Unearthed! in 2016, Part 1

Published Dec 28, 2016, 5:00 PM

It's time to talk about all the things that were unearthed in 2016! This first of two episodes covers stuff it seems like happens every year, things that are actually older than we thought, and shipwrecks.

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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 Tracy me Wilson. I'm Holly Fry. I sound a little excited because it's time for Unearthed. It's like our own fabulous Christmas present to us and listeners. Yeah, it's a lot of people's favorite episodes, so much so that in July, when we said we have too much of this, how in the world should we tackle it? Folks were like to do an extra one now, so we did, and yet there's still plenty. I don't I can't stress how much bigger the Unearthed pin board is than any other year I have worked on it. There are four hundred and twenty pins on it currently. There will be more because we are recording this on December what is it seventh, it's the eight I don't know what day it is. Record to this on December eight. Really, anything that came through after the sixth that's probably not in here. And so you know, I'll be adding more pins to reflect all the things that happened between now and the end of the year. But uh, to compare the first year we did this on Pinterest. To keep up with all of our things that were on earth. It was and there were only a hundred and seven pins on that board, so four times more. Yeah. Holly and I actually got to participate in some unearthing of our own this year. As part of our trip to the Boston area to do some filming, we got to be part of the archaeological dig in Harvard Yard. That's part of the undergraduate UH course offerings. Students actually get to do an archaeological dig every two years and in the next semester they catalog everything that they found UH and we found some things like pipe stems and roof tiles and bricks and other evidence of very early buildings at Harvard. Some of the students found really interesting things while we were there, including entire medicine bottles and stoppers. UM. There was a particular piece that that they found that that looked to have a little face carved on it that was really lovely, and so we have a video of this on our website and we will put it in the show notes for these episodes, and we'll put it up on our social media again when this episode when episode comes out, so folks can see the things that we got to help unearth a little bit, but mostly watch other folks unearthed. It was a really great experience. So Part two is going to be a bit more of a hodgepodge. But today in part one we have roughly three acts. We've got some stuff that seems like it is happening every year, uh, some things that are older than we thought before, and a whole bunch of shipwrecks. So the very first unearthed that Tracy and I ever worked on featured some artifacts that had been unearthed by a badger, but she continues to be one of my favorite things of all time. Burrowing animals are one of the biggest threats actually to British artifacts, so this actually happens pretty often. This year, a badger in Wilchair near Stonehenge managed to dig up a cremation urn and some pieces of pottery. Before that little Shenanigans was was discovered by humans. When some actual humans did come over to see what was going on, they also, on further excavation found an archer's wrist guard, a bronze saw copper chisel with a decorated bone handle, and cremated human remains that had probably been in that urn that the Badger dug up. They're all from about two thousand BC and probably belonged either to an archer or somebody who made archery supplies. In the words of archaeologist Richard Osgood quote, we would never have known these objects were in there. So there's a small part of me that is please the Badger did this, but it probably would have been better that these things had stayed within the monument where they'd resided for four thousand years. Uh. Presumably different Badger also unearthed some forty year old human remains in Ireland this year. This is not even the only Badger story. Here's in my head. The cartoon is this, there's an archaeological archaeologist Badger who's like, why do these humans keep messing with my fines? That's our TV show, Archaeology Badger. Apparently we're never gonna be done talking about Richard the Third, who we have been talking about for so long. But the first time I was not on the show yet. Yeah, it was Holly and Sarah talking about Richard the Third and being found under that car park. This year, archaeologists announced the creation of a three D digital reconstruction of him in his grave site. This was announced on the anniversary of his reinterment, and this reconstruction is based on his position as it was found under the car park, made using extensive photography of the site. You can look at it online yourself and and zoom all around it. We will put a link in the show notes. And we have not talked about old messages in a bottle every year, but it has definitely happened before. A man threw a message in a bottle into the ocean, offering a shilling to whoever founded uh This year, a German woman named Maryanne Winkler found it while on holiday and was indeed giving a shilling, even though it was a hundred and eight years ago when the bottle was originally thrown. This is because the man in question who offered this shilling was George Parker Bitter, who was throwing things into the North Sea to measure the patterns of his currents. The Marine Biological Association in Plymouth, Devon paid Bitter's debt off by apparently getting an old shilling on eBay and sending it to her with a note of things. Also, this particular message in a bottle got the Guinness Book of World's Records record this year for being the oldest message in a bottle, but you know who's counting until we find an even older one. Uh. We also have yet another update brought to you by Crossrail, which has come up a number of times over the years. So this year DNA tests confirmed that a burial pit of Great Plague victims who died between sixteen sixty five and sixteen sixty six, and we're discussed previously on on Earthed on an Unearthed episode did indeed die of your Cinea pestis or bubonic plague. And we have another feels like annual update on Amelia Earhart, this time that she may have died as a castaway, and that is based on new analysis of a bone that has been part of the air Heart body of knowledge for quite some time. This is the work of the International Group for Historical Aircraft Recovery or TIGER if you would make it into an acronym, whose air Heart project is ongoing. There are announcements about it. I mean, it really does seem like every year, and every year we got a lot of really excited notes from folks, and every year it's like this is a this is a new piece of analysis on a thing that already has been around for a while. Yeah. Yes, so this becomes different because it suggests she did not crash and die in the crash, she put down or crashed and then died on the island later. Yeah, but that was already a theory that people already have, and this is like a piece of bone we already knew about and and now we really know about it. I'm underwhelmed. What I'm saying is by the annual Amelia era. Don't sugarcoat it. We also have a couple of things this year that aren't exactly older than they thought. But there's something or than we thought. Uh so here they are that will become clear in just a moment. Neanderthals might have been smarter than we thought, uh, through things like cave paintings. We know for certain that manganese dioxide has been used as a pigment all the way back to the snowe age. However, Neanderthals in southwestern France had these relatively large blocks of it, way more than a person might need for a pigment, especially since there are other black pigments that are a lot easier to obtain. There's a lot of manganese dioxide found in nature, but it does take time and energy to go find it, which raised a question of what could be so special about it that Neanderthals would spend time gathering it instead of doing things like gathering food. In the answer, fire uh, These blocks, when powdered, lowered the autoignition temperature of wood shavings and increase their rate of combustion, meaning that they caught fire more easily and they burned better. And since manganese manganese dioxide by itself doesn't burn, the fact that Neanderthals may have been gathering it for this purpose suggests an amount of curiosity and non intuitive problem solving that aren't often attributed to them. Also, according to a paper published in the journal Antiquity this year, Neanderthal's used toothpicks did uh. The next something or thing is the silk road, which went further than we thought. According to analysis of textiles found in Nepal, this cloth that was found was dated to the years between four hundred and six fifty and they included de gummed silk fibers and mung j eat and Indian lack dies. And since there wouldn't have been a local source of silk. This suggests that Samsong, Nepal, or the artifacts were found, was in fact connected to the silk Road. Yes, it wasn't just some kind of remote place that nobody ever went, as had previously been suspected. It was connected to this much larger trading network. We are going to get to a big chunk of things that it turns out are a lot older than we thought before. After a quick word from answer, here we go with a whole lot of things that we've learned to see her are a lot older than we thought. A mammoth carcass was discovered in the Siberian Arctic in and in January of this year, a team published a paper in the journal Science called Early Human Presence in the Arctic Evidence from forty five thousand year old mammoth remains, which examined cut marks in that mammoth. There haven't been any tools found in the area, but the mammoth's bones have evidence of injuries or cuts that were caused by human wielded weapons or possibly Neanderthals. If verified, this find means that humans made their way to the Arctic about forty five thousand years ago, which is ten thousand years earlier than previously thought. They're beyond prompt there early uh Cambridge University's Liver Homes Center for Human Evolutionary Studies, which often was by the abbreviation l c h S, discovered the partial remains of twenty seven people in Kenya in According to findings released this year, these remains appear to be evidence of a massacre that took place about ten thousand years ago. Six were children and eight appeared to be female, including one who was pregnant. This is the earliest known massacre and it suggests that the history of human warfare goes back even longer than previously thought. There's other Stone Age evidence of conflicts between groups of hunter gatherers, but in terms of a massacre that was likely a community or an extended family unit who were killed, this is really the oldest. If a hypothesis that was published in January is confirmed, humans made a visual depiction of volcanic eruption much earlier than previously thought. The Chevest Cave paintings are some of the oldest, most intricate, and best preserved in the world, and an r disciplinary team of researchers studying them compared geological evidence of nearby eruptions with dating methods to confirm when certain paintings were created. There's a connection between a crimson and white painting that looks like an upward spray and a nearby volcanic eruption that probably would have had a similar shape. Both happened to forty tho years ago, so the window is wide, but there's still a likelihood that that is a depiction. Yeah, and uh, this particular painting without that context was pretty unusual. Most of the other paintings around it are of easily identifiable and pretty detailed animals, so this somewhat abstract spray thing didn't make a lot of sense until it was viewed as a as a volcano and not as a weird swirly abstraction. If confirmed, this means that the oldest depiction of a volcanic eruption is way way older than we previously thought, because before this point, the oldest known visual depiction of a volcane know erupting was from a mural in Turkey that is a comparatively young only nine thousand years old, just a baby as as compared to thirty forty thousand years old uh, next up is fairy tale. So we knew they were old, but apparently they were also older than we thought. According to a paper published in Royal Society Open Science, at least one fairy tale goes all the way back to the Bronze Age. The linguistic research on this was the work of Sarah Grasa Da Silva, social scientist and folklorist, as well as Jamshed Terrani, who's an anthropologist. What they did was they winnowed down two hundred and seventy five fairy tales from Indo European languages to the very most basic essential stories. Then they constructed phylogenetic trees, so the same kinds of trees that are used to illustrate evolution in living things, to construct how far back these stories went. It was sort of like following linguistic footprints back in time to the point where these languages and their stories split off from each other. And through this analysis they found evidence that some fairy tales are five thousand years old, and one, The Smith and the Devil, is about six thousand years old. In The Smith and the Devil, a smith sells his soul to an evil supernatural being. In exchange for the power to weld any material to another. Then he welds the evil being to his anvil to get out of giving up his soul. This actually supports Wilhelm Grimm's assertion that fairy tales were thousands of years old, which was long discredited, although at least one folklorist has questioned whether ancient knowledge of metal working was sufficient to support the idea of having a word for smith. Yeah. Before all this pretty much everyone except for Wilhelm grim and been like, oh, yeah, they're there, are a few hundred years old, and this is like, no, thousands Pacific Islanders may have made their way to Southeast Asia, the mainland Southeast Asia, much earlier than previously thought. And this find actually comes as a result of mitochondrial DNA evidence that was being studied in an effort to answer a completely different question. That question was why are Austronesian languages, which are spread across a very large geographical area with big, big chunks separated by long stretches of ocean. Why are these uh bast sort of diverse area of languages? Why are they so similar? So for a long time, the cultivation of rice in mainland China got the credit for this similarity. The idea was that rice cultivation first spread to Taiwan about four thousand years ago, and that then Taiwanese language routes spread outward from there with the practice of rice cultivation. But this DNA evidence suggests that there was an earlier migration that played a role from Indonesia to Southeast Asia. Eight thousand years ago, there was still a migration out of Taiwan, but migrants from Taiwan made up only about ony percent of the region's population outside of Taiwan, so that original question about Austronesian language is still somewhat unanswered. One theory is that Taiwanese migrants were established as a higher social class and consequently had a greater influence on the language even though their population was smaller. Discovery of the world's oldest fermented fish means that Nordic civilation civilization is probably older than we previously thought. While excavating a ninety two hundred year old settlement, archaeologists found evidence of a large scale fish fermenting operation, and that would have only been necessary and also possible with a large established population staying in one place. Previously, it was believed that Nordic people's were migratory that long ago, and that they were sustaining themselves through foraging and fishing at a more subsistence level. But fermenting fish allows it to be stored and used later, and it's also a kind of complicated process, which means that not only were people staying in one place earlier than previously thought, but they also were more advanced by that point than previously thought in terms of their technological skills. People also got to Ireland earlier than we thought, which we know thanks to a bear bone found in an Irish cave in the nineteen twenties that was radio carbon dated this year based on cut marks on that bone and those tests. A human being butchered the bear sometime around ten thousand, five hundred BC, which is more than two thousand years before the previously believed arrival of people in Ireland, which we had thought was sometime in eight thousand BC. In addition to the fact that people were in Ireland earlier than previously thought, the fact that they were butchering bears probably had a not yet explored ramification on the local ecosystems. Previously, uh, you know, study of the ecosystems of of Ireland were based on the idea that there were two thousand or hundred more years without human involvement. Uh before Now, yeah, that will shift the needle. Uh. People in West Africa started harvesting shade trees to make shade butter a thousand years earlier than we thought, the year one hundred versus the previously believed year eleven hundred. They figured this out by analyzing shells knocked off the shay nuts found insights where people have been living for about one thousand, six hundred years. In addition to pushing back the first use of shade by such a long period, the shells also show that people began cultivating these trees. With human cultivation, the shells become thinner and more consistent, which they were able to trace through these shell fragments. Apart from shade better which some people also pronounced more like she, which is used in medicine and skincare, shape oil is also used in cooking, and shay would is used for building because it's resistant to termites. Axes are also older than we thought uh. Before this particular discovery of a fragment of an axe head in western Australia. The earliest ground edge axes were from Japan circa thirty five thousand years ago, but this find, reported in the Journal Australian Archaeology, is between forty four thousand and forty nine thousand years old, and it's from either the same time as or just after humans first arrived on the continent of Australia. This suggests that ground or polished axes arose in at least two places on Earth independent of one another. In addition to this axe find, Aboriginal people's settled the interior of Australia earlier than previously thought, which is confirmed thanks to some serendipity. A man who took a little detour to answer the call of nature stumbled upon a significant find in Australia, which was a rock shelter with a blackened roof which was adorned with art. Fortunately, Giles Hann, who was the person who made this pit stop, is an archaeologist and bactoral student, and he knew that he was looking at something significant. This rock shelter in Australia's southern interior appears to have been occupied almost as long as humans have been in Australia. About ten thousand years earlier than humans were thought to have moved that far into the interior. Barley made its way to China and was used in beer about a thousand years earlier than previously thought, which we know thanks to residues on a five thousand year old piece of pottery. This is intriguing not just because of that thousand year time difference, but also because it indicates a mix of Chinese and Western brewing traditions that went into this particular uh pottery jar full of beer. Barley was a staple in brewing in the West, long before in China, where other grains were used to permit and too delicious alcohol, which, just so folks know upcoming episode on the history of beer coming sued to this podcast. Yeah. Uh so, Indigo, we thought it was used as early as four thousand, four hundred years ago, but in reality it's closer to six thousand, two hundred years ago, which we now know thanks to textile fabric found in Peru. Not only is this Peruvian sample older than previously known indigo died textiles, but it's geographically also quite far away from that four thousand, four hundred year old sample which was in Egypt, and we know this thanks to some scraps of woven cotton found in two thousand seven and two thousand eight, whose significance was really not clear until this year. Now we will take a break for another quick word from a sponsor before we talk about a truly astounding number of shipwrecks. So last year we talked about what seemed at the time i'm an astounding twenty two shipwrecks being found in the Aegean c and this year they found twenty three more, bringing the total to forty five. Not to be outdone, a different team reported forty one shipwrecks discovered during a seabed survey of the Black Sea, and then Historic England announced that there are probably forty thousand undiscovered shipwrecks off the coast of Britain because of their recency, their number, and in Britain's case, the fact that these are not discovered, these have not really thoroughly been studied yet. I this is um What is the name of that game in Pirates of the Caribbean. Is it liars dice where they're all kind of bidding on what they think they will find under the cup. I don't recall that, but that is a game that is played that way. This is the shipwreck version. Well I bid forty thousand shipwrecks. In January, cruise building a hotel in Alexandria, Virginia found an eighteenth century ship breck, described as quote sturdily built and well preserved. Alexandria is actually rather far inland to be home to a shipwreck. It's just south of Washington, d C. But it's situated on the Potomac River. And the going theory is that the ship is part of waterfront landfill and was intentionally sunk there. And this is not unheard of at all. Quite a lot of waterfront cities are constructed on landfill in Alexandria. Had strong enough suspicions that there might be something significant under there that it passed the Archaeological Protection Code in which requires archaeological study before any work begins in the area. And they're doing quite a lot to preserve and study this particular wreck, including extensive three D imaging studies and then attempting to keep the wood in a wet environment to preserve it for further study later. A similar but much newer shipwreck was also found in the Boston Seaport earlier this year, probably unintentionally wrecked in the eighteen hundreds, but buried under landfill later. Another wreck that was probably intentional researchers Halliday nearly intact Dutch shipwreck dating back to medieval times out of the Acil River. It was probably sunk on purpose in an effort to divert the river's course about six hundred years ago. The vessel itself was actually found in but it's raising of the riverbed was part of a multi year marine archaeology effort to bring it up intact, and that step was done this year. They did this with the help of a massive suction operation, a crane, and a hammock like web of straps and cables. It was way more complicated, of course, than a hammock, though every strap had its own motor to compensate for the variations in pressure and tension that were needed for this delicate job. The ship, known as a COG, was a specialized trading vessel and measured twenty meters or sixty five ft long, and the reason they think that it was sunk there on purpose is that it was placed perpendicular to the flow of the river. And there are other vessels that were sunk in that same location. The idea is that they were probably trying to prevent silk build up that was keeping other vessels from being able to dock in the river. Uh. Their hope with this particular wreck was to dry it out safely and then put it in a museum. In September eight thirty three whaling ships got trapped in pack ice off the coast of Alaska after the wind direction didn't shift to blow the ice out to sea as it had done in years past. The ice soon destroyed the ships and their crews were stranded until seven more ships were able to rescue them. In January of this year, Noah archaeologists announced that they had found the hulls of two of these trapped ships, thanks to a combination of global warming and sonar searches. That disaster is an interesting story on its own. The rescue vessels were also whalers, and they had to dump their cargo in order to be able to rescue more than twelve hundred officers, crew, and families who were stranded when these vessels became trapped in the pack ice. Although nobody was killed, it did it seriously damaged and already struggling whaling industry in the United States, not just because of the loss of so many ships, but also because the rescue ships had to dump all of their cargo to make room for the passengers they were taking on. And this announcement uh for clarity was actually made at the very tail end of but it was after we had already recorded last year's unearthed episodes. Yeah, I think it's one of those things that I tagged this year that had like a website that was launched this year, but an announcement that was the tail tail end of last year. In crews scanning the seabed in preparation for the UK's East Anglia Offshore wind Farm found a sunken submarine. They had initially thought that it might be Dutch in origin, which would have made it the last Dutch World War Two submarine whose whereabouts are as yet unknown, but year after study this was conclusively found to not be that at all. It was neither Dutch nor from World War Two. It was German and from World War One, and it sank sometime after it left on patrol on January thirteenth, nineteen fifteen, possibly due to having struck a mine. And in similar news, a vessel believed to be a British World War two submarine was found off the coast of Sardinia in May of this year. There are also some World War two aircraft found in the ocean this year, but I did not write them into this list of unearthed things. An iron hulled Civil War era steamer was found off the coast of Oak Island, and that's the Oak Island and North Carolina, not the one with the money pit. It was discovered in February during sonar operations and was immediately suspected to be a Blockade Runner. That's one of the ships that would try to break through the Union Black aide to deliver supplies to the Confederacy during the Civil War. By April, the state's Department of Natural and Cultural Resources was quote nine sure that it's the agnes E Fry. The Agnesy Fry was one of three Blackade Runners known to be lost in that particular area, and it's the first Civil War era find in that part of the ocean in decades. Additionally, it's one of the best preserved shipwrecks off the North Carolina coast. A ship was found off the coast of Oman. An excavation started in this year. Oman's Ministry of Heritage and Culture announced the findings. It's believed to be the Esmeralda from Vasco da Gama's fleet, which sank in a storm in May of fifteen oh three. This would have been during Vasco da Gama's second voyage to India. It's the oldest shipwreck from Europe's Age of Discovery to be found and excavated. More than twenty eight hundred artifacts have been brought up from the site, including a bronze bell marked with the year four suggesting that the year that the ship was built, rare coins, and a copper alloy disc bearing the Portuguese coat of arms and another first. This was Oman's first effort at underwater archaeology and it was undertaken with an international team of experts all right. Lastly, this year they found the HMS Terror, companion to the HMS Arabis, which we talked about in our Unearthed episode dedicated to the Franklin expedition. In the discovery of the Arabis basically confirmed what First nation's oral history had been saying all along with the Terror. Savvy Kovic and a knookman whose first language is in noctitute, first spotted what he was suspected was one of the two ships about six years ago. The rack had been part of the area's oral history for more than a hundred and fifty years already at that point, and he took pictures of himself with it, but then he lost the camera, so with no evidence, he kept the fine to himself, suspecting that no one would believe him. However, Adrian Samnowski of the Arctic Research Foundation eventually gained his trust, and in September his testimony led researchers direct Clee to the wreck. Let's find actually led to a fair amount of drama about whether the Arctic Research Foundation was supposed to be searching there or not, and whether they had the correct permits. There was some in fighting between different organizations that have been looking for these recks. But once again we have First Nations people to thank for knowing where these shipwrecks are. It's such an I told you so moment, like we told you what they were there. We've been saying they were there, well we didn't know no what we told you. Well, with the Arabis, it was even like literally more than a century of people being like, hey, it's over there, and only suddenly now, all right, it is over there. Uh So that is our first installment of Unearthed for twenty sixteen, and we are going to be back with another installment. It's got a little bit more of a hodgepod to various things in our next episode, but for now, have some listener mailoray. This listener mail is about our recent episode on the Attica prison uprising, and it is from a listener who has asked to be kept anonymous, and he says, dear history ladies, thank you for your podcast. I listened to it all the time, driving, riding the train, working. I love it. I just got out of federal prison, or really federal camp, and I can tell you that the current situation at the federal camp that I was at is very similar to what you're describing in the conditions at Attica. Feather Bedding is a new term to me, but it was pervasive. I worked in the welding shop, so we were busy and made things all the time. The attitude of the guards, the commissary situation, throwing out our books, just any books they considered, uh, they considered them a fire hazard. The camp system started in the seventies, I think is an afterthought. Most camps were not built, but we're something else before, like a hospital or a school. My camp was very small, a hundred and thirty guys, and it was a wreck building to a golf course, was never meant to house people. Often in the winter, the heat would go out for a week at a time. The staff solution was to install permanent radiators in each office, as it occurred with regularity. If you want any more, I can tell you, but thank you for the segment. I find it very accurate, uh, and then he thanks us, UM, thank you anonymous listener. UM. We have gotten so many at this point from from multiple sides, uh, folks writing to us about that particular episode, whether people whose family members have been incarcerated or themselves have been incarcerated, or people who work in corrections UM, or people who are working as a prison reform advocates, just kind of all over the place. That's been really interesting, And I think of all the subjects we have covered on the show, the one that has brought in the most uh, the most personal recollections from so many people who are tangential to so many different aspects of the thing we're talking about. Yeah, yeah, I mean I I have been delayed, fully surprised by by how many angles we've had in terms of our our listener response to that, which is quite lovely. Yes, and a lot of those emails have been incredibly generous and thoughtful, So thank you so much to everyone. Uh. You can write to us about this or any other podcasts at History Podcasts at how stuffworks dot com. We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash miss in history, and on Twitter at miss in history or tumbler miss in history dot tumbl or dot com, or on Pinterest and Instagram at miss in history. As we've said, we've been keeping up with these unearthed things on Pinterest for the last few years. I'm considering another solution for that next year because the pin boards is way too big. Now you can come to our parent companies website, which is how stuff works dot com to find out all kinds of information about archaeology and history anything else your heart desires. You can come to our website, which is missed in history dot com, where you will find show notes to all the episodes Holly and I have ever done, including all the links to all these stories that we've talked about today, and a couple of specific things we said we would link to, like that three D reconstruction of Richard the Third. Uh. So you can do all that and a whole lot more how stuff works dot com or missed in history dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it? How stuff works dot com

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