Welcome to step you missed in history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I am Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Happy New Year, everybody happy Here. It is Unearthed time. We are taking our annual look back at things that were literally or figuratively unearthed in we know these are technically coming out, we wait until the very end, so all of twenty seventeen could happen. That's actually false because cover um, we're recording these on December twelve, but my review of the unearthed Pinterest board where we keep jack of all this took place on December sixth and seventh, So there's always this little gap, but this is a bigger gap than normal. So I'm just gonna hope that nothing huge happens between now and the end of the year. Also, there are six hundred and twenty five pins on that Pinterest board as of December seven, compared to four d forty three on the board, So we're not going to talk about all six hundred twenty five things. I feel like if we did that, we could have a whole other podcast that's just unearthed thing we that is a thing that could happen, but like like it would have to be retrospective the year before, play out over the course of a year, and then we start again. But we're really difficult and talk about other stuff we do. Uh. And then also this is uh, this is a part of our year end review because it's it's it's basically part of how we keep ourselves on schedule through the holidays. So that's why that is um. So But if you do want to go look at all all pins there at pinterest dot com slash mist in History and they're on the unearthed in seventeen board and you can also see the past few years of boards if you would like to. One other little caveat at the top of this there were whole collections of documents related to Mata Hari and to the assassin, the assassination of John F. Kennedy. This year that we're declassified, we are not really getting into either of those. Uh. Maybe in the new year we will have time to actually look at those documents in a thorough way, but we have not yet, so that's why we're not talking about them. In today's episode. We have anticlimactic headlines shipwrecks, medical finds, and some collections that we are calling how that get there and we told you so, along with a couple of past episode updates, and the next time we will have some thefts, repatriations, stuff people found in their own collections, exclamations, and some edibles and potables, along with a few other assorted tidbits. First, anticlimactic headlines, which are stories that really had people buzzing this year, but then they didn't turn out to be all that earth shaking. We're gonna start with an update from Unearthed in July, which was the exhimation of H. H. Holmes, A k Herman mudget whose murder Castle became an infamous part of the World's Fair and is also covered by an episode in the archive. Holmes was to have been hanged and buried in Pennsylvania in eighteen six, but this year his remains were exhumed to settle long standing speculation about whether that body was really his. And that's what we talked about back in July. In spite of a court order specifying quote, no commercial spectacle or carnival atmosphere shall be created, either by this event or any other incident pertaining to the remains. All this played out on a History Channel series called American Ripper. Uh. And that's a series Mudget's great great grandson, Jeff offered up his own DNA for comparison. Also part of the show was Jeff Mudget's hypothesis that his great great grandfather had in the years before turning his own home into a murder castle, lived in London and carried out the Jack the Ripper murders. Mudget has detailed this hypothesis in a ted X talk and a book called Bloodstains as well. It's based on a couple of journals that he says he inherited from his great great grandfather, which described murders that were committed in London. So after the dramatic exhumation through a layer of concrete that Herman Mudget had requested before his death to try to deter body thieves, DNA and skeletal evidence confirmed that the remains were his. In other words, j. Tolmes did not escape execution and fake his own death. His great great grandson still maintains that he was Jack the Ripper though. UH. People also got really excited about a colossal statue of Pharaoh Ramsey's the second A k Ramsey's the Great, who died in twelve b C. The twenty six ft court site statue was found submerged in groundwater in a Cairo neighborhood, so that on his zone is pretty dramatic, but further examination success that it is definitely not Ramsey's the Second. It's the way less famous and more recent king sam Tech the First, who ruled from six to six sam Tech is known for bringing stability to Egypt after decades of turmoil, but he is not nearly as famous as Ramsey's the Second. It's still a really large statue though, and it might be notable as a late period fine because of its size, but it is not the headline making Ramsey's the Great, And as happens just about every single year, a new headline about Amelia Earhart made the rounds. This time it was photographic proof where air quoting proof, the air Heart and her navigator Fred Noonan's survived a crash landing and were then taken captive by the Japanese. Although this photo got a whole lot of headlines calling it quote conclusive proof, it was really not a lot to go on at all. The figure that was supposed to be air Heart was not even facing the camera, and the face that was supposedly Noonan's was deeply shadowed, and speculation that this shape in the background was her plane boiled basically down to well, it's about the same size as the plane without trying to make light of Amelia Earhart's death. When I first saw the photo, it made me think of Bigfoot because it looked so much like the grainy photos you see the proof that there is a Sasquatch. It definitely felt like grainy conspiracy theorist footage. Yeah, so things got even more doubtful a couple of days after History Channel aired It's Amelia Earhart the Lost Evidence, when a Japanese military history buff published a blog post saying he'd found a copy of that photo published in a book. And that book came out in five, two years before Amelia Earhart vanished in seven, So even before this blog post came out, a number of news outlets started updating their conclusive proof stories and air quotes with some skeptical rebuttals. And these rebuttals, a lot of them had their own problems. They were mainly coming from Richard Gillespie at the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery or Tiger, which has been the mounting expeditions to look for signs of air hearts, since Tiger is the source for most of the new in quotation marks air heart theories that don't pan out, which seemed like they come out every every year. Really often, they're out artifacts that we already know about and have already talked about a lot of times, they're like, now we think the makeup makeup pot means this, uh much to my chagrin. And article that I shared on our Facebook that was a pretty conservative, skeptical read on this whole photo after the fact was updated with extensive quotes from Richard Gillespie, and I was like, wait a minute, Well, well maybe they're just trying to make sure they feed this end of year material. Maybe, so that's really there a land We've gotten a couple of emails from people over the years that are angry that we even talk about anything that that they're doing with the makeup pots and the couple of boone and all that. In an event that we talked about so much on social media that we thought we'd already covered it on the show, Salvador Dolly's body was exhumed for a paternity test. On July, Maria pillar A Belle Martinez reported that her mother told her she had had an affair with Dolly in ninety fifty five, the year before Martinez was born. Martinez has been publicly claiming that she was Salvador Dali's daughter since two thousand seven. So the first big news to come from this exhumation was that when they opened the coffin, Delli's trademark mustache was still excellently groomed and in pristine condition. So that made a lot of news. And then on September six, the Gala Salvador Deli Foundation announced that the results were in. Deli was not Martinez's father. Madrid Court confirmed the announcement on the eight. So after all that, now that would make me sad if I thought I was Salvador Deli's child and then found out I wasn't. But this, this whole cycle of stories made people a lot of people angry in a number of ways. On our Facebook, one of the ways was that another publication used the word painter in the headline and people got really mad. And then people got really mad at her and called her all kinds of names, and I was like man. Just like if I grew up with my mother having told me that this famous artist was my father, I probably would want to know if that was true or not. Yeah, it's conscated right, Uh, to move on. Seven year old Matilda Jones pulled a sword from a lake in Cornwall, the same lake where, according to legend, King Arthur threw ex caliber to return it to the lady of the lake before he died. People ran with the idea that we should make this little girl queen. But the sword is definitely not King Arthur's. It's only twenty or thirty years old, and it is probably a film prop. And similar news, a sphinx head was on earth in the California Desert in December, but it was not evidence of some kind of ancient Egyptian presence in California. I similarly saw a lot of headlines that we're like Egyptian sphinx on earth in California, and they were not from you know, tabloids. This is a plaster of Paris set piece that was used in the nineteen fifty six film The Ten Commandments, and according to Hollywood, lowre cec will Be the Mill had the Exodus set from the movie buried in the desert because it was too expensive to remove it. But it was also of such excellent quality that leaving it there would invite rival filmmakers to use it for their own movies. So it's part of film history, but it's not evidence that there was another group of people in ancient time. Now, now, before we move on, which is going to be to shipwrecks, we're gonna pause for a sponsor break. Shipwrecks are always a listener favorite, so we're going to talk about a few. An incredibly well preserved eighteen hundred year old shipwreck was found off the coast of Spain's Belliaric Islands. This is then part of the Western Mediterranean that only has a few intact shipwrecks. We we talk a lot of times about huge collections of hundreds or even thousands of shipwrecks found in other parts of the Mediterranean, but this is a part where it's not not nearly as frequent. This particular ship contained between a thousand and two thousand ancient Roman jars, still basically where they were when the ship went down. These clay jars probably contain fish sauce that had been mass produced in Spain and Portugal thousands of years old fish, so it might be delicious. I don't know. These jars are a variety known as mph A, and the wreck was discovered after fishers in the area started finding pieces of m for a in their nets. I think that might excite me if I were fishing, it would me I cut fish and something really cool underwater. Teams working at the wreck of the Dutch East India's ship Roostwick, which I'm I'm just gonna say, that's probably how that's pronounced, they found a mysterious chest. The ship sank off of Kent in seventeen forty and as of late August, the chest had not been opened yet, and this is leading to a lot of speculation about whether it is a bona fide treasure chest or something really boring like ledgers, like a pile of dresses, duty rosters. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find the answer to that just yet, so it still remains a magical zone of speculation. But the rest of the ship has its own wealth of treasures, including cannons, fine glassware, and a bunch of Mexican silver dollars. A bronze arm was brought up from the Anti Cithers ship wreck this year, where there are at least seven more statues still submerged. This arm was actually outside of the wreck itself. It was under sediment on the slope where the ship came to rest on the seafloor. I feel like you can't have an unearthed without a little antikither talk. I know there's gonna be stuff coming up from that shipwreck as as people are able to get to it because's kind of treacherous. Next year maybe we'll have a big, fat update on it. Uh And Britain also announced that it would give Canada the wrecks of Franklin's expedition, which we've talked about Unearthed previously. The UK Ministry of Defense officially transferred ownership to Parks Canada, although Britain did hang on to a few of the artifacts. That announcement cracked me up a little bit, because, I mean, I understand it. I understand what's happening here, but the like the their shipwrecks in the water in Canada, how you're gonna send them back? Yeah, you can have that thing that's on your property and unmovable. You can have that that's fine UH To move on to medical finds, A multidisciplinary team investigated a strain of leprosy now known as Hanson's disease, that was found in a hospital cemetery in Winchester, United Kingdom. This study used radiocarbon dating, biomolecular analysis, genotyping, and other methods to examine remains from the eleventh and twelve centuries. One set of remains in the cemetery is from somebody outside of Britain, and so the team concluded that it probably belonged to a religious pilgrim, and then the majority of remains in the cemetery, more than eighty percent of them, showed signs of advanced Hanson's disease. These remains all tie into multiple questions about Hanson's disease. How do the strains of the disease that were common in the past relate to the strains that exist today, and how did religious pilgrimage affect the spread of the disease in the medieval world. The second question is still being examined, but when it comes to the first, the m leprey genome hasn't changed very much since the prevalence of Hanson's disease peaked in Europe, so it's possible that its eventual decline was thanks in part to increasing genetic resistance. The oldest known prostate stones were unearthed a cemetery in Sudan this year. The twelve thousand year old stones were discovered in The findings weren't published in Plus one until this year. Prostate stones are fairly common, but typically they tend to be small and asymptomatic, apart from potentially contributing to urinary tract infections. But the specimens found in the Sudanese grave were the size of walnuts, which would have been incredibly painful. They're so large that you might wonder if they were literally anything else, but analysis confirmed that they formed in a prostate gland. So a little bit gross, a whole lot of yikes. Yeah, it was one of those you look at them and kind of go, maybe that's maybe it's a rock. Maybe it's a rock that happens to be where this body. No, it's not a rock. Researchers uncovered what maybe the world's first ever example of dental fillings. These teeth, there were two of them, were found at the Raparo Free Dan Fight in Italy and they're about thirteen thousand years old. Both teeth have holes drilled into them that extend into the pulp, and then these holes are filled with tar like bitumen. The researchers speculated that the holes may have been for some purpose other than dentistry, perhaps to attach jewelry to the teeth or for some of their cosmetic reason, but the fact that the holes are filled with bitumen suggests that it was an attempt to treat tooth decay, and there are other examples of tooth modifications that suggests some kind of dental work dating even early here. But this is the first known filling, which also would have been done without effective anesthesia and probably with a rock. So once again, a lot of our medical unearthings are Yike's territory. Researchers at the University of Exeter are challenging the widely held assumption that made evil. Europe assumed infertility only affected women, although religious writings on infertility generally focused on women. Historian Dr Katherine Rider found references to infertility in men in medical texts from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries. Now, this did not mean that they otherwise had any sort of clue what they were talking about, though. One test for diagnosing which partner was infertile involved a man and a woman each urinating into a separate pot of brand and then the one that grew worms in it belonged to the infertil partner. You feel like every paragraph I get to read is the yikes paragraph You did wind up on Yike's rotation. We're going to move on to our next category of fines, which we are calling how that get there? A work crew in old Quebec found a live cannonball. Uh. It dates back to the Battle of the Planes of Abraham in seventeen fifty nine. But before anybody knew that this thing was live, they took it out of the ground. They gathered around it for a photograph. Then they contacted archaeologist Surge Rouleau, who, still not knowing that it was a live cannonball, took it home. Once he realized what he had Uh, he contacted a team of army munitions experts who came to neutralize it. Uh. Do you ever read the t s a blog? This will sound like I'm going on a tangent, but it's Germaine. Sure, so they often they do like a weekly report of everything they had to confiscate. I highly recommend it because well, it's unsettling, but you would be shocked at how many times people dig something out of the ground and then they're like, I'm gonna take this hope as a souvenir and the t s A is like, that's a live grenade. Similarly, they have been cannonballs that have shown up where they're like the people just had in like their carry on luggage there. That's terrifying. It is. Indeed, a four hundred year old embellishment bearing a tutor rose was found near the Kremlin. It's five centimeters in diameter and made of tin and lead, and based on the positions of four holes, it was probably used as an adornmentt for clothing. It may seem odd for a four hundred year old tutor rose complete with engraved motto for the British monarch in one doir to be in Moscow, but the location where it was found used to be home to the first English trading and Ambassadorial office there. I like how most of these things that I filed under how that get there have a logical reason why they're there, But it's still surprising at first glance. A large marble container brought to Blendom Palace by the fifth Duke of Marlborough has turned out to be a Roman coffin. The Duke brought the coffin not knowing it was a coffin to the palace and the ninety century and in the years since then it was used both as a water feature and as a planter. It's also a pretty eye catching one. It's carved with a drunken Dionysus at a party with mostly naked revelers, which makes me wonder whose confidant was. Somebody's probably pretty fun by total coincidence, and antiquities dealer visiting the palace identified it as a sarcophagus, at which point they brought it inside to protect it from the elements. From there it was sent for a more detailed restoration, and last up, probably the most surprising of all of these crews restoring a church in Spain, discovered that an eighteenth century priest had found an interesting place to leave his letter to the future inside Jesus's buddocks. Chaplain Joaquin Minguez wrote the letter in seventeen seventies seven, basically making a little time capsule for what life was like at the time, and then he put it into the buttocks of a statue of Jesus, which is odd because you would think he would not enter pay that people would ever find it there. I don't know. I mean, I'm sure unless he just predicted, like the people of the future are just going to be horrible and completely disrespectful, while we waxed repsolic on the complete disrespect of the future that he may or may not have believed people would have. We're gonna pause and have a little break for a sponsor. We are moving on to the category I made up called we told you so. We here does not mean Holly and I told you so. It means whoever was telling historians and archaeologists things, someone had knowledge because maybe wasn't being considered. Yes, so these are all things that have confirmed something that people had already been saying for anywhere from decades to centuries. First up, after being given a homework assignment on World War two, fourteen year old Daniel rom Kristensen's father made a wild suggestion, which is that he should find the German plane that had, according to family lore, crashed on the family's land in northern Denmark during World War Two. Daniel's grandfather was known for telling tall tales, and since no one had found this plane during the decades of plowing their farmland that had happened, everybody had basically come to believe that his story of a World War two plane crash was really just a joke. But Daniel and his father went out with a metal detector and they found not only the plane but also likely the remains of the pilot. They contacted local authorities and soon a local and soon a forensic specialist and a bomb disposal unit were on the property to secure the wreckage. They also had a visit from the German embassy. So Grandad was telling the truth. I like that he got vindicated. A British expatriate living in Japan has at least tentatively confirmed a long dismissed story about British Australian's first contact with Japan. The story goes that in eighteen twenty nine, convicted men aboard the Cypress mutinyed off the coast of Tasmania, with former sailor WILLIAMS Swallow leading the uprising and taking command of the ship. From there, they sailed onto New Zealand, Japan, and southern China. The men were eventually captured, taken back to England, tried and hanged, and even though they were consistent in their story that they'd been in Japan, nobody believed them. Japan's borders were closed off to most foreign visitors at this point, and later examinations of Japanese records didn't mention the Cyprus. But then English teacher Nick Russell stumbled onto a watercolor of a ship sailing under a British flag in an online archive, and this led him to a story about a ship anchoring off Hikoku Island in eighteen thirty and a record of samurai Mikita Hamaguchi visiting the ship to check it for weapons. So some of this is definitely preliminary, but so far they're experts in Japan and Australia who have weighed in and agreed that Russell might have finally proved that these mutineers were not making the whole thing up. DNA ealysis has confirmed that indigenous Australians have lived in the same parts of Australia for as long as those areas have been populated. In other words, Aboriginal Australians have continued to live in the same parts of the continent that their ancestors originally settled. This research was part of the Aboriginal Heritage Project, which hopes to help Australia's Indigenous population trace their regional ancestry and their family genealogy, essentially documenting what's already been part of Aboriginal oral history and culture. But this tenure project also has some possible future implications as well. It might help authorities repatriate artifacts to the correct Aboriginal people's and help survivors of Australia's stolen generations reconnect with their families. As a side note, other studies released this year suggests that Australia was actually settled before the commonly cited forty seven thousand years ago. One team found evidence of human habitation in Booty Cave on Barrow Island, sixty kilometers off the coast of Western austra Alia, dating back to about fifty thousand years Another team, publishing findings in the journal Nature, concluded that a sandstone rock shelter in Northern Territory was inhabited sixty five thousand years ago. This work with the Aboriginal Heritage Project has basically confirmed what Aboriginal Australians were already saying, which is like, our people have been living in this place for times of thousands of years. A genetic study of northwest North America reached incredibly similar conclusions about the indigenous residents of southern Alaska and the western coast of British Columbia. Mitochondrial DNA analysis revealed that Indigenous people living in these areas today are descended from the region's first inhabitants about ten thousand years ago, and also in British Columbia, archaeologists have confirmed with the Hiltsuck Nation's oral history has maintained that the Hiltsuck Nation moved to a small area of land that never froze during the Ice Age and survived there for the duration. Archaelogists carefully excavated the area and found that yet there were artifacts dating back fourteen thousand years, at which point glaciers were covering much of the surrounding land mass, but not that particular area. The HILTech Nation is hopeful that the findings will support the nation's claims in any future negotiations about land rights and other legal issues in the area. So now we're moving on to a category, like a subcategory of that one called we probably told you these are things that may pan out to be and I told you so. Uh so, like you said, there's some ongoing research that might once it's done, move these two that we told you so Pile the Bayatuck. We're an indigenous people in Newfoundland, with the last known member dying in a hospital in eight nine. A strand of that person's hair has been passed down through the family of the doctor who treated her for tuberculosis, so it's not actually possible to extract DNA from that hair, which is missing its route. But researchers were able to extract some DNA from the remains of several b a Tech people along with some of the Maritime Archaic people, which were a prehistoric Newfoundland culture, and they did this after seeking permission from the First Nations and Inuit people's in this area. Currently, this work is trying to trace the origins of these peoples and their family tree, both in and outside of Newfoundland, but it could potentially confirm whether people living today have some Baetuck ancestry. That's one of the things where the people living there today have said we are descended from the people who are of this culture. It's not a culture that completely disappeared, and so this is research that might confirm that. Following a similar theme, North America's Ancestral Puebloans are often described as an ancient people that no longer exists, but some modern Pebloans maintained the ancestral Puebloans didn't die out, they just moved. Archaeologists and anthropologists have been trying to verify this idea while also respecting tribes reluctance to have DNA analysis performed on ancient human remains. So what they've done turned to the bones of animals that the ancient Puebloans domesticated, specifically turkeys, using mitochondrial DNA and analysis. They studied turkey bones from Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado, which was the ancestral Pebloans homeland, and they compared it to the turkeys near the Rio Grand region, where modern Pebloans say that their ancestors eventually relocated. Until about the year twelve eighty, the two groups of turkeys did not have anything in common, but then after twelve eighty turkeys, and the Rio Grand had haplo haplow groups that had previously been found only in the masa Verde turkeys. I just have to say, I think this is the most ingenious way I agree approached this problem. That's somebody is very smart to have come up with this uh and it is obviously preliminary, but a reasonable explanation would be that the ancestral Puebloans moved from masa Verde to the Rio Grand area around twelve eighty, bringing their domesticated turkeys with them. Separate studies not strictly related to where whether anyone will ever get to say we told you so, looked at the pueblo in building methods and may severy date, specifically at the Sun Temple, which day backs dates back to about the year twelve hundred. Research led by Dr Sherry Towers at the Arizona State University Simon eleven Mathematical, Computational and Modeling Sciences Center has shown that there's a lot of mathematical complexity that went into building the structure, especially considering that the Pabloans who built it didn't at the time have a written language or a number system. So the team is now hoping to figure out whether a standard unit of measure that they pieced together from this evidence was also used in other Pabloan sights as well. And we're going to close out this part of our Unearthed with a few assorted tidbits that are relevant to past episodes of the show. In we talked about an unearthed photo believed to be of Billy the Kid playing croquet, which was purchased at a junk shop, making headlines this year. Was enough. They're purported Billy the Kid pick, this time seated next to Pat Garrett, who was the man who would eventually kill him. The picture is a tintype bought by North Carolina lawyer Frank Abrams in Tleven, and it made headlines this year because of estimates that it might be worth millions of dollars. A mass grave connected to the wreck of the Batavia was found on Beacon Island in November. The grave contains the remains of ten people, but the site itself suggests that they were buried respectfully and thoughtfully, so if you don't recall from our past episodes on the Batavia, this eventually turned into a horrifying massacre, so researchers believe that these were people who died in the immediate aftermath of the wreck before things got so bad, rather than later after the massacre happened. And this year we did a two part podcast on Executive Order in nineties sixty six and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War two, and one of the things that we discussed in that and other podcast was at the JAP Thea's population of Hawaii was much too large to incarceerate everyone, so in Hawaii, Japanese Americans were subject to restrictions on fishing, curfews, and other efforts to restrict their movement. Some of the Japanese population of Hawaii were incarcerated, though many were people who were influential in the community, people like business leaders, clergy and other prominent citizens. Hanuliluli Internment Center on Oahu was one of seventeen such incarceration sites. Was the largest incarceration camp in Hawaii, and it was used for Japanese Americans as well as for prisoners of war from other countries. Honolululi was designated as a National Historic Monument in and excavation work began in It has continued on through this year with students participating in the research through coursework at University of Hawaii West Oahu. I remind me a little bit of the ongoing archaeology classes at Harvard to folks from that on the show before last up. In today's part of our Unearthed two parter, a cold case team led by filmmaker Tom Colbert got its hands on a letter purportedly from dB Cooper that they say confirms an FBI cover up, but the FBI has not reopened the case, which it closed last year. This letter was allegedly sent to newspapers after the hijacking, which would confirm that dB Cooper did survive, and it was obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. So we'll have more Unearthed on our next episode. We sure will. But in the meantime, Tracy, do you have a little bit of a listener mail to top this one off? I do. It's another one about our recent episode on the aber Van disaster, and it is from Christina. Christina says, Dear Tracy and Holly, I just finished listening to your recent podcast on the aber Van disaster and was struck by the similarities to an American tragedy in nineteen seventy two, Just six short years later. It occurred in Logan County, West Virginia, and had a similar story to what happened in Wales. The Pittston Coal Company had a cold slurry, the mixture of solid and liquid coal ace impoundment damp that burst, sending a hundred and thirty two million gallons of black wastewater into the Buffalo Creek Hollow. The waves reached over thirty feet high as they descended on sixteen cold towns. Of a population of five thousand, a hundred and twenty five people were killed, one thousand, one hundred twenty one injured, and over four thousand left homeless. Following this, the company claimed the damn failing was an act of God, though a commission determined the company was at fault and gets guilty of murder. The state and hundreds of survivors sued and received millions and damages. I visited Logan County in two thousand eight on a service trip. It's an old county, rich and Appalachian culture, and struggling with poverty and substance abuse. Though physical remnants of the disaster are gone, every resident vividly knows or remembers the flood. There have been studies into the psychological toll the disaster placed on the survivors. I highly recommend the book Everything in Its Path Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood by sociologist Katie Ericsson. As always, thank you for your work educating people and sharing your pa actions for history. Best Christina. Thank you so much for this email, Christina, um I wanted to share it. We've gotten a couple of emails about similar mining disasters to the one that happened in Aberan that we're mostly about landslides or burst damns, et cetera that had a similarly tragic effect, so I'm not going to read all of them, but i did want to read this one, so thank you so much, Christina. If you would like to try to us about this or any other podcast or history podcasts at how stuffworks dot com. We're also all over social media under the name missed in History, so that's where you will find our Facebook, our Pinterest, our Instagram, our Twitter. Our pinterest is where we keep an unearthed board every year, which is where I keep up with this stuff all year long, so we can talk about it at the end. Of the year. You can come to our website, which is missed in history dot com and you will find show notes of all the episodes Holly and I haven't done together and that you will also find uh an archive of every episode we have ever done. And you could find our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, anywhere else who listen to podcasts. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stop works dot com. M

Welcome to step you missed in history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I am Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Happy New Year, everybody happy Here. It is Unearthed time. We are taking our annual look back at things that were literally or figuratively unearthed in we know these are technically coming out, we wait until the very end, so all of twenty seventeen could happen. That's actually false because cover um, we're recording these on December twelve, but my review of the unearthed Pinterest board where we keep jack of all this took place on December sixth and seventh, So there's always this little gap, but this is a bigger gap than normal. So I'm just gonna hope that nothing huge happens between now and the end of the year. Also, there are six hundred and twenty five pins on that Pinterest board as of December seven, compared to four d forty three on the board, So we're not going to talk about all six hundred twenty five things. I feel like if we did that, we could have a whole other podcast that's just unearthed thing we that is a thing that could happen, but like like it would have to be retrospective the year before, play out over the course of a year, and then we start again. But we're really difficult and talk about other stuff we do. Uh. And then also this is uh, this is a part of our year end review because it's it's it's basically part of how we keep ourselves on schedule through the holidays. So that's why that is um. So But if you do want to go look at all all pins there at pinterest dot com slash mist in History and they're on the unearthed in seventeen board and you can also see the past few years of boards if you would like to. One other little caveat at the top of this there were whole collections of documents related to Mata Hari and to the assassin, the assassination of John F. Kennedy. This year that we're declassified, we are not really getting into either of those. Uh. Maybe in the new year we will have time to actually look at those documents in a thorough way, but we have not yet, so that's why we're not talking about them. In today's episode. We have anticlimactic headlines shipwrecks, medical finds, and some collections that we are calling how that get there and we told you so, along with a couple of past episode updates, and the next time we will have some thefts, repatriations, stuff people found in their own collections, exclamations, and some edibles and potables, along with a few other assorted tidbits. First, anticlimactic headlines, which are stories that really had people buzzing this year, but then they didn't turn out to be all that earth shaking. We're gonna start with an update from Unearthed in July, which was the exhimation of H. H. Holmes, A k Herman mudget whose murder Castle became an infamous part of the World's Fair and is also covered by an episode in the archive. Holmes was to have been hanged and buried in Pennsylvania in eighteen six, but this year his remains were exhumed to settle long standing speculation about whether that body was really his. And that's what we talked about back in July. In spite of a court order specifying quote, no commercial spectacle or carnival atmosphere shall be created, either by this event or any other incident pertaining to the remains. All this played out on a History Channel series called American Ripper. Uh. And that's a series Mudget's great great grandson, Jeff offered up his own DNA for comparison. Also part of the show was Jeff Mudget's hypothesis that his great great grandfather had in the years before turning his own home into a murder castle, lived in London and carried out the Jack the Ripper murders. Mudget has detailed this hypothesis in a ted X talk and a book called Bloodstains as well. It's based on a couple of journals that he says he inherited from his great great grandfather, which described murders that were committed in London. So after the dramatic exhumation through a layer of concrete that Herman Mudget had requested before his death to try to deter body thieves, DNA and skeletal evidence confirmed that the remains were his. In other words, j. Tolmes did not escape execution and fake his own death. His great great grandson still maintains that he was Jack the Ripper though. UH. People also got really excited about a colossal statue of Pharaoh Ramsey's the second A k Ramsey's the Great, who died in twelve b C. The twenty six ft court site statue was found submerged in groundwater in a Cairo neighborhood, so that on his zone is pretty dramatic, but further examination success that it is definitely not Ramsey's the Second. It's the way less famous and more recent king sam Tech the First, who ruled from six to six sam Tech is known for bringing stability to Egypt after decades of turmoil, but he is not nearly as famous as Ramsey's the Second. It's still a really large statue though, and it might be notable as a late period fine because of its size, but it is not the headline making Ramsey's the Great, And as happens just about every single year, a new headline about Amelia Earhart made the rounds. This time it was photographic proof where air quoting proof, the air Heart and her navigator Fred Noonan's survived a crash landing and were then taken captive by the Japanese. Although this photo got a whole lot of headlines calling it quote conclusive proof, it was really not a lot to go on at all. The figure that was supposed to be air Heart was not even facing the camera, and the face that was supposedly Noonan's was deeply shadowed, and speculation that this shape in the background was her plane boiled basically down to well, it's about the same size as the plane without trying to make light of Amelia Earhart's death. When I first saw the photo, it made me think of Bigfoot because it looked so much like the grainy photos you see the proof that there is a Sasquatch. It definitely felt like grainy conspiracy theorist footage. Yeah, so things got even more doubtful a couple of days after History Channel aired It's Amelia Earhart the Lost Evidence, when a Japanese military history buff published a blog post saying he'd found a copy of that photo published in a book. And that book came out in five, two years before Amelia Earhart vanished in seven, So even before this blog post came out, a number of news outlets started updating their conclusive proof stories and air quotes with some skeptical rebuttals. And these rebuttals, a lot of them had their own problems. They were mainly coming from Richard Gillespie at the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery or Tiger, which has been the mounting expeditions to look for signs of air hearts, since Tiger is the source for most of the new in quotation marks air heart theories that don't pan out, which seemed like they come out every every year. Really often, they're out artifacts that we already know about and have already talked about a lot of times, they're like, now we think the makeup makeup pot means this, uh much to my chagrin. And article that I shared on our Facebook that was a pretty conservative, skeptical read on this whole photo after the fact was updated with extensive quotes from Richard Gillespie, and I was like, wait a minute, Well, well maybe they're just trying to make sure they feed this end of year material. Maybe, so that's really there a land We've gotten a couple of emails from people over the years that are angry that we even talk about anything that that they're doing with the makeup pots and the couple of boone and all that. In an event that we talked about so much on social media that we thought we'd already covered it on the show, Salvador Dolly's body was exhumed for a paternity test. On July, Maria pillar A Belle Martinez reported that her mother told her she had had an affair with Dolly in ninety fifty five, the year before Martinez was born. Martinez has been publicly claiming that she was Salvador Dali's daughter since two thousand seven. So the first big news to come from this exhumation was that when they opened the coffin, Delli's trademark mustache was still excellently groomed and in pristine condition. So that made a lot of news. And then on September six, the Gala Salvador Deli Foundation announced that the results were in. Deli was not Martinez's father. Madrid Court confirmed the announcement on the eight. So after all that, now that would make me sad if I thought I was Salvador Deli's child and then found out I wasn't. But this, this whole cycle of stories made people a lot of people angry in a number of ways. On our Facebook, one of the ways was that another publication used the word painter in the headline and people got really mad. And then people got really mad at her and called her all kinds of names, and I was like man. Just like if I grew up with my mother having told me that this famous artist was my father, I probably would want to know if that was true or not. Yeah, it's conscated right, Uh, to move on. Seven year old Matilda Jones pulled a sword from a lake in Cornwall, the same lake where, according to legend, King Arthur threw ex caliber to return it to the lady of the lake before he died. People ran with the idea that we should make this little girl queen. But the sword is definitely not King Arthur's. It's only twenty or thirty years old, and it is probably a film prop. And similar news, a sphinx head was on earth in the California Desert in December, but it was not evidence of some kind of ancient Egyptian presence in California. I similarly saw a lot of headlines that we're like Egyptian sphinx on earth in California, and they were not from you know, tabloids. This is a plaster of Paris set piece that was used in the nineteen fifty six film The Ten Commandments, and according to Hollywood, lowre cec will Be the Mill had the Exodus set from the movie buried in the desert because it was too expensive to remove it. But it was also of such excellent quality that leaving it there would invite rival filmmakers to use it for their own movies. So it's part of film history, but it's not evidence that there was another group of people in ancient time. Now, now, before we move on, which is going to be to shipwrecks, we're gonna pause for a sponsor break. Shipwrecks are always a listener favorite, so we're going to talk about a few. An incredibly well preserved eighteen hundred year old shipwreck was found off the coast of Spain's Belliaric Islands. This is then part of the Western Mediterranean that only has a few intact shipwrecks. We we talk a lot of times about huge collections of hundreds or even thousands of shipwrecks found in other parts of the Mediterranean, but this is a part where it's not not nearly as frequent. This particular ship contained between a thousand and two thousand ancient Roman jars, still basically where they were when the ship went down. These clay jars probably contain fish sauce that had been mass produced in Spain and Portugal thousands of years old fish, so it might be delicious. I don't know. These jars are a variety known as mph A, and the wreck was discovered after fishers in the area started finding pieces of m for a in their nets. I think that might excite me if I were fishing, it would me I cut fish and something really cool underwater. Teams working at the wreck of the Dutch East India's ship Roostwick, which I'm I'm just gonna say, that's probably how that's pronounced, they found a mysterious chest. The ship sank off of Kent in seventeen forty and as of late August, the chest had not been opened yet, and this is leading to a lot of speculation about whether it is a bona fide treasure chest or something really boring like ledgers, like a pile of dresses, duty rosters. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find the answer to that just yet, so it still remains a magical zone of speculation. But the rest of the ship has its own wealth of treasures, including cannons, fine glassware, and a bunch of Mexican silver dollars. A bronze arm was brought up from the Anti Cithers ship wreck this year, where there are at least seven more statues still submerged. This arm was actually outside of the wreck itself. It was under sediment on the slope where the ship came to rest on the seafloor. I feel like you can't have an unearthed without a little antikither talk. I know there's gonna be stuff coming up from that shipwreck as as people are able to get to it because's kind of treacherous. Next year maybe we'll have a big, fat update on it. Uh And Britain also announced that it would give Canada the wrecks of Franklin's expedition, which we've talked about Unearthed previously. The UK Ministry of Defense officially transferred ownership to Parks Canada, although Britain did hang on to a few of the artifacts. That announcement cracked me up a little bit, because, I mean, I understand it. I understand what's happening here, but the like the their shipwrecks in the water in Canada, how you're gonna send them back? Yeah, you can have that thing that's on your property and unmovable. You can have that that's fine UH To move on to medical finds, A multidisciplinary team investigated a strain of leprosy now known as Hanson's disease, that was found in a hospital cemetery in Winchester, United Kingdom. This study used radiocarbon dating, biomolecular analysis, genotyping, and other methods to examine remains from the eleventh and twelve centuries. One set of remains in the cemetery is from somebody outside of Britain, and so the team concluded that it probably belonged to a religious pilgrim, and then the majority of remains in the cemetery, more than eighty percent of them, showed signs of advanced Hanson's disease. These remains all tie into multiple questions about Hanson's disease. How do the strains of the disease that were common in the past relate to the strains that exist today, and how did religious pilgrimage affect the spread of the disease in the medieval world. The second question is still being examined, but when it comes to the first, the m leprey genome hasn't changed very much since the prevalence of Hanson's disease peaked in Europe, so it's possible that its eventual decline was thanks in part to increasing genetic resistance. The oldest known prostate stones were unearthed a cemetery in Sudan this year. The twelve thousand year old stones were discovered in The findings weren't published in Plus one until this year. Prostate stones are fairly common, but typically they tend to be small and asymptomatic, apart from potentially contributing to urinary tract infections. But the specimens found in the Sudanese grave were the size of walnuts, which would have been incredibly painful. They're so large that you might wonder if they were literally anything else, but analysis confirmed that they formed in a prostate gland. So a little bit gross, a whole lot of yikes. Yeah, it was one of those you look at them and kind of go, maybe that's maybe it's a rock. Maybe it's a rock that happens to be where this body. No, it's not a rock. Researchers uncovered what maybe the world's first ever example of dental fillings. These teeth, there were two of them, were found at the Raparo Free Dan Fight in Italy and they're about thirteen thousand years old. Both teeth have holes drilled into them that extend into the pulp, and then these holes are filled with tar like bitumen. The researchers speculated that the holes may have been for some purpose other than dentistry, perhaps to attach jewelry to the teeth or for some of their cosmetic reason, but the fact that the holes are filled with bitumen suggests that it was an attempt to treat tooth decay, and there are other examples of tooth modifications that suggests some kind of dental work dating even early here. But this is the first known filling, which also would have been done without effective anesthesia and probably with a rock. So once again, a lot of our medical unearthings are Yike's territory. Researchers at the University of Exeter are challenging the widely held assumption that made evil. Europe assumed infertility only affected women, although religious writings on infertility generally focused on women. Historian Dr Katherine Rider found references to infertility in men in medical texts from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries. Now, this did not mean that they otherwise had any sort of clue what they were talking about, though. One test for diagnosing which partner was infertile involved a man and a woman each urinating into a separate pot of brand and then the one that grew worms in it belonged to the infertil partner. You feel like every paragraph I get to read is the yikes paragraph You did wind up on Yike's rotation. We're going to move on to our next category of fines, which we are calling how that get there? A work crew in old Quebec found a live cannonball. Uh. It dates back to the Battle of the Planes of Abraham in seventeen fifty nine. But before anybody knew that this thing was live, they took it out of the ground. They gathered around it for a photograph. Then they contacted archaeologist Surge Rouleau, who, still not knowing that it was a live cannonball, took it home. Once he realized what he had Uh, he contacted a team of army munitions experts who came to neutralize it. Uh. Do you ever read the t s a blog? This will sound like I'm going on a tangent, but it's Germaine. Sure, so they often they do like a weekly report of everything they had to confiscate. I highly recommend it because well, it's unsettling, but you would be shocked at how many times people dig something out of the ground and then they're like, I'm gonna take this hope as a souvenir and the t s A is like, that's a live grenade. Similarly, they have been cannonballs that have shown up where they're like the people just had in like their carry on luggage there. That's terrifying. It is. Indeed, a four hundred year old embellishment bearing a tutor rose was found near the Kremlin. It's five centimeters in diameter and made of tin and lead, and based on the positions of four holes, it was probably used as an adornmentt for clothing. It may seem odd for a four hundred year old tutor rose complete with engraved motto for the British monarch in one doir to be in Moscow, but the location where it was found used to be home to the first English trading and Ambassadorial office there. I like how most of these things that I filed under how that get there have a logical reason why they're there, But it's still surprising at first glance. A large marble container brought to Blendom Palace by the fifth Duke of Marlborough has turned out to be a Roman coffin. The Duke brought the coffin not knowing it was a coffin to the palace and the ninety century and in the years since then it was used both as a water feature and as a planter. It's also a pretty eye catching one. It's carved with a drunken Dionysus at a party with mostly naked revelers, which makes me wonder whose confidant was. Somebody's probably pretty fun by total coincidence, and antiquities dealer visiting the palace identified it as a sarcophagus, at which point they brought it inside to protect it from the elements. From there it was sent for a more detailed restoration, and last up, probably the most surprising of all of these crews restoring a church in Spain, discovered that an eighteenth century priest had found an interesting place to leave his letter to the future inside Jesus's buddocks. Chaplain Joaquin Minguez wrote the letter in seventeen seventies seven, basically making a little time capsule for what life was like at the time, and then he put it into the buttocks of a statue of Jesus, which is odd because you would think he would not enter pay that people would ever find it there. I don't know. I mean, I'm sure unless he just predicted, like the people of the future are just going to be horrible and completely disrespectful, while we waxed repsolic on the complete disrespect of the future that he may or may not have believed people would have. We're gonna pause and have a little break for a sponsor. We are moving on to the category I made up called we told you so. We here does not mean Holly and I told you so. It means whoever was telling historians and archaeologists things, someone had knowledge because maybe wasn't being considered. Yes, so these are all things that have confirmed something that people had already been saying for anywhere from decades to centuries. First up, after being given a homework assignment on World War two, fourteen year old Daniel rom Kristensen's father made a wild suggestion, which is that he should find the German plane that had, according to family lore, crashed on the family's land in northern Denmark during World War Two. Daniel's grandfather was known for telling tall tales, and since no one had found this plane during the decades of plowing their farmland that had happened, everybody had basically come to believe that his story of a World War two plane crash was really just a joke. But Daniel and his father went out with a metal detector and they found not only the plane but also likely the remains of the pilot. They contacted local authorities and soon a local and soon a forensic specialist and a bomb disposal unit were on the property to secure the wreckage. They also had a visit from the German embassy. So Grandad was telling the truth. I like that he got vindicated. A British expatriate living in Japan has at least tentatively confirmed a long dismissed story about British Australian's first contact with Japan. The story goes that in eighteen twenty nine, convicted men aboard the Cypress mutinyed off the coast of Tasmania, with former sailor WILLIAMS Swallow leading the uprising and taking command of the ship. From there, they sailed onto New Zealand, Japan, and southern China. The men were eventually captured, taken back to England, tried and hanged, and even though they were consistent in their story that they'd been in Japan, nobody believed them. Japan's borders were closed off to most foreign visitors at this point, and later examinations of Japanese records didn't mention the Cyprus. But then English teacher Nick Russell stumbled onto a watercolor of a ship sailing under a British flag in an online archive, and this led him to a story about a ship anchoring off Hikoku Island in eighteen thirty and a record of samurai Mikita Hamaguchi visiting the ship to check it for weapons. So some of this is definitely preliminary, but so far they're experts in Japan and Australia who have weighed in and agreed that Russell might have finally proved that these mutineers were not making the whole thing up. DNA ealysis has confirmed that indigenous Australians have lived in the same parts of Australia for as long as those areas have been populated. In other words, Aboriginal Australians have continued to live in the same parts of the continent that their ancestors originally settled. This research was part of the Aboriginal Heritage Project, which hopes to help Australia's Indigenous population trace their regional ancestry and their family genealogy, essentially documenting what's already been part of Aboriginal oral history and culture. But this tenure project also has some possible future implications as well. It might help authorities repatriate artifacts to the correct Aboriginal people's and help survivors of Australia's stolen generations reconnect with their families. As a side note, other studies released this year suggests that Australia was actually settled before the commonly cited forty seven thousand years ago. One team found evidence of human habitation in Booty Cave on Barrow Island, sixty kilometers off the coast of Western austra Alia, dating back to about fifty thousand years Another team, publishing findings in the journal Nature, concluded that a sandstone rock shelter in Northern Territory was inhabited sixty five thousand years ago. This work with the Aboriginal Heritage Project has basically confirmed what Aboriginal Australians were already saying, which is like, our people have been living in this place for times of thousands of years. A genetic study of northwest North America reached incredibly similar conclusions about the indigenous residents of southern Alaska and the western coast of British Columbia. Mitochondrial DNA analysis revealed that Indigenous people living in these areas today are descended from the region's first inhabitants about ten thousand years ago, and also in British Columbia, archaeologists have confirmed with the Hiltsuck Nation's oral history has maintained that the Hiltsuck Nation moved to a small area of land that never froze during the Ice Age and survived there for the duration. Archaelogists carefully excavated the area and found that yet there were artifacts dating back fourteen thousand years, at which point glaciers were covering much of the surrounding land mass, but not that particular area. The HILTech Nation is hopeful that the findings will support the nation's claims in any future negotiations about land rights and other legal issues in the area. So now we're moving on to a category, like a subcategory of that one called we probably told you these are things that may pan out to be and I told you so. Uh so, like you said, there's some ongoing research that might once it's done, move these two that we told you so Pile the Bayatuck. We're an indigenous people in Newfoundland, with the last known member dying in a hospital in eight nine. A strand of that person's hair has been passed down through the family of the doctor who treated her for tuberculosis, so it's not actually possible to extract DNA from that hair, which is missing its route. But researchers were able to extract some DNA from the remains of several b a Tech people along with some of the Maritime Archaic people, which were a prehistoric Newfoundland culture, and they did this after seeking permission from the First Nations and Inuit people's in this area. Currently, this work is trying to trace the origins of these peoples and their family tree, both in and outside of Newfoundland, but it could potentially confirm whether people living today have some Baetuck ancestry. That's one of the things where the people living there today have said we are descended from the people who are of this culture. It's not a culture that completely disappeared, and so this is research that might confirm that. Following a similar theme, North America's Ancestral Puebloans are often described as an ancient people that no longer exists, but some modern Pebloans maintained the ancestral Puebloans didn't die out, they just moved. Archaeologists and anthropologists have been trying to verify this idea while also respecting tribes reluctance to have DNA analysis performed on ancient human remains. So what they've done turned to the bones of animals that the ancient Puebloans domesticated, specifically turkeys, using mitochondrial DNA and analysis. They studied turkey bones from Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado, which was the ancestral Pebloans homeland, and they compared it to the turkeys near the Rio Grand region, where modern Pebloans say that their ancestors eventually relocated. Until about the year twelve eighty, the two groups of turkeys did not have anything in common, but then after twelve eighty turkeys, and the Rio Grand had haplo haplow groups that had previously been found only in the masa Verde turkeys. I just have to say, I think this is the most ingenious way I agree approached this problem. That's somebody is very smart to have come up with this uh and it is obviously preliminary, but a reasonable explanation would be that the ancestral Puebloans moved from masa Verde to the Rio Grand area around twelve eighty, bringing their domesticated turkeys with them. Separate studies not strictly related to where whether anyone will ever get to say we told you so, looked at the pueblo in building methods and may severy date, specifically at the Sun Temple, which day backs dates back to about the year twelve hundred. Research led by Dr Sherry Towers at the Arizona State University Simon eleven Mathematical, Computational and Modeling Sciences Center has shown that there's a lot of mathematical complexity that went into building the structure, especially considering that the Pabloans who built it didn't at the time have a written language or a number system. So the team is now hoping to figure out whether a standard unit of measure that they pieced together from this evidence was also used in other Pabloan sights as well. And we're going to close out this part of our Unearthed with a few assorted tidbits that are relevant to past episodes of the show. In we talked about an unearthed photo believed to be of Billy the Kid playing croquet, which was purchased at a junk shop, making headlines this year. Was enough. They're purported Billy the Kid pick, this time seated next to Pat Garrett, who was the man who would eventually kill him. The picture is a tintype bought by North Carolina lawyer Frank Abrams in Tleven, and it made headlines this year because of estimates that it might be worth millions of dollars. A mass grave connected to the wreck of the Batavia was found on Beacon Island in November. The grave contains the remains of ten people, but the site itself suggests that they were buried respectfully and thoughtfully, so if you don't recall from our past episodes on the Batavia, this eventually turned into a horrifying massacre, so researchers believe that these were people who died in the immediate aftermath of the wreck before things got so bad, rather than later after the massacre happened. And this year we did a two part podcast on Executive Order in nineties sixty six and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War two, and one of the things that we discussed in that and other podcast was at the JAP Thea's population of Hawaii was much too large to incarceerate everyone, so in Hawaii, Japanese Americans were subject to restrictions on fishing, curfews, and other efforts to restrict their movement. Some of the Japanese population of Hawaii were incarcerated, though many were people who were influential in the community, people like business leaders, clergy and other prominent citizens. Hanuliluli Internment Center on Oahu was one of seventeen such incarceration sites. Was the largest incarceration camp in Hawaii, and it was used for Japanese Americans as well as for prisoners of war from other countries. Honolululi was designated as a National Historic Monument in and excavation work began in It has continued on through this year with students participating in the research through coursework at University of Hawaii West Oahu. I remind me a little bit of the ongoing archaeology classes at Harvard to folks from that on the show before last up. In today's part of our Unearthed two parter, a cold case team led by filmmaker Tom Colbert got its hands on a letter purportedly from dB Cooper that they say confirms an FBI cover up, but the FBI has not reopened the case, which it closed last year. This letter was allegedly sent to newspapers after the hijacking, which would confirm that dB Cooper did survive, and it was obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. So we'll have more Unearthed on our next episode. We sure will. But in the meantime, Tracy, do you have a little bit of a listener mail to top this one off? I do. It's another one about our recent episode on the aber Van disaster, and it is from Christina. Christina says, Dear Tracy and Holly, I just finished listening to your recent podcast on the aber Van disaster and was struck by the similarities to an American tragedy in nineteen seventy two, Just six short years later. It occurred in Logan County, West Virginia, and had a similar story to what happened in Wales. The Pittston Coal Company had a cold slurry, the mixture of solid and liquid coal ace impoundment damp that burst, sending a hundred and thirty two million gallons of black wastewater into the Buffalo Creek Hollow. The waves reached over thirty feet high as they descended on sixteen cold towns. Of a population of five thousand, a hundred and twenty five people were killed, one thousand, one hundred twenty one injured, and over four thousand left homeless. Following this, the company claimed the damn failing was an act of God, though a commission determined the company was at fault and gets guilty of murder. The state and hundreds of survivors sued and received millions and damages. I visited Logan County in two thousand eight on a service trip. It's an old county, rich and Appalachian culture, and struggling with poverty and substance abuse. Though physical remnants of the disaster are gone, every resident vividly knows or remembers the flood. There have been studies into the psychological toll the disaster placed on the survivors. I highly recommend the book Everything in Its Path Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood by sociologist Katie Ericsson. As always, thank you for your work educating people and sharing your pa actions for history. Best Christina. Thank you so much for this email, Christina, um I wanted to share it. We've gotten a couple of emails about similar mining disasters to the one that happened in Aberan that we're mostly about landslides or burst damns, et cetera that had a similarly tragic effect, so I'm not going to read all of them, but i did want to read this one, so thank you so much, Christina. If you would like to try to us about this or any other podcast or history podcasts at how stuffworks dot com. We're also all over social media under the name missed in History, so that's where you will find our Facebook, our Pinterest, our Instagram, our Twitter. Our pinterest is where we keep an unearthed board every year, which is where I keep up with this stuff all year long, so we can talk about it at the end. Of the year. You can come to our website, which is missed in history dot com and you will find show notes of all the episodes Holly and I haven't done together and that you will also find uh an archive of every episode we have ever done. And you could find our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, anywhere else who listen to podcasts. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stop works dot com. M