Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast are Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This is part two of what was Unearthed? Uh. In part one, we had a few big collections of related to one another in some way, of things that were unearthed. We had a whole bunch of shipwrecks, a whole bunch of things that turn out are a lot older than we thought. That kind of thing today is more of a hodgepodge. We've got some recurring favorites, including at least theoretically edible finds yeah except maybe not probably not actually good art and letters uh, some by you know, by a last minute remembrance on my part, everyone's favorite uh exhumations, which at first I almost entirely left out of this episode, But but I discovered my oversight in time, and we're gonna conclude with some historical debunking. Um. As we've noted before, we found a lot more things to talk about this year than can possibly be covered in a couple of episodes, even having weeded out a bunch of things during our special July installment that we did everything that we uh that caught our eye this year is pinned in our Unearthed Unearthed in twenty ten board at pinterest, which is at pinterest dot com slash myths in history. So if you want to see a whole lot more pins, including anything that happened after December six, uh, go have a look at that. Um so today. I mean, really, this is just super super highlights, and I will be candid. The criteria for being included became increasingly draconian. Farther I went on because, uh, we probably pinned enough stuff to have four teen parts of Unearthed, which some people would love, other people would get tired of. That could be a spinoff podcast. One day somebody suggested that we do this or that we like we have this ongoing Unearthed segments. Uh, but having these two episodes as a pretty important part of our our year end ability to have poadcasts every week. So yeah. Uh so. Lund University announced that a skeleton found during a renovation at Lena Castle may belong to Philip Christopher Koonug's Mark account, who disappeared more than three hundred years ago. He was involved with Princess Sophia Dorthea, who was married there three hundred love letters are in the collection at Lund University, and if the skeleton is indeed genuine, it may be the resolution to a very old cold case. Research this year cleared the name of Gaetan Duga, a flight attendant wrongly blamed for being patient zero in the AIDS epidemic. God did die from AIDS related causes in four, but he was portrayed as this knowing vector for the disease in and the band played on his name really became synonymous with the spread of the disease. He was basically portrayed as a villain. Yeah, he gets blamed for an awful lot. Uh. However, do Go was not patient zero. One notation in his medical records was patient oh as in the letter O as in from outside of California. RNA analysis of the virus conclusively proves that HIV had been present in the United States long before dog was. Just because I know folks will probably ask since it's come up, you and I are both currently still a little too close to the origins of the HIV epidemic to be able to talk about it rationally on the show. Yes, it's something very important to both of us. Yes, I don't know that people would enjoy thirty minutes of sobbing. That's what would happen maybe someday, also after a little more historical time has passed, because like this find, there are still things that are that are coming out that are completely rewriting that relatively recent history. UH By studying Chinese smog, researchers believe they have identified the cause of the Great London Smog, which we talked about in a previous episode. We already knew that sulfur dioxide shared a lot of the blame, but we didn't know what it was about that particular fog that caused it to become so acidic and damaging in London. The sulfur dioxide mixed with nitrogen dioxide and that forms these particles that became increasingly concentrated as water in the fog evaporated. So researchers are now using this information to try to prevent such an occurrence from happening in China, which is plagued by longstanding air quality issue use. An international team took a crack at figuring out what was behind the collection of Roman era decapitated skeletons. All was a favorite originally found by York Archeological Trust or y a T. The skeletons were significant not just because many of them had been decapitated while still alive, but also because their heads had typically been buried with them somewhere other than where your head usually goes, like on their chest or down by their feet. The study couldn't clear up exactly who these men were. Even before this round of research took place, there were several theories that maybe they were gladiators, or soldiers or prisoners, and the findings could support any of those conclusions. All of the skeletons appeared to be male, all under the age of forty five, with bone conditions that simultaneously suggested poor childhood health an adult experience with both wielding weapons and being the target of violence. What's notable about the study, besides the fact that there were more than eighty decapitated skeletons to look at, was that a study of several of their genomes revealed that they weren't all from Britain. In a sample of seven, one was from the Middle East. So it's physical evidence to support the idea that people really were quite mobile during the Roman Empire and that the empire itself was cosmopolitan. Next up, we have a collection of fines that are just big in some way. I feel like I have to tell people that in your outline that you put together, the subheader for this is WHOA, that's big well, And this is actually the thing I'm gonna talk about is one of the earlier pins in the board, and I completely forget about what things have previously been been pinned. And there are several other pins from later in the year about this same thing, because it was quite quite large and a big deal. Back in and archaeologists noticed some wooden posts king out of the edge of a quarry, and a small excavation in two thousand and four and another one two years later revealed that this was a fantastically well preserved Bronze Age settlement. Originally, the plan was just to leave the site after as it was after the end of an excavation that ended in two thousand and six, because the soil conditions were such that they could keep the site pretty well preserved. But in more recent years routine monitoring raised some concerns that this wasn't the case anymore, and this led to a massive excavation of the entire site. This year with the study and catalog of all of its contents. This started in August of fifteen and ended in August of sixteen. It was overseen by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit. UH and this I did not see the news about it for the August fifteen and later portion of the study, but this year I saw a lot about it. Three thousand years ago, this settlement in Cambridgeshire in the UK, which is known as must Farm today, was home to people who lived in round structures on stilts over water, and the settlement was eventually destroyed in a fire and the structures collapsed into the water where silt preserved them. They have found so much stuff. It must farm so much. Uh. We've we've had whole episodes about sites like Cookia and Poverty Point, and maybe at some point in the future this could be a similar whole episode. There is of course lots of wood from the settlement itself, things like post rings that would have supported the structures and walls and roofs and a palisade. But then there are also the things that people used to live there. There pottery bowls and jars that still contain the food that was in them. Three thousand years ago. There are lots and lots of tools and weapons, and some surprisingly well preserved textiles made from plant materials. Aside from the site itself, which is one of the largest and best preserved Bronze Age sites in Britain, they've also found some artifacts that suggest that people living there were more advanced than previously thought, in particular some glass beads that are thought to have been part of a necklace. We'll put a link to the must Farm website in the show notes because there's so much cool stuff to look at there that that will lose you a little bit of time, but it's time well spent. This happened to me while writing episode. Um, so yeah, that link will be in our show notes. Researchers uncovered a huge sixth century BC stone slam called a steely that's covered in a Truscan writing. This thing weighs about five hundred pounds and they're at least seventy legible letters and punctuation marks on it. Apart from its size and weight, there's a lot that's remarkable about this fine Most of what we have from Etruscan civilization today is from grave and funeral objects, and this is believed to be part of a temple. It's covered in religious writing, which could yield a whole other segment of knowledge about the Etruscan culture and language. And when the find was first reported in March, researchers were hoping that it would reveal the name of the deity worship there, and in August it did. The temple was dedicated to the fertility goddess Uni Consort of Tinia, the Etruscan supreme deity. Chinese archaeologists excavated a huge network of dikes and levies dating back five thousand years in eastern coastal China. This is the largest water system ever found in China and it's believed to have combined the tasks of irrigation, flood control, and transportation into one system. And this massive system was originally found in two thousand seven, but the excavation took place over twenty and at this point their purpose is somewhat speculative, but the going theory is that they irrigated rice, controlled floodwaters and created three huge reserve mars. Now we are going to take a quick sponsor break before moving on to some more findings and a fine that doesn't quite fit into some of the other categories that we are talking about today. X ray study has confirmed the oral history of Bonos, Lithuania, which is believed to have been home to an escape tunnel used by Jews during the Holocaust. During the Holocaust, about of Lithuanian Jews were killed over the period of about three years, but a story was passed down by survivors, descendants and other people in the area that on the last night of passover, eighty imprisoned Jews escaped through a tunnel they had hand dug over the period of three months. Researchers were reluctant to take on a physical search for evidence of a tunnel at the site because of how many human remains were buried there, But us here it was announced that using ground penetrating radar and electrical resistivity tomography they found the tunnel exactly where they expected it to be, and now we have some fines that are related to art and to writing in some way. After a two year study, an interdisciplinary team led by Mark Walton presented their findings on a collection of two thousand year old Roman Egyptian mummy portraits. These were first unearthed at Taptunists which is now called um El Brigat, and that was more than a hundred years ago that they were originally found. These portraits were painted on wood panels and then the wood panels would be affixed to mummies. They're considered to be one of the precursors to the tradition of European portraiture. Though through noninvasive, non destructive research, the team found a lot about how the paintings were made. They took extensive collections of pictures using an off the shelf digital camera under different lighting conditions from different angles to figure out exactly where the brushstrokes were and in what order different parts of the works were painted. Spectroscopy and other analysis found that both the pigments and the wood itself came from far outside of Egypt, including iron earth pigments from Greece, red lead from Spain, and wood panels from Central Europe. Their conclusion was that these portraits were all made in the same workshop and possibly even by the same person. Uh In a brief little finding, a ground penetrating radar scan of Shakespeare's grave revealed that his skull is probably missing, most likely stolen in seventeen nine. That's something that was reported in eighteen seventy nine but was later dismissed. There's also been ongoing work this year at at Shakespeare's Theater, the Curtain, which I didn't get into you, and this particular and another thing because I mean the but they were finding were the things you expect to find in a theater. Uh. And also I think that work is is still ongoing, so maybe next year we will have to go a final final tally. Researchers from the University of Texas at Arlington used astronomy to figure out the date of Sappho's Midnight poem. Here is a nineteenth century translation of Midnight poem. The silver moon is set, the pleiades are gone, half the long night is spent, and yet I lie alone. Assuming she wrote the poem in Middleini, the capital city of Les Bus, they used multiple pieces of software to compare the night sky to her likely vantage point beginning in five seventy b C. They concluded that the poem was set somewhere between January and April six of that year, while acknowledging that five seventy was somewhat arbitrary since it's not clear exactly when during her life she wrote the poem. The team also said that moving the year wouldn't appreciably change their analysis, regardless of which year it would have been. Still within that rough window of time was how I understood it. The Groyer Codex, whose authenticity has been has been suspects since it was first looted from a cave in Mexico in the nineteen sixties, underwent analysis this year, suggesting that it may indeed be genuine, and if it is, it is the oldest manuscript in the America's This codex is a ten page painted fragment of Maya iconography and a chart of the movements of the planet Venus. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about it, but it appears to be the real thirteenth century deal. And now we have some things that are in theory edible or related to food. They were consumable at one poison point in time someone might have eaten at some point. We figured out where ancient Rome was getting its non stick cookwear, which if you didn't know, the Roman Empire had non stick cookwear. Uh. This red cookware has a non stick coating that resembles Pompeian redware. Although the Roman coatings in this particular fine we're reported to be a higher quality than Pompeian red ware. It wasn't a total mystery where to look for evidence of this Roman non stick cooked cookwear. The first century Roman cookbook Direct Cooking Area. We may or may not be butchering this, but because Latin Uh mentions cumin a teste or qumine a patel, also known as cookwear made in the city of Kuma as the best pan for making a chicken stew. We knew where Cuma was, so it was just a matter of finding the pottery works where this cookwear was made. So confirmation came from a discovery of the dump site where the people at the factory would throw away their defective goods. So thank you for not being perfect at your jobs. Roman Area far a factory workers who helped us track this down. I like that we're looking for factory seconds as part of archaeology. I love it. Yeah. Well, and that this particular report was like apart from the fact that they were defective, somehow they were all in really good quality. UH. Turf cutters in a peat bog in Ireland found a two thousand year old clumb. This was so popular because it is so funny. Inherently of bog butter, that's a substance familiar to the folks who listened to our show on Butter Versus Marjorie. Unlike some bog butters, this one does appear to have started out as actual dairy butter. But Andy Halpin at the National Museum of Ireland so that they would not advise tasting it. Some three d and forty year old cheese was found in a Baltic Seas shipwreck, and we can put this in the bog butter together we have quite a feast. Well, this cheese smells pretty cheesy and also yeasty. It was described as stinky. The team specifically recommended eating this either. This cheese was found aboard a ship that sank in sixteen seventy six. Uh, and I'm not laughing at that part. Only about forty of the eight fifty or so people aboard survived the shipwreck, But I'm laughing that there's this cheese still from sixteen seventy six that smells strongly of cheese and yeast. I like a stinky cheese, but I still probably wouldn't taste that one, so not to be outdone in our in our feast that we're putting together. A clay pot found in central Jutland in has been found to contain the burned residue of three thousand year old cheese burn cheese. At first, the team who found it were excited just because it was a very well preserved Bronze age vessel, which is not common. It was only after they cleaned it that they realized that there was still cheese in there. Um, it's an important find. I'm not laughing at the fine. It's just there's something fundamentally comedic about ending old cheese. I don't know what it is, specifically, this was probably This is where it gets exciting for me. The brown Norwegian way cheese known as Brunos or mysost. I love a brown Norwegian cheese so good, so that makes it quite exciting. I know where to get some locally. I'm thinking of maybe going there after we finished recording, just to get some special. Oh it's good stuff. Also. Now we're just on a dairy kick. An interdisciplinary team found widespread evidence of dairying all through the southern Mediterranean and southern Europe, going basically as far back as the origins. Of agriculture or about nine thousand years. Uh. This study hands on the contents of pottery and whether the residues in the pottery came from meat or from milk. And this could have gone in uh last the previous episode about things from earlier than we thought, because a lot of folks thought dairy came along later. Yeah. Uh. So now we heart exclamation exclamations, as do many listeners. So we've got a couple for this year. First, a mass grave connected to the Spanish Civil War was exhumed this year in the central Spanish city of Valladolid. Uh. This spring and summer they removed one eight five bodies from three graves and they sent them for forensic analysis to try to identify them. And this is one of as many as two thousand mass burial sites in Spain connected to the war. This is part of an ongoing effort to try to balance like the desires of some people to leave remains undisturbed, with also the need to try to identify the remains and if possible, reconnect them with their families or at least let families know what happened. Um. But because they're so so many, it's just an immense, immense task, and I imagine it will be ongoing for quite some time. The room bins of a couple buried in Warwickshire were exhumed and then reburied, which is not typical in their religious tradition, because thieves were using their headstone to break into the adjacent All Saints Church. I feel like we have had a very similar like this just sounds very familiar to me, So I don't recall if we have had a very similar past unearthed uh incident in which people were moved because their graves were being used to break into things. Marjorie Griffin had been buried there in two thousand and three and her her husband George, had been buried in nineteen seventy one. So we're people like climbing atop of the headstone and then jumping up to something else. They were climbing onto the headstone and then jumping into onto the church roof and then breaking into the church. I'm so sorry Marjorie and George. That's terrible thing. It's not respectful at all. The body of a teenager who was killed while hitchhiking in nineteen sixty one was unearthed in Alabama, with the hope of figuring out his identity to the driver of the car that that hitchhiker had been in was in a car accident and the driver survived, but the passenger did not. UH. This body was reburied, and it appears that the analysis that was done was not conclusive yet, at least if if they did figure out who he was, I was not able to find confirmation of that. Remains of eighty three political prisoners hanged during the apartheid era in South Africa were exhumed this year as part of work by the Truth and Reconciliation Unit. They similarly to with the Spanish Civil War mass burials, we're wanting to identify their remains and return them to their families. These eighty three prisoners were among a hundred and thirty hanged for politically related offenses between nineteen sixty and nine nine, and these in particular were buried in unmarked graves. Uh. So we're gonna pause here for a little sponsor break, and then we will come back for a little bit of debunkery to end on a fun note. So, I don't know about you, Holly, but when I was in elementary school, I heard this sort of oversimplified issue filled portrayal of the Roman Empire, but it basically spread through the world as a civilizing, modernizing force and brought along with it all kinds of hygienic improvements like clean water and sewers and personal hygiene, which made everyone healthier than before. Uh yeah, I don't know that I got the hard sell of it. They made everybody healthier, but it was definitely always portrayed as, uh, they were more advanced than anyone else, and any sort of uh benefit beyond that, like hygienic benefit, was kind of implied. But it turns out that that that's not quite true. H Aside from the fact that the Romans weren't the first to come up with such things as plumbing, sewer systems, and bathing, a paper published in the journal Parasitology shows that the Roman focus on hygiene did not actually make people health year, at least when it came to parasitic illnesses spread through contact with poop. This study looked at Rome's influence in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, comparing the prevalence of parasites in burial sites and latrines and copper lights those are fossilized poop. Instead of seeing a decrease in parasites during Roman times, the prevalence of parasites actually increased. Some theories for why include that the Roman baths themselves that were uh so well hyped for staying clean, We're not themselves being kept clean, and that human waste was being used as fertalizer. I'm also making a horrible cartoon reference in my head. I don't think you stuck through all the futurama yet, but I do know the thing about coming over on the sandwich. Yes, so that there's a great episode where there are worms that fry and Jessin becomes smarter and stronger and better. So maybe the Romans just had those worms. That's what made them seem really advanced. Uh No, I'm making that up. They probably did not have worms that made them better. So moving on though, according to the lore, in nineteen one, frozen mammoth hacked out of the permafrost in Alaska was served for dinner at a meeting of the Explorers Club, and this launched a tradition of Explorers Club dinners featuring ever stranger meals, at least in terms of the usual palettes of the Explorers Club membership. A team actually set about to tackle the question of whether mammoth or perhaps even giant sloth really was served, and they published their findings in February. After analyzing a fragment preserved from the meal, which was held at the Yale Peboty Museum and was labeled there as giant sloth and not mammoth, they determined that it was neither mammoth nor sloth. It was green sea turtle, and the papers authors suggests that it was just a publicity stunt, and, to quote from their act abstract quote, our study emphasizes the value of museums collecting and curating voucher specimens, particularly those used for evidence of extraordinary claims. UH. In nineteen thirteen, Masons who were working in a basement in southern France unearthed a skeleton, and soon the local newspaper had published an incredibly salacious story about the skeleton's identity. It was purportedly Ernest Defont Albert, who had left France in eighteen fifty to pursue the California gold Rush, taking with him his sister Ernestine, and when the two returned to France, earnest younger brother, Arthur supposedly killed him with a hatchet, having learned that Ernest and Ernestine were not only in a relationship with each other, but also had buried multiple stillborn babies or perhaps babies killed after being born there at the manor. According to this story, Arthur then buried Ernest under the floorboards and butchered two bullocks in front of the manner, so that the smell of their decomposition would mask the smell of the decomposition of his brother. This is one of those stories that as I was reading it, every turn was like and what and it is very salacious. Historian Bernard Amsson paired up with an American genealogist to get to the bottom of these bones, which had been arranged and displayed in a small glass fronted coffin, and what they confirmed was that Ernest had in fact been killed in California during the gold rush in eighteen sixty two, and also robbed of all his gold. They did a more thorough analysis of the remains to try to figure out who this particular skeleton really belonged to, but those were largely inconclusive, so the bones have gone back to their previous coffin slash display case. Unsurprisedly, folks local to the area were kind of like, oh man, I'm kind of sad that salacious story didn't really happen. It's a good sort of ghost story drama, right, It's got lots of ingredients that people like to tell in lore. So to finish up today, we are going to tick through some of this year's fins that connect to some really famous names, and some of them probably not legit. So to start, several publications reported the Kublakan's palace had been found under the Forbidden City, but all of these seemed to be re reporting one news report and we couldn't conferment through a more academic source. Paul Sanino published a book in which he claims that the man in the iron mask was Eustache douj. He was quoted in reporting about the book that there had long been agreement among historians on this point. He then went on to make some pretty snippy comments about historians to explain why this was not just common knowledge. Historians quote insist on making it antiseptic, moralistic, sensible. There's also no peer review on this book. It's one of the many many people over the years who has been put forth as possibly the identity of the man in the Iron Mask. A bunch of news stories reported that King Arthur's chapel and birthplace had been found in Cornwall, but really this is more like a chapel and a castle type place that were found in Cornwall from approximately the time that King Arthur is believed to have lived if he was actually real. The latest theory on the sources of Joe Arcs voices is epilepsi. That was once again put forth as they have figured out why Joan of Arc had voices. Once again real hard to make such a determination for a long dead person. A skull bone found found in Nanjing, China was reported as belonging to the Buddha, primarily because there was writing on its very elaborate containing container saying it was the Buddhas. That's the only There are many supposed pieces of remains from many figures from many religious and cultural traditions that are questionable in their authenticity. Uh some hair purportedly belonging to the mutineers from the HMS bounty is going to be tested to determine if it is actually hair belonging to mutineers from the HMS bounty. Results are not in yet, maybe we will know that for sure next year. And a new room was found at the Winchester Mystery House, but all the coverage of that room seems to be pickups of the same local news stories, so we don't know much about it yet. Yep. And and one of the most recent of all things discussed in this a pair of money knees found in Nefertiti's tomb probably did belong to Nefertiti. However, there's some debate about whether the nowls this that was done on them actually proved anything new because they didn't have like other DNA to compare it to you. And then some Egyptologists also point out that basically that's what everyone thought all the way back to when the knees were first found in the tomb at its initial discovery in n four. So there was like a lot of hubbub about it, but also a lot of people that were like, really, uh, it's enticing just because it's knees, you know what I mean. It's an odd level of specificity, Yes, uh, just her knees. So yeah, that is our somewhat snarky conclusion of things of very famous names. It made some unearthed headlines this year. Do you have some listener mail unearthed as well? I do. It's kind of related to unearthing things, but not exactly just from Ethan. Ethan says, my name is Ethan, recently started listening to the podcast, recently graduated with a history degree, talks about listening to the podcast gets gets him through days at work and visits visits back home. Uh to skip ahead. I know this was a little while ago, but I loved your episode on the exchange of artistic culture between Asia, Latin America, and Europe in sixteenth century Mexico. In particular, you quickly mentioned the presence of she no slaves in Mexico and the America's. Historical scholarship on this topic is relatively new and fast growing. The interesting thing about no Slaves and the America's is the official the colonial officials had trouble negotiating exactly which classified race they belonged to. A royal edict banning the enslavement of quote indeed, you knows, precluded enslaving people we would call Native Americans. However, clever quote she slaves argued in court that indeed, you knows refers to those who are native to Pains colonies wherever they are. Because many she knows we're from India, Indonesia and the Philippines, they claimed to be Indios and thus not legally enslaved. This met with mixed legal success, but it is a testimony to the fact that race is a social construct that is constantly being negotiated. I found that to be a fascinating piece of information, and it also plays into UM. One of the other things that we discussed in that episode, which was an interview with a curator from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts about an exhibition that they had going on there UM, which were these casta paintings which were sort of like a a catalog of the racial and ethnic hierarchy UH in Mexico during this this colonial period UM, which were in some ways like propaganda to send back to Spain to be like, look, everyone is happy here, we have good relations, but in some ways was also a hierarchical answer key from people trying to figure out how to negotiate these UH inter relationships between raith and race and ethnicity. So this idea that this was also um trickling down to how enslaved people advocated for their own freedom is super fascinating. Um Ethan then goes on to recommend a show topic h and he concludes by saying that he hopes he has persuaded us to do a show on them. Ah. I would like to just note that our current list of listeners suggested podcasts is seven hundred and seventeen things long, which I am not saying at all to discourage people from sending them. We love getting them and they are a huge help, but it is incredibly hard to commit to any individual request unless we are actively either working on it right now, or have definitely done it already, or have definitely decided we're not doing it. Yeah. I will often put stuff on the list, but even so, that could mean that it's presuming you and I are still, for example, working on the show in two years. It could be at the end of two years from now. Like don't this is as Tracy said, not and asked to not send suggestions, but not to get maybe two in love with the idea that something will happen quickly, right, A lot of stuff is not not quickly at all, Like our recent episode of the pilt dumb and I think people have been asking about since you and I first started on the show, and we have several things that are you know, we have requests that carry over from past hosts that yes, super super interesting, but with two episodes a week, that's not a lot of episodes. UM, so yes, please send us suggestions. We love them really hard to commit to whether we are doing them any time soon. Uh. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast where History podcast at how stuff works dot com. 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Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast are Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This is part two of what was Unearthed? Uh. In part one, we had a few big collections of related to one another in some way, of things that were unearthed. We had a whole bunch of shipwrecks, a whole bunch of things that turn out are a lot older than we thought. That kind of thing today is more of a hodgepodge. We've got some recurring favorites, including at least theoretically edible finds yeah except maybe not probably not actually good art and letters uh, some by you know, by a last minute remembrance on my part, everyone's favorite uh exhumations, which at first I almost entirely left out of this episode, But but I discovered my oversight in time, and we're gonna conclude with some historical debunking. Um. As we've noted before, we found a lot more things to talk about this year than can possibly be covered in a couple of episodes, even having weeded out a bunch of things during our special July installment that we did everything that we uh that caught our eye this year is pinned in our Unearthed Unearthed in twenty ten board at pinterest, which is at pinterest dot com slash myths in history. So if you want to see a whole lot more pins, including anything that happened after December six, uh, go have a look at that. Um so today. I mean, really, this is just super super highlights, and I will be candid. The criteria for being included became increasingly draconian. Farther I went on because, uh, we probably pinned enough stuff to have four teen parts of Unearthed, which some people would love, other people would get tired of. That could be a spinoff podcast. One day somebody suggested that we do this or that we like we have this ongoing Unearthed segments. Uh, but having these two episodes as a pretty important part of our our year end ability to have poadcasts every week. So yeah. Uh so. Lund University announced that a skeleton found during a renovation at Lena Castle may belong to Philip Christopher Koonug's Mark account, who disappeared more than three hundred years ago. He was involved with Princess Sophia Dorthea, who was married there three hundred love letters are in the collection at Lund University, and if the skeleton is indeed genuine, it may be the resolution to a very old cold case. Research this year cleared the name of Gaetan Duga, a flight attendant wrongly blamed for being patient zero in the AIDS epidemic. God did die from AIDS related causes in four, but he was portrayed as this knowing vector for the disease in and the band played on his name really became synonymous with the spread of the disease. He was basically portrayed as a villain. Yeah, he gets blamed for an awful lot. Uh. However, do Go was not patient zero. One notation in his medical records was patient oh as in the letter O as in from outside of California. RNA analysis of the virus conclusively proves that HIV had been present in the United States long before dog was. Just because I know folks will probably ask since it's come up, you and I are both currently still a little too close to the origins of the HIV epidemic to be able to talk about it rationally on the show. Yes, it's something very important to both of us. Yes, I don't know that people would enjoy thirty minutes of sobbing. That's what would happen maybe someday, also after a little more historical time has passed, because like this find, there are still things that are that are coming out that are completely rewriting that relatively recent history. UH By studying Chinese smog, researchers believe they have identified the cause of the Great London Smog, which we talked about in a previous episode. We already knew that sulfur dioxide shared a lot of the blame, but we didn't know what it was about that particular fog that caused it to become so acidic and damaging in London. The sulfur dioxide mixed with nitrogen dioxide and that forms these particles that became increasingly concentrated as water in the fog evaporated. So researchers are now using this information to try to prevent such an occurrence from happening in China, which is plagued by longstanding air quality issue use. An international team took a crack at figuring out what was behind the collection of Roman era decapitated skeletons. All was a favorite originally found by York Archeological Trust or y a T. The skeletons were significant not just because many of them had been decapitated while still alive, but also because their heads had typically been buried with them somewhere other than where your head usually goes, like on their chest or down by their feet. The study couldn't clear up exactly who these men were. Even before this round of research took place, there were several theories that maybe they were gladiators, or soldiers or prisoners, and the findings could support any of those conclusions. All of the skeletons appeared to be male, all under the age of forty five, with bone conditions that simultaneously suggested poor childhood health an adult experience with both wielding weapons and being the target of violence. What's notable about the study, besides the fact that there were more than eighty decapitated skeletons to look at, was that a study of several of their genomes revealed that they weren't all from Britain. In a sample of seven, one was from the Middle East. So it's physical evidence to support the idea that people really were quite mobile during the Roman Empire and that the empire itself was cosmopolitan. Next up, we have a collection of fines that are just big in some way. I feel like I have to tell people that in your outline that you put together, the subheader for this is WHOA, that's big well, And this is actually the thing I'm gonna talk about is one of the earlier pins in the board, and I completely forget about what things have previously been been pinned. And there are several other pins from later in the year about this same thing, because it was quite quite large and a big deal. Back in and archaeologists noticed some wooden posts king out of the edge of a quarry, and a small excavation in two thousand and four and another one two years later revealed that this was a fantastically well preserved Bronze Age settlement. Originally, the plan was just to leave the site after as it was after the end of an excavation that ended in two thousand and six, because the soil conditions were such that they could keep the site pretty well preserved. But in more recent years routine monitoring raised some concerns that this wasn't the case anymore, and this led to a massive excavation of the entire site. This year with the study and catalog of all of its contents. This started in August of fifteen and ended in August of sixteen. It was overseen by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit. UH and this I did not see the news about it for the August fifteen and later portion of the study, but this year I saw a lot about it. Three thousand years ago, this settlement in Cambridgeshire in the UK, which is known as must Farm today, was home to people who lived in round structures on stilts over water, and the settlement was eventually destroyed in a fire and the structures collapsed into the water where silt preserved them. They have found so much stuff. It must farm so much. Uh. We've we've had whole episodes about sites like Cookia and Poverty Point, and maybe at some point in the future this could be a similar whole episode. There is of course lots of wood from the settlement itself, things like post rings that would have supported the structures and walls and roofs and a palisade. But then there are also the things that people used to live there. There pottery bowls and jars that still contain the food that was in them. Three thousand years ago. There are lots and lots of tools and weapons, and some surprisingly well preserved textiles made from plant materials. Aside from the site itself, which is one of the largest and best preserved Bronze Age sites in Britain, they've also found some artifacts that suggest that people living there were more advanced than previously thought, in particular some glass beads that are thought to have been part of a necklace. We'll put a link to the must Farm website in the show notes because there's so much cool stuff to look at there that that will lose you a little bit of time, but it's time well spent. This happened to me while writing episode. Um, so yeah, that link will be in our show notes. Researchers uncovered a huge sixth century BC stone slam called a steely that's covered in a Truscan writing. This thing weighs about five hundred pounds and they're at least seventy legible letters and punctuation marks on it. Apart from its size and weight, there's a lot that's remarkable about this fine Most of what we have from Etruscan civilization today is from grave and funeral objects, and this is believed to be part of a temple. It's covered in religious writing, which could yield a whole other segment of knowledge about the Etruscan culture and language. And when the find was first reported in March, researchers were hoping that it would reveal the name of the deity worship there, and in August it did. The temple was dedicated to the fertility goddess Uni Consort of Tinia, the Etruscan supreme deity. Chinese archaeologists excavated a huge network of dikes and levies dating back five thousand years in eastern coastal China. This is the largest water system ever found in China and it's believed to have combined the tasks of irrigation, flood control, and transportation into one system. And this massive system was originally found in two thousand seven, but the excavation took place over twenty and at this point their purpose is somewhat speculative, but the going theory is that they irrigated rice, controlled floodwaters and created three huge reserve mars. Now we are going to take a quick sponsor break before moving on to some more findings and a fine that doesn't quite fit into some of the other categories that we are talking about today. X ray study has confirmed the oral history of Bonos, Lithuania, which is believed to have been home to an escape tunnel used by Jews during the Holocaust. During the Holocaust, about of Lithuanian Jews were killed over the period of about three years, but a story was passed down by survivors, descendants and other people in the area that on the last night of passover, eighty imprisoned Jews escaped through a tunnel they had hand dug over the period of three months. Researchers were reluctant to take on a physical search for evidence of a tunnel at the site because of how many human remains were buried there, But us here it was announced that using ground penetrating radar and electrical resistivity tomography they found the tunnel exactly where they expected it to be, and now we have some fines that are related to art and to writing in some way. After a two year study, an interdisciplinary team led by Mark Walton presented their findings on a collection of two thousand year old Roman Egyptian mummy portraits. These were first unearthed at Taptunists which is now called um El Brigat, and that was more than a hundred years ago that they were originally found. These portraits were painted on wood panels and then the wood panels would be affixed to mummies. They're considered to be one of the precursors to the tradition of European portraiture. Though through noninvasive, non destructive research, the team found a lot about how the paintings were made. They took extensive collections of pictures using an off the shelf digital camera under different lighting conditions from different angles to figure out exactly where the brushstrokes were and in what order different parts of the works were painted. Spectroscopy and other analysis found that both the pigments and the wood itself came from far outside of Egypt, including iron earth pigments from Greece, red lead from Spain, and wood panels from Central Europe. Their conclusion was that these portraits were all made in the same workshop and possibly even by the same person. Uh In a brief little finding, a ground penetrating radar scan of Shakespeare's grave revealed that his skull is probably missing, most likely stolen in seventeen nine. That's something that was reported in eighteen seventy nine but was later dismissed. There's also been ongoing work this year at at Shakespeare's Theater, the Curtain, which I didn't get into you, and this particular and another thing because I mean the but they were finding were the things you expect to find in a theater. Uh. And also I think that work is is still ongoing, so maybe next year we will have to go a final final tally. Researchers from the University of Texas at Arlington used astronomy to figure out the date of Sappho's Midnight poem. Here is a nineteenth century translation of Midnight poem. The silver moon is set, the pleiades are gone, half the long night is spent, and yet I lie alone. Assuming she wrote the poem in Middleini, the capital city of Les Bus, they used multiple pieces of software to compare the night sky to her likely vantage point beginning in five seventy b C. They concluded that the poem was set somewhere between January and April six of that year, while acknowledging that five seventy was somewhat arbitrary since it's not clear exactly when during her life she wrote the poem. The team also said that moving the year wouldn't appreciably change their analysis, regardless of which year it would have been. Still within that rough window of time was how I understood it. The Groyer Codex, whose authenticity has been has been suspects since it was first looted from a cave in Mexico in the nineteen sixties, underwent analysis this year, suggesting that it may indeed be genuine, and if it is, it is the oldest manuscript in the America's This codex is a ten page painted fragment of Maya iconography and a chart of the movements of the planet Venus. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about it, but it appears to be the real thirteenth century deal. And now we have some things that are in theory edible or related to food. They were consumable at one poison point in time someone might have eaten at some point. We figured out where ancient Rome was getting its non stick cookwear, which if you didn't know, the Roman Empire had non stick cookwear. Uh. This red cookware has a non stick coating that resembles Pompeian redware. Although the Roman coatings in this particular fine we're reported to be a higher quality than Pompeian red ware. It wasn't a total mystery where to look for evidence of this Roman non stick cooked cookwear. The first century Roman cookbook Direct Cooking Area. We may or may not be butchering this, but because Latin Uh mentions cumin a teste or qumine a patel, also known as cookwear made in the city of Kuma as the best pan for making a chicken stew. We knew where Cuma was, so it was just a matter of finding the pottery works where this cookwear was made. So confirmation came from a discovery of the dump site where the people at the factory would throw away their defective goods. So thank you for not being perfect at your jobs. Roman Area far a factory workers who helped us track this down. I like that we're looking for factory seconds as part of archaeology. I love it. Yeah. Well, and that this particular report was like apart from the fact that they were defective, somehow they were all in really good quality. UH. Turf cutters in a peat bog in Ireland found a two thousand year old clumb. This was so popular because it is so funny. Inherently of bog butter, that's a substance familiar to the folks who listened to our show on Butter Versus Marjorie. Unlike some bog butters, this one does appear to have started out as actual dairy butter. But Andy Halpin at the National Museum of Ireland so that they would not advise tasting it. Some three d and forty year old cheese was found in a Baltic Seas shipwreck, and we can put this in the bog butter together we have quite a feast. Well, this cheese smells pretty cheesy and also yeasty. It was described as stinky. The team specifically recommended eating this either. This cheese was found aboard a ship that sank in sixteen seventy six. Uh, and I'm not laughing at that part. Only about forty of the eight fifty or so people aboard survived the shipwreck, But I'm laughing that there's this cheese still from sixteen seventy six that smells strongly of cheese and yeast. I like a stinky cheese, but I still probably wouldn't taste that one, so not to be outdone in our in our feast that we're putting together. A clay pot found in central Jutland in has been found to contain the burned residue of three thousand year old cheese burn cheese. At first, the team who found it were excited just because it was a very well preserved Bronze age vessel, which is not common. It was only after they cleaned it that they realized that there was still cheese in there. Um, it's an important find. I'm not laughing at the fine. It's just there's something fundamentally comedic about ending old cheese. I don't know what it is, specifically, this was probably This is where it gets exciting for me. The brown Norwegian way cheese known as Brunos or mysost. I love a brown Norwegian cheese so good, so that makes it quite exciting. I know where to get some locally. I'm thinking of maybe going there after we finished recording, just to get some special. Oh it's good stuff. Also. Now we're just on a dairy kick. An interdisciplinary team found widespread evidence of dairying all through the southern Mediterranean and southern Europe, going basically as far back as the origins. Of agriculture or about nine thousand years. Uh. This study hands on the contents of pottery and whether the residues in the pottery came from meat or from milk. And this could have gone in uh last the previous episode about things from earlier than we thought, because a lot of folks thought dairy came along later. Yeah. Uh. So now we heart exclamation exclamations, as do many listeners. So we've got a couple for this year. First, a mass grave connected to the Spanish Civil War was exhumed this year in the central Spanish city of Valladolid. Uh. This spring and summer they removed one eight five bodies from three graves and they sent them for forensic analysis to try to identify them. And this is one of as many as two thousand mass burial sites in Spain connected to the war. This is part of an ongoing effort to try to balance like the desires of some people to leave remains undisturbed, with also the need to try to identify the remains and if possible, reconnect them with their families or at least let families know what happened. Um. But because they're so so many, it's just an immense, immense task, and I imagine it will be ongoing for quite some time. The room bins of a couple buried in Warwickshire were exhumed and then reburied, which is not typical in their religious tradition, because thieves were using their headstone to break into the adjacent All Saints Church. I feel like we have had a very similar like this just sounds very familiar to me, So I don't recall if we have had a very similar past unearthed uh incident in which people were moved because their graves were being used to break into things. Marjorie Griffin had been buried there in two thousand and three and her her husband George, had been buried in nineteen seventy one. So we're people like climbing atop of the headstone and then jumping up to something else. They were climbing onto the headstone and then jumping into onto the church roof and then breaking into the church. I'm so sorry Marjorie and George. That's terrible thing. It's not respectful at all. The body of a teenager who was killed while hitchhiking in nineteen sixty one was unearthed in Alabama, with the hope of figuring out his identity to the driver of the car that that hitchhiker had been in was in a car accident and the driver survived, but the passenger did not. UH. This body was reburied, and it appears that the analysis that was done was not conclusive yet, at least if if they did figure out who he was, I was not able to find confirmation of that. Remains of eighty three political prisoners hanged during the apartheid era in South Africa were exhumed this year as part of work by the Truth and Reconciliation Unit. They similarly to with the Spanish Civil War mass burials, we're wanting to identify their remains and return them to their families. These eighty three prisoners were among a hundred and thirty hanged for politically related offenses between nineteen sixty and nine nine, and these in particular were buried in unmarked graves. Uh. So we're gonna pause here for a little sponsor break, and then we will come back for a little bit of debunkery to end on a fun note. So, I don't know about you, Holly, but when I was in elementary school, I heard this sort of oversimplified issue filled portrayal of the Roman Empire, but it basically spread through the world as a civilizing, modernizing force and brought along with it all kinds of hygienic improvements like clean water and sewers and personal hygiene, which made everyone healthier than before. Uh yeah, I don't know that I got the hard sell of it. They made everybody healthier, but it was definitely always portrayed as, uh, they were more advanced than anyone else, and any sort of uh benefit beyond that, like hygienic benefit, was kind of implied. But it turns out that that that's not quite true. H Aside from the fact that the Romans weren't the first to come up with such things as plumbing, sewer systems, and bathing, a paper published in the journal Parasitology shows that the Roman focus on hygiene did not actually make people health year, at least when it came to parasitic illnesses spread through contact with poop. This study looked at Rome's influence in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, comparing the prevalence of parasites in burial sites and latrines and copper lights those are fossilized poop. Instead of seeing a decrease in parasites during Roman times, the prevalence of parasites actually increased. Some theories for why include that the Roman baths themselves that were uh so well hyped for staying clean, We're not themselves being kept clean, and that human waste was being used as fertalizer. I'm also making a horrible cartoon reference in my head. I don't think you stuck through all the futurama yet, but I do know the thing about coming over on the sandwich. Yes, so that there's a great episode where there are worms that fry and Jessin becomes smarter and stronger and better. So maybe the Romans just had those worms. That's what made them seem really advanced. Uh No, I'm making that up. They probably did not have worms that made them better. So moving on though, according to the lore, in nineteen one, frozen mammoth hacked out of the permafrost in Alaska was served for dinner at a meeting of the Explorers Club, and this launched a tradition of Explorers Club dinners featuring ever stranger meals, at least in terms of the usual palettes of the Explorers Club membership. A team actually set about to tackle the question of whether mammoth or perhaps even giant sloth really was served, and they published their findings in February. After analyzing a fragment preserved from the meal, which was held at the Yale Peboty Museum and was labeled there as giant sloth and not mammoth, they determined that it was neither mammoth nor sloth. It was green sea turtle, and the papers authors suggests that it was just a publicity stunt, and, to quote from their act abstract quote, our study emphasizes the value of museums collecting and curating voucher specimens, particularly those used for evidence of extraordinary claims. UH. In nineteen thirteen, Masons who were working in a basement in southern France unearthed a skeleton, and soon the local newspaper had published an incredibly salacious story about the skeleton's identity. It was purportedly Ernest Defont Albert, who had left France in eighteen fifty to pursue the California gold Rush, taking with him his sister Ernestine, and when the two returned to France, earnest younger brother, Arthur supposedly killed him with a hatchet, having learned that Ernest and Ernestine were not only in a relationship with each other, but also had buried multiple stillborn babies or perhaps babies killed after being born there at the manor. According to this story, Arthur then buried Ernest under the floorboards and butchered two bullocks in front of the manner, so that the smell of their decomposition would mask the smell of the decomposition of his brother. This is one of those stories that as I was reading it, every turn was like and what and it is very salacious. Historian Bernard Amsson paired up with an American genealogist to get to the bottom of these bones, which had been arranged and displayed in a small glass fronted coffin, and what they confirmed was that Ernest had in fact been killed in California during the gold rush in eighteen sixty two, and also robbed of all his gold. They did a more thorough analysis of the remains to try to figure out who this particular skeleton really belonged to, but those were largely inconclusive, so the bones have gone back to their previous coffin slash display case. Unsurprisedly, folks local to the area were kind of like, oh man, I'm kind of sad that salacious story didn't really happen. It's a good sort of ghost story drama, right, It's got lots of ingredients that people like to tell in lore. So to finish up today, we are going to tick through some of this year's fins that connect to some really famous names, and some of them probably not legit. So to start, several publications reported the Kublakan's palace had been found under the Forbidden City, but all of these seemed to be re reporting one news report and we couldn't conferment through a more academic source. Paul Sanino published a book in which he claims that the man in the iron mask was Eustache douj. He was quoted in reporting about the book that there had long been agreement among historians on this point. He then went on to make some pretty snippy comments about historians to explain why this was not just common knowledge. Historians quote insist on making it antiseptic, moralistic, sensible. There's also no peer review on this book. It's one of the many many people over the years who has been put forth as possibly the identity of the man in the Iron Mask. A bunch of news stories reported that King Arthur's chapel and birthplace had been found in Cornwall, but really this is more like a chapel and a castle type place that were found in Cornwall from approximately the time that King Arthur is believed to have lived if he was actually real. The latest theory on the sources of Joe Arcs voices is epilepsi. That was once again put forth as they have figured out why Joan of Arc had voices. Once again real hard to make such a determination for a long dead person. A skull bone found found in Nanjing, China was reported as belonging to the Buddha, primarily because there was writing on its very elaborate containing container saying it was the Buddhas. That's the only There are many supposed pieces of remains from many figures from many religious and cultural traditions that are questionable in their authenticity. Uh some hair purportedly belonging to the mutineers from the HMS bounty is going to be tested to determine if it is actually hair belonging to mutineers from the HMS bounty. Results are not in yet, maybe we will know that for sure next year. And a new room was found at the Winchester Mystery House, but all the coverage of that room seems to be pickups of the same local news stories, so we don't know much about it yet. Yep. And and one of the most recent of all things discussed in this a pair of money knees found in Nefertiti's tomb probably did belong to Nefertiti. However, there's some debate about whether the nowls this that was done on them actually proved anything new because they didn't have like other DNA to compare it to you. And then some Egyptologists also point out that basically that's what everyone thought all the way back to when the knees were first found in the tomb at its initial discovery in n four. So there was like a lot of hubbub about it, but also a lot of people that were like, really, uh, it's enticing just because it's knees, you know what I mean. It's an odd level of specificity, Yes, uh, just her knees. So yeah, that is our somewhat snarky conclusion of things of very famous names. It made some unearthed headlines this year. Do you have some listener mail unearthed as well? I do. It's kind of related to unearthing things, but not exactly just from Ethan. Ethan says, my name is Ethan, recently started listening to the podcast, recently graduated with a history degree, talks about listening to the podcast gets gets him through days at work and visits visits back home. Uh to skip ahead. I know this was a little while ago, but I loved your episode on the exchange of artistic culture between Asia, Latin America, and Europe in sixteenth century Mexico. In particular, you quickly mentioned the presence of she no slaves in Mexico and the America's. Historical scholarship on this topic is relatively new and fast growing. The interesting thing about no Slaves and the America's is the official the colonial officials had trouble negotiating exactly which classified race they belonged to. A royal edict banning the enslavement of quote indeed, you knows, precluded enslaving people we would call Native Americans. However, clever quote she slaves argued in court that indeed, you knows refers to those who are native to Pains colonies wherever they are. Because many she knows we're from India, Indonesia and the Philippines, they claimed to be Indios and thus not legally enslaved. This met with mixed legal success, but it is a testimony to the fact that race is a social construct that is constantly being negotiated. I found that to be a fascinating piece of information, and it also plays into UM. One of the other things that we discussed in that episode, which was an interview with a curator from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts about an exhibition that they had going on there UM, which were these casta paintings which were sort of like a a catalog of the racial and ethnic hierarchy UH in Mexico during this this colonial period UM, which were in some ways like propaganda to send back to Spain to be like, look, everyone is happy here, we have good relations, but in some ways was also a hierarchical answer key from people trying to figure out how to negotiate these UH inter relationships between raith and race and ethnicity. So this idea that this was also um trickling down to how enslaved people advocated for their own freedom is super fascinating. Um Ethan then goes on to recommend a show topic h and he concludes by saying that he hopes he has persuaded us to do a show on them. Ah. I would like to just note that our current list of listeners suggested podcasts is seven hundred and seventeen things long, which I am not saying at all to discourage people from sending them. We love getting them and they are a huge help, but it is incredibly hard to commit to any individual request unless we are actively either working on it right now, or have definitely done it already, or have definitely decided we're not doing it. Yeah. I will often put stuff on the list, but even so, that could mean that it's presuming you and I are still, for example, working on the show in two years. It could be at the end of two years from now. Like don't this is as Tracy said, not and asked to not send suggestions, but not to get maybe two in love with the idea that something will happen quickly, right, A lot of stuff is not not quickly at all, Like our recent episode of the pilt dumb and I think people have been asking about since you and I first started on the show, and we have several things that are you know, we have requests that carry over from past hosts that yes, super super interesting, but with two episodes a week, that's not a lot of episodes. UM, so yes, please send us suggestions. We love them really hard to commit to whether we are doing them any time soon. Uh. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast where History podcast at how stuff works dot com. We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash miss in history and on Twitter at miss in history, are tumbler is hims, Instry dot Tuller dot com, or on Pinterest at Penchrist dot com slash miss in history and on Instagram and miss in History. You can come to our parent companies website, which is how stuff Works dot com and find all kinds of information about all kinds of fascinating subjects. And you can come to our website missed in history dot com, where you will find show notes for this and all the other episodes Holly and I have done together and an archive every episode we have ever done. We have started working on some videos, and the videos you're going up in our on our podcast are on our homepage and our website, so you can do all that and a whole lot more at how stuff works dot com or miss the History dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com In