Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, the production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. It's part two of our year en Unearthed. This time we have some of our long time listener favorites. I mean we did last time too, but some particular favorites this time, including the edibles and potables, some utsy stuff, and the exclamations. We have some of the things too, and we will kick it off with several different studies that we're all looking at exactly what caused the Neanderthals to die out. Humans and Neanderthals coexisted on the European continent for at least five thousand years before the human population started to outstrip the Neanderthals, and after that, of course, the Neanderthals eventually became extinct. Over the last few months, we have heard about a few different papers trying to get to the bottom of exactly what happened. So according to researchers from Japan and Italy, it might be because humans figured out how to use projectile weapons, including spear throwers and bows and arrows. They found evidence that humans might have used these kinds of weapons between forty and forty five thousand years ago, which is twenty thousand years earlier than previously thought. So they thought that this could have given humans an edge over Neanderthals, who hadn't developed that same technology. However, we should note that in a previous installment of On Earth, we talked about research that suggested that Neanderthal hunting spears could have been used as throwing weapons. That particular study included replicas of three hundred thousand year old javelins, much older than the forty forty five thousand years in this research. And then for a completely different idea, maybe the cause was chronic ear infections. This hypothesis comes from a team of head and neck anatomists who published a paper called Reconstructing the Neanderthal you stayction Tube New Insights on Disease, susceptibility, fitness, cost and Extinction. They published that in the Journal of the Anatomical Record. In the words of Samuel Marquez, PhD. Quote it may sound far fetched, but when we for the first time reconstructed the Eustachian tubes of Neanderthals, we discovered that they are remarkably similar to those of human infants. Middle ear infections are nearly ubiquitous among infants because the flat angle of an infant's eustation tubes is prone to retain the tightest media. Bacteria that caused these infections the same flat angle we found in the Andanderthals. So most human children literally outgrow with these infections. As they get bigger, there ustation tubes get longer and more sharply angled so that their ears can drain better. But Neanderthal's eustation tubes remained flat insu adulthood, making it more likely that they might continue to have recurring or chronic infections, and apart from the risk of death from a really acute infection, this would have just life harder for Neanderthals, especially as they were competing with humans for resources. Just it Gaze, You're suddenly now as curious as Tracy was while she was doing this research. The US station tube is named after sixteenth century anatomist Bartolomeo Eustacy, and we're still not done with this whole Neanderthal question. According to a paper by scientists from Stanford which was published in the journal Nature Communications, the cause might have been infectious diseases, not ear infections. Using mathematical models, they concluded that humans and Neanderthals didn't interact very much for the first centuries of their mutual existence because they each carried and were resistant to different diseases. So they suggested that each population was encircled by a quote invisible disease barrier. But at some point humans and Neanderthals started interbreeding. We know that for sure, and the team behind this research suggests that the children of these pairings may have had immunity to diseases from both groups, tipping precarious balance that had lasted up until then. So that led them to the question, why then did humans eventually get the upper hand rather than Neanderthals if their offspring had immunity to both sets of diseases, And the answer might have been that there were more and deadlier diseases in tropical areas where humans originated than there were farther north into Europe and Asia, so it was a lot easier for humans to move north and survive than it was for Neanderthals to try to move south into tropical Africa. And in our last study that we're talking about on this subject, Maybe it was inbreeding. A team from Indovin University of Technology the Netherlands used mathematical modeling to study the effects of inbreeding on Neanderthal populations. Their research suggests that inbreeding alone was not enough to explain the extinction of the Neanderthals, but small populations of a species are known to experience something called alley effects. Basically, a very small population is just not as genetically fit as a larger one, and in breeding and Alley effects combined could have caused the Neanderthals to go extinct over about a ten thousand year period. So the suggestion here is that the introduction of humans to an area might have influenced the Neanderthal behavior just enough to encourage more inbreeding in a population that was already pretty small. But they didn't think it was enough to say that human activity conclusively caused Neanderthal's extinction, and the words of the papers authors quote, did Neanderthals disappear because of us? No? This study suggests the species demise might have been due merely to a stroke of bad demographic luck. And now we're moving on to one of my favorite subjects, clothing and accessories. Excavations under tarbot Old Parish Church and the Scottish Highlands have unearthed a man's ankle boots, complete with buckles, and the thick hose that he wore with them. The find is about six hundred years old and, in the words of Cecily Spall of field Work Archaeology Services quote the man had been put in a coffin wearing these clothes, but the coffin at some point collapsed and everything concertinaed. I wanted to have this quote in there specifically because the description of everything concertina delighted me. It's not a description I think we use as often in the US. So because this collapse sealed this clothing off from oxygen, it's pretty well preserved, with visible wear and tear that seems to have come from the garment's use and not from the collapse of the coffin or the decomposition of the material over time. You can even see some of this person's leg hair caught in the hose. A metal detectorist in Estonia unearthed a seventeen hundred year old sacrificial site that included a gold bracelet, crossbow, brooches, belt plaques and silver plates. The bracelet in particular is noteworthy. It might actually be a caller and it probably dates back to the third century. An archaeological team came to the site for further study of this discovery, with archaeologist Marika Magid noting that gold is a rare find and sights of this age in Estonia and a piece this large and heavy is particularly rare. Magic told a news broadcast quote, one can say that this is likely the most valuable single find in the material sense to be unearthed in Estonia. Uh this find has been sent to a museum. A Dutch art detective has recovered a ring connected to Oscar Wilde that was stolen during a burglary at Maudlin College in two thousand two. The ring and two medals had been stolen in the same incident, and after the culprit, even Andrews, was caught, he said that he had sold the ring to a scrap dealer. So after this was found, it was returned to the college, which home burser Mark Blandford Baker said he had given up hope of ever seeing again like once the culprit said that he had sold the stuff to a scrap dealer. People were like well, that's definitely gone. This ring's history a bit of it. In eighteen seventy six, Wild and his friend Reginald Harding had given the ring to their friend William Ward. All three of these men were friends while taking classes at the college, and then the ring later became part of the college's collection of Wild memorabilia. Archaeologists in China have used enzyme linked immunosorb and assay to confirm the fibers found in burial urns there are silk fabrics, making them the world's oldest known silk They date back to between fifty three hundred and fifty five hundred years ago, and they suggest that silk making and dying techniques were relatively refined by that point, meaning that people had first started making silk well before that. Previously, the oldest known silk fibers were from between forty two hundred and forty four hundred years old. And to be clear, I put this under clothing because it was the most related category, but it wasn't actually clothing. The silk was part of the material that had been used to wrap the dead, is sort of postmortem clothing. You could also not exactly clothing or at least not always close thing. Researchers have studied twelve hundred beads made from ostrich eggshell to try to spot patterns and how they might reflect social changes that took place on the African continent thousands of years ago. These beads came from thirty different sites, and their styles and shapes seemed to shift when a new influence comes into an area. In the words of lead author Jennifer Miller, quote, these beads are symbols that were made by hunter gatherers from both regions for more than forty thousand years, So changes or lack thereof in these symbols tells us how these communities responded to cultural contact and economic change. So to expand on that, people in Africa started making these beads at least fifty thousand years ago, and according to previous research, the beads tended to get bigger when hurting people moved into a region that had been previously inhabited just by foragers. This new research suggests that the pattern isn't that straightforward. In southern Africa, new styles of beads followed evidence of the reduction of hurting, but previous bead styles didn't go away, but in Eastern Africa, bead style stayed the same even after hurting was introduced to an area. This was the first study of bead patterns specifically in Eastern Africa, and it's possible that the bead makers there just weren't influenced by the newcomers, or it's possible that the hurting people who moved into that area already had a similar bead making style, so changes weren't as a parent. Archaeologists from the University of Copenhagen have published a paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports detailing three human teeth that appear to have been used as jewelry, and those teeth were found in Catali, which also came up in our Autumn Unearthed. So the teeth are about eighty five hundred years old and they had been drilled with the same sorts of micro drills that were used to make beads out of stones or animal bones. They were also worn in a way that suggests that they had been used as jewelry or something similar for quite some time. The teeths chewing surfaces suggests did that they had belonged to a mature adult, and so The suggestion was that they were probably removed either after someone died or from a skull of a person who had died quite some time before that. After we take a quick sponsor break, we're going to move on to another big favorite, edibles and potables. Okay for our edibles and potables this time around. A team of scientists at the University of Bristol has reported the earliest known evidence of baby feeding bottles, or at least their basic equivalent. These are small clay vessels dating back to about five thousand BC. They're small enough for a baby to hold, and they have this little spout at the bottom that a baby could suck milk from. Some of these vessels are shaped like imaginary animals, which suggested to the team that they might be meant for children, but they also noted that they could have been used to feed adults who were very ill or were otherwise unable to eat solid food. The team looked at three specific examples that have been found in the graves of children and tested them, and they contained residues from the milk of domesticated room and animals like cows and the words of Dr Julie Dunn from the University of Bristol, who was the lead author of the paper published on the spine that was published in the journal Nature, quote similar vessels, although rare, do appear in other prehistoric cultures, such as Rome and ancient Greece across the world. Ideally, we'd like to carry out a larger geographic study and investigate whether they served the same purpose. Researchers studying a cave near Tel Aviv have found evidence that Paleolithic people saved animal bones for up to nine weeks so that they could have the marrow as a food source later on, comparing it to being like opening up a can of soup. They had already known that bone marrow was an important source of nutrition in Paleolithic diets, but they had thought that food was scarce enough that people had to eat whatever they had as soon as they had it. The team concluded that these bones were preserved rather than immediately bro can open for their marrow because of evidence of chopping marks that did not match up with butchering methods that were known to be used with fresh meat. And this is the earliest known evidence of people basically using bones for food storage purposes rather than consuming what was inside. Them immediately. A team in Puerto Rico has examined twenty of fossilized clam shells to try to determine how the pre aarrowalk population of the island prepared them for eating. Their analysis of these shells suggest that they were cooked at more than one hundred degrees celsius, which is the boiling point of water, but less than two hundred degrees, concluding that they were cooked over a flame rather than boiled. The study said barbecued, but we know from our recent barbecue live show people have a lot of opinions on whether that would be the correct word in this situation. Yeah. This team also noted that this fine provides some circumstantial evidence about whether pottery was widely used on the island, because you would need some pottery vessels in order to be able to boil claim. A newly published book has detailed the finding of an excavation at berry Fields in Buckinghamshire, England. The excavation took place between two thousand seven and twenty six. One interesting find a bread basket along with the only intact chickens egg from Roman Britain. So this egg was actually one of four that were found at the site, but the other three broke, which was still a very stinky experience. According to the archaeologists on the scene, It's possible that the bread basket and the bread that it presumably contained, as well as the eggs, might have been thrown into this pit sometime after the late third century. That was something that people did for good luck or as part of a religious ritual. All I can think of is Templeton the rat now Um. The book is called berry Fields Iron Age Settlement and a Roman bridge Field System and Settlement along Ackman Street near Fleet Marston, Buckinghamshire, and it is published by Oxford Archaeology. So this last one isn't exactly edible, but it was the best place to put it. Researchers at the University of Copenagen have managed to sequence an entire ancient genome from a fifty seven hundred year old piece of birch pitch that was used as chewing gum. Basically we've talked about chewing gum finds before. They described this as the first time that an entire ancient genome has been extracted from something that was not bone. This piece of pitch was found in southern Denmark, and in addition to the human DNA that it contained, it also had traces of plant and animal DNA that were probably part of that person's diet, as well as DNA from the microbes in their mouth. We have a few examples of items being returned or repatriated to their place or culture of origin. Next, the United States Department of Homeland Security returned the head of a marble statue to Libya in October. In the US and Libya had signed an agreement that imposed restrictions on the import of of being cultural property to the United States, and then this head had been smuggled into the US and violation of that agreement. This was a returned to the Libyan embassy in Washington, d C. When living authorities said it would be returned to its historical location. Cambridge University College is returning a statute that was looted from Nigeria. The bronze statue of a Cockerell was removed from Nigeria, then the Kingdom of Benin in eighteen ninety seven, and then it was given to the college by a student's father. This is one of many bronzes that were taken from Benin and are now in British museums and universities. There's a whole effort that I just saw an article about after sending like this outline was done. It was done, it was sent finished about a whole effort uh in in Britain to try to track down other artifacts that should be returned to Nigeria. And then, in similar news, France has returned to nineteenth century saber to Senegal. The French had seized this sword in eighteen ninety three and then placed it in the collection of Paris's Army Museum. The saber initially belonged to Omar said Utal and was confiscated from his son. This was part of an effort announced last year in which France would return items of African cultural heritage within five years, with French President Emmanuel Macron saying quote, I cannot accept that a large part of cultural heritage from several African countries is in France. There are historical explanations for that, but there are no valid justifications that are durable and unconditional. African heritage can't just be in European private collections and museums. But progress on actually fulfilling this whole plan has actually been slow as French lawmakers have tried to hash out the legal and logistical details. What's next bit isn't exactly a repatriation, but it has some of the same themes. We have talked a lot in our Unearthed episodes and other times about discoveries that have come from DNA analysis on ancient human remains, and the rise of these kinds of studies has brought up some ethical questions. Research that involves the DNA of living people is supposed to be conducted following ethical rules and guidelines based on the idea that people should have a right to privacy when it comes to their own health information and their own DNA, but ancient DNA can be in kind of a gray area. And to be clear, this is not just a theoretical question of what rights long dead ancient people should have over their own DNA. These results of these studies can have huge cultural and political implications for people living today, especially indigenous people and other ethnic minorities. So the National Science Foundation has awarded a three hundred fifty thousand, eight hundred eighty two dollar collaborative grant to the University of Connecticut, the Denver Museum of Nature, and science and partners across the United States, Canada, and Europe to study this question. This team that's being assembled plans to involve in digital this leaders, in these conversations, and to try to establish standards for this research that are respectful of indigenous communities and that encourage collaboration among the researchers doing the work with the people who that work might affect. In July, we talked about Greece's demand for the Parthenon marbles to be returned from the British Museum, and there has been a lot more back and forth about that since then, so stay tuned for a future episode of the podcast on that one. We hope it's in the works. I think at this point it's it's it's moved from we hope to pretty likely. Over just the last twenty four hours, we have some musy news. As almost always, various researchers have been studying the human intestinal microbiome and how that microbiome might be connected to various diseases and conditions. So several studies have connected things like processed foods at an increased use of antibiotics, various hygiene practices, and other behaviors all grouped under the da of a Western lifestyle. So studies have connected that Western lifestyle to changes in the microbiome, and these changes in the microbiome have been correlated with a rise in things like autoimmune disorders, allergies, and gastro intestinal diseases. A paper published in the journal Cell, Host and Microbe examined the gut microbes of people across multiple continents. They specifically looked at the provatelecopri complex, which includes four different clades and is associated with a number of health concerns. The team found that this bacteria was present in about thirty of people with more Western lifestyles and about nine percent of people described as having non Western lifestyles. Yeah, the incredibly basic idea is that in a lot of cases there seems to be a correlation, not necessarily causation, between a lack of these bacteria and various health conditions. So then these results were compared to ancient microbiomes include both fossilized human poop and Lutsie's microbiome. Leutsy, of course, did not have a Western lifestyle at all, and his microbiome showed evidence of three of the four clades of this bacterium. In other Utsy News, researchers at the University of Glasgow and the University of Innsbruck have been trying to identify all the mosses and live rewards that were found around Utsie's remains. These plants are classified as briaphites, and there are thousands of fragments of briaphite in the ice that was around Dutsie's body. Although only twenty three species of bria Phites live in the area today, there are at least seventy five species from immediately around Utsie's remains and from his clothing gear and his gut. And we are going to take one more quick sponsor break before we get to the rest of our unearthed. Okay, we've already talked in these two episodes about various findings that came from burial sites or the grave goods in them in some way. For our next few finds, the connection to burials is the thing that they have in common. First, a team studying a four thousand year old burial site off the coast of the U s State of Georgia have said that it shows evidence of really long ranging relationships among hunter gatherer people's during North America's Woodland period. What they found at the ancient shell pit was a burial site that had a lot in common with funerary practices of people living in the Great Lakes area at about the same time. In the words of Matthew Sanger, who led the research team, quote, our excavations revealed remarkable parallels between the shell Ring in the coastal Southeast and in broadly contemporaneous sites in the Great Lakes, including the use of cremation to handle the dead, cremating the dead in an area separate from where the bones were eventually buried, the use of copper as a burial item, the burial of multiple people at the same time, and the use of ochre in the burial. Not only are these practices very similar, our analyzes clearly showed that the copper found at the shell Ring originated in the Great Lakes and was therefore traded between the two regions. Notably, all of these practices are rare or entirely absent from the regions between the Great Lakes and the Southeast, which suggests that there was not some sort of general diffusion of traditions, but rather a direct transplant. Basically, the suggests that the people living in eastern North America four thousand years ago weren't necessarily sticking to relatively isolated pockets of territory. They may have traveled very long distances and had interactions that stretched across much of the eastern half of the continent. The paper that they published on this was called Great Lakes Copper and Shared Mortuary Practices on the Atlantic Coast Implications for long distance exchange during the Late Archaic, and it was published in the journal American Antiquity. In other news, A Roman Catholic church and settle Check rep Public is nicknamed the Bone Church because it houses the bones of somewhere between forty thousand and seventy thousand people in an ossuary. Some of these bones are stacked and others are arranged into formations, and these are the remains of people who died of plague in the mid fourteenth century, as well as in the Hussite Wars that followed. An ongoing restoration project at the church has also involved excavation in the area, and during that time researchers have found two mass graves, one from a thirteen eighteen famine and one from atty eight plague. Together, this represents another twelve hundred skeletons moving on. The Aquita Museum in Bordeaux, France, is on the site of what was once a convent, and in November they announced that a tomb in the museum's basement might contain the remains of sixteenth century Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne, who died in fifteen ninety two and whose body's location hasn't been totally clear because it was moved several times after his death, Although there is still work to be done, the wooden coffin in the tomb does have Montagna written on it in large brown letters. It does seem like a clue maybe, I mean, it could be some other Montagna, or somebody who loved Montagna, or someone who wanted to confuse us all in the future. In October, a team in Norway found an unusual boat burial. Now, boat burials on their own are not unheard of. There have been several of them found over the last couple of years that I've heard about. But in this case, the same grave site contains the remains of two people who died and were buried about a hundred years apart. The grave site is at a Viking age farm. The older burial is described as a man buried with weapons in a boat between nine and ten ms long in the eighth century. Then in the ninth century, a woman was buried in address fashioned with shell shaped brooches, along with a crucifix shaped brooch, a pearl necklace, scissors, a spindle whirl and a cow's head. She was also placed in a boat, this one seven or eight meters long. For her burial, the older grave was excavated and she and her boat were placed into the boat that was already there, along with the body that was already in it. So this is not the only double boat burial that was ever found, but it's a rare enough occurrence that archaeologist Raymond Savage, who was the project manager for this excavation, said that he had never heard of the practice before. He did later learn of other examples that had been found in another part of Norway. Though, although the team says it's unlikely that the two people were related somehow, there is still a lot to learn from this fine Now we will move on to the exhumations. After a lengthy series of proposals and challenges that we have been talking about on the show since December. Francisco Franco's remains were exhumed and moved on October. They were moved to a cemetery near Madrid by helicopter and then re entered next to his late wife in Unearthed. In October, we talked about plans to exhume the remains of John Dillinger and have them tested to confirm whether maybe the FBI and actually killed someone else in ninety four and then buried that person in Dillinger's place. The whole thing was meant to be covered on a TV documentary, but instead everyone wound up in court after Crown Hill Cemetery objected to this whole plan. History Channel then announced it would not do the documentary after all. One of Dillinger's descendants, Michael Thompson, wanted to go ahead with this exclamation though, saying he wanted some clarity about his ancestors death, But in December, a judge in Indiana found in the cemetery's favor, ruling that the exhimation could not go ahead without the cemetery's consent. This still is not necessarily over though the law gives Thompson's attorney ten days to file an amended complaint, in thirty days to appeal to a higher court. So that could still be ongoing as we are recording this, or in that window between when we record it and when this episode comes out. It's entirely possible that in ten minutes, when we were done this episode, there will be a headline with a new update about that. I would even say probable. It's this is the law of averages for us and other news to Dublin counselors have proposed that the remains of James Joyce be exhumed from Zurich and reinterred in Dublin sometime before the anniversary of the publication of his work. Ulysses that anniversary is happening in twenty two. This has led to debate about what Joyce and his wife Noura Barnicle wanted for their remains after their deaths, as well as to some resistance to that whole idea from the James Joyce Foundation in Switzerland. At this point, this is a motion filed by two city councilors, and it's not a concrete plan for an exhimation to take place, So we might very well be coming back to this one at some point in the future, also sparking intense debate this fall at about the same time it was a plan to turn joyce former home in Dublin into a hostel. That debate seems to still be ongoing as of when we're recording this. For our last item, South Australian Attorney General Vicky Chapman granted a conditional approval to exhume the unidentified remains of the person known as the Somberton Man, something she reportedly started considering last year. This is probably Australia's most famous and enduring unsolved mystery. The body was found on a beach in the summer of nicely dressed, with an unsmoked cigarette on his chest, and with a piece of paper reading Tom and should in a hidden pocket. I think that Josh and Chuck did an episode on it. Oh yeah, did they. I think this is a topic that people have asked us to cover. I can't remember if either of us have ever kind of circled it at some point and then moved away from it. I have many times, So maybe that can be a whole other thing from this unearth that you may hear an episode about later, like, there are two things we have mentioned that are actively in the works for future episodes. Maybe that will be a third one. Uh and stuff you should know did cover it in September. Okay, it's not that long. So yeah, that's our that's our unearthed for the year end of twenty nineteen, which I think is actually coming out at the very start of So happy New year, everyone, and I do have a little bit of listener mail. It takes out fabulous. This is from Katie. Katie writes about our Alfred Wegner episode and says, firstly, thank you so much for your wonderful show. It makes my time spent washing dishes and folding lottery so much more enjoyable. I was tickled by the description of Alfred Wegener's experiments on the formation of moon craters because I essentially recreated them with fourth graders several years ago. The experiment was part of a lunar science unit of study created by one of the major hands on science curriculum companies, so I assume one of their talented educators must have known about Beginner's methods. Instead of cement powder, we used flower with a light dusting of cocoa powder on top, and then we dropped mar bowls and small rocks into the flower and measured and observed the resulting creators. I'm sure my students would have been thrilled to know they were replicating an experiment done by a real scientist. And I hope you are thrilled to know that Vegner's crafty legacy lives on in elementary classrooms across America. Sincerely, Katie, I am actually delighted to know. Yeah, my nieces are definitely old enough to be dropping marbles into uh flower or cocoa powder or whatever. Um. They are maybe not quite old enough to make the connection between that and the moon, but I might just save this for some kind of future visit with nieces later on. UM. I also will mention h a shout out to our listener Cathy, who um I ran into while I was in Disney World recently, and she introduced me to her grandson who specifically loved the Alfred Vegner episode UH, and it came up it coincided with the tectonics the and they're shifting and all of that information being in produced in his course swork at school, so it was kind of perfect timing and he had a much broader sense of the whole subject um. So that was really really lovely. Yeah, well again, Happy New Year everyone. I think this is our first episode of the New Year, and I hope everybody who celebrates holidays and late December early January has had great ones. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcasts were history podcast at I heart radio dot com and then we're all over social media at missed in History. That is where you will find our Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram. And you can also subscribe to our show on Apple, podcast, the I heart radio app, and anywhere else you get your podcast. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my 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, the production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. It's part two of our year en Unearthed. This time we have some of our long time listener favorites. I mean we did last time too, but some particular favorites this time, including the edibles and potables, some utsy stuff, and the exclamations. We have some of the things too, and we will kick it off with several different studies that we're all looking at exactly what caused the Neanderthals to die out. Humans and Neanderthals coexisted on the European continent for at least five thousand years before the human population started to outstrip the Neanderthals, and after that, of course, the Neanderthals eventually became extinct. Over the last few months, we have heard about a few different papers trying to get to the bottom of exactly what happened. So according to researchers from Japan and Italy, it might be because humans figured out how to use projectile weapons, including spear throwers and bows and arrows. They found evidence that humans might have used these kinds of weapons between forty and forty five thousand years ago, which is twenty thousand years earlier than previously thought. So they thought that this could have given humans an edge over Neanderthals, who hadn't developed that same technology. However, we should note that in a previous installment of On Earth, we talked about research that suggested that Neanderthal hunting spears could have been used as throwing weapons. That particular study included replicas of three hundred thousand year old javelins, much older than the forty forty five thousand years in this research. And then for a completely different idea, maybe the cause was chronic ear infections. This hypothesis comes from a team of head and neck anatomists who published a paper called Reconstructing the Neanderthal you stayction Tube New Insights on Disease, susceptibility, fitness, cost and Extinction. They published that in the Journal of the Anatomical Record. In the words of Samuel Marquez, PhD. Quote it may sound far fetched, but when we for the first time reconstructed the Eustachian tubes of Neanderthals, we discovered that they are remarkably similar to those of human infants. Middle ear infections are nearly ubiquitous among infants because the flat angle of an infant's eustation tubes is prone to retain the tightest media. Bacteria that caused these infections the same flat angle we found in the Andanderthals. So most human children literally outgrow with these infections. As they get bigger, there ustation tubes get longer and more sharply angled so that their ears can drain better. But Neanderthal's eustation tubes remained flat insu adulthood, making it more likely that they might continue to have recurring or chronic infections, and apart from the risk of death from a really acute infection, this would have just life harder for Neanderthals, especially as they were competing with humans for resources. Just it Gaze, You're suddenly now as curious as Tracy was while she was doing this research. The US station tube is named after sixteenth century anatomist Bartolomeo Eustacy, and we're still not done with this whole Neanderthal question. According to a paper by scientists from Stanford which was published in the journal Nature Communications, the cause might have been infectious diseases, not ear infections. Using mathematical models, they concluded that humans and Neanderthals didn't interact very much for the first centuries of their mutual existence because they each carried and were resistant to different diseases. So they suggested that each population was encircled by a quote invisible disease barrier. But at some point humans and Neanderthals started interbreeding. We know that for sure, and the team behind this research suggests that the children of these pairings may have had immunity to diseases from both groups, tipping precarious balance that had lasted up until then. So that led them to the question, why then did humans eventually get the upper hand rather than Neanderthals if their offspring had immunity to both sets of diseases, And the answer might have been that there were more and deadlier diseases in tropical areas where humans originated than there were farther north into Europe and Asia, so it was a lot easier for humans to move north and survive than it was for Neanderthals to try to move south into tropical Africa. And in our last study that we're talking about on this subject, Maybe it was inbreeding. A team from Indovin University of Technology the Netherlands used mathematical modeling to study the effects of inbreeding on Neanderthal populations. Their research suggests that inbreeding alone was not enough to explain the extinction of the Neanderthals, but small populations of a species are known to experience something called alley effects. Basically, a very small population is just not as genetically fit as a larger one, and in breeding and Alley effects combined could have caused the Neanderthals to go extinct over about a ten thousand year period. So the suggestion here is that the introduction of humans to an area might have influenced the Neanderthal behavior just enough to encourage more inbreeding in a population that was already pretty small. But they didn't think it was enough to say that human activity conclusively caused Neanderthal's extinction, and the words of the papers authors quote, did Neanderthals disappear because of us? No? This study suggests the species demise might have been due merely to a stroke of bad demographic luck. And now we're moving on to one of my favorite subjects, clothing and accessories. Excavations under tarbot Old Parish Church and the Scottish Highlands have unearthed a man's ankle boots, complete with buckles, and the thick hose that he wore with them. The find is about six hundred years old and, in the words of Cecily Spall of field Work Archaeology Services quote the man had been put in a coffin wearing these clothes, but the coffin at some point collapsed and everything concertinaed. I wanted to have this quote in there specifically because the description of everything concertina delighted me. It's not a description I think we use as often in the US. So because this collapse sealed this clothing off from oxygen, it's pretty well preserved, with visible wear and tear that seems to have come from the garment's use and not from the collapse of the coffin or the decomposition of the material over time. You can even see some of this person's leg hair caught in the hose. A metal detectorist in Estonia unearthed a seventeen hundred year old sacrificial site that included a gold bracelet, crossbow, brooches, belt plaques and silver plates. The bracelet in particular is noteworthy. It might actually be a caller and it probably dates back to the third century. An archaeological team came to the site for further study of this discovery, with archaeologist Marika Magid noting that gold is a rare find and sights of this age in Estonia and a piece this large and heavy is particularly rare. Magic told a news broadcast quote, one can say that this is likely the most valuable single find in the material sense to be unearthed in Estonia. Uh this find has been sent to a museum. A Dutch art detective has recovered a ring connected to Oscar Wilde that was stolen during a burglary at Maudlin College in two thousand two. The ring and two medals had been stolen in the same incident, and after the culprit, even Andrews, was caught, he said that he had sold the ring to a scrap dealer. So after this was found, it was returned to the college, which home burser Mark Blandford Baker said he had given up hope of ever seeing again like once the culprit said that he had sold the stuff to a scrap dealer. People were like well, that's definitely gone. This ring's history a bit of it. In eighteen seventy six, Wild and his friend Reginald Harding had given the ring to their friend William Ward. All three of these men were friends while taking classes at the college, and then the ring later became part of the college's collection of Wild memorabilia. Archaeologists in China have used enzyme linked immunosorb and assay to confirm the fibers found in burial urns there are silk fabrics, making them the world's oldest known silk They date back to between fifty three hundred and fifty five hundred years ago, and they suggest that silk making and dying techniques were relatively refined by that point, meaning that people had first started making silk well before that. Previously, the oldest known silk fibers were from between forty two hundred and forty four hundred years old. And to be clear, I put this under clothing because it was the most related category, but it wasn't actually clothing. The silk was part of the material that had been used to wrap the dead, is sort of postmortem clothing. You could also not exactly clothing or at least not always close thing. Researchers have studied twelve hundred beads made from ostrich eggshell to try to spot patterns and how they might reflect social changes that took place on the African continent thousands of years ago. These beads came from thirty different sites, and their styles and shapes seemed to shift when a new influence comes into an area. In the words of lead author Jennifer Miller, quote, these beads are symbols that were made by hunter gatherers from both regions for more than forty thousand years, So changes or lack thereof in these symbols tells us how these communities responded to cultural contact and economic change. So to expand on that, people in Africa started making these beads at least fifty thousand years ago, and according to previous research, the beads tended to get bigger when hurting people moved into a region that had been previously inhabited just by foragers. This new research suggests that the pattern isn't that straightforward. In southern Africa, new styles of beads followed evidence of the reduction of hurting, but previous bead styles didn't go away, but in Eastern Africa, bead style stayed the same even after hurting was introduced to an area. This was the first study of bead patterns specifically in Eastern Africa, and it's possible that the bead makers there just weren't influenced by the newcomers, or it's possible that the hurting people who moved into that area already had a similar bead making style, so changes weren't as a parent. Archaeologists from the University of Copenhagen have published a paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports detailing three human teeth that appear to have been used as jewelry, and those teeth were found in Catali, which also came up in our Autumn Unearthed. So the teeth are about eighty five hundred years old and they had been drilled with the same sorts of micro drills that were used to make beads out of stones or animal bones. They were also worn in a way that suggests that they had been used as jewelry or something similar for quite some time. The teeths chewing surfaces suggests did that they had belonged to a mature adult, and so The suggestion was that they were probably removed either after someone died or from a skull of a person who had died quite some time before that. After we take a quick sponsor break, we're going to move on to another big favorite, edibles and potables. Okay for our edibles and potables this time around. A team of scientists at the University of Bristol has reported the earliest known evidence of baby feeding bottles, or at least their basic equivalent. These are small clay vessels dating back to about five thousand BC. They're small enough for a baby to hold, and they have this little spout at the bottom that a baby could suck milk from. Some of these vessels are shaped like imaginary animals, which suggested to the team that they might be meant for children, but they also noted that they could have been used to feed adults who were very ill or were otherwise unable to eat solid food. The team looked at three specific examples that have been found in the graves of children and tested them, and they contained residues from the milk of domesticated room and animals like cows and the words of Dr Julie Dunn from the University of Bristol, who was the lead author of the paper published on the spine that was published in the journal Nature, quote similar vessels, although rare, do appear in other prehistoric cultures, such as Rome and ancient Greece across the world. Ideally, we'd like to carry out a larger geographic study and investigate whether they served the same purpose. Researchers studying a cave near Tel Aviv have found evidence that Paleolithic people saved animal bones for up to nine weeks so that they could have the marrow as a food source later on, comparing it to being like opening up a can of soup. They had already known that bone marrow was an important source of nutrition in Paleolithic diets, but they had thought that food was scarce enough that people had to eat whatever they had as soon as they had it. The team concluded that these bones were preserved rather than immediately bro can open for their marrow because of evidence of chopping marks that did not match up with butchering methods that were known to be used with fresh meat. And this is the earliest known evidence of people basically using bones for food storage purposes rather than consuming what was inside. Them immediately. A team in Puerto Rico has examined twenty of fossilized clam shells to try to determine how the pre aarrowalk population of the island prepared them for eating. Their analysis of these shells suggest that they were cooked at more than one hundred degrees celsius, which is the boiling point of water, but less than two hundred degrees, concluding that they were cooked over a flame rather than boiled. The study said barbecued, but we know from our recent barbecue live show people have a lot of opinions on whether that would be the correct word in this situation. Yeah. This team also noted that this fine provides some circumstantial evidence about whether pottery was widely used on the island, because you would need some pottery vessels in order to be able to boil claim. A newly published book has detailed the finding of an excavation at berry Fields in Buckinghamshire, England. The excavation took place between two thousand seven and twenty six. One interesting find a bread basket along with the only intact chickens egg from Roman Britain. So this egg was actually one of four that were found at the site, but the other three broke, which was still a very stinky experience. According to the archaeologists on the scene, It's possible that the bread basket and the bread that it presumably contained, as well as the eggs, might have been thrown into this pit sometime after the late third century. That was something that people did for good luck or as part of a religious ritual. All I can think of is Templeton the rat now Um. The book is called berry Fields Iron Age Settlement and a Roman bridge Field System and Settlement along Ackman Street near Fleet Marston, Buckinghamshire, and it is published by Oxford Archaeology. So this last one isn't exactly edible, but it was the best place to put it. Researchers at the University of Copenagen have managed to sequence an entire ancient genome from a fifty seven hundred year old piece of birch pitch that was used as chewing gum. Basically we've talked about chewing gum finds before. They described this as the first time that an entire ancient genome has been extracted from something that was not bone. This piece of pitch was found in southern Denmark, and in addition to the human DNA that it contained, it also had traces of plant and animal DNA that were probably part of that person's diet, as well as DNA from the microbes in their mouth. We have a few examples of items being returned or repatriated to their place or culture of origin. Next, the United States Department of Homeland Security returned the head of a marble statue to Libya in October. In the US and Libya had signed an agreement that imposed restrictions on the import of of being cultural property to the United States, and then this head had been smuggled into the US and violation of that agreement. This was a returned to the Libyan embassy in Washington, d C. When living authorities said it would be returned to its historical location. Cambridge University College is returning a statute that was looted from Nigeria. The bronze statue of a Cockerell was removed from Nigeria, then the Kingdom of Benin in eighteen ninety seven, and then it was given to the college by a student's father. This is one of many bronzes that were taken from Benin and are now in British museums and universities. There's a whole effort that I just saw an article about after sending like this outline was done. It was done, it was sent finished about a whole effort uh in in Britain to try to track down other artifacts that should be returned to Nigeria. And then, in similar news, France has returned to nineteenth century saber to Senegal. The French had seized this sword in eighteen ninety three and then placed it in the collection of Paris's Army Museum. The saber initially belonged to Omar said Utal and was confiscated from his son. This was part of an effort announced last year in which France would return items of African cultural heritage within five years, with French President Emmanuel Macron saying quote, I cannot accept that a large part of cultural heritage from several African countries is in France. There are historical explanations for that, but there are no valid justifications that are durable and unconditional. African heritage can't just be in European private collections and museums. But progress on actually fulfilling this whole plan has actually been slow as French lawmakers have tried to hash out the legal and logistical details. What's next bit isn't exactly a repatriation, but it has some of the same themes. We have talked a lot in our Unearthed episodes and other times about discoveries that have come from DNA analysis on ancient human remains, and the rise of these kinds of studies has brought up some ethical questions. Research that involves the DNA of living people is supposed to be conducted following ethical rules and guidelines based on the idea that people should have a right to privacy when it comes to their own health information and their own DNA, but ancient DNA can be in kind of a gray area. And to be clear, this is not just a theoretical question of what rights long dead ancient people should have over their own DNA. These results of these studies can have huge cultural and political implications for people living today, especially indigenous people and other ethnic minorities. So the National Science Foundation has awarded a three hundred fifty thousand, eight hundred eighty two dollar collaborative grant to the University of Connecticut, the Denver Museum of Nature, and science and partners across the United States, Canada, and Europe to study this question. This team that's being assembled plans to involve in digital this leaders, in these conversations, and to try to establish standards for this research that are respectful of indigenous communities and that encourage collaboration among the researchers doing the work with the people who that work might affect. In July, we talked about Greece's demand for the Parthenon marbles to be returned from the British Museum, and there has been a lot more back and forth about that since then, so stay tuned for a future episode of the podcast on that one. We hope it's in the works. I think at this point it's it's it's moved from we hope to pretty likely. Over just the last twenty four hours, we have some musy news. As almost always, various researchers have been studying the human intestinal microbiome and how that microbiome might be connected to various diseases and conditions. So several studies have connected things like processed foods at an increased use of antibiotics, various hygiene practices, and other behaviors all grouped under the da of a Western lifestyle. So studies have connected that Western lifestyle to changes in the microbiome, and these changes in the microbiome have been correlated with a rise in things like autoimmune disorders, allergies, and gastro intestinal diseases. A paper published in the journal Cell, Host and Microbe examined the gut microbes of people across multiple continents. They specifically looked at the provatelecopri complex, which includes four different clades and is associated with a number of health concerns. The team found that this bacteria was present in about thirty of people with more Western lifestyles and about nine percent of people described as having non Western lifestyles. Yeah, the incredibly basic idea is that in a lot of cases there seems to be a correlation, not necessarily causation, between a lack of these bacteria and various health conditions. So then these results were compared to ancient microbiomes include both fossilized human poop and Lutsie's microbiome. Leutsy, of course, did not have a Western lifestyle at all, and his microbiome showed evidence of three of the four clades of this bacterium. In other Utsy News, researchers at the University of Glasgow and the University of Innsbruck have been trying to identify all the mosses and live rewards that were found around Utsie's remains. These plants are classified as briaphites, and there are thousands of fragments of briaphite in the ice that was around Dutsie's body. Although only twenty three species of bria Phites live in the area today, there are at least seventy five species from immediately around Utsie's remains and from his clothing gear and his gut. And we are going to take one more quick sponsor break before we get to the rest of our unearthed. Okay, we've already talked in these two episodes about various findings that came from burial sites or the grave goods in them in some way. For our next few finds, the connection to burials is the thing that they have in common. First, a team studying a four thousand year old burial site off the coast of the U s State of Georgia have said that it shows evidence of really long ranging relationships among hunter gatherer people's during North America's Woodland period. What they found at the ancient shell pit was a burial site that had a lot in common with funerary practices of people living in the Great Lakes area at about the same time. In the words of Matthew Sanger, who led the research team, quote, our excavations revealed remarkable parallels between the shell Ring in the coastal Southeast and in broadly contemporaneous sites in the Great Lakes, including the use of cremation to handle the dead, cremating the dead in an area separate from where the bones were eventually buried, the use of copper as a burial item, the burial of multiple people at the same time, and the use of ochre in the burial. Not only are these practices very similar, our analyzes clearly showed that the copper found at the shell Ring originated in the Great Lakes and was therefore traded between the two regions. Notably, all of these practices are rare or entirely absent from the regions between the Great Lakes and the Southeast, which suggests that there was not some sort of general diffusion of traditions, but rather a direct transplant. Basically, the suggests that the people living in eastern North America four thousand years ago weren't necessarily sticking to relatively isolated pockets of territory. They may have traveled very long distances and had interactions that stretched across much of the eastern half of the continent. The paper that they published on this was called Great Lakes Copper and Shared Mortuary Practices on the Atlantic Coast Implications for long distance exchange during the Late Archaic, and it was published in the journal American Antiquity. In other news, A Roman Catholic church and settle Check rep Public is nicknamed the Bone Church because it houses the bones of somewhere between forty thousand and seventy thousand people in an ossuary. Some of these bones are stacked and others are arranged into formations, and these are the remains of people who died of plague in the mid fourteenth century, as well as in the Hussite Wars that followed. An ongoing restoration project at the church has also involved excavation in the area, and during that time researchers have found two mass graves, one from a thirteen eighteen famine and one from atty eight plague. Together, this represents another twelve hundred skeletons moving on. The Aquita Museum in Bordeaux, France, is on the site of what was once a convent, and in November they announced that a tomb in the museum's basement might contain the remains of sixteenth century Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne, who died in fifteen ninety two and whose body's location hasn't been totally clear because it was moved several times after his death, Although there is still work to be done, the wooden coffin in the tomb does have Montagna written on it in large brown letters. It does seem like a clue maybe, I mean, it could be some other Montagna, or somebody who loved Montagna, or someone who wanted to confuse us all in the future. In October, a team in Norway found an unusual boat burial. Now, boat burials on their own are not unheard of. There have been several of them found over the last couple of years that I've heard about. But in this case, the same grave site contains the remains of two people who died and were buried about a hundred years apart. The grave site is at a Viking age farm. The older burial is described as a man buried with weapons in a boat between nine and ten ms long in the eighth century. Then in the ninth century, a woman was buried in address fashioned with shell shaped brooches, along with a crucifix shaped brooch, a pearl necklace, scissors, a spindle whirl and a cow's head. She was also placed in a boat, this one seven or eight meters long. For her burial, the older grave was excavated and she and her boat were placed into the boat that was already there, along with the body that was already in it. So this is not the only double boat burial that was ever found, but it's a rare enough occurrence that archaeologist Raymond Savage, who was the project manager for this excavation, said that he had never heard of the practice before. He did later learn of other examples that had been found in another part of Norway. Though, although the team says it's unlikely that the two people were related somehow, there is still a lot to learn from this fine Now we will move on to the exhumations. After a lengthy series of proposals and challenges that we have been talking about on the show since December. Francisco Franco's remains were exhumed and moved on October. They were moved to a cemetery near Madrid by helicopter and then re entered next to his late wife in Unearthed. In October, we talked about plans to exhume the remains of John Dillinger and have them tested to confirm whether maybe the FBI and actually killed someone else in ninety four and then buried that person in Dillinger's place. The whole thing was meant to be covered on a TV documentary, but instead everyone wound up in court after Crown Hill Cemetery objected to this whole plan. History Channel then announced it would not do the documentary after all. One of Dillinger's descendants, Michael Thompson, wanted to go ahead with this exclamation though, saying he wanted some clarity about his ancestors death, But in December, a judge in Indiana found in the cemetery's favor, ruling that the exhimation could not go ahead without the cemetery's consent. This still is not necessarily over though the law gives Thompson's attorney ten days to file an amended complaint, in thirty days to appeal to a higher court. So that could still be ongoing as we are recording this, or in that window between when we record it and when this episode comes out. It's entirely possible that in ten minutes, when we were done this episode, there will be a headline with a new update about that. I would even say probable. It's this is the law of averages for us and other news to Dublin counselors have proposed that the remains of James Joyce be exhumed from Zurich and reinterred in Dublin sometime before the anniversary of the publication of his work. Ulysses that anniversary is happening in twenty two. This has led to debate about what Joyce and his wife Noura Barnicle wanted for their remains after their deaths, as well as to some resistance to that whole idea from the James Joyce Foundation in Switzerland. At this point, this is a motion filed by two city councilors, and it's not a concrete plan for an exhimation to take place, So we might very well be coming back to this one at some point in the future, also sparking intense debate this fall at about the same time it was a plan to turn joyce former home in Dublin into a hostel. That debate seems to still be ongoing as of when we're recording this. For our last item, South Australian Attorney General Vicky Chapman granted a conditional approval to exhume the unidentified remains of the person known as the Somberton Man, something she reportedly started considering last year. This is probably Australia's most famous and enduring unsolved mystery. The body was found on a beach in the summer of nicely dressed, with an unsmoked cigarette on his chest, and with a piece of paper reading Tom and should in a hidden pocket. I think that Josh and Chuck did an episode on it. Oh yeah, did they. I think this is a topic that people have asked us to cover. I can't remember if either of us have ever kind of circled it at some point and then moved away from it. I have many times, So maybe that can be a whole other thing from this unearth that you may hear an episode about later, like, there are two things we have mentioned that are actively in the works for future episodes. Maybe that will be a third one. Uh and stuff you should know did cover it in September. Okay, it's not that long. So yeah, that's our that's our unearthed for the year end of twenty nineteen, which I think is actually coming out at the very start of So happy New year, everyone, and I do have a little bit of listener mail. It takes out fabulous. This is from Katie. Katie writes about our Alfred Wegner episode and says, firstly, thank you so much for your wonderful show. It makes my time spent washing dishes and folding lottery so much more enjoyable. I was tickled by the description of Alfred Wegener's experiments on the formation of moon craters because I essentially recreated them with fourth graders several years ago. The experiment was part of a lunar science unit of study created by one of the major hands on science curriculum companies, so I assume one of their talented educators must have known about Beginner's methods. Instead of cement powder, we used flower with a light dusting of cocoa powder on top, and then we dropped mar bowls and small rocks into the flower and measured and observed the resulting creators. I'm sure my students would have been thrilled to know they were replicating an experiment done by a real scientist. And I hope you are thrilled to know that Vegner's crafty legacy lives on in elementary classrooms across America. Sincerely, Katie, I am actually delighted to know. Yeah, my nieces are definitely old enough to be dropping marbles into uh flower or cocoa powder or whatever. Um. They are maybe not quite old enough to make the connection between that and the moon, but I might just save this for some kind of future visit with nieces later on. UM. I also will mention h a shout out to our listener Cathy, who um I ran into while I was in Disney World recently, and she introduced me to her grandson who specifically loved the Alfred Vegner episode UH, and it came up it coincided with the tectonics the and they're shifting and all of that information being in produced in his course swork at school, so it was kind of perfect timing and he had a much broader sense of the whole subject um. So that was really really lovely. Yeah, well again, Happy New Year everyone. I think this is our first episode of the New Year, and I hope everybody who celebrates holidays and late December early January has had great ones. 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