The second part of 2013's historical finds includes items unearthed by animals, amateurs and ultra-modern science. Lead coffins, rare torpedoes and mass graves are featured. And of course, there's discussion of everyone's favorite topic: exhumations.
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Frae Wilson, and today is part two of our now traditional year end, although this is happening on the beginning of a new year. Yeah, uh, you're and look back at what has been unearthed in the world of history and history knowledge in the in the last twelve months or so. We mentioned previously that some of the biggest farms this year have already had their whole own entire episodes of the show back in the archive. So today we're going to look at some of the other lesser known things. We've grouped them together into themes. Themes seems to emerge. Yeah, anytime we're doing podcast research, kind of the groupings will reveal themselves a little bit. There are some trends here, So we we have these groups together into like themes. We also have some exhimations this year which are perennial favorites. Um and at the end of this episode, we've got some pretty extreme science responsible for unearthing some pretty cool stuff. So yes, let's start off with the maybe I don't want to say the opposite of science because that's not true. But things that nature unearthed for us, And I love this first one so much so. Uh, in Germany, a badger unearthed. I just I love that Germany of badger unearthed for us a twelfth century burial ground. The badger found a sword, bronze bowls, and ornate belt buckle, and skeletal remains. And all of this happened in Stolpe in Brandenburg. It helps that two people who lived on the farm are also amateur archaeologists innew a human pelvic bone when they saw it, So it's not as though the badger went waving it around and saying, hey, you guys, I found this stuff. The people recognized that they were They did not mistake it for maybe an animal or one of the bodies has been determined to be that of a warrior with several healed injuries that looked like battle wounds. It's estimated that he probably died at around age forty. And Uh. This was found last autumn, so inelve but it wasn't announced until August. So thank you badger for that great fine. Yes, I love everything about that story. Now we're gonna thank some dolphins, some dolphins working for the U. S. Navy found a late nineteenth century Howld torpedo off the coast of Coronado. So it doesn't really sound all that exciting that a torpedo was found in the ocean, except that only fifty of these torpedoes were ever made before they were supplanted by other technologically superior torpedoes, and this is only the second surviving one known to still exist. So significant fine on the part of those dolphins who were working for the navy. Uh, this one not so much an animal helping us. Uh. In Norway, some melting snow in the wake of global warming has actually unearthed a number of artifacts that prior to that had been frozen. They had been trapped in frozen ground. And this included a bow and arrow that we're used to hunt reindeer that are estimated to be about thirty hundred years old. Uh. And again, this melting actually happened in eleven, but the announcement was made. Yeah, there are lots and lots and lots of artifacts that are being sort of brought up to the surface as glaciers recede and snow's melt and things like that. As the temperature of the Earth rises, so Uh, it's cool that we're getting Yeah, it's it's it's unfortunate that that what's bringing a lot of this up is is the the loss of otherwise frozen animal have dad in climate. In addition to animals who have healthily discovered things by accident, sometimes on purpose and sometimes by accident, a number of amateurs found cool stuff this year. People stumble across things in their day to day doings, yes, sometimes in their hobbies. This first, uh, this first unearthing. Metal detector enthusiasts in Leicestershire, England found a seventeen hundred year old coffin containing a child's body in October, and it was about four ft underground, but because it was made of lead, they found it very easily with their metal detectors. So, but there's sort of an ongoing uh, combativeness sometimes between like academic archaeologists and anthropologists and metal detector enthusiasts with sort of ongoing questions of is this a help or a hindrance In this case, what the what the metal detector folks did was they immediately contacted professional archaeologists as soon as they realized that they had a potentially important find in front of them and then they organized a volunteer guard so that it would remain undisturbed until the pros got there. Perfect. This is sort of the ideal situation of what when people who want to get out with their metal detectors um uncover something that maybe have importance. Also in October, a high school student unearthed a baby duckbill dinosaur which would be known as paras rolfus uh this fossil and he was on a school sponsored fossil hunting trips so success at Utah's Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument and he basically turned over a stone and there it was so an easier fine than many other people have had. It took hours of work to excavate it from the rock, and the baby was more than six ft long, so quite large. Yes, I I had originally characterized it in my notes as tiny, but it is only tiny compared to an adult. Yeah, it is not tiny compared to actual small things. So in shajan Pur, India, a farmer named Naraj Kumar found fifteen ancient arrows and hunting tools while plowing one of his fields. And this fine came after his plow got stuck and the animals that were pulling it couldn't move it any farther. He found arrows and a number of metal hunting tools. He's actually made their way kind of out into the community before people realized that they were potentially important, and then they were gathered back up again uh and and handed over to authorities afterward. Our next one involves an amateur who's a very very young one uh So cone Ergel, who was only aged seven, found a twenty ft long dugout canoe while taking a scuba lesson near Oclawaha, Florida, and it's planned to be displayed at the Marion County Museum of History and Archaeology. But as of now, we haven't found out a lot of detail about how old the canoe is or which tribe may have made it. And it actually may take up to two years for to dry out uh in a way that won't harm it. Yeah, they have to very very very slowly get the because it's been you know, underwater and waterlogged for a really long time. You have to extremely slowly get the water out to try to do it without damaging it, without causing it to crack or anything like that. So we may not know much about that for a little while. Yes, this exciting, Yes, and then he'll be you know, nine or ten. Well, speaking of ten year olds, in May, ten year old Jack Sinclair dug up a cannon ball from a four board cannon in his home garden in South England. And it turns out that this cannonball dates to the English Civil War. And I love this quote from him. He said, I thought it was a stone or a ball of some kind. It was really dirty, but when we got the dirt and mud off, it was a cannonball. I was like wow, because I had no idea. Jack Sinclair, aged ten, is charming. Another ten year old found a mummy in his grandmother's attict in August. As you can imagine, this caused all inner of excitement, but it was determined to be a fake by the time September rolled around. It had a real skull, but the bones were all plastic. Uh. And the skull looks like it had been a cadaverish skull that was prepared for medical use or research. Yes, it was not like a dug up human remain skull. I mean, it wasn't like his grandmother had a creepy situation going on in the attic. She had probably acquired it through some yeah fairly boring means well, and then it dates back to a time when when sort of egypt stuff was extremely popular for people to own. That's one that. Uh. The The initial story of the ten year old finding mummy and grandma's attic made the rounds on social and lots and lots of people were saying, hey, have y'all seen this? Have y'all seen this? And we did, and sadly, I mean, it is not a real mummy of historical importance. Uh. Next up, we have several discovered graves, mass graves and otherwise, starting with in September, archaeologists announced that they had unearthed a completely sealed tomb in Italy and the Etruscan necropolis of Tarkinia, and this contained a prince holding a spear and the charred skeleton of his wife, which had some jewelry in a box, a bronze plated box nearby. The thing is this is actually the opposite of what was really going on. The body holding the spear was female and the charge skeleton next to it was male, which led to lots and lots of discussion about gender assumptions in the world of archaeology. All of this was about twenty six hundred years old, and the determination of which sex belonged to which body came after bone analysis. Uh. It's sort of tangentially related. Italy's art theft police also announced that they had recovered a troupe of second and third century BC a trust Etruscan artifacts in June of this year, so it was kind of a big year for Etruscan stuff. Researchers at the University of Bond discovered a fourteen hundred year old mass grave in Mexico, and this provides evidence that the Maya actually dismembered their captives. So the team found the skeletons of twenty four people in what was an artificial cave, and the skulls were all separated from the bodies, with the lower jaws also separated from the rest of the head. Uh. They're still very little known about who these people were, or their social status or why they may have been killed, but some of them had jade tooth inserts, which suggests that they were nobles. It's a big mystery. Yeah. Uh. This year, archaeologists in Poland reported finding four skeletons from the Middle Ages, while excavating for a new road. And the interesting part here was that they appear to have undergone an anti vampire ritual before being buried. Their heads were all removed and placed between their legs. This is another example of ones. We got one. We got lots and lots of emails about when it happened. Uh, we just could not find enough primary source information to make a whole episode about it. Yeah, it was the description as of the situation, We're pretty brief. We kind of gave you everything we know just now. In October, a team that was working in a suburb of Lima, Peru found an undisturbed wary tomb that contained two mummified corpses and the bodies were those of an adult in an infant, with more details to come once those bodies are unwrapped. The theory though, is that the adult was a master weaver and the child was killed and buried in the tomb. The coolest bit of this finding the bodies are at least a thousand years old, and the find is intact, even though the dig site is right in a residential neighborhood. So this thousand year old, perfectly preserved thing was happening just down the street from people's houses. So these people are from the Wary civilization, which was around for about five years before the Inca Empire emerged. So before we move on to a frequently requested thing of exhumations, let's take a moment and have a word from our sponsor. That sounds delightful. Now we will get back to a frequent subject of listener request, and that is exhumations. So this year, Chilean poet Pablo Naruta was exhumed in April in an attempt to discover whether he was poisoned. His nineteen seventy three death certificate lists his cause of death as prostate cancer. Naruta was a member of the Communist Party, and his death came not long after a military coup brought General Augusto Pinochet into power. Naruta had criticized both the coup and Pinochet, and he had planned to go into exile the day after he died. So naturally, this led to lots and lots of questions about whether his death was from natural causes. It was also further compounded because he had told his driver that an unknown doctor had given him an injection that had made his condition worse. So six months after this exhamation. So this November, Patricio Bustos, who's the director of Chilean Forensic Service, announced that a news conference that no trace of chemical was found. So it seems unlikely at this point that Pablo Naruta was poisoned. Also, in the realm of discovering whether or not someone had been poisoned, Brazilian President Joel Gular was exhumed to determine whether he had been poisoned or died of a heart attack as was officially reported he had died in ninety six. Uh and the tests are ongoing on that one. We don't have the results yet. Our last exhumation today is yes, they're ara fat. If you do not recall, he was the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization or the PLO, and he was exhumed by French authorities last year to confirm whether his two thousand and four death was the result of poisoning. So preliminary tests that came out in November suggests that yes, he was poisoned with the radioactive substance polonium to ten. The levels of the substance in his body were eighteen times higher than normal. They had taken tissue samples both from him and from the soil that he was very it in. So, according to the Swiss report that came out at that point, the results quote moderately support the proposition that the death was the consequence of poisoning with polonium to tent But then on December three, a French report was leaked that claimed that this elevated level was really from naturally occurring rate on gas where Arafat was buried, and that he was not actually poisoned. The Swiss team came back at this point and called the French findings debatable, saying that they had actually measured the rate on levels in the tomb before they opened it, and they had ruled out rate on as a cause of the elevated levels. It's entirely possible that this story will continue to develop and that by the time you were listening to this something else will have happened. This is the second time we have actually recorded the piece about about yes or Ara Fat, so that story is continuing to evolve. And now we're moving on to I mean, I already think like digging people up to determine if they were poisoned. It's pretty extreme, but this is extreme science, super extreme science. Uh. In June, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the Croatian Natural History Museum published a paper in Plos One detatling their discovery of the world's oldest evidence of a bone tumor. It came from the left rib of a Neanderthal who lived about a hundred and twenty thousand years ago, and this tumor probably came from a disease called fibrous dysplasia, and before this point, the earliest bone tumors that we knew about or between one thousand and four thousand years old. The bone came from an excavation site which contained the bones of at least eight hundred and seventy six Neanderthals, and it has has not been matched with any of the other bones or fragments there. So it's possible that the remains from the site were the victims of cannibalism or pre natural predation by carnivorous animals. So we don't know, but this tumor is so much older than anything we have ever seen or studied before, and to have had to be looking through the bones of eight seventy different Neanderthals and before finding it, I think that one has a tumor. Yeah. Well, And one of the things about this particular find is that a lot of times this disease causes tumors like they're not it's not a malignancy, but a lot of times it does cause tumors elsewhere in the body. And unless they find other bones belonging to the same body, they won't be able to sort of tell uh just how present the disease was, or how it was affecting the body physically or anything like that. So cool, but also it almost leaves more questions answer raising more questions. In October, a lot of our findings are from October this year. In October, a team of researchers published a paper in Science that examines d n A from three hundred and sixty four prehistoric skeletons, and these skeletons spanned four thousand years of early human history. What they were looking at was tiny changes in mitochondrial DNA from humans who lived between seventy and thirty years ago. So what they found was that there were huge waves of prehistoric UH migration among early humans. Previously, the accepted belief has been pretty much that humans migrated from the Near East into the rest of Europe. But these findings suggest that there were actually really big migrations from western and Eastern Europe as well, that it wasn't just this one unidirectional spreading of people, that there was a lot more movement going on between early human groups. UH. The next one involves airborne leisure technology. So using this UH, archaeologists found the Cambodian city of Maundra Pravada. They've known this city existed before, but they could never pinpoint exactly where because the city's location was unknown until this year to the scientific community. Researchers were hoping as of the announcement that they located it, that it had not been looted. They were just kind of praying that there was nothing going on there and that they would actually have this bounty of research to be conducted, and that research is going to go on for quite sometimes. So they have located it and the work is sort of just beginning. Now. We have a robot, a robot called flac to TC used an infrared camera and a laser scanner to help archaeologists explore the temple of the Feathered Serpent near Mexico City this year. The team wound up finding these strange yellow spears and they don't currently know what they are about or what they mean. These speares are a yellow clay that's covered with jarow site and they had to use the robot to explore because there's just three ft long tunnel running under the temple that was full of debris, So a robot helped with that particular unearthing. So cool. Uh, this one's interesting. An airport security full body scanner, which are a little bit controversial still for some people, revealed that an authentic Roman fresco is under a newer nineteenth century edition which is in the louver. So they used that same technology to examine art instead of people and found whole magical thing. The way that this whole discovery was building, some of the headlines was sort of like, uh, actual Roman art found under fake nineteenth century art, And I was like, that's a little harsh on the nineteenth century art that we're talking about, but yeah, they were able to prove that definitively that there is and much older piece underneath this newer piece. That's so cool. That reminds me of I don't know, if you ever read the t s A blog, I highly recommend it to anybody. Um, it's also a little disturbing because you find out how many people are getting on airplanes, are trying to get on airplanes and loaded weapons. But they often will be like we found seventeen cannonballs this week from the Civil War. We found they often find these little odd artifacts of history and this kind of makes me think of it. They used similar technology to find art under art. So so that concludes our retrospective this year. Well, a lot of what all has been unearthed. I'm sure that there are many many other things. Oh yeah, that that we could have talked about. I was I was telling Holly this morning that when I sat down to actually wrangle all of my collected stuff into notes for this episode, normally what I do is I open all of my stuff in tabs and and I like scrolled and scrolled and scrolled down the bookmarks until I got to the bottom. And then Firefox said, you were about to open nine tabs. Are you sure you want to do that? So even with yeah, we did not with exclusions, Yes, we did not talk about all ninety nine things. And I'm sure there are many other things besides those nine. So you were welcome to right in if there are something that you would like us to either have a whole episode on or mentioned at some point in the future. And listener mail, and I again, do you want to thank the History Blog, which is where I getting up of a lot of these stories first. Well, in a lot of times, news sites will eventually pick up a history story kind of almost the same way they would a human interest story. They're like, this is a neat thing that happened, whereas history the History blog is focused on the historical events that are coming up. Yes, so they kind of aggregate them more quickly. Well, and also a lot of times there's much better context and more important context than what's going around with the headline. So cool resources. You do not already read that? Um, I have some listener mail before we sign off from this today. I hope you will read it. I will do that. Uh, this is from Brian, and Brian says, I enjoyed your podcast on smallpox. I'd like to clear up a small detail. You acted surprised that the cows then are used had horns. In fact, all cows and bulls have horns. Some beef breeds don't have horns because of selective breeding. Very cows typically don't have horns, but this is because they are removed when they are calves for the safety of other cows and people that were with them. When we'd be hord cows on our dairy farm. We administer sedatives and pay medication to reduce the trauma. I just wanted to set a little light on a part of your podcast that I knew something about. Thank you for producing an enjoyable show. So thank you, Brian. Yeah, that's cool information. It is cool, and I think I am. I am more familiar with the with beef cow breads that have been bred not to have farns, just because they were more prevalent where I grew up, So it was surprising to me to see a cow skin still had horns on it. So thank you so much Brian for writing in with that clarification. If you would like to write to us about this or any other episode, you can. We are at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash History class Stuff and on Twitter at Miston History. Are tumbler is at Miston History dot tumbler dot com. And we are on Pinterest. If you would like to learn more about what we've talked about today, come to our website. Put the word archaeology in the search bar, and you will find an article called what's the biggest archaeological find in History. You can do all that and a whole lot more at our website, which is how stuff works dot com for more onness and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. M