Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Before we start today's episode, Election Day in the US that's tomorrow, we would just like to encourage folks if you have not voted already and you are eligible to vote in the US and registered and all that. I know some states have same day registration, which is amazing. Um, I hope everybody is out there exercising the right to vote. I as of when we were recording this, my ballot has been mailed and accepted. I am waiting on my absentee ballot to come. But in the meantime, I've been talking to a lot of people for a whole other podcast about it. Yeah, so if you need some last minute inspiration, you can check out the Why I'm Voting podcast and here why Lots of people, some of them names you know, are motivated to vote. It's been really, really fun having those conversations. Yeah, I've been envious of some of the some of the conversations you've gotten to have for that show. Yes, it's been very fascinating, especially since I am in in pandemic times. I record in my closet, and many people have seen my shoe closet. Now it's pretty great shoe closet. I mean, I love it, but yeah, it's a little bit funny. Every once in a while someone will go, is that a closet. I'm like, yes, it is. Yes. Uh. So, now that we've had our our sort of election day announcements, yeah, like, I know, there's a lot going on, but I just wanted to take a minute for that. It is now, though, time for an Autumn unearthed soray two favorite things together Autumn Man on Earth. I thought you were going to say voting and unearthed. Well, I mean, voting is a whole other, separate thing, but sure. Uh. For any newcomers to the show, this is when we take a look at things that have been literally and figuratively unearthed over the last few months. The last time we did this was Unearthed in July this year, and that was just one episode and some folks wrote in to express their disappointment that it was just a singleton. So good news for those folks. This time, which is covering July through September, it's a two parter and I know it's a little bit weird that this thing is coming out in November and does not include the month of October. As we are recording this right now, it is only October. So that is why um so today in part one of Unearthed in autumn for we have the books and letters and the edibles and potables and some animal finds and along with other stuff. And the next time we'll have some of the other favorites, including the extimations and the shipwrecks. Interestingly, kind of the Archer from recent Unearthed, we do not have a giant selection of episode updates this time around, so rather than having a whole separate update section. There are things that relate to other episodes, just in other categories that they relate to. But as Tracy just mentioned, we're starting with books and Letters. So major restoration work has been ongoing at Oxford Hall in Norfolk, England, after some dormer windows slid off the roof in and that event revealed a number of issues with the dormer's roofs and chimneys that all needed to be addressed, and ahead of that repair work, archaeologists have been searching through the spaces and cavities in the attic and under the roof to make sure any artifacts that might be stowed there can be retrieved and preserved. This started out as a big project with a whole team involved, but because of the COVID nineteen pandemic, many of them were furloughed. Archaeologist Matthew Campion was asked to continue on by himself, so a big part of this work was lifting up floorboards and looking underneath them and looking in other cavities in the structure to retrieve any artifacts that were in there. And they really weren't expecting a lot of major fines with this. Although this structure tased all the way back to Fight two, most of those spaces had already been opened up and examined during other work that happened in more recent years. However, Campion found one area where the old floorboards had never been lifted up, and not only that, there was a layer of lime plaster under the space and that pulled moisture out of it and kept what was in there really pretty dry. So it was an ideal environment for preserving things like documents and textiles, and this area turned out to contain thousands of artifacts, many dating back to the seventeenth and eighteen centuries, but some even older, and many of them packed together in two very old rats nests made of Tutor and Elizabethan textile because of that very dry environment. Even though rats had literally been using these materials to make their little homes. Uh, they were overall in extremely good condition. So although Campion was doing the archaeology work by himself, there were also still builders there on the scene doing their work. Everybody had ppe. They were all socially distancing, and the builders got involved with going through all of this and they made some fines as well. My very very favorite of this whole thing, and why I put this first because I love it so much. This was quoted from Campion's Twitter feed. He said quote The first was found by Rob Jessup who literally pulled a page of a fifteenth century manuscript out of the rubble, passed it to me and quietly asking is this anything? I love it so much. Two other builders found a nearly intact sixteenth century copy of the King's Psalms in its original Tutor cover. There is only one other known copy of this book in existence, and that copy is in the British Library. Although Some of the material and documents were clearly dragged into the space under the floor by rats. Others were almost certainly concealed there intentionally by humans. The betting Fields who lived in the hall were Catholic, and they used their home to shelter Catholic clergy during the Protestant Reformation in England's shift to Protestantism. This edition of the King's Psalms, for example, was written by John Fisher, who was executed after refusing to acknowledge Henry the Eighth as head of the church, becoming a Catholic martyr. It is possible that some of these books and documents were used in illicit Catholic masses and then it hidden out of sight under the floor. There are also lots of other finds in this area, including many many sewing pins and documents that looked like they were cut up for use as sewing patterns. If you see photographs of them, it's like, yes, that is absolutely a bodice. And in another pandemic find, Dr Anna Clayton was using time that opened up because of the pandemic lockdown in Tasmania to go through whaling log books from the Southern Hemisphere. She had previously found school lessons from a little girl, Esther Mary Paul written in the log book of the whaling vessel nim Rod. That was unexpected, and she started trying to figure out the story of how that had come to be. So it turns out that Esther, who was actually born six years after the voyage whose logs she was writing in, she was the niece of a woman named Charlotte Jacobs, and Charlotte Jacobs was married to the Nimrods captain. Esther, her mother, her aunt, and her grandmother had all been living together in the same house when Esther started writing in this log book. She was five years old at the time and was being taught at home, So it seems like either she kind of commandared this to write in or someone gave it to her to write in for her lessons. And some of the writing in this book seems to be lines that she copied us punishment. There are things like behave at Sunday school and Esther shall not go out again, just sort of sweet and heartbreaking. One of these lines struck Tracy is a little bit creepy. It was love your grandmother, Esther love your grandmother, Esther love your grandmother Esther. That one I thought about it. I was like, Tracy, this is the jumping off point for you to write your horror movie. Okay, love your grandmother Esther. Now I'm really creeped out, not even a Halloween episode. So during this research Dr Clayton tracked it down some more of Esther's biography. She grew up, married a chemist in eighteen eighty. That was she was twenty when she got married. They went on to have three children and she lived until the age of forty four. And she loved her grandmother. Tracy, a researcher studying the work of economist Adam Smith, has unearthed a sixteen thirty four edition of Shakespeare's The Two Noble Kinsman as part of a book that includes several English plays. Dr john Stone found it at Royal Scott's College in Salamanca, Spain, and the play was written around sixteen thirteen, and this copy maybe the oldest Shakespearean work in all of Spain. The book is also still in its original binding. Dr Stone speculated that it made its way to the college as part of a student's personal library. So I was kind of curious about their being. Uh. Royal Scots College in Spain. Royal Scots College was founded in Madrid in sixty seven and it's moved a couple of times in the centuries since then. Initially it was a full time seminary, so men from Scotland would travel to the college they would train to be priests there. Today, the college's focus is still on serving the Catholic Church in Scotland, but it's also expanded its role into hosting things like retreats and conferences. More than three point five million pounds worth of rare books were discovered under the floor of a house in Romania. The books had been stolen during a heist in ten At the time, the books were being shipped to an auction in Las Vegas and they were temporarily in a postal warehouse. Two thieves cut through the roof, repelled into the warehouse and removed the books while on top of the shelves to avoid setting off sensors in the floor. I feel like this is the most action movie heist we have talked about on the show, because a lot of the heists we have talked about are more like just somebody smashed the door and and got something and escaped. Uh. The culprits in this crime had already been caught and convicted, but it took a while to figure out what they had done with the books. They were finally found in September thanks to a joint effort from law enforcement in the UK, Italy and Romania. More than two hundred books were recovered and they included first edition works by Galileo and Isaac Newton, among others. The process of tracking these books down also led to are just being filed against thirteen more people. This is a whole network. Twelve of those people have already entered guilty please, and the thirteenth is facing trial in March. Now, before we get into some interesting land and water stories, we're gonna have a little word from a sponsor. Next up, we have a section that I titled land that Used to be Water and vice versa. It is a couple of finds that connect to changing sea levels. So, first, after the last Ice Age, more than thirty percent of Australia's land math went from being above sea level to being underwater. And so that means that there's a huge amount of archaeological information about Australia's Aboriginal people's that's underwater now so, a team of archaeologists from multiple universities in Australia and the UK, in partnership with the moo Juga Aboriginal Corporation, has been studying archaeol logical and geophysical surveys to try to find some of these underwater archaeological sites. In July, they announced the discovery of Australia's first underwater Aboriginal archaeological sites, thanks to surveys from the Deep History of Sea Country project. The two sites are off the coast of Northwest Australia and they are each at least seven thousand years old, the oldest underwater archaeological sites found in Australia to date. The artifacts on earth so far include grinding stones and other stone tools, and the words of Associate Professor Jonathan Benjamin, who is the Maritime Archaeology Program Coordinator at Flinders University's College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences quote, now we finally have the proof that at least some of this archaeological evidence survived the process of sea level rise. The ancient coastal archaeology is not lost for good, we just haven't found it yet. These new discoveries are a first step toward exploring the last real frontier of Australian archaeology, and this next story is kind of the opposite. So back in the nineteen thirties, a farmer in southern Norway decided to drain a wetland so that he could grow crops there, and while digging the drainage trenches, he started finding all kinds of tools and bones. The tools were fish hooks and harpoons, and the bones seemed to belong to sea animals like orca in bluefin tuna, So this collection of fines just didn't quite make sense. The bones and the number of them how they were arranged, that suggested that the site had previously been underwater, but the number of tools also suggested that it had been a settlement, and there were some unanswered questions about whether the bones and the tools were all the same age. At that point they didn't really know whether maybe the bones were from an earlier time when the site had been under water, and then maybe the tools were newer following a shift in the shoreline. The tools were sent to the University Museum of Antiquities in Oslo and the bones to the Natural History Museum PhD candidates n votsvag Nielsen started putting the pieces together in Tween while doing doctoral work. After tracking down both the tools and the bones, Nielsen dated them, confirming that they were the same age, dating back to between hundred b c E. Further excavations in the former wetland followed, with the team eventually unearthing additional tools, projectile points, and lots and lots of tuna bones. At this point, the conclusion is that this area used to be a lagoon and that people from nearby settlements on land used this lagoon to hunt fish, maybe even cleaning the fish from their boats before going back to shore. Unfortunately, though, this had been a better environment for preserving artifacts back when it was still a wetland before it was drained to make it into crop land. The fines that were unearthed back in the thirties were in a lot better condition than the ones that have been found in the last few years. Now, we're going to move on to the topic of animals on pay Yea angelals. On previous installments of on Earth, we have talked about research into dog domestication and the discoveries of canine skeletons that showed evidence that the dog had survived a broken bone, which was possible evidence of it being cared for like a pet. Research announced in July has come to similar conclusions about a cat. The bones of the cat in question were found at an excavation site on the Silk Road in southern Kazakhstan. This had been home to a medieval settlement of the pastoralist Turkic tribe, and the skeleton was relatively speaking complete. I mean it's it's not a whole skeleton, but there were multiple parts still there, and that's pretty unusual. At other excavations in this region, it has been way more common to find individual animal bones rather than partial or complete skeletons. X ray analysis showed evidence of multiple healed broken bones, suggesting that someone had cared for the cat while it recovered from injuries. Based on isotope analysis, it mostly eight fish and DNA evidence confirmed that this was a domesticated cat species rather than a wild step cat. Together, all of this evidence suggests that their words domesticated cats who were being treated as pets in this area going back to at least the eighth century, so in terms of the overall timeline for cat domestication, that is really really recent, but it's not really reason for this particular area. Many of the people's living in this area were nomadic, and while cats might stay for a while at an encampment, historically cats in this area were not known to follow nomadic people's along their travel roots. According to Dr Ashley Harudah, who led the team, this particular society only kept animals that had some kind of essential use for their lives, and they were pastoralists, so most of their lives were hurting. They didn't keep large stores of grains that would attract rodents, so they wouldn't have as much use for cats as rodent control. This particular cat had also lost most of its teeth by the end of its life, meaning that people would have been feeding it, so this seems to be the earliest domesticated cat to be found in the region north of Central Asia and east of China. In other news, archaeologists in southern Poland have found two small clay figurines that looked like pigs. They were found in a settlement that dates back to about thirty five hundred years ago. The settlement was surrounded by a stone wall, and it's not really clear what the purpose of the little pigs was These could have been children's toys, they could have been some kind of ceremonial object. And it's also not clear whether they were made by the same person. So they look somewhat similar to each other, and they were found in the same dwelling, but they also have some stylistic differences. My total lay person's impression. I am not an art historian, I am not an archaeologist, but like my gut when I looked at it was that looks like a parent child art project, because they do look similar, but one of them seems a bit more polished than the other one. Here's what this makes me think of. You know, I know people that will decorate their entire kitchen in pig theme or rooster theme or so. Part of me is like this. This might not have any ceremonial use. It may be ancient kitch I just like pigs. It's just like pigs, y'all um. In another depiction of an animal, researchers found a stone box on the bottom of Lake Titicaca which contained a tiny figure of a llama or alpaca, carved from a spiny oyster shell. It's twenty eight millimeters just over an inch long, and it's a soft coral color. Also in the box was a rolled up piece of gold foil that's about the same length. And it's likely that this find is of Inca origin and it was placed in the lake and offering Ah, yeah, this is It looks so delicate and it's like coral color just makes it look very pretty to me. I like a tiny little carved charm. Sweet. Lastly, according to research published in July, foxes have been eating people's discarded food for more than forty thousand years. The authors came to this conclusion by studying carbon and nitrogen isotopes and the remains of several types of mammals in southwestern Germany, including red and Arctic foxes and before there was a large population of Neanderthals in this region. The isotopes suggested that the foxes had been eating the same foods as other much larger carnivores. So basically, the foxes would have been hunting small animals and then also scavenging from those bigger animals cast off scraps. But as a population of Neanderthal's established itself, the fox's diets included more and more reindeer something that was much too big for the foxes to hunt themselves, but it was part of the Neanderthal diet. The author suggests that the diet of foxes might be a useful indicator to study human behavior. And now we will take another quick sponsor break before we get into other stuff about food. Now we are moving on to what is honestly always one of my favorite things and unearthed, which is that we have lots of edibles and potables. This time around. First UP researchers looked at more than forty thousand oyster shells from archaeological sites all along the Atlantic coast of the United States to draw some conclusions about indigenous management of the reefs. Based on their research, these oyster fisheries were in use for more than five thousand years, and during that time they were really very stable. This was true even as the indigenous populations that were hard of vesting oysters from them grew dramatically and went through multiple shifts in economy and political organization. So even with a much bigger population and a changing social structure, these reefs stayed very stable, suggesting that the whole time people were intentionally managing them with a focus on sustainability, maintaining that through all of these other shifts. In general, when people start harvesting from an oyster bed, it is generally expected that the oysters will get smaller over time due to harvesting pressure. And while there was a trend for slightly smaller oysters during the late Archaic period, in this study, that shifted in most places during the Mississippian period, with the average oyster actually getting bigger over time. Although this may have been related to environmental changes, it might also have been influenced by how people were managing the reefs. For the most part, the oyster populations on these reefs also continued to be pretty stable after Europeans started colony. As in North America. What really caused the reefs to collapse was the development of industrial harvesting and canning in the nineteenth century. We talked about that a bit in our episode on the Chesapeap Bake Oyster Wars. Yes, all right, we're getting one of my favorite words. An excavation of iron age wooden houses called Crannis at Lochte in Scotland has revealed butter mm hmmm, sweet sweet butter, year old butter and about three quarters of the dish that it was stored in. The dish itself had holes in the bottom and it actually may have been used in making the butter. After churning the milk, the cream would be placed in a woven cloth in this dish, so the rest of the liquid could be pressed out through the holes while retaining the solids. So the wooden houses where this was found, those were built out over the lock and they lasted for about twenty years before they would collapse into it, so that that is how these fines got into the luck in the first place. So the butter, not a ton of it, but some survived in this environment thanks to it being very dark and anaerobic. Down at the bottom of the luck butter. Don't eat that butter, No, don't. Archaeologists at the Australian National University have found the earliest evidence of indigenous communities cultivating bananas in Australia. The site is on a tiny island in the Torres Straight and it dates back more than twenty one hundred years. The team found starch granules, banana plant micro fossils and charcoal in the soil. Lead researcher Robert Williams described this find as helping to dispel the idea that Australia's first people's didn't practice agriculture, saying that the Torres Strait has previously been viewed as kind of a boundary between New Guinea, where people practiced agriculture, and Australia, where people were believed to live more as hunter gatherers. So this discovery suggests that the islands and the Torres Straight were more like a bridge than a barrier. Williams is a descendant of the Cambrian Nenewal people's and he also talked about the team's effort to be mindful of how their work would affect indigenous communities, saying, quote, Historically culture has been appropriated by non indigenous archaeologists and anthropologists, so it was really important for me to make a connection with the people in this community and ensure they understood the research really belongs to them. I hope this work is something the community can really be proud about. It demonstrates through clear evidence the diversity and complexity of early horticulture in the Western tourist Strait. To move on on multiple previous editions of Unearthed, we have talked about discoveries that have come from studying the residues on pottery, which have provided evidence of what people in the past were preparing and eating. I remember talking about these kinds of residues related to everything from oh, it turns out this society was making better Oh, it turns out this society was using salmon in a way we didn't expect, Like there's a lot, it comes up a lot. A team of archaeologists has tried to figure out how accurately these residues reflect the use of the pottery over time. They did this in a project I love so much by cooking a bunch of ingredients and newly purchased unglazed ceramic pots. These ingredients included wheat, maize, and venison. They cooked the same ingredients over and over once a week over the course of a year, and then for their last batch, they changed up the ingredients. Then they tested the residues inside the pots to see what stood out the most the ingredients that had been cooked over and over or the ones that have been cooked for the last meal. So kind of unsurprisingly, the burned remains at the bottom of the pots looked most like that final set of ingredients, and while the thin residue layer on the interior surface of the pot showed some evidence of the earlier ingredients. It also still most closely resembled that final meal. Lipids that had been absorbed into the pottery, on the other hand, mostly showed evidence of those things that had been cooked over and over over the course of the year, without nearly as much evidence of that last final meal. This is not to suggest that one set of residues is better than the others, but just that they each give a slightly different look at what the pot was used for. In the words of the author's quote, we propose that these different residue forms present unique opportunities for archaeologists to study the various resources that may have been used across multiple time scales within a cooking vessel's use history. Moving on, researchers at Johanna Schuttenberg University Mints have concluded that the ability to digest lactose past infancy spread through the population of Central Europe over the course of only a few thousand years, meaning it's a pretty recent adaptation. They came to this conclusion after studying the DNA of people who had been killed in battle around twelve hundred BC, and that study, only about one in eight of the people carried a gene that would allow them to break down lactose into adulthood. But today, roughly three thousand years later, roughly nine of adults from the area can tolerate lactose. In the words of Professor Daniel Segman, we conclude that over the past three thousand years, lactase persistent individuals had more children, or alternatively, those children had better chances of survival than those without this treat UH and a completely different subject, a Phoenician wine press has been discovered in Lebanon, making it the first Iron Age wine press to be found there. This wine press dates back to the seventh century BC, and one of the building materials used to make the press was plaster that had been made from lime and ceramic fragments. Making a real lead durable plaster was pretty tricky at the time, and crushing up ceramic fragments helps to make the plaster stronger, longer lasting, and water resistant, which would be pretty important in a wine press. Romans actually later refined this same technique for use in their buildings and for our last edible and potable find. In September, members of a Japanese research expedition found a cash of emergency food that had been left behind by a previous Japanese expedition that took place in nineteen sixty five. It contained canned goods and chewing gum. The chewing gum is cool mint from Lottico, which had been developed specifically for Japanese expedition teams to include vitamins and minerals in a formulation that was meant to withstand five months of extreme temperatures. This cash also contained a can of the first Coca Cola that was available for purchase in Japan. This style of coke can did not have a pole top or an opener. You had to make a whole in it with a can opener to be able to drink it. In the words of an unnamed Coca Cola japan official who was quoted in the Asahiitian bun quote, it is greatly encouraging to imagine that expedition members had Coca Cola in the harsh environment. Um. I I was thinking that maybe it was just because of the times that we're living in, But when I first read that quote, it was the funniest thing I had ever heard in my life, and I laughed about it for a solid minute. I think that's valid. It's very funny. I'm so pleased our product was part of their packaging. It's adorable. Uh. And then we have kind of a little strange anomaly in our wrap up, so we don't have any UTSI updates this time around. UTSI just had a chill quarter. Yeah, I don't. I was like, did was there maybe a pause and research into Utzi because of the pandemic? I don't. I don't know the answer. We just but there's I don't have anything for UZZI this time. Yeah. Oh, but we don't leave let's see out completely. So we're doing something UTSI adjacent for the last unearthing in this one, a four year old shamois discovered in South Tyrol, Italy is becoming something of a model to help guide research into frozen mummies like Leutsy. The shamois that's a small goat antelope was found by a hiker who alerted authorities. So Utsi and other frozen mummies can be really incredibly challenging to study because anything that researchers might physically due to the tissue, I mean they have to walk. This really fine line between preserving the mummy and conducting the research, and when it comes to trying to do things like take DNA samples, the DNA has often degraded over time, so there's very little of it present in the specimen. Basically, there is no room for any kind of trial and error or do over. So researchers are hoping to use this shamlas basically as a model to work out a set of procedures that can be used on human remains to do things like retrieve d n A and do other research work so that they can get it right the first time and preserve those remains as much as possible. I love it. It's a very smart approach to be like, we do have this that is less likely to yield us, you know, developmental insights about humanity. It's like their little test project. It's perfect. Let's make a process based on what we learned right here. So smart. So that is part one of our Unearthed for this fall. I have more stuff in part two, and I have some listener mail to take us out. This is from Emily, and Emily wrote, uh New Mexico history was the subject line. Dear Holly and Tracy, Thank you so much for taking the time to address the New Mexico history. Both of your recent episodes, Nina Otero Warren and the demon Cores were pieces of history that I didn't know very much about, but they connect to me on a personal level. It was really interesting to see in sites into how New Mexico's educational policy was shaped, and of course revisit the complicated past of both Anglo and Spanish colonialism in northern New Mexico. However, I especially loved your demon Core episode. I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, surrounded by the history of the Manhattan Project. We regularly visited the museum and historical parts of Los Alamos when I was a kid to see the science behind the atomic bombs, but I had never heard of the demon Core before. Thanks so much for teaching me something new about my hometown and state. I love your podcast so much. Keep up the good work, Emily. Thank you so much for this email, Emily. I wanted to read it not just because it's nice to read nice emails, but also because there's actually a connection between those two things that did not come up on the episode, which is that Nina Otero Lawren could see the Manhattan Project site from their homestead, and that was like a little detail that came up in the research that I just did not have a great place to reference specifically in the episode. Um, but that was sort of one of the things of of of during World War Two as the Manhattan Project was going on, they sort of they could see in the distance this facility. Uh didn't have the hugest sense of what all was going on there. So thank you again, Emily for that note. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast, we're at history podcast that I heart radio dot com, and we're all over social media at Missed in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook and Pinterest, in Twitter and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on the I heart radio app and Apple Podcasts and anywhere else that you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Before we start today's episode, Election Day in the US that's tomorrow, we would just like to encourage folks if you have not voted already and you are eligible to vote in the US and registered and all that. I know some states have same day registration, which is amazing. Um, I hope everybody is out there exercising the right to vote. I as of when we were recording this, my ballot has been mailed and accepted. I am waiting on my absentee ballot to come. But in the meantime, I've been talking to a lot of people for a whole other podcast about it. Yeah, so if you need some last minute inspiration, you can check out the Why I'm Voting podcast and here why Lots of people, some of them names you know, are motivated to vote. It's been really, really fun having those conversations. Yeah, I've been envious of some of the some of the conversations you've gotten to have for that show. Yes, it's been very fascinating, especially since I am in in pandemic times. I record in my closet, and many people have seen my shoe closet. Now it's pretty great shoe closet. I mean, I love it, but yeah, it's a little bit funny. Every once in a while someone will go, is that a closet. I'm like, yes, it is. Yes. Uh. So, now that we've had our our sort of election day announcements, yeah, like, I know, there's a lot going on, but I just wanted to take a minute for that. It is now, though, time for an Autumn unearthed soray two favorite things together Autumn Man on Earth. I thought you were going to say voting and unearthed. Well, I mean, voting is a whole other, separate thing, but sure. Uh. For any newcomers to the show, this is when we take a look at things that have been literally and figuratively unearthed over the last few months. The last time we did this was Unearthed in July this year, and that was just one episode and some folks wrote in to express their disappointment that it was just a singleton. So good news for those folks. This time, which is covering July through September, it's a two parter and I know it's a little bit weird that this thing is coming out in November and does not include the month of October. As we are recording this right now, it is only October. So that is why um so today in part one of Unearthed in autumn for we have the books and letters and the edibles and potables and some animal finds and along with other stuff. And the next time we'll have some of the other favorites, including the extimations and the shipwrecks. Interestingly, kind of the Archer from recent Unearthed, we do not have a giant selection of episode updates this time around, so rather than having a whole separate update section. There are things that relate to other episodes, just in other categories that they relate to. But as Tracy just mentioned, we're starting with books and Letters. So major restoration work has been ongoing at Oxford Hall in Norfolk, England, after some dormer windows slid off the roof in and that event revealed a number of issues with the dormer's roofs and chimneys that all needed to be addressed, and ahead of that repair work, archaeologists have been searching through the spaces and cavities in the attic and under the roof to make sure any artifacts that might be stowed there can be retrieved and preserved. This started out as a big project with a whole team involved, but because of the COVID nineteen pandemic, many of them were furloughed. Archaeologist Matthew Campion was asked to continue on by himself, so a big part of this work was lifting up floorboards and looking underneath them and looking in other cavities in the structure to retrieve any artifacts that were in there. And they really weren't expecting a lot of major fines with this. Although this structure tased all the way back to Fight two, most of those spaces had already been opened up and examined during other work that happened in more recent years. However, Campion found one area where the old floorboards had never been lifted up, and not only that, there was a layer of lime plaster under the space and that pulled moisture out of it and kept what was in there really pretty dry. So it was an ideal environment for preserving things like documents and textiles, and this area turned out to contain thousands of artifacts, many dating back to the seventeenth and eighteen centuries, but some even older, and many of them packed together in two very old rats nests made of Tutor and Elizabethan textile because of that very dry environment. Even though rats had literally been using these materials to make their little homes. Uh, they were overall in extremely good condition. So although Campion was doing the archaeology work by himself, there were also still builders there on the scene doing their work. Everybody had ppe. They were all socially distancing, and the builders got involved with going through all of this and they made some fines as well. My very very favorite of this whole thing, and why I put this first because I love it so much. This was quoted from Campion's Twitter feed. He said quote The first was found by Rob Jessup who literally pulled a page of a fifteenth century manuscript out of the rubble, passed it to me and quietly asking is this anything? I love it so much. Two other builders found a nearly intact sixteenth century copy of the King's Psalms in its original Tutor cover. There is only one other known copy of this book in existence, and that copy is in the British Library. Although Some of the material and documents were clearly dragged into the space under the floor by rats. Others were almost certainly concealed there intentionally by humans. The betting Fields who lived in the hall were Catholic, and they used their home to shelter Catholic clergy during the Protestant Reformation in England's shift to Protestantism. This edition of the King's Psalms, for example, was written by John Fisher, who was executed after refusing to acknowledge Henry the Eighth as head of the church, becoming a Catholic martyr. It is possible that some of these books and documents were used in illicit Catholic masses and then it hidden out of sight under the floor. There are also lots of other finds in this area, including many many sewing pins and documents that looked like they were cut up for use as sewing patterns. If you see photographs of them, it's like, yes, that is absolutely a bodice. And in another pandemic find, Dr Anna Clayton was using time that opened up because of the pandemic lockdown in Tasmania to go through whaling log books from the Southern Hemisphere. She had previously found school lessons from a little girl, Esther Mary Paul written in the log book of the whaling vessel nim Rod. That was unexpected, and she started trying to figure out the story of how that had come to be. So it turns out that Esther, who was actually born six years after the voyage whose logs she was writing in, she was the niece of a woman named Charlotte Jacobs, and Charlotte Jacobs was married to the Nimrods captain. Esther, her mother, her aunt, and her grandmother had all been living together in the same house when Esther started writing in this log book. She was five years old at the time and was being taught at home, So it seems like either she kind of commandared this to write in or someone gave it to her to write in for her lessons. And some of the writing in this book seems to be lines that she copied us punishment. There are things like behave at Sunday school and Esther shall not go out again, just sort of sweet and heartbreaking. One of these lines struck Tracy is a little bit creepy. It was love your grandmother, Esther love your grandmother, Esther love your grandmother Esther. That one I thought about it. I was like, Tracy, this is the jumping off point for you to write your horror movie. Okay, love your grandmother Esther. Now I'm really creeped out, not even a Halloween episode. So during this research Dr Clayton tracked it down some more of Esther's biography. She grew up, married a chemist in eighteen eighty. That was she was twenty when she got married. They went on to have three children and she lived until the age of forty four. And she loved her grandmother. Tracy, a researcher studying the work of economist Adam Smith, has unearthed a sixteen thirty four edition of Shakespeare's The Two Noble Kinsman as part of a book that includes several English plays. Dr john Stone found it at Royal Scott's College in Salamanca, Spain, and the play was written around sixteen thirteen, and this copy maybe the oldest Shakespearean work in all of Spain. The book is also still in its original binding. Dr Stone speculated that it made its way to the college as part of a student's personal library. So I was kind of curious about their being. Uh. Royal Scots College in Spain. Royal Scots College was founded in Madrid in sixty seven and it's moved a couple of times in the centuries since then. Initially it was a full time seminary, so men from Scotland would travel to the college they would train to be priests there. Today, the college's focus is still on serving the Catholic Church in Scotland, but it's also expanded its role into hosting things like retreats and conferences. More than three point five million pounds worth of rare books were discovered under the floor of a house in Romania. The books had been stolen during a heist in ten At the time, the books were being shipped to an auction in Las Vegas and they were temporarily in a postal warehouse. Two thieves cut through the roof, repelled into the warehouse and removed the books while on top of the shelves to avoid setting off sensors in the floor. I feel like this is the most action movie heist we have talked about on the show, because a lot of the heists we have talked about are more like just somebody smashed the door and and got something and escaped. Uh. The culprits in this crime had already been caught and convicted, but it took a while to figure out what they had done with the books. They were finally found in September thanks to a joint effort from law enforcement in the UK, Italy and Romania. More than two hundred books were recovered and they included first edition works by Galileo and Isaac Newton, among others. The process of tracking these books down also led to are just being filed against thirteen more people. This is a whole network. Twelve of those people have already entered guilty please, and the thirteenth is facing trial in March. Now, before we get into some interesting land and water stories, we're gonna have a little word from a sponsor. Next up, we have a section that I titled land that Used to be Water and vice versa. It is a couple of finds that connect to changing sea levels. So, first, after the last Ice Age, more than thirty percent of Australia's land math went from being above sea level to being underwater. And so that means that there's a huge amount of archaeological information about Australia's Aboriginal people's that's underwater now so, a team of archaeologists from multiple universities in Australia and the UK, in partnership with the moo Juga Aboriginal Corporation, has been studying archaeol logical and geophysical surveys to try to find some of these underwater archaeological sites. In July, they announced the discovery of Australia's first underwater Aboriginal archaeological sites, thanks to surveys from the Deep History of Sea Country project. The two sites are off the coast of Northwest Australia and they are each at least seven thousand years old, the oldest underwater archaeological sites found in Australia to date. The artifacts on earth so far include grinding stones and other stone tools, and the words of Associate Professor Jonathan Benjamin, who is the Maritime Archaeology Program Coordinator at Flinders University's College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences quote, now we finally have the proof that at least some of this archaeological evidence survived the process of sea level rise. The ancient coastal archaeology is not lost for good, we just haven't found it yet. These new discoveries are a first step toward exploring the last real frontier of Australian archaeology, and this next story is kind of the opposite. So back in the nineteen thirties, a farmer in southern Norway decided to drain a wetland so that he could grow crops there, and while digging the drainage trenches, he started finding all kinds of tools and bones. The tools were fish hooks and harpoons, and the bones seemed to belong to sea animals like orca in bluefin tuna, So this collection of fines just didn't quite make sense. The bones and the number of them how they were arranged, that suggested that the site had previously been underwater, but the number of tools also suggested that it had been a settlement, and there were some unanswered questions about whether the bones and the tools were all the same age. At that point they didn't really know whether maybe the bones were from an earlier time when the site had been under water, and then maybe the tools were newer following a shift in the shoreline. The tools were sent to the University Museum of Antiquities in Oslo and the bones to the Natural History Museum PhD candidates n votsvag Nielsen started putting the pieces together in Tween while doing doctoral work. After tracking down both the tools and the bones, Nielsen dated them, confirming that they were the same age, dating back to between hundred b c E. Further excavations in the former wetland followed, with the team eventually unearthing additional tools, projectile points, and lots and lots of tuna bones. At this point, the conclusion is that this area used to be a lagoon and that people from nearby settlements on land used this lagoon to hunt fish, maybe even cleaning the fish from their boats before going back to shore. Unfortunately, though, this had been a better environment for preserving artifacts back when it was still a wetland before it was drained to make it into crop land. The fines that were unearthed back in the thirties were in a lot better condition than the ones that have been found in the last few years. Now, we're going to move on to the topic of animals on pay Yea angelals. On previous installments of on Earth, we have talked about research into dog domestication and the discoveries of canine skeletons that showed evidence that the dog had survived a broken bone, which was possible evidence of it being cared for like a pet. Research announced in July has come to similar conclusions about a cat. The bones of the cat in question were found at an excavation site on the Silk Road in southern Kazakhstan. This had been home to a medieval settlement of the pastoralist Turkic tribe, and the skeleton was relatively speaking complete. I mean it's it's not a whole skeleton, but there were multiple parts still there, and that's pretty unusual. At other excavations in this region, it has been way more common to find individual animal bones rather than partial or complete skeletons. X ray analysis showed evidence of multiple healed broken bones, suggesting that someone had cared for the cat while it recovered from injuries. Based on isotope analysis, it mostly eight fish and DNA evidence confirmed that this was a domesticated cat species rather than a wild step cat. Together, all of this evidence suggests that their words domesticated cats who were being treated as pets in this area going back to at least the eighth century, so in terms of the overall timeline for cat domestication, that is really really recent, but it's not really reason for this particular area. Many of the people's living in this area were nomadic, and while cats might stay for a while at an encampment, historically cats in this area were not known to follow nomadic people's along their travel roots. According to Dr Ashley Harudah, who led the team, this particular society only kept animals that had some kind of essential use for their lives, and they were pastoralists, so most of their lives were hurting. They didn't keep large stores of grains that would attract rodents, so they wouldn't have as much use for cats as rodent control. This particular cat had also lost most of its teeth by the end of its life, meaning that people would have been feeding it, so this seems to be the earliest domesticated cat to be found in the region north of Central Asia and east of China. In other news, archaeologists in southern Poland have found two small clay figurines that looked like pigs. They were found in a settlement that dates back to about thirty five hundred years ago. The settlement was surrounded by a stone wall, and it's not really clear what the purpose of the little pigs was These could have been children's toys, they could have been some kind of ceremonial object. And it's also not clear whether they were made by the same person. So they look somewhat similar to each other, and they were found in the same dwelling, but they also have some stylistic differences. My total lay person's impression. I am not an art historian, I am not an archaeologist, but like my gut when I looked at it was that looks like a parent child art project, because they do look similar, but one of them seems a bit more polished than the other one. Here's what this makes me think of. You know, I know people that will decorate their entire kitchen in pig theme or rooster theme or so. Part of me is like this. This might not have any ceremonial use. It may be ancient kitch I just like pigs. It's just like pigs, y'all um. In another depiction of an animal, researchers found a stone box on the bottom of Lake Titicaca which contained a tiny figure of a llama or alpaca, carved from a spiny oyster shell. It's twenty eight millimeters just over an inch long, and it's a soft coral color. Also in the box was a rolled up piece of gold foil that's about the same length. And it's likely that this find is of Inca origin and it was placed in the lake and offering Ah, yeah, this is It looks so delicate and it's like coral color just makes it look very pretty to me. I like a tiny little carved charm. Sweet. Lastly, according to research published in July, foxes have been eating people's discarded food for more than forty thousand years. The authors came to this conclusion by studying carbon and nitrogen isotopes and the remains of several types of mammals in southwestern Germany, including red and Arctic foxes and before there was a large population of Neanderthals in this region. The isotopes suggested that the foxes had been eating the same foods as other much larger carnivores. So basically, the foxes would have been hunting small animals and then also scavenging from those bigger animals cast off scraps. But as a population of Neanderthal's established itself, the fox's diets included more and more reindeer something that was much too big for the foxes to hunt themselves, but it was part of the Neanderthal diet. The author suggests that the diet of foxes might be a useful indicator to study human behavior. And now we will take another quick sponsor break before we get into other stuff about food. Now we are moving on to what is honestly always one of my favorite things and unearthed, which is that we have lots of edibles and potables. This time around. First UP researchers looked at more than forty thousand oyster shells from archaeological sites all along the Atlantic coast of the United States to draw some conclusions about indigenous management of the reefs. Based on their research, these oyster fisheries were in use for more than five thousand years, and during that time they were really very stable. This was true even as the indigenous populations that were hard of vesting oysters from them grew dramatically and went through multiple shifts in economy and political organization. So even with a much bigger population and a changing social structure, these reefs stayed very stable, suggesting that the whole time people were intentionally managing them with a focus on sustainability, maintaining that through all of these other shifts. In general, when people start harvesting from an oyster bed, it is generally expected that the oysters will get smaller over time due to harvesting pressure. And while there was a trend for slightly smaller oysters during the late Archaic period, in this study, that shifted in most places during the Mississippian period, with the average oyster actually getting bigger over time. Although this may have been related to environmental changes, it might also have been influenced by how people were managing the reefs. For the most part, the oyster populations on these reefs also continued to be pretty stable after Europeans started colony. As in North America. What really caused the reefs to collapse was the development of industrial harvesting and canning in the nineteenth century. We talked about that a bit in our episode on the Chesapeap Bake Oyster Wars. Yes, all right, we're getting one of my favorite words. An excavation of iron age wooden houses called Crannis at Lochte in Scotland has revealed butter mm hmmm, sweet sweet butter, year old butter and about three quarters of the dish that it was stored in. The dish itself had holes in the bottom and it actually may have been used in making the butter. After churning the milk, the cream would be placed in a woven cloth in this dish, so the rest of the liquid could be pressed out through the holes while retaining the solids. So the wooden houses where this was found, those were built out over the lock and they lasted for about twenty years before they would collapse into it, so that that is how these fines got into the luck in the first place. So the butter, not a ton of it, but some survived in this environment thanks to it being very dark and anaerobic. Down at the bottom of the luck butter. Don't eat that butter, No, don't. Archaeologists at the Australian National University have found the earliest evidence of indigenous communities cultivating bananas in Australia. The site is on a tiny island in the Torres Straight and it dates back more than twenty one hundred years. The team found starch granules, banana plant micro fossils and charcoal in the soil. Lead researcher Robert Williams described this find as helping to dispel the idea that Australia's first people's didn't practice agriculture, saying that the Torres Strait has previously been viewed as kind of a boundary between New Guinea, where people practiced agriculture, and Australia, where people were believed to live more as hunter gatherers. So this discovery suggests that the islands and the Torres Straight were more like a bridge than a barrier. Williams is a descendant of the Cambrian Nenewal people's and he also talked about the team's effort to be mindful of how their work would affect indigenous communities, saying, quote, Historically culture has been appropriated by non indigenous archaeologists and anthropologists, so it was really important for me to make a connection with the people in this community and ensure they understood the research really belongs to them. I hope this work is something the community can really be proud about. It demonstrates through clear evidence the diversity and complexity of early horticulture in the Western tourist Strait. To move on on multiple previous editions of Unearthed, we have talked about discoveries that have come from studying the residues on pottery, which have provided evidence of what people in the past were preparing and eating. I remember talking about these kinds of residues related to everything from oh, it turns out this society was making better Oh, it turns out this society was using salmon in a way we didn't expect, Like there's a lot, it comes up a lot. A team of archaeologists has tried to figure out how accurately these residues reflect the use of the pottery over time. They did this in a project I love so much by cooking a bunch of ingredients and newly purchased unglazed ceramic pots. These ingredients included wheat, maize, and venison. They cooked the same ingredients over and over once a week over the course of a year, and then for their last batch, they changed up the ingredients. Then they tested the residues inside the pots to see what stood out the most the ingredients that had been cooked over and over or the ones that have been cooked for the last meal. So kind of unsurprisingly, the burned remains at the bottom of the pots looked most like that final set of ingredients, and while the thin residue layer on the interior surface of the pot showed some evidence of the earlier ingredients. It also still most closely resembled that final meal. Lipids that had been absorbed into the pottery, on the other hand, mostly showed evidence of those things that had been cooked over and over over the course of the year, without nearly as much evidence of that last final meal. This is not to suggest that one set of residues is better than the others, but just that they each give a slightly different look at what the pot was used for. In the words of the author's quote, we propose that these different residue forms present unique opportunities for archaeologists to study the various resources that may have been used across multiple time scales within a cooking vessel's use history. Moving on, researchers at Johanna Schuttenberg University Mints have concluded that the ability to digest lactose past infancy spread through the population of Central Europe over the course of only a few thousand years, meaning it's a pretty recent adaptation. They came to this conclusion after studying the DNA of people who had been killed in battle around twelve hundred BC, and that study, only about one in eight of the people carried a gene that would allow them to break down lactose into adulthood. But today, roughly three thousand years later, roughly nine of adults from the area can tolerate lactose. In the words of Professor Daniel Segman, we conclude that over the past three thousand years, lactase persistent individuals had more children, or alternatively, those children had better chances of survival than those without this treat UH and a completely different subject, a Phoenician wine press has been discovered in Lebanon, making it the first Iron Age wine press to be found there. This wine press dates back to the seventh century BC, and one of the building materials used to make the press was plaster that had been made from lime and ceramic fragments. Making a real lead durable plaster was pretty tricky at the time, and crushing up ceramic fragments helps to make the plaster stronger, longer lasting, and water resistant, which would be pretty important in a wine press. Romans actually later refined this same technique for use in their buildings and for our last edible and potable find. In September, members of a Japanese research expedition found a cash of emergency food that had been left behind by a previous Japanese expedition that took place in nineteen sixty five. It contained canned goods and chewing gum. The chewing gum is cool mint from Lottico, which had been developed specifically for Japanese expedition teams to include vitamins and minerals in a formulation that was meant to withstand five months of extreme temperatures. This cash also contained a can of the first Coca Cola that was available for purchase in Japan. This style of coke can did not have a pole top or an opener. You had to make a whole in it with a can opener to be able to drink it. In the words of an unnamed Coca Cola japan official who was quoted in the Asahiitian bun quote, it is greatly encouraging to imagine that expedition members had Coca Cola in the harsh environment. Um. I I was thinking that maybe it was just because of the times that we're living in, But when I first read that quote, it was the funniest thing I had ever heard in my life, and I laughed about it for a solid minute. I think that's valid. It's very funny. I'm so pleased our product was part of their packaging. It's adorable. Uh. And then we have kind of a little strange anomaly in our wrap up, so we don't have any UTSI updates this time around. UTSI just had a chill quarter. Yeah, I don't. I was like, did was there maybe a pause and research into Utzi because of the pandemic? I don't. I don't know the answer. We just but there's I don't have anything for UZZI this time. Yeah. Oh, but we don't leave let's see out completely. So we're doing something UTSI adjacent for the last unearthing in this one, a four year old shamois discovered in South Tyrol, Italy is becoming something of a model to help guide research into frozen mummies like Leutsy. The shamois that's a small goat antelope was found by a hiker who alerted authorities. So Utsi and other frozen mummies can be really incredibly challenging to study because anything that researchers might physically due to the tissue, I mean they have to walk. This really fine line between preserving the mummy and conducting the research, and when it comes to trying to do things like take DNA samples, the DNA has often degraded over time, so there's very little of it present in the specimen. Basically, there is no room for any kind of trial and error or do over. So researchers are hoping to use this shamlas basically as a model to work out a set of procedures that can be used on human remains to do things like retrieve d n A and do other research work so that they can get it right the first time and preserve those remains as much as possible. I love it. It's a very smart approach to be like, we do have this that is less likely to yield us, you know, developmental insights about humanity. It's like their little test project. It's perfect. Let's make a process based on what we learned right here. So smart. So that is part one of our Unearthed for this fall. I have more stuff in part two, and I have some listener mail to take us out. This is from Emily, and Emily wrote, uh New Mexico history was the subject line. Dear Holly and Tracy, Thank you so much for taking the time to address the New Mexico history. Both of your recent episodes, Nina Otero Warren and the demon Cores were pieces of history that I didn't know very much about, but they connect to me on a personal level. It was really interesting to see in sites into how New Mexico's educational policy was shaped, and of course revisit the complicated past of both Anglo and Spanish colonialism in northern New Mexico. However, I especially loved your demon Core episode. I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, surrounded by the history of the Manhattan Project. We regularly visited the museum and historical parts of Los Alamos when I was a kid to see the science behind the atomic bombs, but I had never heard of the demon Core before. Thanks so much for teaching me something new about my hometown and state. I love your podcast so much. Keep up the good work, Emily. Thank you so much for this email, Emily. I wanted to read it not just because it's nice to read nice emails, but also because there's actually a connection between those two things that did not come up on the episode, which is that Nina Otero Lawren could see the Manhattan Project site from their homestead, and that was like a little detail that came up in the research that I just did not have a great place to reference specifically in the episode. Um, but that was sort of one of the things of of of during World War Two as the Manhattan Project was going on, they sort of they could see in the distance this facility. Uh didn't have the hugest sense of what all was going on there. So thank you again, Emily for that note. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast, we're at history podcast that I heart radio dot com, and we're all over social media at Missed in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook and Pinterest, in Twitter and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on the I heart radio app and Apple Podcasts and anywhere else that you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.