Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast I'm Training. We are now into part two of our now traditional Unearthed episode where we talk about all of the things that were brought up literally and figuratively in We know that you all are listening at the earliest, but we are recording it in ten So when we say this year, that's what we mean. Uh this installment, we're starting with a random assortment of things that didn't really fit into any other category, followed by some medical unearth things, food and drinks, literature and letters, and we're going to end with so many people's favorite category exhumations. So starting off the random stuff, a probable Rembrandt, which was stolen from a French museum during a Bastille Day celebration in was recovered this year when the man who had stolen it confessed, so when the robbery happened, the alarm went off when the thief entered the museum through a library door, but the authorities did not arrive in time to catch him. The painting is called lanfant labou de savant or Child with a soap bubble. There's some debate about whether it's actually a Rembrandt or just something that was painted after Rembrant style, but maybe it's recovery means that we will finally get to find out. On April, a man named Paul Unyaki un earth of Viking age figuring in Denmark while using a metal detector. He immediately contacted a museum. So good on you, Paul for contacting authorities after finding something that seemed significant. Uh. The museum confirmed the age of the figure and started conservation measures on it. The figuring is really small, just four point six centimeters high, and it's notable because it has very detailed clothing. This basically makes it a new source of information about what the Vikings actually wore, and it's also kind of visually and visually interesting because it has a three dimensional head on a two dimensional body. The figuring is wearing an ankle length dress with long sleeves, and the dress itself has several different textures that are possibly meant to represent different fabrics. Her hair is pulled back in a very tight bun, and she has a piece of jewelry in the front of her dress that might indicate she's meant to represent the fertility goddess Freya. Aerial photography help researchers find the remains of two ancient Mayan cities in the Yucatan Peninsula. For one of the cities, it was actually a rediscovery archaeologist Eric von You visited in the nineteen seventies and dubbed it Lagunita, but given the density of the jungle and the remoteness of the location, as well as the vagueness of a youth documentation, it couldn't be found again until more recently. That Lagunita is a facade with an entryway that's made to look as though it's a monster's mouth, which I find so sort of fabulous. Uh. This is a common theme and architecture of the time in this particular example is very well preserved. The other city, known as tom Chin, probably existed at about the same time as Lagunita. Also this year, archaeologists working at Hadrian's Wall found a two thousand year old wooden toilet seat perfectly preserved in a muddy trench. Although other digs have unearthed plenty of Roman latrines and other toilet artifacts. Dr Andrew Burley, who's the director of excavations there, said he had never seen a perfectly preserved wooden toilet seat before. He said that it looked pretty comfortable. He was also hopeful that they would be able to find the latrine that went with it, since, in his words, as reported to the BBC, quote Roman lose are fascinating places to excavate their drain often contain astonishing artifacts. Dr Burley also said that he was looking forward to reading the text of a Roman stylist wax tablet that was also found at Hadrian's Wall this year. In this case, he told the BBC, if we're really lucky, the person using the seat will have had verbal diarrhea and we will be able to get their personal thoughts about life years ago. So I'd really like to meet this doctor Burley, because he sounds like a character that's like the thing that was on earth. That's more, that's most exciting to Tracy is that we now know about this. It's that's a gentleman who does research and sounds hilarious. Uh. In other poop News, archaeologists in Odense, on the island of shune In in Denmark found several latrine barrels dating back to the thirteen hundreds. More notable than the barrels themselves, is that they still contain what latrines are built to contain. So the team hopes that the contents of these barrels will help shed some light on the dietary habits of fourteen century Danes and for people local to the area, at least at that point, you could take a free tour of the dig site on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In April, a documentary film crew dug up a landfill in New Mexico where Atari had purportedly dumped millions of copies of the overwhelmingly unsuccessful video game Et the Extraterrestrial in nineteen eighty three. The film crew did find many copies of the game, but not quite the millions rumored to be buried there. They also found various other Atari video game detritus. I included that mostly because the long held et lore that video game kind of tickles me. Yeah, And it's one of those things that I think the number has grown over the years, you know, I think it used to be I remember hearing it once very early on, is like hundreds of thousands, and it has slowly ballooned up to millions of cartridges. It balloons to the point that there's a page about it at snopes dot com. So we're going to take a brief break for a word from a sponsor, and then talk about some medical things that were unearthed this year. Now we will get back to our lovely unearthing. So the first of our medical unearth things is only tangentially medical. While testing the area in preparation for building a new parking facility, the University of Mississippi Medical Center found that the site contained at least a thousand bodies. This wasn't at all the first time that a burial site has been found on the University of Mississippi campus. Anthropological study is ongoing on other remains that have already been unearthed before this discovery. These particular bodies are believed to have been patients at the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum. The asylum opened in eighteen fifty five and housed a hundred and fifty people. The school considered reburying the bodies elsewhere to make room for the parking facility, but they estimated that it would cost about three thousand dollars per body, or three million dollars total, so expansion plans were put on hold uh, and I could not find an update about exactly where things stood with that discovery as of right now at whether they've decided to continue and rebody the but rebury the bodies elsewhere, or change their construction plans, or exactly what. And it's entirely possible that that whole thing is bogged down in paperwork somewhere and there is nothing to discover. Um Scientists extracted DNA from the tooth of someone who died in the Justinian plague in the year five forty one. Unlike several other historical plagues, there really hadn't been very much medical or biological research on the Justinian plague. But then housing developers found a burial site near Munich, and as they examined the evidence, the team figured out that many of the peoples in the burial site had been buried together, which was of course very common during plague events, and they eventually narrowed it down the Justinian plague. A team led by evolutionary biologist David Wagner at Northern Arizona University determined that the plague had jumped from rodents to people and that it was in fact different from the Black Death during a rehabilitation project at New York City Hall, a team unearthed artifact that archaeologist thought was maybe a needle holder or perhaps a spice grinder at first. It's about a three inch long cylinder with holes in the top, made from a mammal bone, and it dates sometime back to the early eighteen hundreds. It was actually found back in but it wasn't until this year that anthropology student Lisa Geiger published her findings identifying what it actually was. She drew her conclusions thanks to a stint as a docent at the famous Muder Museum. It turns out that this was not a needle holder or a spice grinder. It was quote a vaginal syringe which was used for doucing. Given that this item was found in a big garbage pile that also included the remnants of what looked like a giant celebration, so there was lots of food and lots of liquor, the suspicion is that this was likely brought with a guest and used as a contraceptive or for STD prevention and just as a heads up that would not have been effective. Do not rely on such a thing for birth control or std prevent race these public service announcement. Yeah, I'm just taking a page from stuff mom never told you for a moment that would not work. In March, researchers announced that they'd revived a giant virus from the Siberian perma frost, and that it was still infectious. You may remember seeing these headlines and people uh saying that this is how the zombie apocalypse was going to start. So the virus is much larger than normal, almost as large as a small bacterium, and it affects amba. They named it Pythovirus sabaricum, with pytho coming from the Greek word for a large container that's used to store food or wine. Normally, viruses are extremely compact, but this one contains lots of empty space, which prompted evolutionary biologist Jean Michelle Clavery to say, quote, we don't understand anything anymore. The quotes from the researchers are some of my favorite things. They're pretty fabulous. So now we have three things that are in the realm of food and drink. Divers brought up a bottle marked Seltzer's from a shipwreck that is known as F thirty three thirty one, and this is a cargo vessel that sank not far off the Polish coast, so in the original reports this was believed to have been a German luxury mineral water Seltzers was a known brand of exactly that thing in the early eighteen hundreds, but later on they figured out that what was in the bottle was actually alcohol, probably vodka or gin, which was reported to be drinkable but not necessarily good in Egypt. While doing a routine cleaning in another team, a Japanese team led by Giro Condo of Waseda University, stumbled across a completely different, previously unknown burial place, that of conso Imheb, the head of beer production for the Court of a Menhotep. The third the t shaped tomb with a burial chamber in two halls, and it also includes a painting showing the whole process of grain fermentation and presenting the finished product to the mother goddess Moot. It's more than three thousand years old. U s archaeologists also found what they believed to be a precursor to Chianti while doing an excavation in Tuscany, down at the bottom of a hundred and five ft deep well. They found bronze vessels, cups, coins, and all kinds of other stuff. The various depths of the well include artifacts that spanned a fifteen hundred year time span, so really lots of different layers of things going down deeply into this well. Included at three different levels are some very well preserved degree seeds. The findings confirmed that there were at least three kinds of grapes in use during Roman and Etruscan times in the area, and researchers are looking into whether the way they are used might be similar to the proportions of candy, which is a seventy fifteen fifteen mix of three different types of grape. And now we are moving on to the arena of unearthed elements in literature and letters. So this first one is not really a discovery, but it is a release. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston released a number of letters from the personal papers of Jacqueline Kennedy on Nassis this year, and that's a collection of about twenty two thousand letters, postcards, and other pieces of mail. In particular, the newly released documents include condolence letters after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Also included were the responses sent to each letter, which were handled by the First Ladies personal secretaries. One particularly sweet note is from a and You're old Louisian, a girl who said, I think you're the nicest lady in the whole world. I mean it too. It's so sweet. It's particularly sweet because your is misspelled is why oh you are? Which is charming. In a ten year old note, a scrap of paper with Jane Austen's handwriting on it was found tucked into a book at the Jane Austen's home museum. This is probably a fragment of one of her brother's sermons, and it says quote men may get into a habit of repeating the words of our prayers by wrote, perhaps without thoroughly understanding, certainly without thoroughly feeling their full force and meaning. The scrap is dated eighteen fourteen, which is when Austin was working on Mansfield Park, and it has some similar religious themes to some things that are in the book. There's also some illegible writing on the back that the discoverers are hoping to be able to restore fragments of two poems by Sappho were on Earth from a private collection this year. It was very serendipitous. The person who owned the papyrus asked Oxford classicist Dirk abbinc about the Greek writing on the papyrus, and he immediately recognized its importance. Sappho was a tremendously influential poet in her time, but only one complete poem by her has actually survived until today. Sappho lived in the seventh century b c E. And this piece of papyrus dates to the second or third century CE. This fine brings the total known poems by Sappho to six. In February, Dr Gian Yang visited St John's College, University of Cambridge from China, and while he was there he discovered that a small volume of music that had been held in the university's rare books collection was really a priceless document detailing pre modern Chinese musical history. This is possibly a completely unique find in the world. The book was originally purchased in China in eighteen o four by the Reverend James Inman, who brought it back home with him to Britain. It's believed to have been printed in China around seventeen seventy and and Men donated all of his books to St. John's College after becoming a fellow there. The book contains an introduction to three different Chinese instruments, which are a flute, a lout, and a recorder, as well as thirteen different pieces of music. Um the entire notation that's used as something that has not been really well documented or surviving documentation has not lasted until now, uh so it gives a huge amount of information about uh Chinese musical history that we didn't have before. So cool. A previously unknown Shakespeare First Folio was authenticated in France this year, so that brings the total number of known first Folios to two hundred and thirty three. So, for the non Shakespeare buffs in the crowd, the First Folio is the first publication of the collected works of Shakespeare. It's considered to be the most reliable text for many of Shakespeare's plays, and this one is in excellent condition, which is surprising considering that until this year librarians at the public library where it was house thought it was a very old, but not particularly exceptional Shakespearean edition, and that was in part because the title page and introductory material were missing. However, it caught the eye of Remy Cordonier, the director of the Library's Medieval and Early Modern Collection, who thought that it could in fact be a first folio. It's planned that it will be put on display in st Omair where it was found next year. Before we get into, uh, the favorite topic of exhumations, let's take another brief moment for a word from a sponsor. So now we will wrap things up by talking about some exhamations. And this is, of course not all of the exhamations. UH. Treatsy had not yet set up her Google alert for exhamations until part way through the year, so she's got a pretty significant list that she's compiled, but not necessarily comprehensive. No there there. It's similarly with the rest of it. There would not be room for every single one. So Oliver Cromwell's body was exhumed in sixteen sixty one for a quote posthumous execution. They basically after he had died, had been buried, drew and quartered him and other things to his body. At that time, a brass plate that had been placed on his chest was taken by one of the officials he was present, and then that plate was passed down through the generations, and then it was sold at auction in December of this year, which is why we were talking about it for seventy four thousand, five hundred pounds or four thousand, nine sixty five euros. Neither the person it eventually was passed down to, nor the person who bought it was named, which is common practice for softies, which is who handled the auction. The plate itself is inscribed with a code of arm arms, the dates of Cromwell's birth and death, and his uh his coordination, and then in Latin quote, here is buried Oliver Cromwell, Protector of the Republic of England, Scotland and Ireland, which is a statement that the people of Ireland would buy and large find issue with. I'm surprised you didn't mention that his head is elsewhere and we don't know where. Yes, his head is elsewhere, we don't know where, but the fate of his body after he was posthumously executed is kind of hard to substantiate. Yeah, allegedly some people know where the head is. There has been some back and forth among the governments of Great Britain, Argentina and the Falkland Islands in recent weeks about the potential exhamations of one and twenty three unidentified bodies buried in Darwin Cemetery in the Falklands. Uh These are the bodies of Argentinian soldiers who died between April and June of nineteen two when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, which Britain claimed as its territory Wry. The result was the Falklands War. The Independent reported that Argentina was set to exhume one bodies. Argentina said the decision to exhume was extremely personal and it would be left to the families and the Falkland Islands government said that it had not received a request to actually do any of this, so as of right now, this whole situation is unresolved as far as our information goes. Yes, there is clearly still tension between Britain and Argentina on the subject of the Falkland Islands. In November, Kentucky State Police exhumed the body of an unidentified nineteen sixty nine murder victim. The woman's badly decomposed body was found by a man picking flowers for his wife in June of that year, officials are hoping to find a match through CODIS, which is the combined DNA index system. They called the murder an ongoing cold case, and are particularly interested in it because no one has come forward to say, this might be my relative in the time since the murder happened, which is a little unusual. I mean, they're they're frequently unidentified bodies, but not as frequently unidentified bodies with literally no one speculating that that might be their loved one. Prague announced that it would pay for the exhimation of Joseph too Far, who was a Roman Catholic priest who died after being interrogated and tortured. So while too Far was giving a sermon in December of nine, several witnesses said they saw an iron cross behind him move on its own several times, and when word got back to the government of at that time Czechoslovakia of this purported miracle, too Far was arrested and tortured until he said that he had orchestrated it. It then became a tool to try to discredit the Catholic Church and oppress Roman Catholics in Czechoslovakia. So this exhamation is in part for the beatification process and to close things out, and probably the most weirdly romantic exhumation of the year uh Frederick Chopin's heart. So when Chopin died, he asked for his heart to be removed from his body and buried in Poland, and it was after being sealed in a jar of liquor which his sister smuggled into Warsaw, probably under her dress. Um. Since then his heart has been passed from relative to relative, buried, dug up, buried again, all this while the rest of his body was at par Lache's cemetery in Paris. So in April, a number of officials, including the Archbishop of Warsaw, the culture minister, and to scientists, gathered at Holy Cross Church in Warsaw, where they removed the heart from its secret resting place, inspected it, took photos, and sealed the jar with wax to make sure that it's liquor preserved contents did not evaporate and dry out. Then they put the heart back where it was. This was in part to try to figure out whether Chopin really died of tuberculosis um. And it happened now because people were afraid and you know, convinced officials that it was a real possibility that the liquor might evaporate out of the jar and destroy the heart. Officials planned to repeat this inspection in another fifty years. And they also didn't say anything about it for months. They didn't completely in secret in the middle of the night. Very hush, hush. That's how all good exhamations go. Ye. Often they are in the middle of the night to avoid onlookers, but this one was particularly secret. So that is our unearthing. So in uh we can look forward to another Chopin's Heart discussion. Yes, I wonder what podcasting will be like in four. Do you also have some listener mail for us? I knew and this one is just kind of a charming story. Um. She also has lots of episode suggestions that I'm gonna I'm gonna stick with the charming story. This is from Genie. He says, Dear Tracy and Holly, I greatly appreciate your podcast that I'm a faithful listener. I'm also the mother of a young daughter in history buff She and I often listen to your podcast together, and I thought you might enjoy knowing the extent to which she absorbs and thinks about your words. We listened to your Good King winces Last episode last winter, and then several weeks later she said to me, I think I know who the stranger was that King WinCE this last wanted to help. I replied, oh, really who, she said, Let's see imagine my surprise. I tried to keep a straight face that she's explained to me that Utsy was walking in the snow looking for food and fuel, and King Winces Last and his page were the last to see him alive before his pursuers found him and killed him. I was glad to learn that the king survived, because who needs that kind of political instability. We also greatly enjoyed your episode on Chinese foot finding, and it has led to some interesting discussions about sexism, racism, and tradition. That episode is also to the state, the one I find most stomach turning, even more than the mommification episode, which my daughter has practically memorized. That made me laugh so hard when I read it, and I feel like I should apologize to this mother having to listen to the scorey details over and over the Let's the episode and the good King wins his last episode are from before our time, but this story is so delightful wanted to share it, and it also seems like a good close out for like the year end holiday season episodes for even though the earliest you could be hearing this is So you would like to write to us about this or any other uh things, you can. We're free podcast at how stuff works dot com. We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash misson hisstory and on Twitter at miss in History. Are tumbler is missin history dot tumbler dot com, and are on Pinterest at Interest dot com slash mist in History. We also have a sp edshard store in which we are hoping that we now have an awesome shirt that says I love exhumations. Really it's a heart exhamations. Yeah, that is true. It's pretty good. It's pretty great. Uh So we're hopeful that that's there now. If not, it will be there soon. Um. If you would like to learn more about what we have talked about today, you can come to our parent company's website, that is how stuff Works dot com and put the words Shakespeare in the search park. You are going to find tops and rare books which include the Shakespeare First folio. You can also come to our website, which is missing history dot com to find show notes about all of our episodes and an archive of all of the episodes and occasional other posts about other stuff. I have recently put one up that includes all the ways to contact us and which ones are the most reliable, so we can do all of that and a whole lot more at how stuff works dot com and MS industry dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com

Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast I'm Training. We are now into part two of our now traditional Unearthed episode where we talk about all of the things that were brought up literally and figuratively in We know that you all are listening at the earliest, but we are recording it in ten So when we say this year, that's what we mean. Uh this installment, we're starting with a random assortment of things that didn't really fit into any other category, followed by some medical unearth things, food and drinks, literature and letters, and we're going to end with so many people's favorite category exhumations. So starting off the random stuff, a probable Rembrandt, which was stolen from a French museum during a Bastille Day celebration in was recovered this year when the man who had stolen it confessed, so when the robbery happened, the alarm went off when the thief entered the museum through a library door, but the authorities did not arrive in time to catch him. The painting is called lanfant labou de savant or Child with a soap bubble. There's some debate about whether it's actually a Rembrandt or just something that was painted after Rembrant style, but maybe it's recovery means that we will finally get to find out. On April, a man named Paul Unyaki un earth of Viking age figuring in Denmark while using a metal detector. He immediately contacted a museum. So good on you, Paul for contacting authorities after finding something that seemed significant. Uh. The museum confirmed the age of the figure and started conservation measures on it. The figuring is really small, just four point six centimeters high, and it's notable because it has very detailed clothing. This basically makes it a new source of information about what the Vikings actually wore, and it's also kind of visually and visually interesting because it has a three dimensional head on a two dimensional body. The figuring is wearing an ankle length dress with long sleeves, and the dress itself has several different textures that are possibly meant to represent different fabrics. Her hair is pulled back in a very tight bun, and she has a piece of jewelry in the front of her dress that might indicate she's meant to represent the fertility goddess Freya. Aerial photography help researchers find the remains of two ancient Mayan cities in the Yucatan Peninsula. For one of the cities, it was actually a rediscovery archaeologist Eric von You visited in the nineteen seventies and dubbed it Lagunita, but given the density of the jungle and the remoteness of the location, as well as the vagueness of a youth documentation, it couldn't be found again until more recently. That Lagunita is a facade with an entryway that's made to look as though it's a monster's mouth, which I find so sort of fabulous. Uh. This is a common theme and architecture of the time in this particular example is very well preserved. The other city, known as tom Chin, probably existed at about the same time as Lagunita. Also this year, archaeologists working at Hadrian's Wall found a two thousand year old wooden toilet seat perfectly preserved in a muddy trench. Although other digs have unearthed plenty of Roman latrines and other toilet artifacts. Dr Andrew Burley, who's the director of excavations there, said he had never seen a perfectly preserved wooden toilet seat before. He said that it looked pretty comfortable. He was also hopeful that they would be able to find the latrine that went with it, since, in his words, as reported to the BBC, quote Roman lose are fascinating places to excavate their drain often contain astonishing artifacts. Dr Burley also said that he was looking forward to reading the text of a Roman stylist wax tablet that was also found at Hadrian's Wall this year. In this case, he told the BBC, if we're really lucky, the person using the seat will have had verbal diarrhea and we will be able to get their personal thoughts about life years ago. So I'd really like to meet this doctor Burley, because he sounds like a character that's like the thing that was on earth. That's more, that's most exciting to Tracy is that we now know about this. It's that's a gentleman who does research and sounds hilarious. Uh. In other poop News, archaeologists in Odense, on the island of shune In in Denmark found several latrine barrels dating back to the thirteen hundreds. More notable than the barrels themselves, is that they still contain what latrines are built to contain. So the team hopes that the contents of these barrels will help shed some light on the dietary habits of fourteen century Danes and for people local to the area, at least at that point, you could take a free tour of the dig site on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In April, a documentary film crew dug up a landfill in New Mexico where Atari had purportedly dumped millions of copies of the overwhelmingly unsuccessful video game Et the Extraterrestrial in nineteen eighty three. The film crew did find many copies of the game, but not quite the millions rumored to be buried there. They also found various other Atari video game detritus. I included that mostly because the long held et lore that video game kind of tickles me. Yeah, And it's one of those things that I think the number has grown over the years, you know, I think it used to be I remember hearing it once very early on, is like hundreds of thousands, and it has slowly ballooned up to millions of cartridges. It balloons to the point that there's a page about it at snopes dot com. So we're going to take a brief break for a word from a sponsor, and then talk about some medical things that were unearthed this year. Now we will get back to our lovely unearthing. So the first of our medical unearth things is only tangentially medical. While testing the area in preparation for building a new parking facility, the University of Mississippi Medical Center found that the site contained at least a thousand bodies. This wasn't at all the first time that a burial site has been found on the University of Mississippi campus. Anthropological study is ongoing on other remains that have already been unearthed before this discovery. These particular bodies are believed to have been patients at the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum. The asylum opened in eighteen fifty five and housed a hundred and fifty people. The school considered reburying the bodies elsewhere to make room for the parking facility, but they estimated that it would cost about three thousand dollars per body, or three million dollars total, so expansion plans were put on hold uh, and I could not find an update about exactly where things stood with that discovery as of right now at whether they've decided to continue and rebody the but rebury the bodies elsewhere, or change their construction plans, or exactly what. And it's entirely possible that that whole thing is bogged down in paperwork somewhere and there is nothing to discover. Um Scientists extracted DNA from the tooth of someone who died in the Justinian plague in the year five forty one. Unlike several other historical plagues, there really hadn't been very much medical or biological research on the Justinian plague. But then housing developers found a burial site near Munich, and as they examined the evidence, the team figured out that many of the peoples in the burial site had been buried together, which was of course very common during plague events, and they eventually narrowed it down the Justinian plague. A team led by evolutionary biologist David Wagner at Northern Arizona University determined that the plague had jumped from rodents to people and that it was in fact different from the Black Death during a rehabilitation project at New York City Hall, a team unearthed artifact that archaeologist thought was maybe a needle holder or perhaps a spice grinder at first. It's about a three inch long cylinder with holes in the top, made from a mammal bone, and it dates sometime back to the early eighteen hundreds. It was actually found back in but it wasn't until this year that anthropology student Lisa Geiger published her findings identifying what it actually was. She drew her conclusions thanks to a stint as a docent at the famous Muder Museum. It turns out that this was not a needle holder or a spice grinder. It was quote a vaginal syringe which was used for doucing. Given that this item was found in a big garbage pile that also included the remnants of what looked like a giant celebration, so there was lots of food and lots of liquor, the suspicion is that this was likely brought with a guest and used as a contraceptive or for STD prevention and just as a heads up that would not have been effective. Do not rely on such a thing for birth control or std prevent race these public service announcement. Yeah, I'm just taking a page from stuff mom never told you for a moment that would not work. In March, researchers announced that they'd revived a giant virus from the Siberian perma frost, and that it was still infectious. You may remember seeing these headlines and people uh saying that this is how the zombie apocalypse was going to start. So the virus is much larger than normal, almost as large as a small bacterium, and it affects amba. They named it Pythovirus sabaricum, with pytho coming from the Greek word for a large container that's used to store food or wine. Normally, viruses are extremely compact, but this one contains lots of empty space, which prompted evolutionary biologist Jean Michelle Clavery to say, quote, we don't understand anything anymore. The quotes from the researchers are some of my favorite things. They're pretty fabulous. So now we have three things that are in the realm of food and drink. Divers brought up a bottle marked Seltzer's from a shipwreck that is known as F thirty three thirty one, and this is a cargo vessel that sank not far off the Polish coast, so in the original reports this was believed to have been a German luxury mineral water Seltzers was a known brand of exactly that thing in the early eighteen hundreds, but later on they figured out that what was in the bottle was actually alcohol, probably vodka or gin, which was reported to be drinkable but not necessarily good in Egypt. While doing a routine cleaning in another team, a Japanese team led by Giro Condo of Waseda University, stumbled across a completely different, previously unknown burial place, that of conso Imheb, the head of beer production for the Court of a Menhotep. The third the t shaped tomb with a burial chamber in two halls, and it also includes a painting showing the whole process of grain fermentation and presenting the finished product to the mother goddess Moot. It's more than three thousand years old. U s archaeologists also found what they believed to be a precursor to Chianti while doing an excavation in Tuscany, down at the bottom of a hundred and five ft deep well. They found bronze vessels, cups, coins, and all kinds of other stuff. The various depths of the well include artifacts that spanned a fifteen hundred year time span, so really lots of different layers of things going down deeply into this well. Included at three different levels are some very well preserved degree seeds. The findings confirmed that there were at least three kinds of grapes in use during Roman and Etruscan times in the area, and researchers are looking into whether the way they are used might be similar to the proportions of candy, which is a seventy fifteen fifteen mix of three different types of grape. And now we are moving on to the arena of unearthed elements in literature and letters. So this first one is not really a discovery, but it is a release. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston released a number of letters from the personal papers of Jacqueline Kennedy on Nassis this year, and that's a collection of about twenty two thousand letters, postcards, and other pieces of mail. In particular, the newly released documents include condolence letters after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Also included were the responses sent to each letter, which were handled by the First Ladies personal secretaries. One particularly sweet note is from a and You're old Louisian, a girl who said, I think you're the nicest lady in the whole world. I mean it too. It's so sweet. It's particularly sweet because your is misspelled is why oh you are? Which is charming. In a ten year old note, a scrap of paper with Jane Austen's handwriting on it was found tucked into a book at the Jane Austen's home museum. This is probably a fragment of one of her brother's sermons, and it says quote men may get into a habit of repeating the words of our prayers by wrote, perhaps without thoroughly understanding, certainly without thoroughly feeling their full force and meaning. The scrap is dated eighteen fourteen, which is when Austin was working on Mansfield Park, and it has some similar religious themes to some things that are in the book. There's also some illegible writing on the back that the discoverers are hoping to be able to restore fragments of two poems by Sappho were on Earth from a private collection this year. It was very serendipitous. The person who owned the papyrus asked Oxford classicist Dirk abbinc about the Greek writing on the papyrus, and he immediately recognized its importance. Sappho was a tremendously influential poet in her time, but only one complete poem by her has actually survived until today. Sappho lived in the seventh century b c E. And this piece of papyrus dates to the second or third century CE. This fine brings the total known poems by Sappho to six. In February, Dr Gian Yang visited St John's College, University of Cambridge from China, and while he was there he discovered that a small volume of music that had been held in the university's rare books collection was really a priceless document detailing pre modern Chinese musical history. This is possibly a completely unique find in the world. The book was originally purchased in China in eighteen o four by the Reverend James Inman, who brought it back home with him to Britain. It's believed to have been printed in China around seventeen seventy and and Men donated all of his books to St. John's College after becoming a fellow there. The book contains an introduction to three different Chinese instruments, which are a flute, a lout, and a recorder, as well as thirteen different pieces of music. Um the entire notation that's used as something that has not been really well documented or surviving documentation has not lasted until now, uh so it gives a huge amount of information about uh Chinese musical history that we didn't have before. So cool. A previously unknown Shakespeare First Folio was authenticated in France this year, so that brings the total number of known first Folios to two hundred and thirty three. So, for the non Shakespeare buffs in the crowd, the First Folio is the first publication of the collected works of Shakespeare. It's considered to be the most reliable text for many of Shakespeare's plays, and this one is in excellent condition, which is surprising considering that until this year librarians at the public library where it was house thought it was a very old, but not particularly exceptional Shakespearean edition, and that was in part because the title page and introductory material were missing. However, it caught the eye of Remy Cordonier, the director of the Library's Medieval and Early Modern Collection, who thought that it could in fact be a first folio. It's planned that it will be put on display in st Omair where it was found next year. Before we get into, uh, the favorite topic of exhumations, let's take another brief moment for a word from a sponsor. So now we will wrap things up by talking about some exhamations. And this is, of course not all of the exhamations. UH. Treatsy had not yet set up her Google alert for exhamations until part way through the year, so she's got a pretty significant list that she's compiled, but not necessarily comprehensive. No there there. It's similarly with the rest of it. There would not be room for every single one. So Oliver Cromwell's body was exhumed in sixteen sixty one for a quote posthumous execution. They basically after he had died, had been buried, drew and quartered him and other things to his body. At that time, a brass plate that had been placed on his chest was taken by one of the officials he was present, and then that plate was passed down through the generations, and then it was sold at auction in December of this year, which is why we were talking about it for seventy four thousand, five hundred pounds or four thousand, nine sixty five euros. Neither the person it eventually was passed down to, nor the person who bought it was named, which is common practice for softies, which is who handled the auction. The plate itself is inscribed with a code of arm arms, the dates of Cromwell's birth and death, and his uh his coordination, and then in Latin quote, here is buried Oliver Cromwell, Protector of the Republic of England, Scotland and Ireland, which is a statement that the people of Ireland would buy and large find issue with. I'm surprised you didn't mention that his head is elsewhere and we don't know where. Yes, his head is elsewhere, we don't know where, but the fate of his body after he was posthumously executed is kind of hard to substantiate. Yeah, allegedly some people know where the head is. There has been some back and forth among the governments of Great Britain, Argentina and the Falkland Islands in recent weeks about the potential exhamations of one and twenty three unidentified bodies buried in Darwin Cemetery in the Falklands. Uh These are the bodies of Argentinian soldiers who died between April and June of nineteen two when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, which Britain claimed as its territory Wry. The result was the Falklands War. The Independent reported that Argentina was set to exhume one bodies. Argentina said the decision to exhume was extremely personal and it would be left to the families and the Falkland Islands government said that it had not received a request to actually do any of this, so as of right now, this whole situation is unresolved as far as our information goes. Yes, there is clearly still tension between Britain and Argentina on the subject of the Falkland Islands. In November, Kentucky State Police exhumed the body of an unidentified nineteen sixty nine murder victim. The woman's badly decomposed body was found by a man picking flowers for his wife in June of that year, officials are hoping to find a match through CODIS, which is the combined DNA index system. They called the murder an ongoing cold case, and are particularly interested in it because no one has come forward to say, this might be my relative in the time since the murder happened, which is a little unusual. I mean, they're they're frequently unidentified bodies, but not as frequently unidentified bodies with literally no one speculating that that might be their loved one. Prague announced that it would pay for the exhimation of Joseph too Far, who was a Roman Catholic priest who died after being interrogated and tortured. So while too Far was giving a sermon in December of nine, several witnesses said they saw an iron cross behind him move on its own several times, and when word got back to the government of at that time Czechoslovakia of this purported miracle, too Far was arrested and tortured until he said that he had orchestrated it. It then became a tool to try to discredit the Catholic Church and oppress Roman Catholics in Czechoslovakia. So this exhamation is in part for the beatification process and to close things out, and probably the most weirdly romantic exhumation of the year uh Frederick Chopin's heart. So when Chopin died, he asked for his heart to be removed from his body and buried in Poland, and it was after being sealed in a jar of liquor which his sister smuggled into Warsaw, probably under her dress. Um. Since then his heart has been passed from relative to relative, buried, dug up, buried again, all this while the rest of his body was at par Lache's cemetery in Paris. So in April, a number of officials, including the Archbishop of Warsaw, the culture minister, and to scientists, gathered at Holy Cross Church in Warsaw, where they removed the heart from its secret resting place, inspected it, took photos, and sealed the jar with wax to make sure that it's liquor preserved contents did not evaporate and dry out. Then they put the heart back where it was. This was in part to try to figure out whether Chopin really died of tuberculosis um. And it happened now because people were afraid and you know, convinced officials that it was a real possibility that the liquor might evaporate out of the jar and destroy the heart. Officials planned to repeat this inspection in another fifty years. And they also didn't say anything about it for months. They didn't completely in secret in the middle of the night. Very hush, hush. That's how all good exhamations go. Ye. Often they are in the middle of the night to avoid onlookers, but this one was particularly secret. So that is our unearthing. So in uh we can look forward to another Chopin's Heart discussion. Yes, I wonder what podcasting will be like in four. Do you also have some listener mail for us? I knew and this one is just kind of a charming story. Um. She also has lots of episode suggestions that I'm gonna I'm gonna stick with the charming story. This is from Genie. He says, Dear Tracy and Holly, I greatly appreciate your podcast that I'm a faithful listener. I'm also the mother of a young daughter in history buff She and I often listen to your podcast together, and I thought you might enjoy knowing the extent to which she absorbs and thinks about your words. We listened to your Good King winces Last episode last winter, and then several weeks later she said to me, I think I know who the stranger was that King WinCE this last wanted to help. I replied, oh, really who, she said, Let's see imagine my surprise. I tried to keep a straight face that she's explained to me that Utsy was walking in the snow looking for food and fuel, and King Winces Last and his page were the last to see him alive before his pursuers found him and killed him. I was glad to learn that the king survived, because who needs that kind of political instability. We also greatly enjoyed your episode on Chinese foot finding, and it has led to some interesting discussions about sexism, racism, and tradition. That episode is also to the state, the one I find most stomach turning, even more than the mommification episode, which my daughter has practically memorized. That made me laugh so hard when I read it, and I feel like I should apologize to this mother having to listen to the scorey details over and over the Let's the episode and the good King wins his last episode are from before our time, but this story is so delightful wanted to share it, and it also seems like a good close out for like the year end holiday season episodes for even though the earliest you could be hearing this is So you would like to write to us about this or any other uh things, you can. We're free podcast at how stuff works dot com. We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash misson hisstory and on Twitter at miss in History. Are tumbler is missin history dot tumbler dot com, and are on Pinterest at Interest dot com slash mist in History. We also have a sp edshard store in which we are hoping that we now have an awesome shirt that says I love exhumations. Really it's a heart exhamations. Yeah, that is true. It's pretty good. It's pretty great. Uh So we're hopeful that that's there now. If not, it will be there soon. Um. If you would like to learn more about what we have talked about today, you can come to our parent company's website, that is how stuff Works dot com and put the words Shakespeare in the search park. You are going to find tops and rare books which include the Shakespeare First folio. You can also come to our website, which is missing history dot com to find show notes about all of our episodes and an archive of all of the episodes and occasional other posts about other stuff. I have recently put one up that includes all the ways to contact us and which ones are the most reliable, so we can do all of that and a whole lot more at how stuff works dot com and MS industry dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com