Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It is time for part two of our July installment of Unearthed. Once again, we're talking about things that have been literally or figuratively unearthed in the second quarter of one. I'll just tell everybody I wrote in my notes because it's been that kind of a eighteen months. In this second installment of the episode, we have got exhumations and repatriations, some mysteries that have been solved, and other stuff. And as has become a tradition, we will kick it off with some things that were not easy to categorize, which I've all pulled together as potpourri. And for folks who usually uh skip listener mail, today's listener mail is another Unearthed specific listener mail. So, as Tracy said, we're kicking off with some things that don't really fit neatly into categories this time. First, a four thousand, four hundred year old wooden staff shaped like a life sized snake has been found buried in Pete, about seventy five miles northwest of Helsinki, Finland. This piece resembles a grass snake or a European adder. It's about twenty one or roughly half a meter long, and it's made from a single piece of wood, and researchers have suggested that it is a staff that was used in shamanic rituals. I had a conversation with a friend yesterday in which I learned that in a lot of uh, sort of northern European areas, there are a very very few snake species um, and so there's really only a third option in terms of snakes in Finland, so that maybe being a European adder or a grass snake isn't actually narrowing it down all that much. Uh. In seventeen eighty nine, to move on, botanist William James Beal stored thousands of seeds that he gathered in the vicinity of East Lansing, Michigan, and he buried them in bottles to see if they would still be viable years or even a century later. This has become known as the Beal seed viability Experiment. His plan was that every five years, somebody would dig up a bottle and plant the seeds that were inside of it to see if they grew. But over the years the people who have been managing this incredibly long running experiment have stretched out that interval, first to ten years and then for twenty years, making an experiment that was originally planned to go for a hundred years ready to go for much longer. So the most recent scheduled digging up was planned for, but of course that had to be postponed due to the pandemic, and that actually may have happened once before, when the nineteen nineteen attempt was postponed, possibly because of the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic. In April, Dr David Lowry, Associate professor of Botany and Michigan State University, dug up one of the bottles under cover of night to protect the remaining bottles from sunlight. This is also done with a lot of secrecy to protect them in this whole project, and some of these seeds started sprouting in May, so yes, some of them are still viable as of mid June thirteen. Of the seeds that germinated, they all appear to be verbascum blataria a k A. Moth mullin. But this phase of the experiment is not over yet. There are also plans underway to plant more seeds to continue this into the future, so it's one of those things that is all still ongoing. I love this project. A ceramic jar gouge with an iron nail that was found under the floor of Agora's classical commercial building in Athens, Greece is being described as a curse jar. This jar is more than two thousand years old and it contains the head and lower limbs of a young chicken. It is also inscribed with the names of fifty five people, along with what appears to be the Greek words for we bind. Researchers speculated that this might have been linked to some kind of in fighting or a dispute related to the building, or possibly an impending lawsuit, or it might have had something to do with the political and social upheaval that was going on around the time it was probably made because that was right around the time of Alexander the greats death in three b c E. This jar was discovered in two thousand six, but it was just this year that it was translated and the research on it was published. An other news. Thieves broke into Arandel Castle and they stole various historical items in a heist that has been estimated to have a worth of about a million pounds. This includes a set of gold Rosa beads that Mary, Queen of Scott's carried to her execution in fifteen eighties seven. Some of the other items that were stolen included coronation mugs, ceremonial items and some silver spoons. This theft happened on May twenty one, and on June twod authorities released photos of the ladders that were used for the people who stole these things to force their way into the dining room area of the castle. Their hope was that if the thieves also stole these ladders, the ladders owners might recognize them in contact authorities and that that could potentially lead to a break in the case. The castle's insurers also offered a reward. On June three, and in other Castle news, archaeologists working at Nottingham Castle have found the bones of three Gwennan monkeys, which may have been exotic pets belonging to Jane Kirby. Jane Kirby lived at the castle from the early seventeen nineties to eighteen twenty five, and at that point the castle had been converted into apartments. The team has also found the bones of European crane and other exotic animals there, suggesting that Kirby and maybe some of the other residents essentially created a small menagerie there. There are also written documents suggesting that Kirby kept a quote large ape as a pet. These discoveries were made during a three year restoration of the castle, which is just reopen to the public. So, uh, like you're probably thinking, we think Jane Kirby sounds like a great subject for a podcast episode, but the problem is that it really does not seem like there's enough publicly available information at this point to do it. Yeah, it's one of those things where I think probably if we if we personally went to archives and started digging stuff out, that would be possible. But that's not the level of research that our show can do. And the information I could find about her was basically like a paragraph at the Dotingham Castle whip site. Moving on. Stone walls dating back to the Edo period have been unearthed at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, Japan. These are roughly four hundred year old walls that were found at the site of restoration work happening at a museum at the palace, and it's believed that this wall has not been altered or repaired since it was originally built, and that makes it a unique opportunity to study building techniques from that time. It's believed that this wall originally formed part of a moat. Egypt's new National Museum of Egyptian Civilization has been partially open for a few years now, but it finally opened in full in April of this year. Many of the items in its collection were previously held in other Egyptian museums, including the mummies of eighteen kings and four queens that have been housed at the Egyptian Museum. On April three, these mummies were moved via the Pharaoh's Golden Parade, traveling about five kilometers that's three point one miles to get there. The procession was arranged in chronological order, with the oldest of the mummies first, and some of the most famous mummies in the procession included that of Ramsey's The Seconds, and the one who's believed to be previous podcast subject hot cheps It. If you missed this when it happened, it was beautiful. There was a lot of spectacle involved, with all of the mummies transported in specially designed shock absorbing vehicles that look almost like if you try to make a tank look like a boat, a nod to the way many of the mummies had previously been transported by boat. The roads they traveled on were also freshly paved to minimize any possible jostling, and once all of the mummies were settled in the new Royal Hall of Mummies, they were open for public view on April eighteen. So at this point in the pandemic, Egypt had lifted a lot of the restrictions on outdoor gatherings, but the event was still staged to play really well on screen, including things like putting up barriers to keep the cameras from catching poorer parts of the city. So we've tacked on previous installments of An Earth about how the tourism industry is a big part of Egypt's economy and that has been just devastated during the pandemic. So this broadcast, which was aired live on YouTube, was meant to try to help bridge that gap, along with a lot of other like public openings of mummies and public reveals of things that have been found at archaeology digs and things like that that have been happening over the course of the pandemic. So in our last bit of potpourri before we take a break, the paper A Short Scam of Maori Journeys to Antarctica, published in the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand in June, has walked through the history of Maori voyages to the waters around Antarctica and the continent of Antarctica itself. These voyages began around the seventh century with a Polynesian voyager named Hui Ti Reniura. Maori oral traditions described this person as the first human to travel to the Antarctic. Because paper also traces the involvement of Maori in European led expeditions to Antarctica that started more than a thousand years after that, and if you read accounts of these expeditions that are written by Europeans, they often just leave out the Maori contributions to the expeditions. So this work involved analyzing literature that detailed Antarctic voyages as well as the oral traditions that were maintained in Maori communities. Some reporting on this has framed early Polynesian voyages to Antarctic waters as totally new information. But this is really an established part of Maori oral tradition that it just became more widely known with this paper and the media coverage that has surrounded this paper. And now we're going to take a quick sponsor break. Next up, we have some repatriations. First, authorities in Italy have recovered more than eight hundred artifacts worth an estimated eleven million euros from one Belgian collector who was running illicit digs in the Apulia region of southern Italy. The investigation into this started in when somebody listed part of a funerary steely for sale, describing it as having come from a quote wealthy collector. This steely was missing a portion that was decorated with a part of a shield and a warrior on horseback, and those missing pieces were on a steely fragment in the collection of a southern Italian museum. Just like investigators saw, oh, we we have the missing piece of this in a museum, maybe the rest of this should really be in a museum. The recovered items have been described as an archaeological treasure. Most date from the sixth through the third entries b C and they include steely and for a, black glazed ceramics and terra cotta figurines, And in another repatriation to religiously significant stone lentels depicting the Hindu deities of Indra and Yama were returned to Thailand from the United States on May. These are believed to have been stolen from archaeological sites in Thailand during the Vietnam War, and they were on display at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco for decades. Returning the lentel's involved lengthy investigation by the Department of Homeland Security and a four year legal process. They were unveiled in Bangkok on May thirty one, and at that point Thai authorities were still deciding where their final home would be, with smaller museums near the border, with Cambodia being one possibility. And moving on to a repatriation that has involved human remains, researchers at Mercer University make in Georgia have returned a sensa or a shrunken heads to Ecuador. A former member of the faculty who's now deceased, had traded some of his personal items for this senso while serving in the U s. Military in Ecuador, this head had been on display at Mercer and had also been used in the John Houston film. Wise Blood researchers at the university spent years trying to authenticate it and to figure out exactly where it had come from so that it could be returned. Ecuador's National Cultural Heritage Institute provided the university with a list of thirty three criteria to validate the sensas authenticity, and they were able to confirm thirty of those. So the university actually repatriated that sensa to the Ecuadorian consulate in Atlanta back in not totally clear whether it has made it all the way back to Ecuador yet, And this wound up in this installment of Unearthed because this spring the team published an open access paper titled the Authentication and Repatriation of a Ceremonial Sansa to its country of origin. They published that in the journal Heritage Science, detailing this whole process. Now we have got several exhumations to discuss. Archaeological work ahead of an airport expansion on the Dutch Caribbean island of sent Eustasius has uncovered a burial site. Since the area used to be a plantation, it is likely that the bodies buried there were enslaved Africans, many of whom had been born in Africa. As of the end of May, forty eight skeletons had been discovered at the site, but it was believed to contain many more, possibly making it the largest such burial site discovered in the Caribbean. Initial analysis suggested that the people buried there were as we said, of African descent, but a lot more research into this is needed and planned to get a fuller sense of it. Like they already have multiple different people of different specialties ready to work on studying and and learning more about these people. Yeah, this is one of those things that's so early in the process, it's kind of all all up in the air. In another piece of news, the remains of the unidentified person known as the Summerton Man have been exhumed in Australia. He was found dead on December one, and his cause of death could not be determined. When he was found, he was neatly dressed and well groomed, holding a partially smoked cigarette and carrying no kind of identification that could confirm his identity. Yeah, I think this has been on the shortlist for an episode by what or the other of us for a long time. Yes, and I know stuff you should know. I think did an episode on it as well. I think so. Yeah. So train tickets that were found in this man's pockets raised more questions than they answered, as did a scrap of paper reading tomm should which is the which are the last words of the pillar? The rubiat that was found in his fob pocket. The words had been torn out of a book that a different, unnamed man found in his car on November and then written in that book that were a phone number and a strange code, neither of which helped investigators crack this case. This is a long running unsolved mystery, and scientists hope to use DNA testing to determine the man's identity, something that had not happened yet when we recorded this. The body of murder victim Joe Anne Fox was exhumed in Tarahote, Indiana in late June. Fox had been a mother of three, and she was murdered on June nineteen sixty seven. The case went cold, though, and was reopened in ten when her name came up during investigations into a different cold case, that was the murder of Pamela Milem who was killed in nineteen seventy two. Her killer was actually identified in so this exclamation was done to try to gather additional evidence after a person of interest was identified in this case, and the results of that work have not been publicized as of when we recorded this. Officials in England are exhuming as many as three thousand bodies from a Buckinghamshire churchyard ahead of the construction of the high speed rail line known as HS two. Other mass disinterments involving the HS two line have included the moving of at least sixty thousand bodies from a former burial site at Houston Station. In this current removal is going on at Old St Mary's Churchyard and it's just one aspect of archaeological work being done before the construction of the rail line. Other archaeological finds ahead ahead of the HS two have come up on previous editions of unearthed and an archaeological project along the line that will run from London to Birmingham is being described as the largest archaeological dig ever done in the UK and our last exhimation. This time around, the remains of Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife Mary Anne were exhumed from their burial site in Memphis, Tennessee, and moved to the National Confederate Museum in Columbia. As this was going on, opponents to the removal waived Confederate flags, dumped debris from the site on a Black Lives Matter mural, and harassed and threatened Black activists and city officials who had advocated for it. So forests remains were buried under a large marble base in Health Sciences Park, so that obviously was gonna take a long time to deal with. So officials started this work in May, hoping that they would be done with it before Juneteenth celebrations started in the park. This actually was successful. The removal was completed on June eleven. All right, now we're moving onto a few historical mysteries that have been solved at least somewhat. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have been studying the remains of Lutheran Bishop Payeter Windstrop, who died in sixteventy nine and was buried in the family crypt. At some point a small bundle was placed in the coffin with windstrips remains situated between its calves. For a time that bundle's contents were totally unknown, but after X raying the bundle, researchers discovered that it contained a very small set of remains, probably a fetus that had been still born at about five or six months gestation. So that still left a lot of unanswered questions. But according to the paper related in Death A Curious Case of a Fetus Hidden and Bishop Patter Windstrips, Coffin and Lund, Sweden, which was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, reports the bishop and the fetus were related. They share about their genes, which according to the paper, could mean that the bishop was the fetuses uncle or half brother or grandfather. That, of course, does not answer all of the questions. Though it was not uncommon in seventeenth century Sweden for children to be buried in coffins with adults, but it's not known exactly why or even when this fetus was placed in the bishop's coffin. It is possible, but definitely not proven, that this is the only son of the bishop's son. Also named Podor, who chose to study math and military fortification rather than joining the church like his father and grandfather. So one possible explanation is that this was something of a symbolic gesture placing the last of the Windstrip family line in the coffin with his grandfather. Aside from that, the bishop's remains, they're just an extraordinarily good condition. They essentially went through a natural mummification process. He was buried wearing very fine clothing with the coffin law mind, with herbaceous plants and covered in silk, and all of that is just an extremely good condition, especially considering how old it is. The coffin had been removed for reburial in twelve and a multidisciplinary team from Lundon University and the Lundon University Historical Museum got permission to study it when they realized just how well preserved it was. Next up, researchers have used muonic X ray analysis to figure out what's in a nineteenth century medicine bottle used by Japanese doctor Ogata Kwan. Ogata had established a school for Western Technology and Medicine, which is credited as the starting point of the Osaka University Faculty of Medicine. The bottle was from one of two medicine chess in the Osaka University collection and could no longer be open thanks to the passage of time. This bottle was also believed to hold mer curate chloride because the symbol for con was on the stopper, and in Japanese CONCO stands for mercuric chloride. The muonic X ray analysis confirmed this without anybody having to get the bottle open or damage its contents. And now for our last somewhat solved mystery. After analyzing a skull and jaw bone fragment found in Israel, researchers are describing some previously discovered but hard to classify fossils as being part of one group nesher Ramla Homo, named for the nesher Rambla site. These fossils date back to onety thousand to one hundred twenty thousand years ago, and they've been hard to classify because they've had some features in common with both Neanderthals and with modern humans. So the potentially solved mystery here is that these hard to categorize fossils may really represent members of one group. With this skull and jaw bone fragment coming from one of its later members. And although researchers did not claim that these fossils represent an entirely new hominid species, articles about this definitely did with that. Let's take a sponsor break. We've talked a lot about middens and latrines on Unearthed over the years. Both of them are places where people dump their unwanted stuff and then later on that becomes a rich source of archaeological information. And we've got a couple of things related to that now. First, researchers have used uranium thorium dating to determine that a shell midden outside Cape Town is between a hundred nine hundred thousand and a hundred thousand years old. That makes this the oldest known shell midden in the world. The shells that were used for this are ostrich shells, which are one of the most common food scraps in ancient Africa, but most of the shells in this particular midden are actually marine shells. Thanks to its location near the coast, the eggshells are just easier to date precisely than the marine shells are. We have talked about all kinds of things pulled out of latrines over the last many years of on Earth, but this time it is an entire latrine pulled out of the ground. Excavations ahead of a planned real estate development started in Berlin in and in April, archaeologists raised an entire litrine and all of its contents. This latrine dates back to about the fourteenth century, and like most such latrines, it is full of things like animal bones and broken pottery and other refuse, in addition to the human bodily waste that would have gone into it. So to make this site ready for the construction, a crew stabilized the walls of the latrine and they pulled the whole thing up with a crane, carving out a block that's roughly six square and a little more than six ft deep. This whole thing is going to be studied and conserved and eventually put on display, and it's estimated that it will be ready for public viewing in three Okay, we are moving on to a couple of cool maps. A team from multiple research centers and universities has put together a digital platform to map out trade routes used by the Hanseatic League, which dominated trade in northern Europe from thirteen fifty to sixteen fifty. Historian Dr Bart Holterman from the Institute for Historical Research at the University of Gottingen has described it as an open street map for the Hanseatic period, something researchers can use to map out travel routs and estimate travel times, and which also includes the dates for when fares were held in different cities and towns, and there is also information about the towns themselves, like whether they had a harbor or a ferry and whether tolls were collected. So this digital platform is called via Bundus and it is at viabundus dot eu. I have found this to be so cool. I find the whole thing fascinating. The first thing it made me think of was actually Bram Stoker, who loved to map out how things would work, and I could picture him being like, this is a treasure trove. Yeah. It made me think about when I was researching that episode about getting the smallpox vaccine across the Atlantic Ocean, and I went down this rabbit hole of trying to figure out the transit time of getting across the North Atlantic versus the transit time of getting to the Caribbean. And a lot. In other news, A rediscovered stone slab in western France maybe the oldest three D map of a known area in Europe. This slab was first discovered way back in nineteen by archaeologist Paul de Chatelier at a prehistoric burial ground in western Brittany, but then it went into storage under the moat of his chateau, where it was unearthed for a second time in After doing some analysis, researchers concluded that it is a three D map of the River Odette Valley. It is less clear exactly why this map was made. One idea is that it was used to mark a high ranking person's territory, like maybe a prince or a minor king. This piece is known as the Sambalex lab and it dates back to somewhere between nine hundred and sixteen fifty b C. All right, now, it is time for another listener favorite, that being shipwrecks. The wreck of a British submarine was found off the coast of Malta in nineteen where it had been sunk by a German mine in World War Two. The wreck was spotted thanks to an autonomous underwater vehicle, but dives to the site were postponed due to the pandemic. In April, maritime archaeologists from the University of Malta made a series of dives to the wreck and established that it was the HMS Urge. The Urge had become the subject of debate over the last few years after a diver found a different wrecked submarine off the coast of Libya and claimed that that was the Urge. This had led to some speculation that the Urge had been part of a secret or maybe unauthorized mission and had been sunk by Italian aircraft. That wreck off the coast of Libya is definitely not the Urge, though the one off the coast of Malta is clearly marked as the Urge, with obvious damage from a mine in its hole near the bow. It took some effort to get pictures of the ship's name, though the ship had been corroded through its years in the sea and it's now home to a legally protected species of coral. Yeah, once they were able to get the right angle on it, like it very obviously, says the Urge on the air UH. In other news, a sixteenth century bronze cannon that may have been carried aboard a second Spanish Armada worship has been recovered by Spanish police after it was removed from the sea floor. Shellfish divers had found this cannon in mid April and they had reported it. They said they stumbled on these three cannons down there, but then when authorities showed up to get the cannons, there were only two. The police questioned several suspects in this. They found a video of somebody pulling the cannon up from the ocean floor. They found out where that person was. They speculated that this person just did that on a whim. At last check, authorities were deciding how best to preserve these cannons. Back in our year end Unearthed for we talked about the discovery of a wreck believed to be the Vasa sister ship. The Vassa sank on its maiden voyage, and it was covered in the episode More Shipwreck Stories Battleships. Way back in TWN, the Vassa's sister ship was the Opplet, And as it turned out, that wreck we previously discussed is not the Opplet, it is really two Rex. The Apollo and Maria. Analysis of some of the timbers from these wrecks showed that they were from trees that were felled during the winter of sixteen forty six to sixteen forty seven. That was way too late for this to be the Applet, which was built not long after the Vassa sank in sixteen twenty eight. The Apollo and the Maria both saw combat in the sixteen fifties, and We're deliberately scuttled at Vaxholm in sixteen seventy seven in an attempt to make it harder for enemy ships to make their way through a set of narrow straits to get to Stockholm. Our next shipwreck is an eighteenth century shipwreck that's been found off the coast of Antigua, but at this point it's really not clear what ship it might be. The British kept very careful records of the dockyard there and they have not really yielded any clues. There is some speculation that it's the French East India Company vessel Beaumont, which was later sold and renamed the Leon, but it is not clear at this point if that's correct. This is a really well preserved wreck, though, and it measure about forty meters in length. And lastly, in shipwrecks. Noah has designated part of Lake Michigan as a sanctuary for shipwrecks, protecting nine hundred sixty two square miles of the lake. This area contains the wrecks of thirty six known wrecks, along with as many as sixty that have not yet been discovered. And now we've got a couple of papers that are related to plague to discuss. First, researchers have used DNA from the teeth of people who died during the Black Death Years to determine whether they definitively died of plague or something else. Previously, most plague victims had been associated with being buried in mass graves, but researchers believed that at least some or even most people who died of the plague received an individual burial. But for a long time it just wasn't possible to figure this out because the technology had not evolved to allow that yet. Plague doesn't typically leave evidence on people's skeletons, and at this point, skeletons are what's left to examine. Through DNA analysis, the team found people who had died of plague in individual graves in Cambridge and in the nearby village of Clopton, rather than in a rushed mass burial that the Black Death brings to mind. The studies lead author Craig Sesford of the University of Cambridge said, quote, these individual burials show that even during plague outbreaks, individual people were being buried with considerable care and attention. And according to research published in the journal Cell Reports in June, the oldest known strain of your Cinea pestis bacteria has been found in the remains of a five thousand year old hunter gatherer. This is two thousand years earlier than the previously believed first strain of the plague. It's not clear how the disease presented itself in this person, but since there were bacteria in his bloodstream, he probably died of it. There was no sign of plague in the remains of people near him, which makes it seem as though this very early strain of plague was not particularly contagious. It may have been contracted directly from a bite from an infected rodent. And as a final kind of fun thing to end on the physical effects of two pointy shoes, researchers at the University of Cambridge have concluded that wealthier medieval people's love of very pointy toad shoes known as poulin led them to develop bunyans, and among skeletons that showed evidence of bunyan's, people were also more likely to have evidence of a broken bone sustained in a fall. So this research involved the study of a hundred and seventies seven skeletons buried in and around Cambridge, and the skeletons that were dated from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, when people's shoes had a relatively practical rounded toebox, on least six percent of people had evidence of bunyans. But then in the fourteenth and fifteen centuries, when poule and popularity really hit its peaked, twenty seven percent of people had evidence of bunyans, and this also varied by class. Only about three percent of skeletons in rural areas had bunyans, but fort of people buried at the Friary did, nearly half of whom were clergy, and it appears that clergy were wearing fashionable pointy shoes in spite of laws forbidding them from doing so. Listen I don't need this kind of negativity of my life. I really don't. They are extraordinarily pointy shoes, far pointier than any pointy shoes that a person here in the US probably be wearing today. Uh. That is our Unearthed except for these special Unearthed listener mail that I have from Kayla. Kayla wrote to say, Hi, Holly and Tracy. I wanted to start by letting you know that I really enjoy your show. I listened when I saw Crochet and even to help me fall asleep, and I really mean that as a compliment. I am an undergraduate student of anthropology focusing my work right now on stable isotopes, specifically using them to learn more about non human grade eights and other primates. I just finished your episode on hatchtep Suit and the Kingdom of Punt I just started listening to your show, so I'm really far behind you. Briefly mentioned researchers using oxygen isotope ratios from a mummified baboon to try to locate pot in. After that specific episode came out, another study was published do the same thing, this time using stronium stable isotopes instead. Stronium is located in bedrock and enters the body via the food chain. You are what you eat. It's composition barries depending on your geographic location. Thus it can be used to trace migration patterns. Bioarchaeologist contest stronium isotope compositions in tooth enamel, which has formed early in development and can place the individual around their time of birth slash adolescents. This can be compared to stronium isotope ratios in bone and hair, which regenerate relatively frequently and that can therefore place an individual near their time of death. In the study I previously mentioned, anthropologists used stronium and oxygen stable isotopes from baboons from the New Kingdom and Ptolemaic periods in ancient Egypt to try to locate pooped. One of the baboon's stronium isotope ratios from its enamel that places its early life somewhere in present day Ethiopia, Air Trea, Jabouty, and parts of Somalia and Yemen, while the austronium isotope ratio in the bones revealed it had lived in Egypt for years before its death. This study pretty much just confirms previous works that place pooped near the Horn of Africa. But I wanted to send the paper along to you because it goes into the cultural significance of baboons in ancient Egyptian culture burial context and has some beautifu images of ancient Egyptian art and mummified baboons. I thought you'd be interested in this, uh. And then Kayla attached the PDF and said, thank you for the work you do keeping people stories alive and for curing my insomnia at the same time. Ha ha, take care best, Caleb. Thank you so much, Kayleb for sending this. It's possible that this later came up on Unearthed on the show, but I don't actually remember, and I really enjoyed getting this email just as I was working on Unearthed. Also, honestly, I don't fault people for listening to the show to fall asleep. Sometimes. I know for sure there are times that I am doing something in my house and I'm listening to podcasts and I realized what I'm really doing is just having the cadence of people's voices keeping me company, rather than listening to what they're saying. Yeah, I definitely grew up in in a TV house not a music house, you know what I mean, where TV is the background, and so for me, that's very very common, and it's very very comforting and I love it. So if listen anyway that our work helps anybody, I'm honored and delighted. Yep, here for it. So thank you so much for that email. If you would like to send us email, We're at History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. We've had a lot of people contacting us on social media recently asking how they can send topic suggestions and the answer is the email address of History Podcast at I heeart radio dot com. That is really the easiest place to keep up with versus things like tweets that I've may see but then never see again. Uh so History podcast that I heart radio dot com. We're also all over social media I Missed in History. That's ree'll find our Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on the I heart radio app and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. 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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It is time for part two of our July installment of Unearthed. Once again, we're talking about things that have been literally or figuratively unearthed in the second quarter of one. I'll just tell everybody I wrote in my notes because it's been that kind of a eighteen months. In this second installment of the episode, we have got exhumations and repatriations, some mysteries that have been solved, and other stuff. And as has become a tradition, we will kick it off with some things that were not easy to categorize, which I've all pulled together as potpourri. And for folks who usually uh skip listener mail, today's listener mail is another Unearthed specific listener mail. So, as Tracy said, we're kicking off with some things that don't really fit neatly into categories this time. First, a four thousand, four hundred year old wooden staff shaped like a life sized snake has been found buried in Pete, about seventy five miles northwest of Helsinki, Finland. This piece resembles a grass snake or a European adder. It's about twenty one or roughly half a meter long, and it's made from a single piece of wood, and researchers have suggested that it is a staff that was used in shamanic rituals. I had a conversation with a friend yesterday in which I learned that in a lot of uh, sort of northern European areas, there are a very very few snake species um, and so there's really only a third option in terms of snakes in Finland, so that maybe being a European adder or a grass snake isn't actually narrowing it down all that much. Uh. In seventeen eighty nine, to move on, botanist William James Beal stored thousands of seeds that he gathered in the vicinity of East Lansing, Michigan, and he buried them in bottles to see if they would still be viable years or even a century later. This has become known as the Beal seed viability Experiment. His plan was that every five years, somebody would dig up a bottle and plant the seeds that were inside of it to see if they grew. But over the years the people who have been managing this incredibly long running experiment have stretched out that interval, first to ten years and then for twenty years, making an experiment that was originally planned to go for a hundred years ready to go for much longer. So the most recent scheduled digging up was planned for, but of course that had to be postponed due to the pandemic, and that actually may have happened once before, when the nineteen nineteen attempt was postponed, possibly because of the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic. In April, Dr David Lowry, Associate professor of Botany and Michigan State University, dug up one of the bottles under cover of night to protect the remaining bottles from sunlight. This is also done with a lot of secrecy to protect them in this whole project, and some of these seeds started sprouting in May, so yes, some of them are still viable as of mid June thirteen. Of the seeds that germinated, they all appear to be verbascum blataria a k A. Moth mullin. But this phase of the experiment is not over yet. There are also plans underway to plant more seeds to continue this into the future, so it's one of those things that is all still ongoing. I love this project. A ceramic jar gouge with an iron nail that was found under the floor of Agora's classical commercial building in Athens, Greece is being described as a curse jar. This jar is more than two thousand years old and it contains the head and lower limbs of a young chicken. It is also inscribed with the names of fifty five people, along with what appears to be the Greek words for we bind. Researchers speculated that this might have been linked to some kind of in fighting or a dispute related to the building, or possibly an impending lawsuit, or it might have had something to do with the political and social upheaval that was going on around the time it was probably made because that was right around the time of Alexander the greats death in three b c E. This jar was discovered in two thousand six, but it was just this year that it was translated and the research on it was published. An other news. Thieves broke into Arandel Castle and they stole various historical items in a heist that has been estimated to have a worth of about a million pounds. This includes a set of gold Rosa beads that Mary, Queen of Scott's carried to her execution in fifteen eighties seven. Some of the other items that were stolen included coronation mugs, ceremonial items and some silver spoons. This theft happened on May twenty one, and on June twod authorities released photos of the ladders that were used for the people who stole these things to force their way into the dining room area of the castle. Their hope was that if the thieves also stole these ladders, the ladders owners might recognize them in contact authorities and that that could potentially lead to a break in the case. The castle's insurers also offered a reward. On June three, and in other Castle news, archaeologists working at Nottingham Castle have found the bones of three Gwennan monkeys, which may have been exotic pets belonging to Jane Kirby. Jane Kirby lived at the castle from the early seventeen nineties to eighteen twenty five, and at that point the castle had been converted into apartments. The team has also found the bones of European crane and other exotic animals there, suggesting that Kirby and maybe some of the other residents essentially created a small menagerie there. There are also written documents suggesting that Kirby kept a quote large ape as a pet. These discoveries were made during a three year restoration of the castle, which is just reopen to the public. So, uh, like you're probably thinking, we think Jane Kirby sounds like a great subject for a podcast episode, but the problem is that it really does not seem like there's enough publicly available information at this point to do it. Yeah, it's one of those things where I think probably if we if we personally went to archives and started digging stuff out, that would be possible. But that's not the level of research that our show can do. And the information I could find about her was basically like a paragraph at the Dotingham Castle whip site. Moving on. Stone walls dating back to the Edo period have been unearthed at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, Japan. These are roughly four hundred year old walls that were found at the site of restoration work happening at a museum at the palace, and it's believed that this wall has not been altered or repaired since it was originally built, and that makes it a unique opportunity to study building techniques from that time. It's believed that this wall originally formed part of a moat. Egypt's new National Museum of Egyptian Civilization has been partially open for a few years now, but it finally opened in full in April of this year. Many of the items in its collection were previously held in other Egyptian museums, including the mummies of eighteen kings and four queens that have been housed at the Egyptian Museum. On April three, these mummies were moved via the Pharaoh's Golden Parade, traveling about five kilometers that's three point one miles to get there. The procession was arranged in chronological order, with the oldest of the mummies first, and some of the most famous mummies in the procession included that of Ramsey's The Seconds, and the one who's believed to be previous podcast subject hot cheps It. If you missed this when it happened, it was beautiful. There was a lot of spectacle involved, with all of the mummies transported in specially designed shock absorbing vehicles that look almost like if you try to make a tank look like a boat, a nod to the way many of the mummies had previously been transported by boat. The roads they traveled on were also freshly paved to minimize any possible jostling, and once all of the mummies were settled in the new Royal Hall of Mummies, they were open for public view on April eighteen. So at this point in the pandemic, Egypt had lifted a lot of the restrictions on outdoor gatherings, but the event was still staged to play really well on screen, including things like putting up barriers to keep the cameras from catching poorer parts of the city. So we've tacked on previous installments of An Earth about how the tourism industry is a big part of Egypt's economy and that has been just devastated during the pandemic. So this broadcast, which was aired live on YouTube, was meant to try to help bridge that gap, along with a lot of other like public openings of mummies and public reveals of things that have been found at archaeology digs and things like that that have been happening over the course of the pandemic. So in our last bit of potpourri before we take a break, the paper A Short Scam of Maori Journeys to Antarctica, published in the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand in June, has walked through the history of Maori voyages to the waters around Antarctica and the continent of Antarctica itself. These voyages began around the seventh century with a Polynesian voyager named Hui Ti Reniura. Maori oral traditions described this person as the first human to travel to the Antarctic. Because paper also traces the involvement of Maori in European led expeditions to Antarctica that started more than a thousand years after that, and if you read accounts of these expeditions that are written by Europeans, they often just leave out the Maori contributions to the expeditions. So this work involved analyzing literature that detailed Antarctic voyages as well as the oral traditions that were maintained in Maori communities. Some reporting on this has framed early Polynesian voyages to Antarctic waters as totally new information. But this is really an established part of Maori oral tradition that it just became more widely known with this paper and the media coverage that has surrounded this paper. And now we're going to take a quick sponsor break. Next up, we have some repatriations. First, authorities in Italy have recovered more than eight hundred artifacts worth an estimated eleven million euros from one Belgian collector who was running illicit digs in the Apulia region of southern Italy. The investigation into this started in when somebody listed part of a funerary steely for sale, describing it as having come from a quote wealthy collector. This steely was missing a portion that was decorated with a part of a shield and a warrior on horseback, and those missing pieces were on a steely fragment in the collection of a southern Italian museum. Just like investigators saw, oh, we we have the missing piece of this in a museum, maybe the rest of this should really be in a museum. The recovered items have been described as an archaeological treasure. Most date from the sixth through the third entries b C and they include steely and for a, black glazed ceramics and terra cotta figurines, And in another repatriation to religiously significant stone lentels depicting the Hindu deities of Indra and Yama were returned to Thailand from the United States on May. These are believed to have been stolen from archaeological sites in Thailand during the Vietnam War, and they were on display at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco for decades. Returning the lentel's involved lengthy investigation by the Department of Homeland Security and a four year legal process. They were unveiled in Bangkok on May thirty one, and at that point Thai authorities were still deciding where their final home would be, with smaller museums near the border, with Cambodia being one possibility. And moving on to a repatriation that has involved human remains, researchers at Mercer University make in Georgia have returned a sensa or a shrunken heads to Ecuador. A former member of the faculty who's now deceased, had traded some of his personal items for this senso while serving in the U s. Military in Ecuador, this head had been on display at Mercer and had also been used in the John Houston film. Wise Blood researchers at the university spent years trying to authenticate it and to figure out exactly where it had come from so that it could be returned. Ecuador's National Cultural Heritage Institute provided the university with a list of thirty three criteria to validate the sensas authenticity, and they were able to confirm thirty of those. So the university actually repatriated that sensa to the Ecuadorian consulate in Atlanta back in not totally clear whether it has made it all the way back to Ecuador yet, And this wound up in this installment of Unearthed because this spring the team published an open access paper titled the Authentication and Repatriation of a Ceremonial Sansa to its country of origin. They published that in the journal Heritage Science, detailing this whole process. Now we have got several exhumations to discuss. Archaeological work ahead of an airport expansion on the Dutch Caribbean island of sent Eustasius has uncovered a burial site. Since the area used to be a plantation, it is likely that the bodies buried there were enslaved Africans, many of whom had been born in Africa. As of the end of May, forty eight skeletons had been discovered at the site, but it was believed to contain many more, possibly making it the largest such burial site discovered in the Caribbean. Initial analysis suggested that the people buried there were as we said, of African descent, but a lot more research into this is needed and planned to get a fuller sense of it. Like they already have multiple different people of different specialties ready to work on studying and and learning more about these people. Yeah, this is one of those things that's so early in the process, it's kind of all all up in the air. In another piece of news, the remains of the unidentified person known as the Summerton Man have been exhumed in Australia. He was found dead on December one, and his cause of death could not be determined. When he was found, he was neatly dressed and well groomed, holding a partially smoked cigarette and carrying no kind of identification that could confirm his identity. Yeah, I think this has been on the shortlist for an episode by what or the other of us for a long time. Yes, and I know stuff you should know. I think did an episode on it as well. I think so. Yeah. So train tickets that were found in this man's pockets raised more questions than they answered, as did a scrap of paper reading tomm should which is the which are the last words of the pillar? The rubiat that was found in his fob pocket. The words had been torn out of a book that a different, unnamed man found in his car on November and then written in that book that were a phone number and a strange code, neither of which helped investigators crack this case. This is a long running unsolved mystery, and scientists hope to use DNA testing to determine the man's identity, something that had not happened yet when we recorded this. The body of murder victim Joe Anne Fox was exhumed in Tarahote, Indiana in late June. Fox had been a mother of three, and she was murdered on June nineteen sixty seven. The case went cold, though, and was reopened in ten when her name came up during investigations into a different cold case, that was the murder of Pamela Milem who was killed in nineteen seventy two. Her killer was actually identified in so this exclamation was done to try to gather additional evidence after a person of interest was identified in this case, and the results of that work have not been publicized as of when we recorded this. Officials in England are exhuming as many as three thousand bodies from a Buckinghamshire churchyard ahead of the construction of the high speed rail line known as HS two. Other mass disinterments involving the HS two line have included the moving of at least sixty thousand bodies from a former burial site at Houston Station. In this current removal is going on at Old St Mary's Churchyard and it's just one aspect of archaeological work being done before the construction of the rail line. Other archaeological finds ahead ahead of the HS two have come up on previous editions of unearthed and an archaeological project along the line that will run from London to Birmingham is being described as the largest archaeological dig ever done in the UK and our last exhimation. This time around, the remains of Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife Mary Anne were exhumed from their burial site in Memphis, Tennessee, and moved to the National Confederate Museum in Columbia. As this was going on, opponents to the removal waived Confederate flags, dumped debris from the site on a Black Lives Matter mural, and harassed and threatened Black activists and city officials who had advocated for it. So forests remains were buried under a large marble base in Health Sciences Park, so that obviously was gonna take a long time to deal with. So officials started this work in May, hoping that they would be done with it before Juneteenth celebrations started in the park. This actually was successful. The removal was completed on June eleven. All right, now we're moving onto a few historical mysteries that have been solved at least somewhat. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have been studying the remains of Lutheran Bishop Payeter Windstrop, who died in sixteventy nine and was buried in the family crypt. At some point a small bundle was placed in the coffin with windstrips remains situated between its calves. For a time that bundle's contents were totally unknown, but after X raying the bundle, researchers discovered that it contained a very small set of remains, probably a fetus that had been still born at about five or six months gestation. So that still left a lot of unanswered questions. But according to the paper related in Death A Curious Case of a Fetus Hidden and Bishop Patter Windstrips, Coffin and Lund, Sweden, which was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, reports the bishop and the fetus were related. They share about their genes, which according to the paper, could mean that the bishop was the fetuses uncle or half brother or grandfather. That, of course, does not answer all of the questions. Though it was not uncommon in seventeenth century Sweden for children to be buried in coffins with adults, but it's not known exactly why or even when this fetus was placed in the bishop's coffin. It is possible, but definitely not proven, that this is the only son of the bishop's son. Also named Podor, who chose to study math and military fortification rather than joining the church like his father and grandfather. So one possible explanation is that this was something of a symbolic gesture placing the last of the Windstrip family line in the coffin with his grandfather. Aside from that, the bishop's remains, they're just an extraordinarily good condition. They essentially went through a natural mummification process. He was buried wearing very fine clothing with the coffin law mind, with herbaceous plants and covered in silk, and all of that is just an extremely good condition, especially considering how old it is. The coffin had been removed for reburial in twelve and a multidisciplinary team from Lundon University and the Lundon University Historical Museum got permission to study it when they realized just how well preserved it was. Next up, researchers have used muonic X ray analysis to figure out what's in a nineteenth century medicine bottle used by Japanese doctor Ogata Kwan. Ogata had established a school for Western Technology and Medicine, which is credited as the starting point of the Osaka University Faculty of Medicine. The bottle was from one of two medicine chess in the Osaka University collection and could no longer be open thanks to the passage of time. This bottle was also believed to hold mer curate chloride because the symbol for con was on the stopper, and in Japanese CONCO stands for mercuric chloride. The muonic X ray analysis confirmed this without anybody having to get the bottle open or damage its contents. And now for our last somewhat solved mystery. After analyzing a skull and jaw bone fragment found in Israel, researchers are describing some previously discovered but hard to classify fossils as being part of one group nesher Ramla Homo, named for the nesher Rambla site. These fossils date back to onety thousand to one hundred twenty thousand years ago, and they've been hard to classify because they've had some features in common with both Neanderthals and with modern humans. So the potentially solved mystery here is that these hard to categorize fossils may really represent members of one group. With this skull and jaw bone fragment coming from one of its later members. And although researchers did not claim that these fossils represent an entirely new hominid species, articles about this definitely did with that. Let's take a sponsor break. We've talked a lot about middens and latrines on Unearthed over the years. Both of them are places where people dump their unwanted stuff and then later on that becomes a rich source of archaeological information. And we've got a couple of things related to that now. First, researchers have used uranium thorium dating to determine that a shell midden outside Cape Town is between a hundred nine hundred thousand and a hundred thousand years old. That makes this the oldest known shell midden in the world. The shells that were used for this are ostrich shells, which are one of the most common food scraps in ancient Africa, but most of the shells in this particular midden are actually marine shells. Thanks to its location near the coast, the eggshells are just easier to date precisely than the marine shells are. We have talked about all kinds of things pulled out of latrines over the last many years of on Earth, but this time it is an entire latrine pulled out of the ground. Excavations ahead of a planned real estate development started in Berlin in and in April, archaeologists raised an entire litrine and all of its contents. This latrine dates back to about the fourteenth century, and like most such latrines, it is full of things like animal bones and broken pottery and other refuse, in addition to the human bodily waste that would have gone into it. So to make this site ready for the construction, a crew stabilized the walls of the latrine and they pulled the whole thing up with a crane, carving out a block that's roughly six square and a little more than six ft deep. This whole thing is going to be studied and conserved and eventually put on display, and it's estimated that it will be ready for public viewing in three Okay, we are moving on to a couple of cool maps. A team from multiple research centers and universities has put together a digital platform to map out trade routes used by the Hanseatic League, which dominated trade in northern Europe from thirteen fifty to sixteen fifty. Historian Dr Bart Holterman from the Institute for Historical Research at the University of Gottingen has described it as an open street map for the Hanseatic period, something researchers can use to map out travel routs and estimate travel times, and which also includes the dates for when fares were held in different cities and towns, and there is also information about the towns themselves, like whether they had a harbor or a ferry and whether tolls were collected. So this digital platform is called via Bundus and it is at viabundus dot eu. I have found this to be so cool. I find the whole thing fascinating. The first thing it made me think of was actually Bram Stoker, who loved to map out how things would work, and I could picture him being like, this is a treasure trove. Yeah. It made me think about when I was researching that episode about getting the smallpox vaccine across the Atlantic Ocean, and I went down this rabbit hole of trying to figure out the transit time of getting across the North Atlantic versus the transit time of getting to the Caribbean. And a lot. In other news, A rediscovered stone slab in western France maybe the oldest three D map of a known area in Europe. This slab was first discovered way back in nineteen by archaeologist Paul de Chatelier at a prehistoric burial ground in western Brittany, but then it went into storage under the moat of his chateau, where it was unearthed for a second time in After doing some analysis, researchers concluded that it is a three D map of the River Odette Valley. It is less clear exactly why this map was made. One idea is that it was used to mark a high ranking person's territory, like maybe a prince or a minor king. This piece is known as the Sambalex lab and it dates back to somewhere between nine hundred and sixteen fifty b C. All right, now, it is time for another listener favorite, that being shipwrecks. The wreck of a British submarine was found off the coast of Malta in nineteen where it had been sunk by a German mine in World War Two. The wreck was spotted thanks to an autonomous underwater vehicle, but dives to the site were postponed due to the pandemic. In April, maritime archaeologists from the University of Malta made a series of dives to the wreck and established that it was the HMS Urge. The Urge had become the subject of debate over the last few years after a diver found a different wrecked submarine off the coast of Libya and claimed that that was the Urge. This had led to some speculation that the Urge had been part of a secret or maybe unauthorized mission and had been sunk by Italian aircraft. That wreck off the coast of Libya is definitely not the Urge, though the one off the coast of Malta is clearly marked as the Urge, with obvious damage from a mine in its hole near the bow. It took some effort to get pictures of the ship's name, though the ship had been corroded through its years in the sea and it's now home to a legally protected species of coral. Yeah, once they were able to get the right angle on it, like it very obviously, says the Urge on the air UH. In other news, a sixteenth century bronze cannon that may have been carried aboard a second Spanish Armada worship has been recovered by Spanish police after it was removed from the sea floor. Shellfish divers had found this cannon in mid April and they had reported it. They said they stumbled on these three cannons down there, but then when authorities showed up to get the cannons, there were only two. The police questioned several suspects in this. They found a video of somebody pulling the cannon up from the ocean floor. They found out where that person was. They speculated that this person just did that on a whim. At last check, authorities were deciding how best to preserve these cannons. Back in our year end Unearthed for we talked about the discovery of a wreck believed to be the Vasa sister ship. The Vassa sank on its maiden voyage, and it was covered in the episode More Shipwreck Stories Battleships. Way back in TWN, the Vassa's sister ship was the Opplet, And as it turned out, that wreck we previously discussed is not the Opplet, it is really two Rex. The Apollo and Maria. Analysis of some of the timbers from these wrecks showed that they were from trees that were felled during the winter of sixteen forty six to sixteen forty seven. That was way too late for this to be the Applet, which was built not long after the Vassa sank in sixteen twenty eight. The Apollo and the Maria both saw combat in the sixteen fifties, and We're deliberately scuttled at Vaxholm in sixteen seventy seven in an attempt to make it harder for enemy ships to make their way through a set of narrow straits to get to Stockholm. Our next shipwreck is an eighteenth century shipwreck that's been found off the coast of Antigua, but at this point it's really not clear what ship it might be. The British kept very careful records of the dockyard there and they have not really yielded any clues. There is some speculation that it's the French East India Company vessel Beaumont, which was later sold and renamed the Leon, but it is not clear at this point if that's correct. This is a really well preserved wreck, though, and it measure about forty meters in length. And lastly, in shipwrecks. Noah has designated part of Lake Michigan as a sanctuary for shipwrecks, protecting nine hundred sixty two square miles of the lake. This area contains the wrecks of thirty six known wrecks, along with as many as sixty that have not yet been discovered. And now we've got a couple of papers that are related to plague to discuss. First, researchers have used DNA from the teeth of people who died during the Black Death Years to determine whether they definitively died of plague or something else. Previously, most plague victims had been associated with being buried in mass graves, but researchers believed that at least some or even most people who died of the plague received an individual burial. But for a long time it just wasn't possible to figure this out because the technology had not evolved to allow that yet. Plague doesn't typically leave evidence on people's skeletons, and at this point, skeletons are what's left to examine. Through DNA analysis, the team found people who had died of plague in individual graves in Cambridge and in the nearby village of Clopton, rather than in a rushed mass burial that the Black Death brings to mind. The studies lead author Craig Sesford of the University of Cambridge said, quote, these individual burials show that even during plague outbreaks, individual people were being buried with considerable care and attention. And according to research published in the journal Cell Reports in June, the oldest known strain of your Cinea pestis bacteria has been found in the remains of a five thousand year old hunter gatherer. This is two thousand years earlier than the previously believed first strain of the plague. It's not clear how the disease presented itself in this person, but since there were bacteria in his bloodstream, he probably died of it. There was no sign of plague in the remains of people near him, which makes it seem as though this very early strain of plague was not particularly contagious. It may have been contracted directly from a bite from an infected rodent. And as a final kind of fun thing to end on the physical effects of two pointy shoes, researchers at the University of Cambridge have concluded that wealthier medieval people's love of very pointy toad shoes known as poulin led them to develop bunyans, and among skeletons that showed evidence of bunyan's, people were also more likely to have evidence of a broken bone sustained in a fall. So this research involved the study of a hundred and seventies seven skeletons buried in and around Cambridge, and the skeletons that were dated from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, when people's shoes had a relatively practical rounded toebox, on least six percent of people had evidence of bunyans. But then in the fourteenth and fifteen centuries, when poule and popularity really hit its peaked, twenty seven percent of people had evidence of bunyans, and this also varied by class. Only about three percent of skeletons in rural areas had bunyans, but fort of people buried at the Friary did, nearly half of whom were clergy, and it appears that clergy were wearing fashionable pointy shoes in spite of laws forbidding them from doing so. Listen I don't need this kind of negativity of my life. I really don't. They are extraordinarily pointy shoes, far pointier than any pointy shoes that a person here in the US probably be wearing today. Uh. That is our Unearthed except for these special Unearthed listener mail that I have from Kayla. Kayla wrote to say, Hi, Holly and Tracy. I wanted to start by letting you know that I really enjoy your show. I listened when I saw Crochet and even to help me fall asleep, and I really mean that as a compliment. I am an undergraduate student of anthropology focusing my work right now on stable isotopes, specifically using them to learn more about non human grade eights and other primates. I just finished your episode on hatchtep Suit and the Kingdom of Punt I just started listening to your show, so I'm really far behind you. Briefly mentioned researchers using oxygen isotope ratios from a mummified baboon to try to locate pot in. After that specific episode came out, another study was published do the same thing, this time using stronium stable isotopes instead. Stronium is located in bedrock and enters the body via the food chain. You are what you eat. It's composition barries depending on your geographic location. Thus it can be used to trace migration patterns. Bioarchaeologist contest stronium isotope compositions in tooth enamel, which has formed early in development and can place the individual around their time of birth slash adolescents. This can be compared to stronium isotope ratios in bone and hair, which regenerate relatively frequently and that can therefore place an individual near their time of death. In the study I previously mentioned, anthropologists used stronium and oxygen stable isotopes from baboons from the New Kingdom and Ptolemaic periods in ancient Egypt to try to locate pooped. One of the baboon's stronium isotope ratios from its enamel that places its early life somewhere in present day Ethiopia, Air Trea, Jabouty, and parts of Somalia and Yemen, while the austronium isotope ratio in the bones revealed it had lived in Egypt for years before its death. This study pretty much just confirms previous works that place pooped near the Horn of Africa. But I wanted to send the paper along to you because it goes into the cultural significance of baboons in ancient Egyptian culture burial context and has some beautifu images of ancient Egyptian art and mummified baboons. I thought you'd be interested in this, uh. And then Kayla attached the PDF and said, thank you for the work you do keeping people stories alive and for curing my insomnia at the same time. Ha ha, take care best, Caleb. Thank you so much, Kayleb for sending this. It's possible that this later came up on Unearthed on the show, but I don't actually remember, and I really enjoyed getting this email just as I was working on Unearthed. Also, honestly, I don't fault people for listening to the show to fall asleep. Sometimes. I know for sure there are times that I am doing something in my house and I'm listening to podcasts and I realized what I'm really doing is just having the cadence of people's voices keeping me company, rather than listening to what they're saying. Yeah, I definitely grew up in in a TV house not a music house, you know what I mean, where TV is the background, and so for me, that's very very common, and it's very very comforting and I love it. So if listen anyway that our work helps anybody, I'm honored and delighted. Yep, here for it. So thank you so much for that email. If you would like to send us email, We're at History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. We've had a lot of people contacting us on social media recently asking how they can send topic suggestions and the answer is the email address of History Podcast at I heeart radio dot com. That is really the easiest place to keep up with versus things like tweets that I've may see but then never see again. Uh so History podcast that I heart radio dot com. We're also all over social media I Missed in History. That's ree'll find our Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on the I heart radio app and anywhere else 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 iHeart Video app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, h