hui Ti Reniura. Maori
Speaker 1: oral traditions described this person as the first human to
Speaker 1: travel to the Antarctic. Because paper also traces the involvement
Speaker 1: of Maori in European led expeditions to Antarctica that started
Speaker 1: more than a thousand years after that, and if you
Speaker 1: read accounts of these expeditions that are written by Europeans,
Speaker 1: they often just leave out the Maori contributions to the expeditions.
Speaker 1: So this work involved analyzing literature that detailed Antarctic voyages
Speaker 1: as well as the oral traditions that were maintained in
Speaker 1: Maori communities. Some reporting on this has framed early Polynesian
Speaker 1: voyages to Antarctic waters as totally new information. But this
Speaker 1: is really an established part of Maori oral tradition that
Speaker 1: it just became more widely known with this paper and
Speaker 1: the media coverage that has surrounded this paper. And now
Speaker 1: we're going to take a quick sponsor break. Next up,
Speaker 1: we have some repatriations. First, authorities in Italy have recovered
Speaker 1: more than eight hundred artifacts worth an estimated eleven million
Speaker 1: euros from one Belgian collector who was running illicit digs
Speaker 1: in the Apulia region of southern Italy. The investigation into
Speaker 1: this started in when somebody listed part of a funerary
Speaker 1: steely for sale, describing it as having come from a
Speaker 1: quote wealthy collector. This steely was missing a portion that
Speaker 1: was decorated with a part of a shield and a
Speaker 1: warrior on horseback, and those missing pieces were on a
Speaker 1: steely fragment in the collection of a southern Italian museum.
Speaker 1: Just like investigators saw, oh, we we have the missing
Speaker 1: piece of this in a museum, maybe the rest of
Speaker 1: this should really be in a museum. The recovered items
Speaker 1: have been described as an archaeological treasure. Most date from
Speaker 1: the sixth through the third entries b C and they
Speaker 1: include steely and for a, black glazed ceramics and terra
Speaker 1: cotta figurines, And in another repatriation to religiously significant stone
Speaker 1: lentels depicting the Hindu deities of Indra and Yama were
Speaker 1: returned to Thailand from the United States on May. These
Speaker 1: are believed to have been stolen from archaeological sites in
Speaker 1: Thailand during the Vietnam War, and they were on display
Speaker 1: at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco for decades.
Speaker 1: Returning the lentel's involved lengthy investigation by the Department of
Speaker 1: Homeland Security and a four year legal process. They were
Speaker 1: unveiled in Bangkok on May thirty one, and at that
Speaker 1: point Thai authorities were still deciding where their final home
Speaker 1: would be, with smaller museums near the border, with Cambodia
Speaker 1: being one possibility. And moving on to a repatriation that
Speaker 1: has involved human remains, researchers at Mercer University make in
Speaker 1: Georgia have returned a sensa or a shrunken heads to Ecuador.
Speaker 1: A former member of the faculty who's now deceased, had
Speaker 1: traded some of his personal items for this senso while
Speaker 1: serving in the U s. Military in Ecuador, this head
Speaker 1: had been on display at Mercer and had also been
Speaker 1: used in the John Houston film. Wise Blood researchers at
Speaker 1: the university spent years trying to authenticate it and to
Speaker 1: figure out exactly where it had come from so that
Speaker 1: it could be returned. Ecuador's National Cultural Heritage Institute provided
Speaker 1: the university with a list of thirty three criteria to
Speaker 1: validate the sensas authenticity, and they were able to confirm
Speaker 1: thirty of those. So the university actually repatriated that sensa
Speaker 1: to the Ecuadorian consulate in Atlanta back in not totally
Speaker 1: clear whether it has made it all the way back
Speaker 1: to Ecuador yet, And this wound up in this installment
Speaker 1: of Unearthed because this spring the team published an open
Speaker 1: access paper titled the Authentication and Repatriation of a Ceremonial
Speaker 1: Sansa to its country of origin. They published that in
Speaker 1: the journal Heritage Science, detailing this whole process. Now we
Speaker 1: have got several exhumations to discuss. Archaeological work ahead of
Speaker 1: an airport expansion on the Dutch Caribbean island of sent
Speaker 1: Eustasius has uncovered a burial site. Since the area used
Speaker 1: to be a plantation, it is likely that the bodies
Speaker 1: buried there were enslaved Africans, many of whom had been
Speaker 1: born in Africa. As of the end of May, forty
Speaker 1: eight skeletons had been discovered at the site, but it
Speaker 1: was believed to contain many more, possibly making it the
Speaker 1: largest such burial site discovered in the Caribbean. Initial analysis
Speaker 1: suggested that the people buried there were as we said,
Speaker 1: of African descent, but a lot more research into this
Speaker 1: is needed and planned to get a fuller sense of it.
Speaker 1: Like they already have multiple different people of different specialties
Speaker 1: ready to work on studying and and learning more about
Speaker 1: these people. Yeah, this is one of those things that's
Speaker 1: so early in the process, it's kind of all all
Speaker 1: up in the air. In another piece of news, the
Speaker 1: remains of the unidentified person known as the Summerton Man
Speaker 1: have been exhumed in Australia. He was found dead on
Speaker 1: December one, and his cause of death could not be determined.
Speaker 1: When he was found, he was neatly dressed and well groomed,
Speaker 1: holding a partially smoked cigarette and carrying no kind of
Speaker 1: identification that could confirm his identity. Yeah, I think this
Speaker 1: has been on the shortlist for an episode by what
Speaker 1: or the other of us for a long time. Yes,
Speaker 1: and I know stuff you should know. I think did
Speaker 1: an episode on it as well. I think so. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So train tickets that were found in this man's pockets
Speaker 1: raised more questions than they answered, as did a scrap
Speaker 1: of paper reading tomm should which is the which are
Speaker 1: the last words of the pillar? The rubiat that was
Speaker 1: found in his fob pocket. The words had been torn
Speaker 1: out of a book that a different, unnamed man found
Speaker 1: in his car on November and then written in that
Speaker 1: book that were a phone number and a strange code,
Speaker 1: neither of which helped investigators crack this case. This is
Speaker 1: a long running unsolved mystery, and scientists hope to use
Speaker 1: DNA testing to determine the man's identity, something that had
Speaker 1: not happened yet when we recorded this. The body of
Speaker 1: murder victim Joe Anne Fox was exhumed in Tarahote, Indiana
Speaker 1: in late June. Fox had been a mother of three,
Speaker 1: and she was murdered on June nineteen sixty seven. The
Speaker 1: case went cold, though, and was reopened in ten when
Speaker 1: her name came up during investigations into a different cold case,
Speaker 1: that was the murder of Pamela Milem who was killed
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy two. Her killer was actually identified in
Speaker 1: so this exclamation was done to try to gather additional
Speaker 1: evidence after a person of interest was identified in this case,
Speaker 1: and the results of that work have not been publicized
Speaker 1: as of when we recorded this. Officials in England are
Speaker 1: exhuming as many as three thousand bodies from a Buckinghamshire
Speaker 1: churchyard ahead of the construction of the high speed rail
Speaker 1: line known as HS two. Other mass disinterments involving the
Speaker 1: HS two line have included the moving of at least
Speaker 1: sixty thousand bodies from a former burial site at Houston Station.
Speaker 1: In this current removal is going on at Old St
Speaker 1: Mary's Churchyard and it's just one aspect of archaeological work
Speaker 1: being done before the construction of the rail line. Other
Speaker 1: archaeological finds ahead ahead of the HS two have come
Speaker 1: up on previous editions of unearthed and an archaeological project
Speaker 1: along the line that will run from London to Birmingham
Speaker 1: is being described as the largest archaeological dig ever done
Speaker 1: in the UK and our last exhimation. This time around,
Speaker 1: the remains of Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader
Speaker 1: Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife Mary Anne were exhumed
Speaker 1: from their burial site in Memphis, Tennessee, and moved to
Speaker 1: the National Confederate Museum in Columbia. As this was going on,
Speaker 1: opponents to the removal waived Confederate flags, dumped debris from
Speaker 1: the site on a Black Lives Matter mural, and harassed
Speaker 1: and threatened Black activists and city officials who had advocated
Speaker 1: for it. So forests remains were buried under a large
Speaker 1: marble base in Health Sciences Park, so that obviously was
Speaker 1: gonna take a long time to deal with. So officials
Speaker 1: started this work in May, hoping that they would be
Speaker 1: done with it before Juneteenth celebrations started in the park.
Speaker 1: This actually was successful. The removal was completed on June eleven.
Speaker 1: All right, now we're moving onto a few historical mysteries
Speaker 1: that have been solved at least somewhat. Researchers at Lund
Speaker 1: University in Sweden have been studying the remains of Lutheran
Speaker 1: Bishop Payeter Windstrop, who died in sixteventy nine and was
Speaker 1: buried in the family crypt. At some point a small
Speaker 1: bundle was placed in the coffin with windstrips remains situated
Speaker 1: between its calves. For a time that bundle's contents were
Speaker 1: totally unknown, but after X raying the bundle, researchers discovered
Speaker 1: that it contained a very small set of remains, probably
Speaker 1: a fetus that had been still born at about five
Speaker 1: or six months gestation. So that still left a lot
Speaker 1: of unanswered questions. But according to the paper related in
Speaker 1: Death A Curious Case of a Fetus Hidden and Bishop
Speaker 1: Patter Windstrips, Coffin and Lund, Sweden, which was published in
Speaker 1: the Journal of Archaeological Science, reports the bishop and the
Speaker 1: fetus were related. They share about their genes, which according
Speaker 1: to the paper, could mean that the bishop was the
Speaker 1: fetuses uncle or half brother or grandfather. That, of course,
Speaker 1: does not answer all of the questions. Though it was
Speaker 1: not uncommon in seventeenth century Sweden for children to be
Speaker 1: buried in coffins with adults, but it's not known exactly
Speaker 1: why or even when this fetus was placed in the
Speaker 1: bishop's coffin. It is possible, but definitely not proven, that
Speaker 1: this is the only son of the bishop's son. Also
Speaker 1: named Podor, who chose to study math and military fortification
Speaker 1: rather than joining the church like his father and grandfather.
Speaker 1: So one possible explanation is that this was something of
Speaker 1: a symbolic gesture placing the last of the Windstrip family
Speaker 1: line in the coffin with his grandfather. Aside from that,
Speaker 1: the bishop's remains, they're just an extraordinarily good condition. They
Speaker 1: essentially went through a natural mummification process. He was buried
Speaker 1: wearing very fine clothing with the coffin law mind, with
Speaker 1: herbaceous plants and covered in silk, and all of that
Speaker 1: is just an extremely good condition, especially considering how old
Speaker 1: it is. The coffin had been removed for reburial in
Speaker 1: twelve and a multidisciplinary team from Lundon University and the
Speaker 1: Lundon University Historical Museum got permission to study it when
Speaker 1: they realized just how well preserved it was. Next up,
Speaker 1: researchers have used muonic X ray analysis to figure out
Speaker 1: what's in a nineteenth century medicine bottle used by Japanese
Speaker 1: doctor Ogata Kwan. Ogata had established a school for Western
Speaker 1: Technology and Medicine, which is credited as the starting point
Speaker 1: of the Osaka University Faculty of Medicine. The bottle was
Speaker 1: from one of two medicine chess in the Osaka University
Speaker 1: collection and could no longer be open thanks to the
Speaker 1: passage of time. This bottle was also believed to hold
Speaker 1: mer curate chloride because the symbol for con was on
Speaker 1: the stopper, and in Japanese CONCO stands for mercuric chloride.
Speaker 1: The muonic X ray analysis confirmed this without anybody having
Speaker 1: to get the bottle open or damage its contents. And
Speaker 1: now for our last somewhat solved mystery. After analyzing a
Speaker 1: skull and jaw bone fragment found in Israel, researchers are
Speaker 1: describing some previously discovered but hard to classify fossils as
Speaker 1: being part of one group nesher Ramla Homo, named for
Speaker 1: the nesher Rambla site. These fossils date back to onety
Speaker 1: thousand to one hundred twenty thousand years ago, and they've
Speaker 1: been hard to classify because they've had some features in
Speaker 1: common with both Neanderthals and with modern humans. So the
Speaker 1: potentially solved mystery here is that these hard to categorize
Speaker 1: fossils may really represent members of one group. With this
Speaker 1: skull and jaw bone fragment coming from one of its
Speaker 1: later members. And although researchers did not claim that these
Speaker 1: fossils represent an entirely new hominid species, articles about this
Speaker 1: definitely did with that. Let's take a sponsor break. We've
Speaker 1: talked a lot about middens and latrines on Unearthed over
Speaker 1: the years. Both of them are places where people dump
Speaker 1: their unwanted stuff and then later on that becomes a
Speaker 1: rich source of archaeological information. And we've got a couple
Speaker 1: of things related to that now. First, researchers have used
Speaker 1: uranium thorium dating to determine that a shell midden outside
Speaker 1: Cape Town is between a hundred nine hundred thousand and
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand years old. That makes this the oldest
Speaker 1: known shell midden in the world. The shells that were
Speaker 1: used for this are ostrich shells, which are one of
Speaker 1: the most common food scraps in ancient Africa, but most
Speaker 1: of the shells in this particular midden are actually marine shells.
Speaker 1: Thanks to its location near the coast, the eggshells are
Speaker 1: just easier to date precisely than the marine shells are.
Speaker 1: We have talked about all kinds of things pulled out
Speaker 1: of latrines over the last many years of on Earth,
Speaker 1: but this time it is an entire latrine pulled out
Speaker 1: of the ground. Excavations ahead of a planned real estate
Speaker 1: development started in Berlin in and in April, archaeologists raised
Speaker 1: an entire litrine and all of its contents. This latrine
Speaker 1: dates back to about the fourteenth century, and like most
Speaker 1: such latrines, it is full of things like animal bones
Speaker 1: and broken pottery and other refuse, in addition to the
Speaker 1: human bodily waste that would have gone into it. So
Speaker 1: to make this site ready for the construction, a crew
Speaker 1: stabilized the walls of the latrine and they pulled the
Speaker 1: whole thing up with a crane, carving out a block
Speaker 1: that's roughly six square and a little more than six
Speaker 1: ft deep. This whole thing is going to be studied
Speaker 1: and conserved and eventually put on display, and it's estimated
Speaker 1: that it will be ready for public viewing in three Okay,
Speaker 1: we are moving on to a couple of cool maps.
Speaker 1: A team from multiple research centers and universities has put
Speaker 1: together a digital platform to map out trade routes used
Speaker 1: by the Hanseatic League, which dominated trade in northern Europe
Speaker 1: from thirteen fifty to sixteen fifty. Historian Dr Bart Holterman
Speaker 1: from the Institute for Historical Research at the University of
Speaker 1: Gottingen has described it as an open street map for
Speaker 1: the Hanseatic period, something researchers can use to map out
Speaker 1: travel routs and estimate travel times, and which also includes
Speaker 1: the dates for when fares were held in different cities
Speaker 1: and towns, and there is also information about the towns themselves,
Speaker 1: like whether they had a harbor or a ferry and
Speaker 1: whether tolls were collected. So this digital platform is called
Speaker 1: via Bundus and it is at viabundus dot eu. I
Speaker 1: have found this to be so cool. I find the
Speaker 1: whole thing fascinating. The first thing it made me think
Speaker 1: of was actually Bram Stoker, who loved to map out
Speaker 1: how things would work, and I could picture him being like,
Speaker 1: this is a treasure trove. Yeah. It made me think
Speaker 1: about when I was researching that episode about getting the
Speaker 1: smallpox vaccine across the Atlantic Ocean, and I went down
Speaker 1: this rabbit hole of trying to figure out the transit
Speaker 1: time of getting across the North Atlantic versus the transit
Speaker 1: time of getting to the Caribbean. And a lot. In
Speaker 1: other news, A rediscovered stone slab in western France maybe
Speaker 1: the oldest three D map of a known area in Europe.
Speaker 1: This slab was first discovered way back in nineteen by
Speaker 1: archaeologist Paul de Chatelier at a prehistoric burial ground in
Speaker 1: western Brittany, but then it went into storage under the
Speaker 1: moat of his chateau, where it was unearthed for a
Speaker 1: second time in After doing some analysis, researchers concluded that
Speaker 1: it is a three D map of the River Odette Valley.
Speaker 1: It is less clear exactly why this map was made.
Speaker 1: One idea is that it was used to mark a
Speaker 1: high ranking person's territory, like maybe a prince or a
Speaker 1: minor king. This piece is known as the Sambalex lab
Speaker 1: and it dates back to somewhere between nine hundred and
Speaker 1: sixteen fifty b C. All right, now, it is time
Speaker 1: for another listener favorite, that being shipwrecks. The wreck of
Speaker 1: a British submarine was found off the coast of Malta
Speaker 1: in nineteen where it had been sunk by a German
Speaker 1: mine in World War Two. The wreck was spotted thanks
Speaker 1: to an autonomous underwater vehicle, but dives to the site
Speaker 1: were postponed due to the pandemic. In April, maritime archaeologists
Speaker 1: from the University of Malta made a series of dives
Speaker 1: to the wreck and established that it was the HMS Urge.
Speaker 1: The Urge had become the subject of debate over the
Speaker 1: last few years after a diver found a different wrecked
Speaker 1: submarine off the coast of Libya and claimed that that
Speaker 1: was the Urge. This had led to some speculation that
Speaker 1: the Urge had been part of a secret or maybe
Speaker 1: unauthorized mission and had been sunk by Italian aircraft. That
Speaker 1: wreck off the coast of Libya is definitely not the Urge,
Speaker 1: though the one off the coast of Malta is clearly
Speaker 1: marked as the Urge, with obvious damage from a mine
Speaker 1: in its hole near the bow. It took some effort
Speaker 1: to get pictures of the ship's name, though the ship
Speaker 1: had been corroded through its years in the sea and
Speaker 1: it's now home to a legally protected species of coral. Yeah,
Speaker 1: once they were able to get the right angle on it,
Speaker 1: like it very obviously, says the Urge on the air UH.
Speaker 1: In other news, a sixteenth century bronze cannon that may
Speaker 1: have been carried aboard a second Spanish Armada worship has
Speaker 1: been recovered by Spanish police after it was removed from
Speaker 1: the sea floor. Shellfish divers had found this cannon in
Speaker 1: mid April and they had reported it. They said they
Speaker 1: stumbled on these three cannons down there, but then when
Speaker 1: authorities showed up to get the cannons, there were only two.
Speaker 1: The police questioned several suspects in this. They found a
Speaker 1: video of somebody pulling the cannon up from the ocean floor.
Speaker 1: They found out where that person was. They speculated that
Speaker 1: this person just did that on a whim. At last check,
Speaker 1: authorities were deciding how best to preserve these cannons. Back
Speaker 1: in our year end Unearthed for we talked about the
Speaker 1: discovery of a wreck believed to be the Vasa sister ship.
Speaker 1: The Vassa sank on its maiden voyage, and it was
Speaker 1: covered in the episode More Shipwreck Stories Battleships. Way back
Speaker 1: in TWN, the Vassa's sister ship was the Opplet, And
Speaker 1: as it turned out, that wreck we previously discussed is
Speaker 1: not the Opplet, it is really two Rex. The Apollo
Speaker 1: and Maria. Analysis of some of the timbers from these
Speaker 1: wrecks showed that they were from trees that were felled
Speaker 1: during the winter of sixteen forty six to sixteen forty seven.
Speaker 1: That was way too late for this to be the Applet,
Speaker 1: which was built not long after the Vassa sank in
Speaker 1: sixteen twenty eight. The Apollo and the Maria both saw
Speaker 1: combat in the sixteen fifties, and We're deliberately scuttled at
Speaker 1: Vaxholm in sixteen seventy seven in an attempt to make
Speaker 1: it harder for enemy ships to make their way through
Speaker 1: a set of narrow straits to get to Stockholm. Our
Speaker 1: next shipwreck is an eighteenth century shipwreck that's been found
Speaker 1: off the coast of Antigua, but at this point it's
Speaker 1: really not clear what ship it might be. The British
Speaker 1: kept very careful records of the dockyard there and they
Speaker 1: have not really yielded any clues. There is some speculation
Speaker 1: that it's the French East India Company vessel Beaumont, which
Speaker 1: was later sold and renamed the Leon, but it is
Speaker 1: not clear at this point if that's correct. This is
Speaker 1: a really well preserved wreck, though, and it measure about
Speaker 1: forty meters in length. And lastly, in shipwrecks. Noah has
Speaker 1: designated part of Lake Michigan as a sanctuary for shipwrecks,
Speaker 1: protecting nine hundred sixty two square miles of the lake.
Speaker 1: This area contains the wrecks of thirty six known wrecks,
Speaker 1: along with as many as sixty that have not yet
Speaker 1: been discovered. And now we've got a couple of papers
Speaker 1: that are related to plague to discuss. First, researchers have
Speaker 1: used DNA from the teeth of people who died during
Speaker 1: the Black Death Years to determine whether they definitively died
Speaker 1: of plague or something else. Previously, most plague victims had
Speaker 1: been associated with being buried in mass graves, but researchers
Speaker 1: believed that at least some or even most people who
Speaker 1: died of the plague received an individual burial. But for
Speaker 1: a long time it just wasn't possible to figure this
Speaker 1: out because the technology had not evolved to allow that yet.
Speaker 1: Plague doesn't typically leave evidence on people's skeletons, and at
Speaker 1: this point, skeletons are what's left to examine. Through DNA analysis,
Speaker 1: the team found people who had died of plague in
Speaker 1: individual graves in Cambridge and in the nearby village of Clopton,
Speaker 1: rather than in a rushed mass burial that the Black
Speaker 1: Death brings to mind. The studies lead author Craig Sesford
Speaker 1: of the University of Cambridge said, quote, these individual burials
Speaker 1: show that even during plague outbreaks, individual people were being
Speaker 1: buried with considerable care and attention. And according to research
Speaker 1: published in the journal Cell Reports in June, the oldest
Speaker 1: known strain of your Cinea pestis bacteria has been found
Speaker 1: in the remains of a five thousand year old hunter gatherer.
Speaker 1: This is two thousand years earlier than the previously believed
Speaker 1: first strain of the plague. It's not clear how the
Speaker 1: disease presented itself in this person, but since there were
Speaker 1: bacteria in his bloodstream, he probably died of it. There
Speaker 1: was no sign of plague in the remains of people
Speaker 1: near him, which makes it seem as though this very
Speaker 1: early strain of plague was not particularly contagious. It may
Speaker 1: have been contracted directly from a bite from an infected rodent.
Speaker 1: And as a final kind of fun thing to end
Speaker 1: on the physical effects of two pointy shoes, researchers at
Speaker 1: the University of Cambridge have concluded that wealthier medieval people's
Speaker 1: love of very pointy toad shoes known as poulin led
Speaker 1: them to develop bunyans, and among skeletons that showed evidence
Speaker 1: of bunyan's, people were also more likely to have evidence
Speaker 1: of a broken bone sustained in a fall. So this
Speaker 1: research involved the study of a hundred and seventies seven
Speaker 1: skeletons buried in and around Cambridge, and the skeletons that
Speaker 1: were dated from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, when
Speaker 1: people's shoes had a relatively practical rounded toebox, on least
Speaker 1: six percent of people had evidence of bunyans. But then
Speaker 1: in the fourteenth and fifteen centuries, when poule and popularity
Speaker 1: really hit its peaked, twenty seven percent of people had
Speaker 1: evidence of bunyans, and this also varied by class. Only
Speaker 1: about three percent of skeletons in rural areas had bunyans,
Speaker 1: but fort of people buried at the Friary did, nearly
Speaker 1: half of whom were clergy, and it appears that clergy
Speaker 1: were wearing fashionable pointy shoes in spite of laws forbidding
Speaker 1: them from doing so. Listen I don't need this kind
Speaker 1: of negativity of my life. I really don't. They are
Speaker 1: extraordinarily pointy shoes, far pointier than any pointy shoes that
Speaker 1: a person here in the US probably be wearing today. Uh.
Speaker 1: That is our Unearthed except for these special Unearthed listener
Speaker 1: mail that I have from Kayla. Kayla wrote to say, Hi,
Speaker 1: Holly and Tracy. I wanted to start by letting you
Speaker 1: know that I really enjoy your show. I listened when
Speaker 1: I saw Crochet and even to help me fall asleep,
Speaker 1: and I really mean that as a compliment. I am
Speaker 1: an undergraduate student of anthropology focusing my work right now
Speaker 1: on stable isotopes, specifically using them to learn more about
Speaker 1: non human grade eights and other primates. I just finished
Speaker 1: your episode on hatchtep Suit and the Kingdom of Punt
Speaker 1: I just started listening to your show, so I'm really
Speaker 1: far behind you. Briefly mentioned researchers using oxygen isotope ratios
Speaker 1: from a mummified baboon to try to locate pot in.
Speaker 1: After that specific episode came out, another study was published
Speaker 1: do the same thing, this time using stronium stable isotopes instead.
Speaker 1: Stronium is located in bedrock and enters the body via
Speaker 1: the food chain. You are what you eat. It's composition
Speaker 1: barries depending on your geographic location. Thus it can be
Speaker 1: used to trace migration patterns. Bioarchaeologist contest stronium isotope compositions
Speaker 1: in tooth enamel, which has formed early in development and
Speaker 1: can place the individual around their time of birth slash adolescents.
Speaker 1: This can be compared to stronium isotope ratios in bone
Speaker 1: and hair, which regenerate relatively frequently and that can therefore
Speaker 1: place an individual near their time of death. In the
Speaker 1: study I previously mentioned, anthropologists used stronium and oxygen stable
Speaker 1: isotopes from baboons from the New Kingdom and Ptolemaic periods
Speaker 1: in ancient Egypt to try to locate pooped. One of
Speaker 1: the baboon's stronium isotope ratios from its enamel that places
Speaker 1: its early life somewhere in present day Ethiopia, Air Trea, Jabouty,
Speaker 1: and parts of Somalia and Yemen, while the austronium isotope
Speaker 1: ratio in the bones revealed it had lived in Egypt
Speaker 1: for years before its death. This study pretty much just
Speaker 1: confirms previous works that place pooped near the Horn of Africa.
Speaker 1: But I wanted to send the paper along to you
Speaker 1: because it goes into the cultural significance of baboons in
Speaker 1: ancient Egyptian culture burial context and has some beautifu images
Speaker 1: of ancient Egyptian art and mummified baboons. I thought you'd
Speaker 1: be interested in this, uh. And then Kayla attached the
Speaker 1: PDF and said, thank you for the work you do
Speaker 1: keeping people stories alive and for curing my insomnia at
Speaker 1: the same time. Ha ha, take care best, Caleb. Thank
Speaker 1: you so much, Kayleb for sending this. It's possible that
Speaker 1: this later came up on Unearthed on the show, but
Speaker 1: I don't actually remember, and I really enjoyed getting this
Speaker 1: email just as I was working on Unearthed. Also, honestly,
Speaker 1: I don't fault people for listening to the show to
Speaker 1: fall asleep. Sometimes. I know for sure there are times
Speaker 1: that I am doing something in my house and I'm
Speaker 1: listening to podcasts and I realized what I'm really doing
Speaker 1: is just having the cadence of people's voices keeping me company,
Speaker 1: rather than listening to what they're saying. Yeah, I definitely
Speaker 1: grew up in in a TV house not a music house,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, where TV is the background,
Speaker 1: and so for me, that's very very common, and it's
Speaker 1: very very comforting and I love it. So if listen
Speaker 1: anyway that our work helps anybody, I'm honored and delighted. Yep,
Speaker 1: here for it. So thank you so much for that email.
Speaker 1: If you would like to send us email, We're at
Speaker 1: History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. We've had
Speaker 1: a lot of people contacting us on social media recently
Speaker 1: asking how they can send topic suggestions and the answer
Speaker 1: is the email address of History Podcast at I heeart
Speaker 1: radio dot com. That is really the easiest place to
Speaker 1: keep up with versus things like tweets that I've may
Speaker 1: see but then never see again. Uh so History podcast
Speaker 1: that I heart radio dot com. We're also all over
Speaker 1: social media I Missed in History. That's ree'll find our
Speaker 1: Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram. And you can
Speaker 1: subscribe to our show on the I heart radio app
Speaker 1: and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed
Speaker 1: in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the iHeart
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Speaker 1: favorite shows, h