Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying and it's time for Unearthed and July Part two. We got a lot of the favorite things in this edition, including the edibles and potables, and the shipwrecks and just some weird stuff. Is all grouped together because it was all kind of odd, uh, and some other assorted findings. I think weird stuff is a great category, but we are going to start with edibles and potables. A team in Manti in Sri Lanka believes that they have found the world's oldest clove, estimated to be one thousand years old. There have been other clove discoveries that were older than that, but at this point they're believed to be misidentifications. Clothes are not native to Sri Lanka, though they grow in the Maluku Islands, which are about four thousand miles away. So this is not just the oldest clove, but it's also evidence of a wide ranging trade in spices that dates back at least one thousand years, and this is supported by peppercorns of about the same age found at the same site, which probably came from the Indian subcontinent. Archaeologists in China's Jangsu Province found a jar full of eggs in a year old tomb, and that led newspapers around the world to make a lot of jokes about thousand year eggs, also known as century eggs. These were just eggs. They were in very good condition considering their age. Only one of them was obviously broken, although the team did report that the material inside the eggs would have been largely decomposed by now. They planned to conduct some X ray studies to determine exactly how many eggs were in this jar, because they were way too delicate to handle without the risk of damaging them. They are not certain why the eggs were placed in the tomb, whether this was an offering or if it was more of a symbol of reverse or whether the deceased just really liked eggs and wanted to make sure that they had some eggs in the afterlife. I want eggs in the afterlife. Researchers in St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands now believe that the presence of very small snail and clam shells and archaeological sites there are evidence of children helping their parents gather food through foraging. Previously, the conclusion had been that these types of shells were evidence of people who were really close to starvation and we're just eating whatever they could find. But this team looked at shell midden's dating back to about sixteen hundred years ago and concluded that the adult foragers were focusing on large shellfish that were really worth their time and effort to crack into, while the children were picking up whatever they found that was small enough for them to handle easily. This is all sort of speculative, but it's also similar to research taking place with current populations of islands in the Pacific, where four patterns have been the same for generations and where children routinely gather with their parents moving on to some other food stuffs. A team excavating a construction site in Ontario, Canada found some charred keenewa seeds from a species of the plant that was native to eastern North America but is extinct today. These seeds date back to around nine hundred b C, which isn't the oldest keenewa seed ever, but it is the farthest north that they have been found that far back in history by a lot. The previous northernmost example of this kina was from Kentucky, and then the next oldest crop found in this part of Ontario is corn that dated back to five d b C, so four hundred years younger. This is technically find The seeds themselves were unearthed in but the excavation they were part of had collected one hundred forty thousand of them and most of them were charred, so it took years to go through all of them to find out what was what, So it was late when the findings on this were published. Today people think of keenoas coming from South America, and it does, but this is a species of food crop that was living at the time in what's now Kentucky, Illinois, and Arkansas. In similar news, a team of researchers from universities and institutions in the US, the UK, China, and Lithuania has cross referenced the findings of hundreds of studies of charred food crops like rice, millet, wheat, and barley to create a massive map of how these foods moved around the prehistoric world and what they found was that these staple foods moved a very long way between eight thousand and fifteen hundred BC, so I wouldn't necessarily put all of that into the prehistoric bucket. Wheat and barley were carried from southwest Asia into Europe, China, and the Indian subcontinent. Rice spread across much of Asia. Millet and sorgham originated in western Africa but moved to the eastern and sub Saharan part of the continent, as well as across the Indian Ocean, and then different types of millets started out in Eastern Asia and moved west all the way to Europe. Basically, although people might imagine that food became more globalized after Europeans started traveling to North America, that whole thing really started much much earlier, with ordinary farmers trying new crops and strategies just to get enough food. Now we have several things about beer. Researchers in Peru are crediting a beer like beverage called Chicha with keeping the Warri civilization stable in that part of the continent from about six hundred to eleven CE. This team has done research into pottery and the residues within the pottery vessels and suggests that these pots in the ticha that was being made, they're all being made locally, with people traveling to what was essentially a tap room for festivals and for more casual gatherings. The beverage was also made with drought resistant pepper berries, which would have helped ensure a steady supply of beer even when other ingredients are much harder to grow. A lot of headlines about this was like the secret to a long lived society is plenty of beer. In other beer news, in six the s s Oregon sank off Long Island. There were no fatalities, but sadly a load of beer went down with the ship. And this year a diver brought three bottles back up from the bottom and gave one of those bottles to serious brewing company who planned to see if they could extract living yeast from it, and the diver was one of the brewery's regular customers. Staff at the brewery also tasted this beer, just a few drops of it. According to the breweries owner of Bill Felter, quote, it was nasty. I mean, I feel like we could have said that without tasting it, but that's just probably um. A few days after the story broke about Sirius Brewing's plan to brew shipwreck beer, another story made their rounds that St. James Brewery and whole Brook, Long Island had already been making beer with yeast extracted from a bottle from that same wreck for at least a year. That beer uses both the shipwreck yeast and the modern string sane An owner brewer Jamie Adams, was at the time planning a beer with only yeast from the wreck to debut at the New York State Brewers Fest. So after getting this news that another brewery had already been doing the thing he planned to do, Felter shelved his plans to make a similar beer, not of respect for Adams having done it already. Basically, the two New York brewers were trying not to horn in on each other's beers. This seems like a pretty amicable resolution, especially since at first Adams thought about filing a season desist over it. So hooray for brewers being cool. Yeah, it's a whole saga about this shipwreck beer. Uh. And in one last piece of beer news, scientists in Israel have extracted yeast from a pottery that was up to five thousand years old, and they've used that to brew beer. We got a note about this one from listener Shatta, who mentioned that the yeast had come from an archaeological fine we had talked about an unearthed in I think that's actually a much older find. The pottery that we talked about in that particular thing was much older. But it's totally possible that we did talk about the same find at somewhere in a previous unearthed, because when I looked at I was just keyword searching the past scripts for the word beer. We've talked about beer, and almost all of them I'm I'm waiting for the giant vodka discovery. So since I'm not really a beer drinker. Um, okay, so this next one is not exactly about food, but bear with us. There is a lot of variety and human speech, but a prevailing theory has been that most speech sounds have existed for most of human history, not really changing all that much. So even though some sounds like m are common in much of the world, while others like the clicking sounds in some African languages are more localized, that all of these specific sounds have actually stayed pretty much the same over time, But there's some new research from the University of Zurich and two Max Planck Institutes that suggests, maybe not hypothesizing, that some sounds like and are relatively new and they only came about as the shape of our human palet changed, with the changes of the palette coming along with changes to what we eat. So basically, early humans had a diet that was full of tough foods that were difficult to chew, so by the time people reached adulthood, their upper and lower teeth meant edge to edge. But over time people started eating softer foods, shifting their palette so that they had a slight overbite with their upper front teeth slightly in front of the lower ones most of the time, and that may have made it possible for languages to start including sounds known as labya dentals, in which your lower lip touches your upper teeth. These sounds exist in about half of languages worldwide, and they're especially prevalent in European languages, apparently rising with advances in milling and other technologies that helped people produce softer foods. These aren't the first researchers to suggest this connection, but earlier linguists have been a lot more cautious that this could just be a correlation rather in a causation. And now we're going to take a quick break so Tracy and I can make lots of weird noises with our mouths and figure out what we're doing and if that is Palette related through history, we'll be back at just a moment. Okay, we have a couple or three discoveries coming up that basically confirm existing oral histories. First up, archaeologists in Nova Scotia have been using ground penetrating radar to try to confirm whether Fort Ann is the site of an Acadian burial ground. There's a known British cemetery at that site, but it's also believed that there are at least two thousand Acadian people buried there as well, without any sort of marker remaining for them. Preliminary evidence suggests that this is the case. This radar study found very regularly spaced disturbances that were arranged in lines at the same depth every time, So if this is accurate, it would confirm the Acadian belief that they have ancestors buried at Fort Anne. This ground penetrating radar work really happened at the end of December, but it was just making news at the start of this year. And I'll also note that we do have the Acadian expulsion on the idealist for a future episode. Don't know when it will happen. Archaeologists have confirmed the oral histories of the Lake Bebean First Nation in northern British Columbia, Canada, something the nation had asked to have done. According to the nation's oral history, there were fishing villages along the shores of Lake Bebing before the arrival of European colonists in the area. The team found evidence of these villages, one of them quite large, along with wooden fishing weirs which would have been used to catch sakey salmon. And in our last confirmation, researchers have also discovered that First Nations people in the northwestern coast of North America were farming clams for about three thousand years, longer than previously thought, and that study had focused on claim and beds that had been recorded in native oral histories. We are now moving on to one of my favorite things art, in this case cave art and rock art Uh there's a massive collection of witch marks in a limestone gorge called Creswell Craigs in East Midlands. In the UK, staff knew there were some kind of markings down there, but they didn't really know much about them, and they described them to visitors as Victorian graffiti. But a couple of cavers remarked on them last year, leading experts to take a closer look. What they found was not the two or three markings that they were kind of expecting. There were as many as a thousand marks. These were meant as wards against evil. They included marks that looked like a V to stand for the Virgin Mary, and shapes that look like crosses, and the letters PM, which stands for pot Maria. These types of marks were common in the area from the sixteenth through the nineteen centuries, although it's not completely clear exactly when these particular marks were made or exactly what people were hoping to keep out or for that matter, in by making these marks. Yeah, these are these are the sorts of marks that you were really see in a lot of places, like not just in the UK, if you go to um Old like colonial era homes in North America, A lot of times there are vs and crosses and things in places that were meant a word evil away. This is just an astoundingly large collection of them. Uh, And I am really curious of Like, did you think there was a hell mouth down there? What was happening? Researchers have also recorded and interpreted a set of Cherokee inscriptions in Manitou Cave in Alabama. The first of these inscriptions dates back to April of eighteen twenty eight, so that was just a few years before the Cherokee and other native people's were removed from the area under the Indian Removal activate teen thirty, and also just three years after the Cherokee adopted the Cherokee syllabary as a system of writing for the Cherokee language. The inscriptions in the cave document things like a stickball game and the religious ceremony surrounding it. Stickball is not a simple sport, it has important ritual significance within Cherokee culture and religion, and there are also inscriptions on the ceiling of the cave written backwards as if the reader is somewhere within the rock. So this research team included European Americans as well as members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, the United Katua Band of Cherokees, and the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and they all work together to determine both how to interpret what the inscriptions mean and to decide what should and shouldn't be published in academic works, and some of these inscriptions were just not meant to be read beyond the Cherokee. This work was also important because there's not a lot of archaeological evidence of a Cherokee presence in the area. The cave became a tourist attraction in and other physical connections to the Cherokee were removed or destroyed at that time. Moving on, archaeologists studying indigenous petroglyphs in Australia have discovered the crews of nineteenth century whaling ships added their own carvings to the same area as well, sometimes right on top of the existing indigenous art. Some of the carvings in the Damp Year Archipelago are up to fifty thousand years old, and the whalers additions are from eighteen forty one and eighteen forty nine. The team found carvings from crew members of the Connecticut and the Delta, both of which were whalers that hailed from the United States. It's not clear whether the whaling crews interacted with the local population at all, or what their motivations were for choosing these particular carving sites. It could have been an intentional signal of disrespect, or they could have just thought they were adding graffiti to a place that already had a lot of graffiti on it. This particular study also noted that the interactions between these whaling crews and the indigenous people of Australia is something that warrants for their study because in a lot of places it's not clear whether anybody came ashore, whether they had any contact with anyone. But it's also clear that the native people knew that there were quailers off the coast of Australia up so there's lots of room for more work to be done. Moving on. A team has determined that cave art found in the Balkan Peninsula in is the peninsula's oldest known figurative cave art, so that oldest known designation is what happened this year. The paintings date back about thirty four thousand years and they include a bison and ibis and what maybe human figures. Researchers at the University of Barcelona have also found a piece of Paleolithic art carved into limestone that they're describing as a very early example of narrative art. The pieces about twelve thousand, five hundred years old and appears to depict two people chasing two birds, which appear to be an adult and a young crane. There are only three scenes found in Paleolithic art so far that depict humans alongside birds. So next up we have a whole collection of findings that in some way are connected to like a technological acronym, so it's things like DNA and CT scans and lighter stuff like that. First up, researchers used DNA analysis to study some chewed up pieces of pitch that were unearthed in western Sweden back in the nineteen eighties. These were about eight thousand years old and at the time they were being used to make weapons, so people would heat up this pitch and then chew on it to make it really soft and sticky, and then use little bits of it to do things like attached points to weapon shafts. The DNA analysis suggested that three different people had chewed on this pitch, two female and one male, and they may have been quite young, based on the size of the tooth impressions, as young as five years old. But they did not find any weapons that were made with this particular pitch, so it's possible that they were just kids chewing on the same stuff used to make weapons, and we're not weapon makers. Them Elves and another discovery. In previous installments of Unearthed, we have talked about vikings a lot, and we have also talked about horse burials a lot, and now we have both at the same time. We knew that Viking warriors were often buried with their horses, and now, thanks to DNA evidence, we know that most of the Viking warriors were mail and so were the horses that were buried with them. Of the nineteen horses that were studied in this particular project, eighteen of them were male. All of them appeared to be healthy and well cared for before being killed, apparently for the purpose of the burial. In researchers performed CT scans on a group of mummies at a hospital in Madrid. This year, They announced their findings that one of them was a priest named Nespamdo who was paraoh Ptolemy the seconds eye Doctor, possibly also Ptolemy the Third's eye doctor, although that is a matter of dispute uh and they made this conclusion based on a collection of plaques from within the bandages, one of which was thought God of eye doctors. He has a designation because of a story within the mythology of replacing somebody's eye after it was not God, I think in battle. In previous installments of Unearthed, we have talked about the use of ground penetrating radar and other non invasive technologies which has led to the discovery of massive cities and buried structures in South America and in Europe. Similar discoveries have also been happening in Africa, where light our scans in a South African nature preserve have pinpointed the location of the city of Quinning, which thrived from the fourteen hundreds until the late nineteenth century. It's basic location was already known, but this pinpointed it more specifically, and this new study also suggests that it had about three times as many buildings as previously thought. It's likely that the city was composed of between eight hundred and nine hundred walled compounds housing as many as ten thousand people. A team from the University of Cincinnati have discovered evidence that suggests that the Maya did more than a subsistence level of farming, growing a surplus of things like cotton to trade all around the Yucatan Peninsula. This research has involved satellite imaging and light our studies that have revealed drainage and irrigation systems along with Rhodes. In the words of Nicholas Dunning, a professor of geography who was part of this research team, quote, it was a much more complex market economy than the Maya are often given credit for. And last we have a little lengthier fine. DNA testing has been conducted on the remains of Casimir Pulaski. Pulaski was an immigrant from Poland to North America. He became a general in George Washington's Continental Army. He's considered now to be a war hero in both Poland and in the United States. Scientists who examined his skeleton a couple of decades ago found that his pelvis looked more like what they would expect on a female skeleton. They were surprised enough by the pelvis's appearance that they wondered whether his bones had been replaced with someone else's. At the time, they planned to compare DNA from the remains to Pulaski's living grand niece, but the technology in n was not yet advanced enough to give a truly conclusive answer. That is not the case today, and this year researchers concluded that yes, the bones really are Pulaski's. So this evidence also suggests that Pulaski may have been intersex or had physical traits that don't clearly fit into a binary of male and female. So in Pulaski's case, this includes that his bone structure appeared more female, while he also had male pattern baldness and facial hair. Facial hair is not an exclusively male trait, but his pattern of facial hair was definitely more masculine. This news led to a number of articles suggesting that Pulaski might have been female, or that we might need to refer to him with she her pronouns instead of male pronouns, but that also doesn't really match up what we know of Pulaski's life. He was recorded as a boy when he was baptized, and he really doesn't seemed to have gone outside the gender norms for men during his life. If he or his family thought anything was unusual about his body, that is not recorded anywhere. So taking all of our cues from Pulaski himself, he remains the right pronoun. Yeah. We we should not reassign people's pronouns based on DNA evidence contrary to how they actually lived. Uh. This was also part of a Smithsonian Channel documentary, which, to be clear, I have not watched. I don't know what all it says in there. It's called America's Hidden Stories. The general was female question mark and maybe we will have an episode about Pulaski at some point in the future. Yeah, he seems really interesting. Um. This research is also really interesting, and it's also always interesting to have another potentially intersex person um in our library of episodes. And the last bit before we take a break isn't directly related to Casimir Pulaski, but it does follow on with this practice of trying to figure out sex and gender based on a person's remains, and the idea of researchers figuring out a person's sex based on their skeletal remains. It's come up pretty frequently on our Unearthed episodes and in other episodes of the show, but this is a really difficult task in cultures that practice cremation. In a paper published in January, Claudio Cavazouti of Durham University discusses analyzing the cremated remains of a hundred and twenty four people which were buried along with gendered grave goods, as in, a grave containing weapons probably belonged to a man, and a grave containing a yarn spindle was probably a woman's. They cross referenced twenty four different skeletal traits with the goods those remains were buried with to see if they could find anything that seemed to predict gender. Out of these twenty four traits, eight of them predicted the grave goods gender with an accuracy rate of about eighty percent or better, which is comparable with the methods that are used to evaluate uncremated remains. So measurement of specific parts of the bones like the thigh, the upper arm, the jaw, and the big toe, among others, seemed to correlate with the grave goods. Even after the body had been cremated, there is still a lot of room for uncertainty in this though. It all rests on the assumption that a society had very clear gender roles in which people did not really deviate from those roles, and that people's grave goods were closely connected to their gender. It also assumes that there's a close correlation between gender and sex, and in the words of a press release on this discovery, quote anatomical sex determination is possible in cremated remains, though they caution that the measurements identified in this study differ from those used to sex modern cremated remains, indicating that sexually diagnostic traits differ between populations across time and space, but it is still an interesting potential new source of data. Now we're gonna take a quick sponsor break before getting into some other things. Next up, we have a whole collection of things that were repatriated or returned to where they came from. First up, art Detective Arthur Brand returned to Spanish reliefs that were at least a thousand years old, handing them over to two officers and two museum curators at the Spanish Embassy in London. These reliefs had been stolen from the Santa Maria de Lara church in northern Spain in two thousand four, and then a British couple bought them, having no idea what they are or that they had been stolen. The British Library returned three historic documents that had been removed from a Greek monastery in nineteen nine. Authorities in Greece had traced the illegally traffic documents to the British Library, which immediately returned the documents through the Greek embassy in London. And another similar story, a Bible that was stolen out of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and then nineties was found in a museum in the Netherlands and returned. The Bible was four hundred four years old and it's theft had gone unnoticed for several years until auditors surveyed the rare Books room where it was housed. There were three hundred fourteen books missing from this room, allegedly thanks to library archivist Gregory Prior and Caliban bookshop owner John Schulman, who were in on the job together. It appears that the criminal case so the two of them, is ongoing. Yeah, as as I was looking at this, there was there were a lot of indictments and hearings and things like that, and it doesn't appear that there have been convictions or acquittals yet unless I missed something. This is not the only huge document or book theft that we have to talk about, because in similar news, in the nineteen forties, Harold E. Perry, who was a clerk in the Massachusetts State Archives, meticulously stole an extensive collection of historical documents and then covered his acts by destroying the records of those documents in the archive catalog. This is just evil archivists day. A lot of these letters were kept in a bound book, and he also clipped out the index page of the book that listed the documents. His crime came to light, and he was arrested in nineteen fifty and he received a suspended sentence in exchange for helping track down the material that he had stolen and then sold. Last year, authorities tracked down one of the documents, a letter from Alexander Hamilton's to the Marquis de Lafayette written in seventeen eighty during the Revolutionary War. The FBI ultimately seized the letter from an auction house in late and in May of this year, the U s Attorney filed a forfeiture complaint in Federal court to try to get the letter back into the Commonwealth archive. That process seems to still be ongoing. A relief found in Australia's Macquarie Museum has been repatriated to Egypt after it was discovered that the piece had been sled out of Egypt in the nineteen nineties. The fragment was initially unearthed in the nineteen seventies or eighties, but then officials at the storehouse where it was being kept discovered that it was missing. In Now we're shifting gears to talk about the remains of people, and in April, Germany began the process of returning the remains of Aboriginal people to Australia. These remains had been removed from Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The April ceremony was the first of several, described by Australia's Minister for Communications as quote the largest number of ancestors returned from Germany to date in Australia. Attempts will be made to confirm the identity of each so they can be returned to the appropriate people, and for one last gear shift in this section. In opposite news to all of that, and April, Greek President pro Copus Pavlopolis called for the British Museum to return a collection of two thousand, five hundred year old sculptures known as the Parthenon Marbles, which were removed from Greece by Lord elgin In and are now in the collection of the British Museum. So Greece has been requesting for these marbles to be returned since it became independent in eighteen thirty two, and this is also a developing story, with protests taking place over it at the British Museum in June. The museum has maintained that these were acquired through a legal agreement with the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Greece at the time, and has so far returned refused to return the marbles. Now we're doing a bigger gear shift to kind of nuttier topics. Yeah, this was just the stuff that was just weird. It goes together because it's weird. The Calby potato chip factory. So there's your clue. We're really shifting gears at this point. In Hong Kong has been using French potatoes to make its chips, and one of its shipments earlier this year contained not a potato but an unexploded World War One hand grenade. It's a fine how do you do? Uh? The grenade had been discharged, but it had not been detonated, and then it probably just lay in a field until it was accidentally dug up along with potatoes. A bomb squad detonated it on site. No one was injured, and then the news reports called it a bomb to tear, which is great. Yes, if you do not speak French, a pum to tear is what you call a potato. It means apple of the earth, yep. But this is a bomb to tear. I'm not usually really into the puns, but the fact that this one combined the French that delighted me. A plumber and machine operator in Aubourg, Denmark pulled a medieval sword out of the ground in February, having just found it on the job. The Historical Museum of Northern Jutland was called in and identified the sword as probably dating back to the fourteenth century. They noted that it was very well made and was the type of item that normally would have been buried with the person who owned it, so they speculated that it may have been lost during a battle and then it just stayed where it fell for the centuries that followed. This is not the first just discovered sword that we've talked about, but it's been a while since we had one that wasn't in a lake. A team at the University of York has unearthed an account of a nun faking her death to escape the convents. The register that contained this account was in the archive the whole time, so the book itself was not lost, but this was part of a marginal note in one of them, so somebody had to actually read all the scribbling to get to it. It dates back to thirteen eighteen. Archbishop William Melton wrote the nun Joan of Leeds was after quote the way of carnal lust, but really that may have just meant that she wanted to leave the religious life behind and get married. He wrote that she quote out of a malicious mind, simulating a bodily illness. She pretended to be dead, not dreading for the health of her soul, and with the help of numerous of her accomplices evildoers with malice aforethought crafted a dummy in the likeness of her body in order to mislead the devoted faithful, and she had no shame in procuring its burial the sacred space amongst the religious of that place. He later described it as a scandal of all of her order. So in the reporting about this, Professor Sarah Rees Jones described this as being like a Monty Python sketch. And so far no one has found an update about the resolution to all of this. We don't know what happened with jan of Leeds or what happened with the rest of her orders. Mystery. I hope she had a very fun life. According to a paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, iron age celts in southern France may have tried to embalm decapitated heads. They came to this conclusion while studying skull fragments that dated back to the third century b C. With the fragments likely coming from people who were decapitated after having been killed in battle. They found traces of resin that are not present in animal skulls from the area, suggesting that the resident was applied intentionally, probably to try to slow down the decay process. These skull fragments were also found within the walls of a compound, so they suspect that this was done for the fort's own warriors as a mark of respect, maybe to display them, not to preserve the skulls for display outside as a warning to their enemies. I guess maybe if you were really into it, you might preserve your enemies skulls and hang them inside to look upon them in victory things. Just a little. Let's preserve this head and keep it indoors all I can think of his future AMAS Head museum. Yeah, where they just keep heads alive so that you could talk to former presidents. Uh. We are once again moving into a new area of discussion. Now we are to a fan favorite, which is shipwrecks. Yep, who doesn't love a shipwreck story? Uh? An anchor off the coast of Cornwall, maybe from the Merchant Royal, which was a ship that wrecked in the seventeenth century and is described as the most valuable shipwreck of all time. A fishing vessel called the Spirit and Lady caught the anchor while trawling separately, Alexandria University's Archaeological Mission found several submerged anchors off the coast of Egypt, as well a shipwreck found off the Mediterranean coast of Egypt in what was the sunken port city of what I think is pronounced Sonus Heracleon, that is a guess, has confirmed herodotus description of a type of boat known as a barrass. These ships were used to sail along the Nile, and Herodotus wrote a lengthy description of them and their construction in his history. He said that they were using planks arranged like bricks and connected with tenens, with beams stretched over the planks, with a rudder and keel, and the whole thing made waterproof with papyrus. So he wrote this description about twenty five hundred years ago, But this is the first time anybody has found the exact type of vessel that he was talking about. I don't know if anybody is super doubted whether he was being truthful in this account of boats. There are plenty of questions and Herodotus history, but it was nice to have it validated. In other news, and astrolabe was pulled up for the wreck of the Esmerelda, one of Vasco da Gama ships. In this year. It was confirmed to be the oldest astrolabe ever found. Da Gama had left the Esmerelda off the coast of Portugal in fifteen o three, and the ship later sank in a storm. This astrolabe was so warned by the time it was discovered that it's markings were no longer visible to the naked eye. It just looks like kind of a corroded disc, so it took laser scanning and the construction of a three D model to actually confirm what it was. A whole bunch of shipping containers fell off a ship in the North Sea at the beginning of this year. Some of those contained hazardous materials and the area is ecologically delicate, so salvage crews got to work trying to track them all down, and they wound up finding a shipwreck that dates back to fifteen forty and is described as Dutch maritime histories missing link because it represents a bridge between medieval maritime technology and the Dutch Golden Age. This is at least fifty years older than the previous oldest Dutch ship, and researchers are hoping to use it to learn more about how Dutch maritime technology evolved. An ancient shipwreck off the coast of Greece has been opened up as a public underwater museum. And it's not all that uncommon for shipwrecks to become dive sites. I mean, we talked about beer brought up from a shipwreck earlier in the show, but this is the first ancient shipwreck in Greece to be open to the public. It's a ship that went down in the late fifth century BC, so it's very old. It was carrying a huge load of m for a filled with wine. So divers can see the remains of the ship and these jars that are all over the sea floor, plus of course the sea life that makes its home there now and then our last thing is just a cool thing that Tracy found and I love it. I thought you might. Archaeologists from Washington State University have found what they believe is North of America's oldest tattoo tool. It dates back about two thousand years to the ancestral Puebloans in what is now you Tom and it is made of a suma candle, yucca leaves and cactus spines, and those cactus spines are stained black at the tips. Yeah, I wonder what that tattoo was. It's a good question, um, and that has been unearthed for July. We'll have some more unearthed in the fall. See how it goes in terms of having them more than twice a year. Yeah, and in the meantime while we ponder what that could be like. Uh, do you have listener mail for us? I do. It is another listener mail about Tiffany stained Glass. And so this is from Nathaniel, who says, Hi, Holly and Tracy, I'm a longtime listener, first time writer. I just listened to your recent podcast on hap shuts It. I was aware of her existence, but not much more than that, and I'm amazed at how much more there is to know about her and the mystery of poot. Thank you. The reason I'm writing, though, is the letter you read at the end of that episode from a listener and stained glass artisan, Christopher. I loved hearing what Christopher wrote, and I wanted to add more information in that vein. I'm also a great fan of Tiffany stained Glass put me down as another plus one request for an episode on that or an adjacent topic, and wanted to let you know about an even bigger Tiffany Treasure Trove close by. I'd like to thank Christopher for having so many teas in that sentence. The Church of the Covenant, at the corner of Berkeley and Newberry Streets, just one block away from the Arlington Street church in Boston, which Christopher named in his letter, has not only an enormous intact collection of Tiffany stained glass, the church sanctuaries whole interior design was entirely done by Tiffany to coordinate with the windows, and includes an enormous Tiffany chandelier that was displayed at the Chicago World's Fair. It's the largest surviving church that Tiffany ever did unchanged since completion apart from maintenance, and is now a National Historic Landmark Tracy. Since you're a fellow Boston area local, you might want to know there are open tours of Sanctuary offered in season most days. If you want to do you an episode on Tiffany or stained Glass, I'm happy to put you in touch with someone at the Church of the Covenant if you'd like. Although not a frequent churchgoer, I grew up attending Covenant and married there a few years ago, and I'm still a member. I would be thrilled to be helpful to you. Then Nathaniel passes on uh topic suggestion about the invention and history of pipe organs, which is also really fascinating, and then concludes, I love the podcast and love history. Thank you for helping me discover fascinating kidds knowledge about the world. You make me a better and more nuanced person. Warm regards, Nathaniel, Thank you so much, Nathaniel. Um, Yeah, there is a surprising amount of Tiffany Glass and Tiffany designed stuff in Boston and I'm sure in a lot of other cities too. Uh. The way back when we first talked about Tiffany Stained Glass on the show, one of the things that I had stumbled across in very short succession was that a whole building that was originally designed, the interior design was all done by Tiffany, and there's this huge restoration project going on because it's a building that changed hands a lot of times, so unlike this church. Uh, like a bunch of stuff is covered over and moved around, and they've been trying to put it back to what it used to look like. So there's just there's so much. So thank you Nathaniel for that note and to everybody who has sent us lots of email lately if you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast. Where a history podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and then we're all over social media at miss in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram. You can also come to our website missed in History dot com and find show notes for all the episodes Holly and I have ever worked on together. This one includes the links to the original stories for all of these things that were unearthed. You can also find a searchable five it every episode ever and then up at the top of the page where it says live shows, you can see information about our upcoming live shows and tour, and you can subscribe to our show in Apple Podcasts, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you get more podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radios 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, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying and it's time for Unearthed and July Part two. We got a lot of the favorite things in this edition, including the edibles and potables, and the shipwrecks and just some weird stuff. Is all grouped together because it was all kind of odd, uh, and some other assorted findings. I think weird stuff is a great category, but we are going to start with edibles and potables. A team in Manti in Sri Lanka believes that they have found the world's oldest clove, estimated to be one thousand years old. There have been other clove discoveries that were older than that, but at this point they're believed to be misidentifications. Clothes are not native to Sri Lanka, though they grow in the Maluku Islands, which are about four thousand miles away. So this is not just the oldest clove, but it's also evidence of a wide ranging trade in spices that dates back at least one thousand years, and this is supported by peppercorns of about the same age found at the same site, which probably came from the Indian subcontinent. Archaeologists in China's Jangsu Province found a jar full of eggs in a year old tomb, and that led newspapers around the world to make a lot of jokes about thousand year eggs, also known as century eggs. These were just eggs. They were in very good condition considering their age. Only one of them was obviously broken, although the team did report that the material inside the eggs would have been largely decomposed by now. They planned to conduct some X ray studies to determine exactly how many eggs were in this jar, because they were way too delicate to handle without the risk of damaging them. They are not certain why the eggs were placed in the tomb, whether this was an offering or if it was more of a symbol of reverse or whether the deceased just really liked eggs and wanted to make sure that they had some eggs in the afterlife. I want eggs in the afterlife. Researchers in St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands now believe that the presence of very small snail and clam shells and archaeological sites there are evidence of children helping their parents gather food through foraging. Previously, the conclusion had been that these types of shells were evidence of people who were really close to starvation and we're just eating whatever they could find. But this team looked at shell midden's dating back to about sixteen hundred years ago and concluded that the adult foragers were focusing on large shellfish that were really worth their time and effort to crack into, while the children were picking up whatever they found that was small enough for them to handle easily. This is all sort of speculative, but it's also similar to research taking place with current populations of islands in the Pacific, where four patterns have been the same for generations and where children routinely gather with their parents moving on to some other food stuffs. A team excavating a construction site in Ontario, Canada found some charred keenewa seeds from a species of the plant that was native to eastern North America but is extinct today. These seeds date back to around nine hundred b C, which isn't the oldest keenewa seed ever, but it is the farthest north that they have been found that far back in history by a lot. The previous northernmost example of this kina was from Kentucky, and then the next oldest crop found in this part of Ontario is corn that dated back to five d b C, so four hundred years younger. This is technically find The seeds themselves were unearthed in but the excavation they were part of had collected one hundred forty thousand of them and most of them were charred, so it took years to go through all of them to find out what was what, So it was late when the findings on this were published. Today people think of keenoas coming from South America, and it does, but this is a species of food crop that was living at the time in what's now Kentucky, Illinois, and Arkansas. In similar news, a team of researchers from universities and institutions in the US, the UK, China, and Lithuania has cross referenced the findings of hundreds of studies of charred food crops like rice, millet, wheat, and barley to create a massive map of how these foods moved around the prehistoric world and what they found was that these staple foods moved a very long way between eight thousand and fifteen hundred BC, so I wouldn't necessarily put all of that into the prehistoric bucket. Wheat and barley were carried from southwest Asia into Europe, China, and the Indian subcontinent. Rice spread across much of Asia. Millet and sorgham originated in western Africa but moved to the eastern and sub Saharan part of the continent, as well as across the Indian Ocean, and then different types of millets started out in Eastern Asia and moved west all the way to Europe. Basically, although people might imagine that food became more globalized after Europeans started traveling to North America, that whole thing really started much much earlier, with ordinary farmers trying new crops and strategies just to get enough food. Now we have several things about beer. Researchers in Peru are crediting a beer like beverage called Chicha with keeping the Warri civilization stable in that part of the continent from about six hundred to eleven CE. This team has done research into pottery and the residues within the pottery vessels and suggests that these pots in the ticha that was being made, they're all being made locally, with people traveling to what was essentially a tap room for festivals and for more casual gatherings. The beverage was also made with drought resistant pepper berries, which would have helped ensure a steady supply of beer even when other ingredients are much harder to grow. A lot of headlines about this was like the secret to a long lived society is plenty of beer. In other beer news, in six the s s Oregon sank off Long Island. There were no fatalities, but sadly a load of beer went down with the ship. And this year a diver brought three bottles back up from the bottom and gave one of those bottles to serious brewing company who planned to see if they could extract living yeast from it, and the diver was one of the brewery's regular customers. Staff at the brewery also tasted this beer, just a few drops of it. According to the breweries owner of Bill Felter, quote, it was nasty. I mean, I feel like we could have said that without tasting it, but that's just probably um. A few days after the story broke about Sirius Brewing's plan to brew shipwreck beer, another story made their rounds that St. James Brewery and whole Brook, Long Island had already been making beer with yeast extracted from a bottle from that same wreck for at least a year. That beer uses both the shipwreck yeast and the modern string sane An owner brewer Jamie Adams, was at the time planning a beer with only yeast from the wreck to debut at the New York State Brewers Fest. So after getting this news that another brewery had already been doing the thing he planned to do, Felter shelved his plans to make a similar beer, not of respect for Adams having done it already. Basically, the two New York brewers were trying not to horn in on each other's beers. This seems like a pretty amicable resolution, especially since at first Adams thought about filing a season desist over it. So hooray for brewers being cool. Yeah, it's a whole saga about this shipwreck beer. Uh. And in one last piece of beer news, scientists in Israel have extracted yeast from a pottery that was up to five thousand years old, and they've used that to brew beer. We got a note about this one from listener Shatta, who mentioned that the yeast had come from an archaeological fine we had talked about an unearthed in I think that's actually a much older find. The pottery that we talked about in that particular thing was much older. But it's totally possible that we did talk about the same find at somewhere in a previous unearthed, because when I looked at I was just keyword searching the past scripts for the word beer. We've talked about beer, and almost all of them I'm I'm waiting for the giant vodka discovery. So since I'm not really a beer drinker. Um, okay, so this next one is not exactly about food, but bear with us. There is a lot of variety and human speech, but a prevailing theory has been that most speech sounds have existed for most of human history, not really changing all that much. So even though some sounds like m are common in much of the world, while others like the clicking sounds in some African languages are more localized, that all of these specific sounds have actually stayed pretty much the same over time, But there's some new research from the University of Zurich and two Max Planck Institutes that suggests, maybe not hypothesizing, that some sounds like and are relatively new and they only came about as the shape of our human palet changed, with the changes of the palette coming along with changes to what we eat. So basically, early humans had a diet that was full of tough foods that were difficult to chew, so by the time people reached adulthood, their upper and lower teeth meant edge to edge. But over time people started eating softer foods, shifting their palette so that they had a slight overbite with their upper front teeth slightly in front of the lower ones most of the time, and that may have made it possible for languages to start including sounds known as labya dentals, in which your lower lip touches your upper teeth. These sounds exist in about half of languages worldwide, and they're especially prevalent in European languages, apparently rising with advances in milling and other technologies that helped people produce softer foods. These aren't the first researchers to suggest this connection, but earlier linguists have been a lot more cautious that this could just be a correlation rather in a causation. And now we're going to take a quick break so Tracy and I can make lots of weird noises with our mouths and figure out what we're doing and if that is Palette related through history, we'll be back at just a moment. Okay, we have a couple or three discoveries coming up that basically confirm existing oral histories. First up, archaeologists in Nova Scotia have been using ground penetrating radar to try to confirm whether Fort Ann is the site of an Acadian burial ground. There's a known British cemetery at that site, but it's also believed that there are at least two thousand Acadian people buried there as well, without any sort of marker remaining for them. Preliminary evidence suggests that this is the case. This radar study found very regularly spaced disturbances that were arranged in lines at the same depth every time, So if this is accurate, it would confirm the Acadian belief that they have ancestors buried at Fort Anne. This ground penetrating radar work really happened at the end of December, but it was just making news at the start of this year. And I'll also note that we do have the Acadian expulsion on the idealist for a future episode. Don't know when it will happen. Archaeologists have confirmed the oral histories of the Lake Bebean First Nation in northern British Columbia, Canada, something the nation had asked to have done. According to the nation's oral history, there were fishing villages along the shores of Lake Bebing before the arrival of European colonists in the area. The team found evidence of these villages, one of them quite large, along with wooden fishing weirs which would have been used to catch sakey salmon. And in our last confirmation, researchers have also discovered that First Nations people in the northwestern coast of North America were farming clams for about three thousand years, longer than previously thought, and that study had focused on claim and beds that had been recorded in native oral histories. We are now moving on to one of my favorite things art, in this case cave art and rock art Uh there's a massive collection of witch marks in a limestone gorge called Creswell Craigs in East Midlands. In the UK, staff knew there were some kind of markings down there, but they didn't really know much about them, and they described them to visitors as Victorian graffiti. But a couple of cavers remarked on them last year, leading experts to take a closer look. What they found was not the two or three markings that they were kind of expecting. There were as many as a thousand marks. These were meant as wards against evil. They included marks that looked like a V to stand for the Virgin Mary, and shapes that look like crosses, and the letters PM, which stands for pot Maria. These types of marks were common in the area from the sixteenth through the nineteen centuries, although it's not completely clear exactly when these particular marks were made or exactly what people were hoping to keep out or for that matter, in by making these marks. Yeah, these are these are the sorts of marks that you were really see in a lot of places, like not just in the UK, if you go to um Old like colonial era homes in North America, A lot of times there are vs and crosses and things in places that were meant a word evil away. This is just an astoundingly large collection of them. Uh, And I am really curious of Like, did you think there was a hell mouth down there? What was happening? Researchers have also recorded and interpreted a set of Cherokee inscriptions in Manitou Cave in Alabama. The first of these inscriptions dates back to April of eighteen twenty eight, so that was just a few years before the Cherokee and other native people's were removed from the area under the Indian Removal activate teen thirty, and also just three years after the Cherokee adopted the Cherokee syllabary as a system of writing for the Cherokee language. The inscriptions in the cave document things like a stickball game and the religious ceremony surrounding it. Stickball is not a simple sport, it has important ritual significance within Cherokee culture and religion, and there are also inscriptions on the ceiling of the cave written backwards as if the reader is somewhere within the rock. So this research team included European Americans as well as members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, the United Katua Band of Cherokees, and the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and they all work together to determine both how to interpret what the inscriptions mean and to decide what should and shouldn't be published in academic works, and some of these inscriptions were just not meant to be read beyond the Cherokee. This work was also important because there's not a lot of archaeological evidence of a Cherokee presence in the area. The cave became a tourist attraction in and other physical connections to the Cherokee were removed or destroyed at that time. Moving on, archaeologists studying indigenous petroglyphs in Australia have discovered the crews of nineteenth century whaling ships added their own carvings to the same area as well, sometimes right on top of the existing indigenous art. Some of the carvings in the Damp Year Archipelago are up to fifty thousand years old, and the whalers additions are from eighteen forty one and eighteen forty nine. The team found carvings from crew members of the Connecticut and the Delta, both of which were whalers that hailed from the United States. It's not clear whether the whaling crews interacted with the local population at all, or what their motivations were for choosing these particular carving sites. It could have been an intentional signal of disrespect, or they could have just thought they were adding graffiti to a place that already had a lot of graffiti on it. This particular study also noted that the interactions between these whaling crews and the indigenous people of Australia is something that warrants for their study because in a lot of places it's not clear whether anybody came ashore, whether they had any contact with anyone. But it's also clear that the native people knew that there were quailers off the coast of Australia up so there's lots of room for more work to be done. Moving on. A team has determined that cave art found in the Balkan Peninsula in is the peninsula's oldest known figurative cave art, so that oldest known designation is what happened this year. The paintings date back about thirty four thousand years and they include a bison and ibis and what maybe human figures. Researchers at the University of Barcelona have also found a piece of Paleolithic art carved into limestone that they're describing as a very early example of narrative art. The pieces about twelve thousand, five hundred years old and appears to depict two people chasing two birds, which appear to be an adult and a young crane. There are only three scenes found in Paleolithic art so far that depict humans alongside birds. So next up we have a whole collection of findings that in some way are connected to like a technological acronym, so it's things like DNA and CT scans and lighter stuff like that. First up, researchers used DNA analysis to study some chewed up pieces of pitch that were unearthed in western Sweden back in the nineteen eighties. These were about eight thousand years old and at the time they were being used to make weapons, so people would heat up this pitch and then chew on it to make it really soft and sticky, and then use little bits of it to do things like attached points to weapon shafts. The DNA analysis suggested that three different people had chewed on this pitch, two female and one male, and they may have been quite young, based on the size of the tooth impressions, as young as five years old. But they did not find any weapons that were made with this particular pitch, so it's possible that they were just kids chewing on the same stuff used to make weapons, and we're not weapon makers. Them Elves and another discovery. In previous installments of Unearthed, we have talked about vikings a lot, and we have also talked about horse burials a lot, and now we have both at the same time. We knew that Viking warriors were often buried with their horses, and now, thanks to DNA evidence, we know that most of the Viking warriors were mail and so were the horses that were buried with them. Of the nineteen horses that were studied in this particular project, eighteen of them were male. All of them appeared to be healthy and well cared for before being killed, apparently for the purpose of the burial. In researchers performed CT scans on a group of mummies at a hospital in Madrid. This year, They announced their findings that one of them was a priest named Nespamdo who was paraoh Ptolemy the seconds eye Doctor, possibly also Ptolemy the Third's eye doctor, although that is a matter of dispute uh and they made this conclusion based on a collection of plaques from within the bandages, one of which was thought God of eye doctors. He has a designation because of a story within the mythology of replacing somebody's eye after it was not God, I think in battle. In previous installments of Unearthed, we have talked about the use of ground penetrating radar and other non invasive technologies which has led to the discovery of massive cities and buried structures in South America and in Europe. Similar discoveries have also been happening in Africa, where light our scans in a South African nature preserve have pinpointed the location of the city of Quinning, which thrived from the fourteen hundreds until the late nineteenth century. It's basic location was already known, but this pinpointed it more specifically, and this new study also suggests that it had about three times as many buildings as previously thought. It's likely that the city was composed of between eight hundred and nine hundred walled compounds housing as many as ten thousand people. A team from the University of Cincinnati have discovered evidence that suggests that the Maya did more than a subsistence level of farming, growing a surplus of things like cotton to trade all around the Yucatan Peninsula. This research has involved satellite imaging and light our studies that have revealed drainage and irrigation systems along with Rhodes. In the words of Nicholas Dunning, a professor of geography who was part of this research team, quote, it was a much more complex market economy than the Maya are often given credit for. And last we have a little lengthier fine. DNA testing has been conducted on the remains of Casimir Pulaski. Pulaski was an immigrant from Poland to North America. He became a general in George Washington's Continental Army. He's considered now to be a war hero in both Poland and in the United States. Scientists who examined his skeleton a couple of decades ago found that his pelvis looked more like what they would expect on a female skeleton. They were surprised enough by the pelvis's appearance that they wondered whether his bones had been replaced with someone else's. At the time, they planned to compare DNA from the remains to Pulaski's living grand niece, but the technology in n was not yet advanced enough to give a truly conclusive answer. That is not the case today, and this year researchers concluded that yes, the bones really are Pulaski's. So this evidence also suggests that Pulaski may have been intersex or had physical traits that don't clearly fit into a binary of male and female. So in Pulaski's case, this includes that his bone structure appeared more female, while he also had male pattern baldness and facial hair. Facial hair is not an exclusively male trait, but his pattern of facial hair was definitely more masculine. This news led to a number of articles suggesting that Pulaski might have been female, or that we might need to refer to him with she her pronouns instead of male pronouns, but that also doesn't really match up what we know of Pulaski's life. He was recorded as a boy when he was baptized, and he really doesn't seemed to have gone outside the gender norms for men during his life. If he or his family thought anything was unusual about his body, that is not recorded anywhere. So taking all of our cues from Pulaski himself, he remains the right pronoun. Yeah. We we should not reassign people's pronouns based on DNA evidence contrary to how they actually lived. Uh. This was also part of a Smithsonian Channel documentary, which, to be clear, I have not watched. I don't know what all it says in there. It's called America's Hidden Stories. The general was female question mark and maybe we will have an episode about Pulaski at some point in the future. Yeah, he seems really interesting. Um. This research is also really interesting, and it's also always interesting to have another potentially intersex person um in our library of episodes. And the last bit before we take a break isn't directly related to Casimir Pulaski, but it does follow on with this practice of trying to figure out sex and gender based on a person's remains, and the idea of researchers figuring out a person's sex based on their skeletal remains. It's come up pretty frequently on our Unearthed episodes and in other episodes of the show, but this is a really difficult task in cultures that practice cremation. In a paper published in January, Claudio Cavazouti of Durham University discusses analyzing the cremated remains of a hundred and twenty four people which were buried along with gendered grave goods, as in, a grave containing weapons probably belonged to a man, and a grave containing a yarn spindle was probably a woman's. They cross referenced twenty four different skeletal traits with the goods those remains were buried with to see if they could find anything that seemed to predict gender. Out of these twenty four traits, eight of them predicted the grave goods gender with an accuracy rate of about eighty percent or better, which is comparable with the methods that are used to evaluate uncremated remains. So measurement of specific parts of the bones like the thigh, the upper arm, the jaw, and the big toe, among others, seemed to correlate with the grave goods. Even after the body had been cremated, there is still a lot of room for uncertainty in this though. It all rests on the assumption that a society had very clear gender roles in which people did not really deviate from those roles, and that people's grave goods were closely connected to their gender. It also assumes that there's a close correlation between gender and sex, and in the words of a press release on this discovery, quote anatomical sex determination is possible in cremated remains, though they caution that the measurements identified in this study differ from those used to sex modern cremated remains, indicating that sexually diagnostic traits differ between populations across time and space, but it is still an interesting potential new source of data. Now we're gonna take a quick sponsor break before getting into some other things. Next up, we have a whole collection of things that were repatriated or returned to where they came from. First up, art Detective Arthur Brand returned to Spanish reliefs that were at least a thousand years old, handing them over to two officers and two museum curators at the Spanish Embassy in London. These reliefs had been stolen from the Santa Maria de Lara church in northern Spain in two thousand four, and then a British couple bought them, having no idea what they are or that they had been stolen. The British Library returned three historic documents that had been removed from a Greek monastery in nineteen nine. Authorities in Greece had traced the illegally traffic documents to the British Library, which immediately returned the documents through the Greek embassy in London. And another similar story, a Bible that was stolen out of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and then nineties was found in a museum in the Netherlands and returned. The Bible was four hundred four years old and it's theft had gone unnoticed for several years until auditors surveyed the rare Books room where it was housed. There were three hundred fourteen books missing from this room, allegedly thanks to library archivist Gregory Prior and Caliban bookshop owner John Schulman, who were in on the job together. It appears that the criminal case so the two of them, is ongoing. Yeah, as as I was looking at this, there was there were a lot of indictments and hearings and things like that, and it doesn't appear that there have been convictions or acquittals yet unless I missed something. This is not the only huge document or book theft that we have to talk about, because in similar news, in the nineteen forties, Harold E. Perry, who was a clerk in the Massachusetts State Archives, meticulously stole an extensive collection of historical documents and then covered his acts by destroying the records of those documents in the archive catalog. This is just evil archivists day. A lot of these letters were kept in a bound book, and he also clipped out the index page of the book that listed the documents. His crime came to light, and he was arrested in nineteen fifty and he received a suspended sentence in exchange for helping track down the material that he had stolen and then sold. Last year, authorities tracked down one of the documents, a letter from Alexander Hamilton's to the Marquis de Lafayette written in seventeen eighty during the Revolutionary War. The FBI ultimately seized the letter from an auction house in late and in May of this year, the U s Attorney filed a forfeiture complaint in Federal court to try to get the letter back into the Commonwealth archive. That process seems to still be ongoing. A relief found in Australia's Macquarie Museum has been repatriated to Egypt after it was discovered that the piece had been sled out of Egypt in the nineteen nineties. The fragment was initially unearthed in the nineteen seventies or eighties, but then officials at the storehouse where it was being kept discovered that it was missing. In Now we're shifting gears to talk about the remains of people, and in April, Germany began the process of returning the remains of Aboriginal people to Australia. These remains had been removed from Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The April ceremony was the first of several, described by Australia's Minister for Communications as quote the largest number of ancestors returned from Germany to date in Australia. Attempts will be made to confirm the identity of each so they can be returned to the appropriate people, and for one last gear shift in this section. In opposite news to all of that, and April, Greek President pro Copus Pavlopolis called for the British Museum to return a collection of two thousand, five hundred year old sculptures known as the Parthenon Marbles, which were removed from Greece by Lord elgin In and are now in the collection of the British Museum. So Greece has been requesting for these marbles to be returned since it became independent in eighteen thirty two, and this is also a developing story, with protests taking place over it at the British Museum in June. The museum has maintained that these were acquired through a legal agreement with the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Greece at the time, and has so far returned refused to return the marbles. Now we're doing a bigger gear shift to kind of nuttier topics. Yeah, this was just the stuff that was just weird. It goes together because it's weird. The Calby potato chip factory. So there's your clue. We're really shifting gears at this point. In Hong Kong has been using French potatoes to make its chips, and one of its shipments earlier this year contained not a potato but an unexploded World War One hand grenade. It's a fine how do you do? Uh? The grenade had been discharged, but it had not been detonated, and then it probably just lay in a field until it was accidentally dug up along with potatoes. A bomb squad detonated it on site. No one was injured, and then the news reports called it a bomb to tear, which is great. Yes, if you do not speak French, a pum to tear is what you call a potato. It means apple of the earth, yep. But this is a bomb to tear. I'm not usually really into the puns, but the fact that this one combined the French that delighted me. A plumber and machine operator in Aubourg, Denmark pulled a medieval sword out of the ground in February, having just found it on the job. The Historical Museum of Northern Jutland was called in and identified the sword as probably dating back to the fourteenth century. They noted that it was very well made and was the type of item that normally would have been buried with the person who owned it, so they speculated that it may have been lost during a battle and then it just stayed where it fell for the centuries that followed. This is not the first just discovered sword that we've talked about, but it's been a while since we had one that wasn't in a lake. A team at the University of York has unearthed an account of a nun faking her death to escape the convents. The register that contained this account was in the archive the whole time, so the book itself was not lost, but this was part of a marginal note in one of them, so somebody had to actually read all the scribbling to get to it. It dates back to thirteen eighteen. Archbishop William Melton wrote the nun Joan of Leeds was after quote the way of carnal lust, but really that may have just meant that she wanted to leave the religious life behind and get married. He wrote that she quote out of a malicious mind, simulating a bodily illness. She pretended to be dead, not dreading for the health of her soul, and with the help of numerous of her accomplices evildoers with malice aforethought crafted a dummy in the likeness of her body in order to mislead the devoted faithful, and she had no shame in procuring its burial the sacred space amongst the religious of that place. He later described it as a scandal of all of her order. So in the reporting about this, Professor Sarah Rees Jones described this as being like a Monty Python sketch. And so far no one has found an update about the resolution to all of this. We don't know what happened with jan of Leeds or what happened with the rest of her orders. Mystery. I hope she had a very fun life. According to a paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, iron age celts in southern France may have tried to embalm decapitated heads. They came to this conclusion while studying skull fragments that dated back to the third century b C. With the fragments likely coming from people who were decapitated after having been killed in battle. They found traces of resin that are not present in animal skulls from the area, suggesting that the resident was applied intentionally, probably to try to slow down the decay process. These skull fragments were also found within the walls of a compound, so they suspect that this was done for the fort's own warriors as a mark of respect, maybe to display them, not to preserve the skulls for display outside as a warning to their enemies. I guess maybe if you were really into it, you might preserve your enemies skulls and hang them inside to look upon them in victory things. Just a little. Let's preserve this head and keep it indoors all I can think of his future AMAS Head museum. Yeah, where they just keep heads alive so that you could talk to former presidents. Uh. We are once again moving into a new area of discussion. Now we are to a fan favorite, which is shipwrecks. Yep, who doesn't love a shipwreck story? Uh? An anchor off the coast of Cornwall, maybe from the Merchant Royal, which was a ship that wrecked in the seventeenth century and is described as the most valuable shipwreck of all time. A fishing vessel called the Spirit and Lady caught the anchor while trawling separately, Alexandria University's Archaeological Mission found several submerged anchors off the coast of Egypt, as well a shipwreck found off the Mediterranean coast of Egypt in what was the sunken port city of what I think is pronounced Sonus Heracleon, that is a guess, has confirmed herodotus description of a type of boat known as a barrass. These ships were used to sail along the Nile, and Herodotus wrote a lengthy description of them and their construction in his history. He said that they were using planks arranged like bricks and connected with tenens, with beams stretched over the planks, with a rudder and keel, and the whole thing made waterproof with papyrus. So he wrote this description about twenty five hundred years ago, But this is the first time anybody has found the exact type of vessel that he was talking about. I don't know if anybody is super doubted whether he was being truthful in this account of boats. There are plenty of questions and Herodotus history, but it was nice to have it validated. In other news, and astrolabe was pulled up for the wreck of the Esmerelda, one of Vasco da Gama ships. In this year. It was confirmed to be the oldest astrolabe ever found. Da Gama had left the Esmerelda off the coast of Portugal in fifteen o three, and the ship later sank in a storm. This astrolabe was so warned by the time it was discovered that it's markings were no longer visible to the naked eye. It just looks like kind of a corroded disc, so it took laser scanning and the construction of a three D model to actually confirm what it was. A whole bunch of shipping containers fell off a ship in the North Sea at the beginning of this year. Some of those contained hazardous materials and the area is ecologically delicate, so salvage crews got to work trying to track them all down, and they wound up finding a shipwreck that dates back to fifteen forty and is described as Dutch maritime histories missing link because it represents a bridge between medieval maritime technology and the Dutch Golden Age. This is at least fifty years older than the previous oldest Dutch ship, and researchers are hoping to use it to learn more about how Dutch maritime technology evolved. An ancient shipwreck off the coast of Greece has been opened up as a public underwater museum. And it's not all that uncommon for shipwrecks to become dive sites. I mean, we talked about beer brought up from a shipwreck earlier in the show, but this is the first ancient shipwreck in Greece to be open to the public. It's a ship that went down in the late fifth century BC, so it's very old. It was carrying a huge load of m for a filled with wine. So divers can see the remains of the ship and these jars that are all over the sea floor, plus of course the sea life that makes its home there now and then our last thing is just a cool thing that Tracy found and I love it. I thought you might. Archaeologists from Washington State University have found what they believe is North of America's oldest tattoo tool. It dates back about two thousand years to the ancestral Puebloans in what is now you Tom and it is made of a suma candle, yucca leaves and cactus spines, and those cactus spines are stained black at the tips. Yeah, I wonder what that tattoo was. It's a good question, um, and that has been unearthed for July. We'll have some more unearthed in the fall. See how it goes in terms of having them more than twice a year. Yeah, and in the meantime while we ponder what that could be like. Uh, do you have listener mail for us? I do. It is another listener mail about Tiffany stained Glass. And so this is from Nathaniel, who says, Hi, Holly and Tracy, I'm a longtime listener, first time writer. I just listened to your recent podcast on hap shuts It. I was aware of her existence, but not much more than that, and I'm amazed at how much more there is to know about her and the mystery of poot. Thank you. The reason I'm writing, though, is the letter you read at the end of that episode from a listener and stained glass artisan, Christopher. I loved hearing what Christopher wrote, and I wanted to add more information in that vein. I'm also a great fan of Tiffany stained Glass put me down as another plus one request for an episode on that or an adjacent topic, and wanted to let you know about an even bigger Tiffany Treasure Trove close by. I'd like to thank Christopher for having so many teas in that sentence. The Church of the Covenant, at the corner of Berkeley and Newberry Streets, just one block away from the Arlington Street church in Boston, which Christopher named in his letter, has not only an enormous intact collection of Tiffany stained glass, the church sanctuaries whole interior design was entirely done by Tiffany to coordinate with the windows, and includes an enormous Tiffany chandelier that was displayed at the Chicago World's Fair. It's the largest surviving church that Tiffany ever did unchanged since completion apart from maintenance, and is now a National Historic Landmark Tracy. Since you're a fellow Boston area local, you might want to know there are open tours of Sanctuary offered in season most days. If you want to do you an episode on Tiffany or stained Glass, I'm happy to put you in touch with someone at the Church of the Covenant if you'd like. Although not a frequent churchgoer, I grew up attending Covenant and married there a few years ago, and I'm still a member. I would be thrilled to be helpful to you. Then Nathaniel passes on uh topic suggestion about the invention and history of pipe organs, which is also really fascinating, and then concludes, I love the podcast and love history. Thank you for helping me discover fascinating kidds knowledge about the world. You make me a better and more nuanced person. Warm regards, Nathaniel, Thank you so much, Nathaniel. Um, Yeah, there is a surprising amount of Tiffany Glass and Tiffany designed stuff in Boston and I'm sure in a lot of other cities too. Uh. The way back when we first talked about Tiffany Stained Glass on the show, one of the things that I had stumbled across in very short succession was that a whole building that was originally designed, the interior design was all done by Tiffany, and there's this huge restoration project going on because it's a building that changed hands a lot of times, so unlike this church. Uh, like a bunch of stuff is covered over and moved around, and they've been trying to put it back to what it used to look like. So there's just there's so much. So thank you Nathaniel for that note and to everybody who has sent us lots of email lately if you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast. Where a history podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and then we're all over social media at miss in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram. You can also come to our website missed in History dot com and find show notes for all the episodes Holly and I have ever worked on together. This one includes the links to the original stories for all of these things that were unearthed. You can also find a searchable five it every episode ever and then up at the top of the page where it says live shows, you can see information about our upcoming live shows and tour, and you can subscribe to our show in Apple Podcasts, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you get more podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radios 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.