Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly fry Back. When we went to Paris in twenty nineteen, which just it feels like eons ago and maybe something that happened on another planet. At this point, I saw the lady in the unicorn tapestries that the muse de Cluny, and these tapestries are beautiful. After I looked at the tapestries and then I went through the entire rest of the museum, I went back into the tapestry room and just sat with them for a while. After we got back to the US, I kept trying and failing to figure out how to do an episode on these tapestries, and then it finally dawned on me that looking at unicorns more broadly might be the way to go, rather than trying to like intricately describe tapestries with our words on an audio podcastst we will be talking about the tapestries, but more of a general history of unicorns. Just a heads up though that the history of unicorn lore includes a lot of lore about people hunting them and towards the end of this episode will also be covering some modern history that touches on animal cruelty. You probably know exactly what animal we mean when we say unicorn, but spelling it out to level set is actually kind of tricky because descriptions and depictions of unicorns have shifted a lot over the millennia. Even something very very basic like saying a mythical magical quadruped that has only one horn does not necessarily always work. Case in point, the paleolithic art in Lasco Cave network in France spell seventeen thousand years old, and one particular animal depicted there has been nicknamed the unicorn, and sometimes that's described as the oldest depiction of a unicorn in the world. This is in the main chamber of those caves that's known as the rotunda or the Hall of the Bulls, and the animal in question has four legs and a sagging belly and a kind of squarish head. But in spite of its nickname and the fact that people like to say it's the oldest depiction of a unicorn, it definitely has two very long, straight horns. It is so clearly two horns rather than one that I went down a huge and unsuccessful rabbit hole trying to figure out who first called it the unicorn and why they did that? Like was there a shadow? Was the cave all art? Like? What was happening? I am not the only person to find this naming weird. French archaeologist Annette Lemming Empereire, who specialized in cave art, called the unicorn quote most inappropriately named in her book on these paintings. Even though those two horns raised some questions about the unicorn Moniker, this doesn't really look like a real animal, and it's the only animal depiction in the Lisco Caves that isn't readily identifiable as something specific like a horse or a stag or a bull. Some sources describe it as almost feline. Overall, it is not as skilled or elegant in its execution as other artwork in the cave, so it's possible that it's just an early piece of work by someone who wasn't experienced. But there's also speculation that it was intentionally obscured in some way and that it depicts a person dressed as an animal, or maybe that it shows an animal that is mythical or imaginary. Another early depiction more clearly shows a one horned animal, but there is still some speculation involved. This is found on seals from the Indus Valleys realization, also known as the Harappan Civilization. This is the earliest known civilization on the Indian subcontinent, and it existed from roughly dred b c. We talked about the civilization a bit in our episode on Mohenjo Daro, which was one of its most important cities. These seals are small, they're usually square, and they are carved from stone in a way that would leave a clear positive imprint if you press it into a soft substance like clay. One of the most common motifs on these seals is usually described as a unicorn. It's a quadruped with a body a little like an rix or an ox, and it's shown in profile with a single long horn growing from its head just in front of the ear. There's been some speculation that this is a depiction of a real animal that actually had two horns. You just can't see it on the seal because the second horn is hidden behind the other one. At the same time, though these animals usually have all four of their legs visible, and other animals on other seals do have two horns with both of the horns visible. So at this point it's generally believed that these seals depict only one horn because the animal being shown had only one horn, and also that this might be a mythical animal rather than a living one. Unfortunately, the script that's on a lot of these seals cannot help answer this question because scholars haven't figured out how to read it yet. I imagine us cracking the code and it just being like, not relevant to the nige at all. An early depiction that definitely shows an animal with only one horn is a small brass statue from the Omlash culture and what's now Iran, dating back to the eighth or ninth century BC. This is a stylized goat like quadruped with one sort of sweeping flame like horn at the center of its head. It was found among some grave goods, but we really do not know its significance. One element of unicorn lore that we will talk about more in a bit is the idea that a unicorn is a magical beast who can only be captured by a virtuous maiden. And it's possible that, like the Indus Valley seals. This lore has roots on the Indian subcontinent. The Hindu epic poem Mahabharata was composed in Sanskrit and probably written down for the first time some time between three hundred b c E and three hundred c E, although it's circulated orally before that. This is both a historical and a religious text, and it includes lots of stories and folk tales. One of these is about a rishi or an enlightened sage named Riscius Ringa, whose mother was a celestial being cursed to take the form of a dome. Riscius Ringo was born with deer horns and raised by another sage who kept him secluded, teaching him phila sofie and holy texts away from society. After a drought and a famine struck a nearby kingdom, the king's advisers told him that the only way to bring back the rain was to find a rishi who had never seen a woman, and to marry that rishi to his daughter. The king's daughter lured Rischia Sringa out of the forest, and when they arrived back at the palace, the rain began. This is really the barest outline of this story. Riches Ringa is sometimes described as having one horn and sometimes two, and sometimes his name is translated to something like gazelle horn. But some scholars trace a through line from this and other myths and stories from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism to the unicorn hunt stories of medieval Europe in which a virgin tames or helps to capture or kill a unicorn. We should note, though, that this very basic virgin capture idea might go all the way back to one of the world's oldest works of literature, which is the epic of Gilgamesh, in which a woman seduces the wild man inky Do, although the woman in that case is not usually described as virtuous. The Chinning from Chinese mythology is sometimes called a Chinese unicorn. It has a body like a deer, covered with scales like a dragon, and a tail like an ox. These creatures are mystical and magical, described as so benevolent that they don't even harm the grass as they walk. They are associated with both the births and the deaths of sages and emperors, but the idea that they're a Chinese unicorn is something of a misnomer. While they are sometimes depicted as having only one horn, many many depictions have two horns or more. There are similar animals in the mythology of other parts of Asia with similar names, including the kirn in Japan and the guillen in Thailand. The earliest descriptions of unicorns in the Greek and Roman world also have Asian roots, which we will get to after a quick sponsor break. Many European descriptions of unicorns from the medieval period and later traced back to the work of Catisus of Natos, who was a Greek physician and historian who lived around four b C. And Ktisius's description goes back to what is now India. To be clear, Catius had not been to India. He lived in and traveled through Persia for about seventeen years while working as court physician to Achimanid kings Darius the second and Artisserxes the second. He met people who had traveled and traded along the Silk Road, and he wrote what he heard from them in his book Indica. This book is believed to be the first Greek work entirely about India. It wasn't particularly accurate Thoughts left Artisserses service around or three seven b c e and went back to Greece. That was only after that point that he wrote his Indica, along with a similar book that was on Persia. A lot of what he wrote was probably second hand at best. He learned it from people whose travels might not have taken them all that close to the Indian subcontinent. He also documented stories from myths and epic poems as though they were just straightforward fat. To make matters worse, we don't have a complete copy of the Indica today, we just have fragments and quotes from it in the work of later writers, many of whom really thought he was a crackpot. In the Indicatsias describes quote certain wild asses there as big as a horse or bigger, as well as being strong and so fast that no other animal can outrun them. Catsius describes these animals as white with a crimson head, with a horn growing from their brow that's half a cubit in length. That's works out too approximately nine inches or twenty three centimeters. The horn is white at the bottom, black in the middle, and crimson at the tip. According to Ctesius, the meat of these animals is too bitter to eat, but they are hunted for their horns and their ankle bones or talus's. If somebody drinks from a cup made out of the horn, they're immune to poison and to seizures. The animals talus bone, also called the astragolis, is exceptionally beautiful and heavy, which is important because these bones were used to make dice for both divination and gaming. In Ktisius's account, this wild ass cannot be captured alive, so people hunt them by surrounding them in a pasture when they're with their young, and then using arrows and javelins. There are a lot of opinions about exactly what animal Ktisis might have been describing here. Poet and professor O'Dell Shepherd published a book called The Lore of the Unicorn in nine that's still cited today, and he can louted that Catsius conflated three different animals, a wild ass, a rhinoceros, and a cheru also called the Tibetan antelope. Others conclude that it is just one animal, a badly described rhinoceros, and that Catsius thought the horn was multicolored because he had seen rhinoceros horn cups that were decorated that way. One of the question marks here involves that talus bone. Although Catsius did not say he had personally ever seen one of these animals, he did say he had seen it's a stragg list. He described it as looking like the astragg list of an ox. Typically, the ankle bones of hoofed animals were the ones that were used to make dice, and oxen have hooves, so that makes sense. But a rhinoceros does not have hooves, and if Catsius saw one of their talus bones, he probably would not have described it as the most beautiful as stragglers he had ever seen, which is what he said about the unicorn. But own, I mean, you know, tasteberries. Writing a few decades later, Aristotle was dismissive of Catsius's work, but he's still referenced to the quote Indian ass. In his The History of Animals, he wrote quote, some animals have horns, others have none. Most of those with horns also have cloven feet, as the ox, the stag, and the goat. We have never seen an animal with a solid hoof with two horns, and there are only a few that have a solid hoof and one horn, as the Indian ass and the orix. Of all animals with a solid hoof, the Indian ass alone has a talus. It is not clear what animal Aristotle was talking about when he mentioned the orix here, since the orax is a real animal and it has two horns. But the history of animals reinforced this idea that in India, and maybe also in Africa, since Orax has lived there, there was a unique animal that had only one horn, whose horn had some special property eives. In general, one horned animals were clearly seen as remarkable and worthy of note. Julius Caesar's commentaries on the Gallic Wars, written around fifty b C, includes descriptions of the strange animals of the Hersinian forest. One is an animal that has the shape of an ox and a deer, but with one horn branched like a hand, stretching out from its forehead in between its ears. Sometimes this gets kind of distilled. To Julius Caesar said there were unicorns in Germany. Plenty of the Elder's Natural History, published in seventy seven CE, describes an Indian animal with one horn in a way that seems to have come from Catsius's earlier writing, but he goes on to say that people in India hunt quote a very fierce animal called the monocaros, which has the head of stag, the feet of the elephant, and the tail of the bore, while the rest of the body is like that of the horse. It makes a deep, lowing noise and has a single black horn which projects from the middle of its forehead two cubits in the length. This animal, it is said, cannot be taken alive. Later Roman writers returned again to Catsius's description, including alien around the second century. Aliens description is quite similar to the one of Catsius, except he describes the animal's body as red with a black horn. By about this point, an animal called the monoceros was becoming used as a symbol or allegory in Christian artwork. There are a whole lot of depictions that today we would call unicorns that are represented in mosaics and reliefs and tapestries and manuscript illuminations. Unicorns came to represent purity and chastity, as well as sometimes representing Jesus Christ. A round the year one ninety or Tullian of Carthage wrote that the unicorns horn represented the Cross. Depictions of unicorns being hunted often included wounds that were reminiscent of Jesus Christ's wounds during his crucifixion, and sometimes maidens that were depicted along with the unicorn were meant to represent the Virgin Mary. By about the third century CE, the Greek word minosterros had made its way into translations of the Christian Bible in place of the Hebrew word re m. In modern Hebrew, this is often translated as orix, although there is some argument that it references the now extinct rox. Just to be clear, since we got a lot of email the last time these came up, the rix o r y x is an antelope with long horns. It still lives today, but the rax a u r o c hs is a bovine species that is now extinct. Over time, the Greek word minosterros was translated as the Latin word unicornis way back at the beginning of this episode, we talked about epic poems in which wild men were captured by a maid, and by the fourth century this idea had also folded into the unicorn lore. Instead of being impossible to catch alive. Unicorns were depicted as approachable only by virtuous young women. One of the earliest appearances of this idea is in the collection known as the Physiologists, whose author is unknown. This is a beastiary written sometime between the second and fourth centuries, and one passage describes the unicorn as strong and fierce and capable of being caught only with the help of a maid. In his Etymologies, Spanish cleric Isadore of Seville wrote of the monoceros as a tremendously strong animal, capable of killing elephants with its horn. Isadora agreed with the author of the Physiologists. According to Isadore, that there was only one way to catch it. Quote. If a virgin girl is placed in front of a unicorn and she bears her breast to it, all of its fierceness will cease, and it will lay its head on her bosom, and thus quieted, it is easily caught past podcast subject. Hildegard of Bingen also wrote about maidens catching unicorns in the eleventh century, with various parts of the unicorn having medicinal value. Mentions of the unicorn were not exclusive to Christian texts during this period. Islamic text described an animal called the carcadan, which physically resembled a rhinoceros and could be lured by a maiden. That animal's horn was also reported to treat poisoning. During the medieval period, unicorns proliferated in stories, poems, religious writings, beast theories, illuminated manuscripts just on and on, and they were also used in heraldry, for example, as part of the royal coat of arms of Scotland, which included a lion on a golden shield, supported on either side by a white unicorn bound in a golden chain. When James the sixth of Scotland ascended to the English throne as James the First in sixteen o three, the coat of arms retained the Scottish unicorn on one side, replacing it with a lion on the other. The idea that the unicorns horn could cure or prevent poisoning went all the way back to Catsius, and by the twelfth century people were selling purported unicorn horns. These were usually off white or ivory colored. They were long and narrow and spiraled, and so valuable and rare that they were passed down within royal and noble families will come back to these later. By the fourteenth century, belief in unicorns was widespread enough in Europe that people used the term to describe very real and pretty ordinary animals. Here is something Marco Polo wrote about what he saw in Sumatra. Quote. There are wild elephants in the country, and numerous unicorns, which are very nearly as big. They have hair like that of a buffalo, feet like those of an elephant, and a horn in the middle of the forehead, which is black and very thick. They do no mischief, however, with the horn, but with the tongue alone, for this is covered all over with long and strong prickles, And when savage with anyone, they crush him under their knees and then rasp him with their tongue. The head resembles that of a wild boar, and they carry it ever bent towards the ground. They delight much to abide in Meyer and mud. 'tis a passing, ugly beast to look upon, And it's not in the least like that which our stories tell of as being caught in the lap of a virgin. In fact, is altogether different from what we fancied. This is pretty clearly a description of a Sumatran rhinoceros, although that species really has two horns, with the larger nearer to the nose and the smaller one often just a little nub behind it. It really cracks me up that for Marco Polo it was a shorter walk to Wow. Unicorns sure are ugly, and this is different some other animals. We will get to the tapestries that inspired this episode after we take another quick sponsor break. Now we are finally to the subject that prompted me to do this episode, which is tapestries, specifically mild fleur or thousand flower tapestries. These have a background that are almost totally covered in these tiny flowers and plants. This style of tapestry was popular in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Europe, especially in France and the Low Countries. There were lots of tapestries made in this style, and there are two different sets that depict unicorns that are still in existence today and are among the greatest works of medieval artwork that we still have. One which we at the top of the show is the Lady in the Unicorn. This is a set of six tapestries made around fifteen hundred. The Music de Cluny acquired them in eighteen eighty two after they were discovered at a chateau a couple of decades before, where they were being damaged by dampness and rodents. Five of them represent the five senses touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight, and the sixth is called a Monsieur lizier or to my only desire. It's named for the words displayed on a tent shown in the tapestry. Like the name suggests, each of them depicts a lady in a unicorn. Each one also features a lion, and some also include other women or other animals, or sometimes both. The plants and animals that fill the backgrounds of these tapestries are real. They show things like oak and orange trees, holly, monkeys, rabbits, dogs, and various birds. They're also all clearly meant to be a set. They all have the same red background. The coat of arms of the Leaviste family is incorporated into each of them, and the elegant lady and the unicorn are always shown in a blue oval. Each of these tapestries has the lady doing something that's associated with the sense that is being portrayed, So in the one representing touch, she's touching the unicorn's horn, and in sight she is holding a mirror. It's really not known who wove these tapestries or where or which member of the Laviste family commissioned to them, which is presumably how they came to be made, and then there's debate about how to interpret them. Are they a meditation on the senses, is a monsour disy, a sixth sense, or some aspect that united all of the other senses, or just something else we haven't figured out yet. In that tapestry, the lady is placing some jewelry in a chest held by a maid, or perhaps removing the jewelry, and we don't know what is their significance. The other major set of unicorn tapestries is that the met cloisters in New York City, and it is a sequence depicting a hunt for the unicorn. There's some debate about what order these are meant to be shown in, as well as whether the ones that are generally listed first and last are really part of that same set. With those two included, they are the hunters enter the woods, the unicorn purifies water, the unicorn crosses a stream, the unicorn defense himself, the unicorn surrenders to a maiden, the hunters returned to the castle, and lastly, the unicorn rests in a garden, which is also called the unicorn in captivity. These were probably woven between four and fifteen o five, but they were first documented in sight in the home of Francois the six de la Rochefuco. The tapestry stayed in the La Rochuco family until the and Revolution, when they were looted but ultimately returned. John D. Rockefeller Jr. Bought them in nineteen twenty three and donated them to the met Cloisters in nineteen thirty seven. With the exception of the unicorn surrenders to the maiden, much of that one is missing, probably due to damage. After the tapestries were looted during the French Revolution. Rockefeller bought the remaining pieces separately after learning that the family still had them and that parts of them were being used to plug up drafty walls. As with the lady in the Unicorn tapestries, we don't know for sure who commissioned these or exactly where they were made, but each of them includes the letter A and a backward E, and that might be a clue. It's possible that these are made in celebration of the marriage of Anne of Brittany to Louis the twelfth in fourteen ninety nine. There's debate about how to interpret these tapestries as well. One interpretation is that the unicorn hunt is an allegory for the crucifixion of Jesus as Christ, and that if the unicorn rests in a garden is really part of the set, it's meant to represent the unicorn in a paradise or a unicorn that has been resurrected. Discussions of the symbolism in these tapestries extend not only to their subjects, but also to the plants and the animals in the militia background. These tapestry sets were made as European belief in unicorns as real magical animals was really approaching its peak, but by the late sixteenth century, more and more people were starting to express some skepticism about this. One was past podcast subject Emoise Pare, who described the unicorn as quote more imagined than real and natural in his Book of Venoms in fifteen seventy nine. His fifteen eighty two discourse on the Unicorn expressed his doubts about both unicorns as a real animal and cures that were supposedly made from their horns. An anonymously pub was Rebuttal compared Parade to the devil, and he responded by publishing retort of amboise parade to the response made against his Discourse of the Unicorn. This led to a whole huge back and forth that escalated all the way to people denouncing him to already the Third of France and Catherine de Medici. I love this idea of writing papers back and forth to yell at one another. Yeah it was. It's the slow Burn way to be angry. Yeah it was. It was like a Reddit thread. But in fifteen two. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sailors from places like Italy, Spain and Britain started voyaging farther into the Arctic searching for a passage to Asia, and they encountered an animal that people who lived in the far northern parts of the world already knew about. That was the narwhale. Narwhal's have a long, distinctive tooth, usually only one found most often but not exclusively, in males. In other words, they look like a way oh with a unicorn horn. It did not take long for people to make the connection between this long, straight, spiraling whale tooth and the alcorns or unicorn horns that had been passed down through families as remedies for poison. It's likely that some of these were made by other means, like getting a tusk of something else and like boiling it until it was soft enough to make it straighter in spirally. But in sixteen thirteen, Caspar Bartholn, the elder professor of medicine at the University of Copenhagen, started to believe that alcorns that were being held in cabinets of curiosities and other collections were really from narwhal's. His brother in law, Olivorm concluded the same after comparing narwhale skeletons with purported unicorn horns. Caspar Son Thomas compiled and synthesized their research and added his own material in sixty five, publishing it as New Observations about the unicorn. Thomas Bartolin concluded that alcorns were real and had powerfully effective medicinal uses, but that they were marine tusks, not the horns of land animals, so if you needed alcorn, you should buy it right from the source, that source being Scandinavian whalers. It cracks me up because it was really like these ones that come from an industry importance to where we live. People didn't entirely give up on the idea of unicorns as a real land animal, though. In sixteen sixty three a unicorn skeleton was purportedly discovered in a cave in Quedlburg, Germany. One of the people who believed that this skeleton was the real deal was scientist and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz. This is the person who developed differential and integral calcul lists independently of Isaac Newton, so presumably a smart person. When writing about this find, he referenced the Bartolon's earlier work about sea creatures, but also maintained that this skeleton was credible. It's not clear who assembled these bones and whether they intentionally did it to be deceptive, but this was probably an incomplete hodgepodge of mammoth and rhinoceros bones. Also in the seventeenth century, Dutch cartographer Petrus Plantius introduced a constellation called Minoceros in the northern sky, surrounded by Oriyan, Gemini Hydra, and Canus major. Although belief in real living unicorns eventually waned, efforts to find living specimens continued well into the nineteenth century, and the scientific effort to categorize and classify animals that we talked about in our recent episode on the platypus that extended to the unicorn as well. For example, George Cuvier, that's the person who thought the platypus belonged in the same order as ant eaters and spots. He argued that unicorns were anatomically impossible because they were typically depicted as having cloven hoofs, which meant that their skull could only produce two horns, not one. By the twentieth century, some people had moved from looking for unicorns to making them. Franklin Dove, biologists at the University of Maine, published works on horn physiology in the nineteen thirties, including surgically altering animals so that they would grow only one horn. Dove had been fascinated by stories of African herders manipulating the horns of their livestock so that they had only one horn or many, or horns that grew in interesting shapes, as well as herders in Nepal who had manipulated their rams to grow only a single horn. In May of nineteen thirty six, Dove published an article in Scientific Monthly called Artificial Production of the Fabulous Unicorn. He described how goats are born with two horn buds, and for about the first week of their life, those buds are part of their skin, not attached to their skull. So it was possible to surgically move the buds from the sides of the upper head to the middle so they would be next to each other, and then they would grow with the appearance of only one horn. Oberon Zel, also known as Oberon Zell Ravenhart built on this work in the nineteen seventies and eighties, applying for a patent on a surgical procedure under the name Timothy G. Z l In two. This patent was granted in nineteen eighty four. It describes a method for surgically repositioning in animal's horn buds so they grow at the appearance of only one horn. In addition to this surgical technique, Zell cross different breeds of goat so that they would have the silky hair of an angora, but with somewhat longer legs. Zell performed with the resulting animals at Renaissance Bears before signing a contract with Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus, with a goat named Lancelot and his brothers joining the show. The circus maintained that Lancelot was a real, living unicorn who had just wandered up to one of their tents in nineteen eighty four, and the goat was one of the circus's main acts In and eighty six. Ringling Brothers faced huge criticism from animal rights groups, including the Humane Society and the A s p c A, as well as multiple U. S d A inspections involving these animals. In early nine six, the animals were briefly confiscated following allegations that the circus was violating animal rights laws that banned the use of disfigured animals as entertainment. Purported unicorn discovery still occasionally make headlines. In A sloppy English translation of a release from the Korean Central News Agency led to a bunch of headlines that archaeologists in Pyongyang had discovered a unicor horns layer. There's a lot about this story that's unclear, from the exact site that was being described to why the English translation was worded the way that it was. But what the announcement was really about was a place called Kieran Ghoul or Kieran's Grotto, which is associated with King Tong Young, founder of the ancient kingdom of Cogurio, not a grotto belonging to a literal Kieran or a layer of an actual unicorn. And of course there are seemingly infinite unicorns and pop culture today. Trying to cover all of them would be a whole different podcast. I have one I want to talk about in our behind the scenes just quite a unicorn. We can do that, but a take on the unicorn story and its medicinal value. Do you have listener mail though I do. It's from Katie and it's about our recent Unearthed where we talked about the ethics of DNA research, and Katie wrote to say dear ally and Tracy just wanted to write a quick note about something you mentioned in your Unearthed part one this year and your discussion of the DNA analysis of sitting bowls hair, you mentioned that an ethical code for ancient DNA research was published in October in Nature. That code, while a good first step, was not without its problems and controversies. It was drafted by a group of over sixty active ancient DNA researchers out of a virtual meeting in However, multiple active ancient DNA researchers, several of whom are indigenous and who are extremely active in the global discussion of the ethics of ancient DNA and indigenous DNA in particular. We're not invited to that meeting. Just wanted to direct your attention to some of the excellent commentary by several of those scientists on those guidelines. See this commentary in the New York Times as well as this response piece in Nature. Thank you for all of your excellent work. Love your work from me and Miriam Rouge too. It's from Katie. I think Miriam Regrew is a PETS maybe, but I have not. The picture was broken unfortunately, so yes Um, I did not actually see any of this commentary because I had been trying to figure out where whether it's to talk in more detail about the DNA Code of Ethics that was published late last year, and I wound up just including it as like a one sentence aside, and I did not look further into all of the discussion around it, which I would have done with a longer treatment. So I'm sorry for dropping the ball on that, and thank you Katie for bringing my attention to it. Um. I did read the New York Times commentary. I was gonna say the response piece in Nature is behind a paywall. Probably the commentary of the New York Times is also behind a paywall, but I have access to the New York Times, so um, I have not been able to look at the response piece in Nature yet. But yeah, the point was aid in the New York Times article that like some of the voices who would be most important to this discussion, because one of the really critical pieces of it is thoughtfully and ethically dealing with the DNA of indigenous people, like the researchers who are specifically involved with in that, we're not involved in the conversation. So thank you Katie for that note. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast or a history podcast that I heart Radio dot com and we're all over social media. Missed in History and so we'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app wherever else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly fry Back. When we went to Paris in twenty nineteen, which just it feels like eons ago and maybe something that happened on another planet. At this point, I saw the lady in the unicorn tapestries that the muse de Cluny, and these tapestries are beautiful. After I looked at the tapestries and then I went through the entire rest of the museum, I went back into the tapestry room and just sat with them for a while. After we got back to the US, I kept trying and failing to figure out how to do an episode on these tapestries, and then it finally dawned on me that looking at unicorns more broadly might be the way to go, rather than trying to like intricately describe tapestries with our words on an audio podcastst we will be talking about the tapestries, but more of a general history of unicorns. Just a heads up though that the history of unicorn lore includes a lot of lore about people hunting them and towards the end of this episode will also be covering some modern history that touches on animal cruelty. You probably know exactly what animal we mean when we say unicorn, but spelling it out to level set is actually kind of tricky because descriptions and depictions of unicorns have shifted a lot over the millennia. Even something very very basic like saying a mythical magical quadruped that has only one horn does not necessarily always work. Case in point, the paleolithic art in Lasco Cave network in France spell seventeen thousand years old, and one particular animal depicted there has been nicknamed the unicorn, and sometimes that's described as the oldest depiction of a unicorn in the world. This is in the main chamber of those caves that's known as the rotunda or the Hall of the Bulls, and the animal in question has four legs and a sagging belly and a kind of squarish head. But in spite of its nickname and the fact that people like to say it's the oldest depiction of a unicorn, it definitely has two very long, straight horns. It is so clearly two horns rather than one that I went down a huge and unsuccessful rabbit hole trying to figure out who first called it the unicorn and why they did that? Like was there a shadow? Was the cave all art? Like? What was happening? I am not the only person to find this naming weird. French archaeologist Annette Lemming Empereire, who specialized in cave art, called the unicorn quote most inappropriately named in her book on these paintings. Even though those two horns raised some questions about the unicorn Moniker, this doesn't really look like a real animal, and it's the only animal depiction in the Lisco Caves that isn't readily identifiable as something specific like a horse or a stag or a bull. Some sources describe it as almost feline. Overall, it is not as skilled or elegant in its execution as other artwork in the cave, so it's possible that it's just an early piece of work by someone who wasn't experienced. But there's also speculation that it was intentionally obscured in some way and that it depicts a person dressed as an animal, or maybe that it shows an animal that is mythical or imaginary. Another early depiction more clearly shows a one horned animal, but there is still some speculation involved. This is found on seals from the Indus Valleys realization, also known as the Harappan Civilization. This is the earliest known civilization on the Indian subcontinent, and it existed from roughly dred b c. We talked about the civilization a bit in our episode on Mohenjo Daro, which was one of its most important cities. These seals are small, they're usually square, and they are carved from stone in a way that would leave a clear positive imprint if you press it into a soft substance like clay. One of the most common motifs on these seals is usually described as a unicorn. It's a quadruped with a body a little like an rix or an ox, and it's shown in profile with a single long horn growing from its head just in front of the ear. There's been some speculation that this is a depiction of a real animal that actually had two horns. You just can't see it on the seal because the second horn is hidden behind the other one. At the same time, though these animals usually have all four of their legs visible, and other animals on other seals do have two horns with both of the horns visible. So at this point it's generally believed that these seals depict only one horn because the animal being shown had only one horn, and also that this might be a mythical animal rather than a living one. Unfortunately, the script that's on a lot of these seals cannot help answer this question because scholars haven't figured out how to read it yet. I imagine us cracking the code and it just being like, not relevant to the nige at all. An early depiction that definitely shows an animal with only one horn is a small brass statue from the Omlash culture and what's now Iran, dating back to the eighth or ninth century BC. This is a stylized goat like quadruped with one sort of sweeping flame like horn at the center of its head. It was found among some grave goods, but we really do not know its significance. One element of unicorn lore that we will talk about more in a bit is the idea that a unicorn is a magical beast who can only be captured by a virtuous maiden. And it's possible that, like the Indus Valley seals. This lore has roots on the Indian subcontinent. The Hindu epic poem Mahabharata was composed in Sanskrit and probably written down for the first time some time between three hundred b c E and three hundred c E, although it's circulated orally before that. This is both a historical and a religious text, and it includes lots of stories and folk tales. One of these is about a rishi or an enlightened sage named Riscius Ringa, whose mother was a celestial being cursed to take the form of a dome. Riscius Ringo was born with deer horns and raised by another sage who kept him secluded, teaching him phila sofie and holy texts away from society. After a drought and a famine struck a nearby kingdom, the king's advisers told him that the only way to bring back the rain was to find a rishi who had never seen a woman, and to marry that rishi to his daughter. The king's daughter lured Rischia Sringa out of the forest, and when they arrived back at the palace, the rain began. This is really the barest outline of this story. Riches Ringa is sometimes described as having one horn and sometimes two, and sometimes his name is translated to something like gazelle horn. But some scholars trace a through line from this and other myths and stories from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism to the unicorn hunt stories of medieval Europe in which a virgin tames or helps to capture or kill a unicorn. We should note, though, that this very basic virgin capture idea might go all the way back to one of the world's oldest works of literature, which is the epic of Gilgamesh, in which a woman seduces the wild man inky Do, although the woman in that case is not usually described as virtuous. The Chinning from Chinese mythology is sometimes called a Chinese unicorn. It has a body like a deer, covered with scales like a dragon, and a tail like an ox. These creatures are mystical and magical, described as so benevolent that they don't even harm the grass as they walk. They are associated with both the births and the deaths of sages and emperors, but the idea that they're a Chinese unicorn is something of a misnomer. While they are sometimes depicted as having only one horn, many many depictions have two horns or more. There are similar animals in the mythology of other parts of Asia with similar names, including the kirn in Japan and the guillen in Thailand. The earliest descriptions of unicorns in the Greek and Roman world also have Asian roots, which we will get to after a quick sponsor break. Many European descriptions of unicorns from the medieval period and later traced back to the work of Catisus of Natos, who was a Greek physician and historian who lived around four b C. And Ktisius's description goes back to what is now India. To be clear, Catius had not been to India. He lived in and traveled through Persia for about seventeen years while working as court physician to Achimanid kings Darius the second and Artisserxes the second. He met people who had traveled and traded along the Silk Road, and he wrote what he heard from them in his book Indica. This book is believed to be the first Greek work entirely about India. It wasn't particularly accurate Thoughts left Artisserses service around or three seven b c e and went back to Greece. That was only after that point that he wrote his Indica, along with a similar book that was on Persia. A lot of what he wrote was probably second hand at best. He learned it from people whose travels might not have taken them all that close to the Indian subcontinent. He also documented stories from myths and epic poems as though they were just straightforward fat. To make matters worse, we don't have a complete copy of the Indica today, we just have fragments and quotes from it in the work of later writers, many of whom really thought he was a crackpot. In the Indicatsias describes quote certain wild asses there as big as a horse or bigger, as well as being strong and so fast that no other animal can outrun them. Catsius describes these animals as white with a crimson head, with a horn growing from their brow that's half a cubit in length. That's works out too approximately nine inches or twenty three centimeters. The horn is white at the bottom, black in the middle, and crimson at the tip. According to Ctesius, the meat of these animals is too bitter to eat, but they are hunted for their horns and their ankle bones or talus's. If somebody drinks from a cup made out of the horn, they're immune to poison and to seizures. The animals talus bone, also called the astragolis, is exceptionally beautiful and heavy, which is important because these bones were used to make dice for both divination and gaming. In Ktisius's account, this wild ass cannot be captured alive, so people hunt them by surrounding them in a pasture when they're with their young, and then using arrows and javelins. There are a lot of opinions about exactly what animal Ktisis might have been describing here. Poet and professor O'Dell Shepherd published a book called The Lore of the Unicorn in nine that's still cited today, and he can louted that Catsius conflated three different animals, a wild ass, a rhinoceros, and a cheru also called the Tibetan antelope. Others conclude that it is just one animal, a badly described rhinoceros, and that Catsius thought the horn was multicolored because he had seen rhinoceros horn cups that were decorated that way. One of the question marks here involves that talus bone. Although Catsius did not say he had personally ever seen one of these animals, he did say he had seen it's a stragg list. He described it as looking like the astragg list of an ox. Typically, the ankle bones of hoofed animals were the ones that were used to make dice, and oxen have hooves, so that makes sense. But a rhinoceros does not have hooves, and if Catsius saw one of their talus bones, he probably would not have described it as the most beautiful as stragglers he had ever seen, which is what he said about the unicorn. But own, I mean, you know, tasteberries. Writing a few decades later, Aristotle was dismissive of Catsius's work, but he's still referenced to the quote Indian ass. In his The History of Animals, he wrote quote, some animals have horns, others have none. Most of those with horns also have cloven feet, as the ox, the stag, and the goat. We have never seen an animal with a solid hoof with two horns, and there are only a few that have a solid hoof and one horn, as the Indian ass and the orix. Of all animals with a solid hoof, the Indian ass alone has a talus. It is not clear what animal Aristotle was talking about when he mentioned the orix here, since the orax is a real animal and it has two horns. But the history of animals reinforced this idea that in India, and maybe also in Africa, since Orax has lived there, there was a unique animal that had only one horn, whose horn had some special property eives. In general, one horned animals were clearly seen as remarkable and worthy of note. Julius Caesar's commentaries on the Gallic Wars, written around fifty b C, includes descriptions of the strange animals of the Hersinian forest. One is an animal that has the shape of an ox and a deer, but with one horn branched like a hand, stretching out from its forehead in between its ears. Sometimes this gets kind of distilled. To Julius Caesar said there were unicorns in Germany. Plenty of the Elder's Natural History, published in seventy seven CE, describes an Indian animal with one horn in a way that seems to have come from Catsius's earlier writing, but he goes on to say that people in India hunt quote a very fierce animal called the monocaros, which has the head of stag, the feet of the elephant, and the tail of the bore, while the rest of the body is like that of the horse. It makes a deep, lowing noise and has a single black horn which projects from the middle of its forehead two cubits in the length. This animal, it is said, cannot be taken alive. Later Roman writers returned again to Catsius's description, including alien around the second century. Aliens description is quite similar to the one of Catsius, except he describes the animal's body as red with a black horn. By about this point, an animal called the monoceros was becoming used as a symbol or allegory in Christian artwork. There are a whole lot of depictions that today we would call unicorns that are represented in mosaics and reliefs and tapestries and manuscript illuminations. Unicorns came to represent purity and chastity, as well as sometimes representing Jesus Christ. A round the year one ninety or Tullian of Carthage wrote that the unicorns horn represented the Cross. Depictions of unicorns being hunted often included wounds that were reminiscent of Jesus Christ's wounds during his crucifixion, and sometimes maidens that were depicted along with the unicorn were meant to represent the Virgin Mary. By about the third century CE, the Greek word minosterros had made its way into translations of the Christian Bible in place of the Hebrew word re m. In modern Hebrew, this is often translated as orix, although there is some argument that it references the now extinct rox. Just to be clear, since we got a lot of email the last time these came up, the rix o r y x is an antelope with long horns. It still lives today, but the rax a u r o c hs is a bovine species that is now extinct. Over time, the Greek word minosterros was translated as the Latin word unicornis way back at the beginning of this episode, we talked about epic poems in which wild men were captured by a maid, and by the fourth century this idea had also folded into the unicorn lore. Instead of being impossible to catch alive. Unicorns were depicted as approachable only by virtuous young women. One of the earliest appearances of this idea is in the collection known as the Physiologists, whose author is unknown. This is a beastiary written sometime between the second and fourth centuries, and one passage describes the unicorn as strong and fierce and capable of being caught only with the help of a maid. In his Etymologies, Spanish cleric Isadore of Seville wrote of the monoceros as a tremendously strong animal, capable of killing elephants with its horn. Isadora agreed with the author of the Physiologists. According to Isadore, that there was only one way to catch it. Quote. If a virgin girl is placed in front of a unicorn and she bears her breast to it, all of its fierceness will cease, and it will lay its head on her bosom, and thus quieted, it is easily caught past podcast subject. Hildegard of Bingen also wrote about maidens catching unicorns in the eleventh century, with various parts of the unicorn having medicinal value. Mentions of the unicorn were not exclusive to Christian texts during this period. Islamic text described an animal called the carcadan, which physically resembled a rhinoceros and could be lured by a maiden. That animal's horn was also reported to treat poisoning. During the medieval period, unicorns proliferated in stories, poems, religious writings, beast theories, illuminated manuscripts just on and on, and they were also used in heraldry, for example, as part of the royal coat of arms of Scotland, which included a lion on a golden shield, supported on either side by a white unicorn bound in a golden chain. When James the sixth of Scotland ascended to the English throne as James the First in sixteen o three, the coat of arms retained the Scottish unicorn on one side, replacing it with a lion on the other. The idea that the unicorns horn could cure or prevent poisoning went all the way back to Catsius, and by the twelfth century people were selling purported unicorn horns. These were usually off white or ivory colored. They were long and narrow and spiraled, and so valuable and rare that they were passed down within royal and noble families will come back to these later. By the fourteenth century, belief in unicorns was widespread enough in Europe that people used the term to describe very real and pretty ordinary animals. Here is something Marco Polo wrote about what he saw in Sumatra. Quote. There are wild elephants in the country, and numerous unicorns, which are very nearly as big. They have hair like that of a buffalo, feet like those of an elephant, and a horn in the middle of the forehead, which is black and very thick. They do no mischief, however, with the horn, but with the tongue alone, for this is covered all over with long and strong prickles, And when savage with anyone, they crush him under their knees and then rasp him with their tongue. The head resembles that of a wild boar, and they carry it ever bent towards the ground. They delight much to abide in Meyer and mud. 'tis a passing, ugly beast to look upon, And it's not in the least like that which our stories tell of as being caught in the lap of a virgin. In fact, is altogether different from what we fancied. This is pretty clearly a description of a Sumatran rhinoceros, although that species really has two horns, with the larger nearer to the nose and the smaller one often just a little nub behind it. It really cracks me up that for Marco Polo it was a shorter walk to Wow. Unicorns sure are ugly, and this is different some other animals. We will get to the tapestries that inspired this episode after we take another quick sponsor break. Now we are finally to the subject that prompted me to do this episode, which is tapestries, specifically mild fleur or thousand flower tapestries. These have a background that are almost totally covered in these tiny flowers and plants. This style of tapestry was popular in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Europe, especially in France and the Low Countries. There were lots of tapestries made in this style, and there are two different sets that depict unicorns that are still in existence today and are among the greatest works of medieval artwork that we still have. One which we at the top of the show is the Lady in the Unicorn. This is a set of six tapestries made around fifteen hundred. The Music de Cluny acquired them in eighteen eighty two after they were discovered at a chateau a couple of decades before, where they were being damaged by dampness and rodents. Five of them represent the five senses touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight, and the sixth is called a Monsieur lizier or to my only desire. It's named for the words displayed on a tent shown in the tapestry. Like the name suggests, each of them depicts a lady in a unicorn. Each one also features a lion, and some also include other women or other animals, or sometimes both. The plants and animals that fill the backgrounds of these tapestries are real. They show things like oak and orange trees, holly, monkeys, rabbits, dogs, and various birds. They're also all clearly meant to be a set. They all have the same red background. The coat of arms of the Leaviste family is incorporated into each of them, and the elegant lady and the unicorn are always shown in a blue oval. Each of these tapestries has the lady doing something that's associated with the sense that is being portrayed, So in the one representing touch, she's touching the unicorn's horn, and in sight she is holding a mirror. It's really not known who wove these tapestries or where or which member of the Laviste family commissioned to them, which is presumably how they came to be made, and then there's debate about how to interpret them. Are they a meditation on the senses, is a monsour disy, a sixth sense, or some aspect that united all of the other senses, or just something else we haven't figured out yet. In that tapestry, the lady is placing some jewelry in a chest held by a maid, or perhaps removing the jewelry, and we don't know what is their significance. The other major set of unicorn tapestries is that the met cloisters in New York City, and it is a sequence depicting a hunt for the unicorn. There's some debate about what order these are meant to be shown in, as well as whether the ones that are generally listed first and last are really part of that same set. With those two included, they are the hunters enter the woods, the unicorn purifies water, the unicorn crosses a stream, the unicorn defense himself, the unicorn surrenders to a maiden, the hunters returned to the castle, and lastly, the unicorn rests in a garden, which is also called the unicorn in captivity. These were probably woven between four and fifteen o five, but they were first documented in sight in the home of Francois the six de la Rochefuco. The tapestry stayed in the La Rochuco family until the and Revolution, when they were looted but ultimately returned. John D. Rockefeller Jr. Bought them in nineteen twenty three and donated them to the met Cloisters in nineteen thirty seven. With the exception of the unicorn surrenders to the maiden, much of that one is missing, probably due to damage. After the tapestries were looted during the French Revolution. Rockefeller bought the remaining pieces separately after learning that the family still had them and that parts of them were being used to plug up drafty walls. As with the lady in the Unicorn tapestries, we don't know for sure who commissioned these or exactly where they were made, but each of them includes the letter A and a backward E, and that might be a clue. It's possible that these are made in celebration of the marriage of Anne of Brittany to Louis the twelfth in fourteen ninety nine. There's debate about how to interpret these tapestries as well. One interpretation is that the unicorn hunt is an allegory for the crucifixion of Jesus as Christ, and that if the unicorn rests in a garden is really part of the set, it's meant to represent the unicorn in a paradise or a unicorn that has been resurrected. Discussions of the symbolism in these tapestries extend not only to their subjects, but also to the plants and the animals in the militia background. These tapestry sets were made as European belief in unicorns as real magical animals was really approaching its peak, but by the late sixteenth century, more and more people were starting to express some skepticism about this. One was past podcast subject Emoise Pare, who described the unicorn as quote more imagined than real and natural in his Book of Venoms in fifteen seventy nine. His fifteen eighty two discourse on the Unicorn expressed his doubts about both unicorns as a real animal and cures that were supposedly made from their horns. An anonymously pub was Rebuttal compared Parade to the devil, and he responded by publishing retort of amboise parade to the response made against his Discourse of the Unicorn. This led to a whole huge back and forth that escalated all the way to people denouncing him to already the Third of France and Catherine de Medici. I love this idea of writing papers back and forth to yell at one another. Yeah it was. It's the slow Burn way to be angry. Yeah it was. It was like a Reddit thread. But in fifteen two. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sailors from places like Italy, Spain and Britain started voyaging farther into the Arctic searching for a passage to Asia, and they encountered an animal that people who lived in the far northern parts of the world already knew about. That was the narwhale. Narwhal's have a long, distinctive tooth, usually only one found most often but not exclusively, in males. In other words, they look like a way oh with a unicorn horn. It did not take long for people to make the connection between this long, straight, spiraling whale tooth and the alcorns or unicorn horns that had been passed down through families as remedies for poison. It's likely that some of these were made by other means, like getting a tusk of something else and like boiling it until it was soft enough to make it straighter in spirally. But in sixteen thirteen, Caspar Bartholn, the elder professor of medicine at the University of Copenhagen, started to believe that alcorns that were being held in cabinets of curiosities and other collections were really from narwhal's. His brother in law, Olivorm concluded the same after comparing narwhale skeletons with purported unicorn horns. Caspar Son Thomas compiled and synthesized their research and added his own material in sixty five, publishing it as New Observations about the unicorn. Thomas Bartolin concluded that alcorns were real and had powerfully effective medicinal uses, but that they were marine tusks, not the horns of land animals, so if you needed alcorn, you should buy it right from the source, that source being Scandinavian whalers. It cracks me up because it was really like these ones that come from an industry importance to where we live. People didn't entirely give up on the idea of unicorns as a real land animal, though. In sixteen sixty three a unicorn skeleton was purportedly discovered in a cave in Quedlburg, Germany. One of the people who believed that this skeleton was the real deal was scientist and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz. This is the person who developed differential and integral calcul lists independently of Isaac Newton, so presumably a smart person. When writing about this find, he referenced the Bartolon's earlier work about sea creatures, but also maintained that this skeleton was credible. It's not clear who assembled these bones and whether they intentionally did it to be deceptive, but this was probably an incomplete hodgepodge of mammoth and rhinoceros bones. Also in the seventeenth century, Dutch cartographer Petrus Plantius introduced a constellation called Minoceros in the northern sky, surrounded by Oriyan, Gemini Hydra, and Canus major. Although belief in real living unicorns eventually waned, efforts to find living specimens continued well into the nineteenth century, and the scientific effort to categorize and classify animals that we talked about in our recent episode on the platypus that extended to the unicorn as well. For example, George Cuvier, that's the person who thought the platypus belonged in the same order as ant eaters and spots. He argued that unicorns were anatomically impossible because they were typically depicted as having cloven hoofs, which meant that their skull could only produce two horns, not one. By the twentieth century, some people had moved from looking for unicorns to making them. Franklin Dove, biologists at the University of Maine, published works on horn physiology in the nineteen thirties, including surgically altering animals so that they would grow only one horn. Dove had been fascinated by stories of African herders manipulating the horns of their livestock so that they had only one horn or many, or horns that grew in interesting shapes, as well as herders in Nepal who had manipulated their rams to grow only a single horn. In May of nineteen thirty six, Dove published an article in Scientific Monthly called Artificial Production of the Fabulous Unicorn. He described how goats are born with two horn buds, and for about the first week of their life, those buds are part of their skin, not attached to their skull. So it was possible to surgically move the buds from the sides of the upper head to the middle so they would be next to each other, and then they would grow with the appearance of only one horn. Oberon Zel, also known as Oberon Zell Ravenhart built on this work in the nineteen seventies and eighties, applying for a patent on a surgical procedure under the name Timothy G. Z l In two. This patent was granted in nineteen eighty four. It describes a method for surgically repositioning in animal's horn buds so they grow at the appearance of only one horn. In addition to this surgical technique, Zell cross different breeds of goat so that they would have the silky hair of an angora, but with somewhat longer legs. Zell performed with the resulting animals at Renaissance Bears before signing a contract with Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus, with a goat named Lancelot and his brothers joining the show. The circus maintained that Lancelot was a real, living unicorn who had just wandered up to one of their tents in nineteen eighty four, and the goat was one of the circus's main acts In and eighty six. Ringling Brothers faced huge criticism from animal rights groups, including the Humane Society and the A s p c A, as well as multiple U. S d A inspections involving these animals. In early nine six, the animals were briefly confiscated following allegations that the circus was violating animal rights laws that banned the use of disfigured animals as entertainment. Purported unicorn discovery still occasionally make headlines. In A sloppy English translation of a release from the Korean Central News Agency led to a bunch of headlines that archaeologists in Pyongyang had discovered a unicor horns layer. There's a lot about this story that's unclear, from the exact site that was being described to why the English translation was worded the way that it was. But what the announcement was really about was a place called Kieran Ghoul or Kieran's Grotto, which is associated with King Tong Young, founder of the ancient kingdom of Cogurio, not a grotto belonging to a literal Kieran or a layer of an actual unicorn. And of course there are seemingly infinite unicorns and pop culture today. Trying to cover all of them would be a whole different podcast. I have one I want to talk about in our behind the scenes just quite a unicorn. We can do that, but a take on the unicorn story and its medicinal value. Do you have listener mail though I do. It's from Katie and it's about our recent Unearthed where we talked about the ethics of DNA research, and Katie wrote to say dear ally and Tracy just wanted to write a quick note about something you mentioned in your Unearthed part one this year and your discussion of the DNA analysis of sitting bowls hair, you mentioned that an ethical code for ancient DNA research was published in October in Nature. That code, while a good first step, was not without its problems and controversies. It was drafted by a group of over sixty active ancient DNA researchers out of a virtual meeting in However, multiple active ancient DNA researchers, several of whom are indigenous and who are extremely active in the global discussion of the ethics of ancient DNA and indigenous DNA in particular. We're not invited to that meeting. Just wanted to direct your attention to some of the excellent commentary by several of those scientists on those guidelines. See this commentary in the New York Times as well as this response piece in Nature. Thank you for all of your excellent work. Love your work from me and Miriam Rouge too. It's from Katie. I think Miriam Regrew is a PETS maybe, but I have not. The picture was broken unfortunately, so yes Um, I did not actually see any of this commentary because I had been trying to figure out where whether it's to talk in more detail about the DNA Code of Ethics that was published late last year, and I wound up just including it as like a one sentence aside, and I did not look further into all of the discussion around it, which I would have done with a longer treatment. So I'm sorry for dropping the ball on that, and thank you Katie for bringing my attention to it. Um. I did read the New York Times commentary. I was gonna say the response piece in Nature is behind a paywall. Probably the commentary of the New York Times is also behind a paywall, but I have access to the New York Times, so um, I have not been able to look at the response piece in Nature yet. But yeah, the point was aid in the New York Times article that like some of the voices who would be most important to this discussion, because one of the really critical pieces of it is thoughtfully and ethically dealing with the DNA of indigenous people, like the researchers who are specifically involved with in that, we're not involved in the conversation. So thank you Katie for that note. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast or a history podcast that I heart Radio dot com and we're all over social media. Missed in History and so we'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app wherever else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.