Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly fry. Hey, it's time for Unearthed that because we started doing this quarterly, and it's a strange and interesting thing because it feels a little weird to do something that's just part of the normal calendar right now. So we're recording this just as a random note. Stuff is moving so fast in the world right now. We are recording this on April seven, and I don't think it's coming out until two weeks after this approximately, So Heaven only knows what will be discovered between now and this well, and also who really knows what will be happening in the world when this comes out on I think apod like it's it's a it seems like a million years from now the fastest things have been going. Um, that's aside from what I was really going to say, which is that when we do these episodes, some of the things that we are talking about our discoveries that literally just happened. They happened just now, They were announced right away. Sometimes it is published findings from digs that happened months or years earlier, or analysis of something that has happened a long time ago but only studied recently, just like the paper is what has recently happened. Either way, it seems likely at this point that when we get to July, our middle of the year Unearthed, which has been a two parter for the last couple of years, might have a little less to report given the coronavirus pandemic. So I'm just gonna enjoy this wealth of Unearthed things while we have it. Uh. In today's episode, we have some stuff that was reported during the last two weeks, of which missed the cut off for the year end Unearthed episodes. We also have some episode updates, some crime, animals and games, and the next time we're gonna have the Edibles and potables and the shipwrecks and their repatriations, along with other stuff. Kicking off with stuff that really came from the tail end of twenty nineteen, Brian Furry, archival researcher for the Making Gay History podcast Unearthed, what maybe the oldest audio recording ever made of activists Marcia P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. It's an interview conducted in nineteen seventy by Liza Cowen of the New York City radio station w b AI, when Rivera was nineteen and Johnson was just. The tape containing this interview was in the basement of the Lesbian her Story Archives in Brooklyn, New York, and the tape was just smarked STAR that stands for Street Action Transvestite Revolutionaries. That was the name of the organization that Johnson and Rivera founded in nineteen seventy. The interview was released as a bow this episode of the Making Gay History podcast, which is an oral history podcast hosted by Eric Marcus uh. This bonus episode came out on December twenty nineteen that It also includes some conversation with Brian Frey about finding this tape, like the actual process of the unearthing of the tape. We also did an episode on Sylvia Rivero which includes information about Johnson and their work with Star. Underwater archaeological excavations have uncovered the remains of a seven thousand year old sea wall off the coast of Israel. According to a paper called a submerged seven thousand year old village and sea wall demonstrate earliest known coastal defense against sea level rise. Published in December. It is the oldest such structure ever to be discovered, so, based on this team's analysis, Neolithic villagers built this wall, which is about a hundred meters long, using boulders that had to be excavated from riverbeds as far as two kilometers away from the village itself. All of that sounds like just an immense undertaking to me. Unfortunately, this seems to have offered the village only temporary protection. At some point, the village was flooded and abandoned, although it is not clear whether the villagers relocated ahead of the flooding or afterward. And other news, that team at the University of Oregon has concluded that human migration to the Caribbean islands progressed differently than has been previously and generally thought. For a geographical refresher, you can group the islands and the Caribbean very roughly into two groups, the greater Antilles, which are the larger islands like Jamaica, Cuba, and Hispaniola, and then the lesser Antilles, which are the smaller islands that extend generally southward from those larger ones. The prevailing view among most researchers has been that people started settling in the southern part of the Lesser Antilles at the spots that were closest to the South American mainland, and then moved northward from there. This team came to the opposite conclusion that they traveled to the farther away but larger Greater Antilles first and then moved south. They came to these conclusions after reevaluating two thousand, five hundred radio carbon dating results from fifty five Caribbean islands. They also concluded that this migration probably happened in two primary waves, the first one about five thousand, eight hundred years ago and the second only two thousand, five hundred years ago. The team's paper on this was published in the journal Science Advances in December. Natalie Mueller and a team from Washington University in St. Louis has been studying ancient food crops that exist in the archaeological record but have no written or oral histories describing how they were grown and used. In other words, we know these crops existed thanks to archaeological specimens, but we really don't know what it took to cultivate them properly or how people use them for food. Okay, if folks think that all you have to do is stick a seed in the ground and it grows like that works, some seeds definitely not all of them. Uh. And in this case, archaeologists in the nineteen thirties had found seed caches and dried leaves and rock shelters in Arkansas, and these seeds did not represent the maze, squash and beans that are a well known staple of indigenous cuisine in that part of North America. So that left a whole lot of questions about exactly what kind of seeds these were and how people grew and used them before those other three foods became such important staples. After meticulous efforts to get these seeds to germinate and grow, Mueller figured out how to grow to plants goosefoot and erect not weed, and realize that these two plants have a higher yield when they're grown together than they do if one has grown separately from the other. It's possible that they were as important to indigenous diets as maize eventually became. In Mueller's words, quote, the main reason I'm really interested in yield is because there's a debate within archaeology about why these plants were abandoned. We haven't had a lot of evidence about it one way or the other, but a lot of people have just kind of assumed that Maze would be a lot more productive because we grow Maze now and it's known to be one of the most productive crops in the world per unit area. The paper that came from all of this is Experimental Cultivation of Eastern North America's Lost Crops Insights into Agricultural Practice and Yield Potential, and that was published in December in the Journal of Ethnobiology. And for our last unearthed thing, that was really from December. In late December, it was announced that a cord found near the body of Utsi the Iceman was a bowstring made from animal fibers. It's now believed to be the oldest bowstring ever found. So that is both something from late twenty nineteen and are regularly scheduled. That's the update, because there's always something new about Utsi always uh Leutsy is the gifts that keeps on giving. Let's take a quick sponsor b Uh and then we'll do some of the updates of previous episodes. Back in July of twenty nineteen, we did an episode on Thomas Cook and the rise of the tourism industry. Just two months later, the Thomas Cook Group collapsed, leaving travelers stranded around the world. And a question that followed, which is when that happens with a lot of businesses when they go under, especially large businesses that have been around for a really long time, was how to save the company's archive. And this wasn't just about nostalgia for old stuff. Company archives can document not only a company's own history, but also the time and place in which the company operated and its customers and employees. They can be truly immense sources of historical information. In the case of Thomas Cook, that archive included a wealth of written records, passenger lists, brochures, letters, books, and other materials at the company produced. So a panel was convened in November often to figure out what to do with this archive, and in January it was announced that the Thomas Cook Archive would go to the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland. When the announcement was made public, the collection itself had already been moved, so it was accompanied by pictures of like where all the boxes are now? Previous hosts did an episode on Kahokia on June eleven. The general consensus on ka Hokia has been that the Mississippian peoples who built it abandoned it sometime in the mid fourteenth century, and that it remained abandoned from that point. However, according to a study published in the journal American Antiquity, while the Mississippian peoples who had lived on the site did abandon it around that time, it was repopulated in the fifteen hundreds, with people continuing to be present there for at least two hundred more years. These conclusions were based on analysis of things like fossil, pollen, char coal, and fecal remnants. Particularly important to this work, we're fecal standals from the sediment at the bottom of Horseshoe Lake, and this is not the first time that we have talked about fecal remnants in Horseshoe Lake and unearthed. In July nineteen, we talked about a team that analyzed the lake's sediment layers, including fecal components, to trace how the human population at Cokia had changed in response to things like environmental and weather conditions. We did an episode on the Hartford Circus fire in March, and we have done various updates since then about efforts to identify remains of some of the victims. This included exhuming bodies from Northwood Cemetery to analyze their DNA. In particular, the bodies of two women were exhumed to try to confirm whether either of them was Grace Dorothy Smith Fiffield, who is still classified as missing. However, based on a report from February, neither set of remains is a match to Filfield's living granddaughter, so it's possible that back in the Field's remains were misidentified and released to the wrong family. The state of Connecticut has turned to the DNA Doe Project to see if they can find a match among people who have used DNA testing services for their own DNA. Currently, there are five sets of unidentified remains buried in Northwood Cemetery, and six victims of the fire are still listed as missing. Efforts to identify remains are still ongoing, but it is a time consuming process, in part because those remains were so badly damaged in the fire. Moving on to the ongoing saga of efforts to exhume John Dillinger's remains. Members of the Dillinger family, who had taken the matter to court withdrew their lawsuit in January, so for the moment, this matter is settled and the remains will not be exhumed. However, an attorney representing Dillinger's nephew issued a statement that this nephew could still file a new challenge at some point in the future if he chose. Previous Hosts episode on Dillinger came out on December, We actually, in a rare set of circumstances, do not have a standalone exhimation section in this edition of Unearthed, because those two were really the biggest stories. I think part of the reason is, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, the months from December through March or like not as conducive to getting into the ground. During Unearthed in October, team we talked about Shamus Blackly, who had traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Peabody Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology at Harvard to collect samples of ancient yeast, and then he made bread with what he hoped was that ancient yeast and not contamination with modern yeast. He tweeted a thread on Twitter about that bread that he made that we talked about back in October. On March twenty nine of this year, he tweeted another thread about how he had made bread to quote with leavening cultures sampled from ancient Egyptian baking vessels, using ancient emmer wheat with an ancient Egyptian recipe, and using ancient Egyptian baking tools and no oven. He did this under embers in a cooking pit. It was like the last bat delicious. According to Blackley's report, and DNA analysis of the yeast starter is still forthcoming to confirm whether it really is ancient yeast. That part is really really tricky. There is wild yeast around us all the time. Yeah, I've seen several people share threads about how to try to collect wild yeast to make a starter. Yes, there have been some yeast shortages during the pandemic. I have yeast guilt related to this because I don't do a lot of baking. But I bought yeast just by accident shortly before this all started, because I was wanted to try a bread recipe in a cookbook that I have, and so I have this tiny jar of yeast to my fridge that I feel so guilty for having. Um. I feel like immediately, we have a bread machine which someone gave to us that we had not used in the year since moving here. And I was just at the point where I was like, should we get rid of the bread machine? We have not used it in a year, And then the pandemic was declared and it was much harder to get to the store and buy bread. Um. And just coincidentally, I had bought a thing of bread machine yeast sometime earlier this year, I guess. So it's like we've been making our own bread in the machine. I also have some yused guilt, although I am we are making it, like at least once a week we're making a loaf of bread. Anyway, that is not using ancient Egyptian techniques and tools. That's literally using a machine that's doing it for us. Uh. So uh. This this next thing is on a much more serious note. It is not exactly an episode update, but the Wampanoag tribes have come up in a couple of recent episodes of our show, including Paul Cuffey and King Phil War On March, the U S Secretary of the Interior, David Bernhardt, issued a decision that the mashpe Wappanog's three hundred acres of reservation land on Cape Cod would be taken out of trust and the reservation would be disestablished. The federal government had taken the land into trust in ten but afterward to federal courts issued rulings that the government had not had the authority to do that. The mashpe Wapanag tribe had a separate suit file that was still pending when the Department of the Interior's decision was announced. The tribe itself was and continues to be federally recognized. Tribal Council Chairman Cederate Cromwell was quoted as saying, quote, it feels like we've been dropped off into a new world we've never seen before. I eat in this pandemic and the way my tribe is being treated with this happening now, this is a direct, hardcore blow to dissolving and disestablishing my tribe. Cromwell and others involved also criticized the Department of the Interior for issuing this decision at four o'clock in the afternoon on a Friday during a pandemic. Representative Bill Keating, who represents the congressional district where the reservation is located, called the decision quote one of the most cruel and nonsensical acts I have seen since coming to Congress. The Secretary should be ashamed. Keating is also one of the sponsors of a bill called mashp Wampanog Tribe Reservation Reaffirmation Act, which has passed the House but not the Senate. That act would reaffirm the tribes reservation status. As of the moment that we are recording this, it is really not clear what happens next. Many of the tribe's projects had been put on hold because of the pandemic, including the establishment of a school that's part of the effort to revive the Wampanog language. Obviously, a lot of the services that would have been helpful in negotiating this process are also non essential or considered not essential and are not operating. Um. It is a deeply uncertain time for the tribe and its reservation land. In our twenty nineteen year End Unearthed, we talked about results of ground penetrating radar scans that were used to look for signs of mass graves associated with the nine massacre in Greenwood, also known as the Tulsa Race Riot. We did an episode about that massacre in and we reissued it as a Saturday Classic. Last year, during the run of HBO's Watchman TV series, which had several connecting points to that massacre, the city of Tulsa announced plans to do a test excavation at Oaklawn Cemetery. That was one of the locations where ground penetrating radar had revealed signs of a possible mass grave, something that we talked about on a previous addition. As we said of Unearthed at the last update, that excavation was planned to start on April one and go on for ten days. However, the excavation has had to be postponed we are not sure until when because of the COVID nineteen pandemic. Also earlier this year, the state of Oklahoma announced that it will require the massacre to be taught in schools. Continuing on the more serious thread of topics UH and Unearthed, in July twenty nineteen, we talked about a discovery made by Hannah Durkin of Newcastle University. Durkin had published a paper on a woman named Ridosci, who had died in nineteen thirty seven and was believed to be the last survivor of the Transatlantic slave trade in the United States. Previously, the last known survivor had been a man named Cudjo Lewis, who died in nineteen thirty five, so two years before Ridoci did. We also previously talked about the publication of Zoraneil Hurston's book Barracoon, which came from an interview that she conducted with Lewis. Well, Durkin has now found that another person outlived both Rudosci and Cudjoe Lewis. That's Matilda or Career, who died in Selma, Alabama, in January nineteen forty. She was eighty three at the time. She her mother, and her sister had all been in slaved in West Africa when Matilda was too and they were transported to the US on one of the last slave ships to arrive here in eighteen sixty. Just to repeat, because I feel like it's an important thing to keep in mind, the last known survivor of the Transatlantic slave trade and the United States died in ninety We're going to close out our updates with a couple of brief bits that were just fun. In our two part podcast on the Lumier Brothers from we talked about their short arrival of a train at Lasiota. YouTuber Dennis Sherriev used neural networks and algorithms to upscale that film to four K resolution at sixty frames per second, and it is really beautiful. Uh, this is an audio podcast, so we can't really convey how cool it is. I will say this. One of the cool things that I saw going around on Twitter of people discussing this film is that we have always kind of giggled a little bit many modern era people about how funny it was that people of the time were startled by this piece of footage and they're like, oh, but seeing it like this, I totally see how that would have happened. I think we talked in that episode about how probably that didn't really happen, but just in case, all right, like they weren't scared and run right and run away. But even so, I think most people were a little bit just like owed by it. It's literally looks like a train coming at you. And when we see it, even with our modernized used to constant um technological advances in film and television. Seeing the way it's framed and the way it's filmed, it really does feel for a second like a train is coming right now. Yeah, it's quite striking. Yeah. As I was typing this in here, I realized the sort of absurdity that I was typing into an audio podcast outline video that you can watch on the internet anyway. Lastly, this is a fun ending for these updates. Nearly hundred Girl Scouts took part in an archaeological dig at the birthplace of founder Juliette Gordon Lowe. I forgot to put in when we did that episode. It wasn't that long ago. You can find it in our archive. The dig was an advance of clearing the garden area at the birthplace for some new landscaping, and some of the items that they unearthed included household objects like nails. What a cool project, That's what I thought. I love it. Do you want to take a quick sponsor break before we dig into crime. Yeah, we're gonna have some crime after the break. There's a lot of stuff in our unearthed episodes that you could classify as criminal in one way or another, including some stuff we've already talked about. But next up we have a couple of things that fall under crime by a more straightforward definition, like you maybe might hear about on a true crime podcast. First, on ninth teen sixteen, a man named Joseph Henry Loveless escaped from custody in Idaho, where he was being held on suspicion of having brutally murdered his wife. In January of this year, headlines broke that his remains had been identified. The first piece of the remains in question was found on August nine. That was just his torso, buried in a shallow grave in a cave and found by a family looking for projectile points. His hand was found nearby, in which led authorities to conduct a more thorough search of the cave. That search unearthed other parts of the body. A part they never found was his head. Uh In twenty nineteen, law enforcement went to the DNA dough Project and tried to construct a family tree for these remains, and that connected them to one of loveless Is living grandchildren, a likely conclusion as that Loveless was murdered and dismembered in an active retribution for the grizzly murder of his wife. Uh, there are various ethical questions about things like the DNA Doughe project making connections between living people and acts of crime. I feel like that's a little bit outside the scope of what we can really talk about in the podcast, but I wanted to acknowledge there are questions. Uh, late March twenty nine or early March, in the Hague, Netherlands, Vincent van Gogh's painting Spring Garden was stolen from singer Laren Museum, which was closed because of the pandemic. Seeing as how this happened during a pandemic and just days before we recorded this, there is no other information at this time, including whether any other artwork from the museum was stolen, since this was an overnight thing. If this did happen on the morning of the thirty, that was Van Go's birthday, can I just tell you this is one of those news stories that just burned my butter Like he doesn't shock me at all. There are there are so many news stories that make me angry, but this would just set me into fits of rage. It's like, let's just like at an insult injury, not only stealing a painting, but also stealing the painting on the artist's birthday while taking advantage of a global pandemic to do. I just I feel ways there's a lot of layers there. It makes me so angry. We're gonna move on to some hopefully less outraging things involving animals. We have a whole collection of animal unearthed things coming up during our year. In Unearthed in twenty nineteen we talked about Iceland's now extinct but genetically distinct walruses, and today we have some more walrus news. According to research from the Universities of Cambridge, Oslo and Trondheim, it's possible that Greenland's Norse colonies disappeared around the fifteenth century in part because they had been over hunting the local walruses for their tusks. Walrus ivory was an important trade good in medieval Europe, and it seems as though leading up to the fourteen hundreds, the animals the Norse people were hunting in Greenland were getting smaller and smaller, and we're more likely to be female rather than male, and we're also hunted from farther and farther north on the island, suggesting that people were running out of larger male animals to hunt closer to home, and the words of Dr James H. Barrett from the University of Cambridge's Department of Archaeology quote our findings suggest that Norse hunters were forced to venture deeper into the Arctic circle for increasingly meager ivory harvests. This would have exacerbated the decline of walrus populations and consequently those sustained by the walrus trade. Barrett's co author Bastion Star, also noted that this would not have been the only factor. Other things like the Little Ice Age and unsustainable farming methods and the Black Death also would have played a part in tighten A restoration project was completed on the altar piece at the Basilica Cathedral in Kaska Viejo, Panama, which is part of Panama City today, not far from the southern end of the Panama Canal. While doing this work, it was discovered that orchid bees had built their nest in the altar piece more than two hundred years ago. This is a very solitary shy bee species. Typically, females build their nests far away from each other, and that can make it really tricky for scientists to study them like. The nests are by themselves hard to find and far apart, but during this work, restorers found at least a hundred and twenty clusters of or could be nests in this altarpiece. Some of them pre dated a fire that happened in eighteen seventy because they had been covered with gilding when the altar piece was restored after that fire. Scientists analyzed the pollen that had been preserved in these nests, and they found that they represented forty eight different plant species, which gave them a much clearer sense of the plant life around Panama City in the nineteenth century. Moving on, researchers studying twenty eight thousand, five hundred year old fossils in the Czech Republic have found evidence that supports the idea of early dog domestication. There. They used dental microware texture analysis, and doing that they sorted the dogs or dog like animals into two categories, the more wolf like and the more dog like. The more wolf like teeth had microware patterns that suggested that they had been eating mostly soft foods, like meat from mammoths. The more dog like teeth, on the other hand had marks that suggested that their diet was a lot harder and more brittle, so things like bones and hard scraps that people fed to them. The researchers called the more dog like animals protodogs, which is a very fun and cute name. I liked it. I don't I don't mean to make their research sound not important, but that's adorable. Yeah, I really liked the protodog moniker, which is a very normal thing to call an animal in this text, but it's still delighted me. Um. Something else that delights me as middens. We have talked about middens a lot on the show. These are basically trash heaps where people have thrown their various cast off broken stuff, and they often contain a wealth of information when archaeologists start studying them. But I do not think we have ever talked about ancient pac rat middens, which can preserve plant and animal materials for thousands or even tens of thousands of years. In the words of Michael Tesler, a postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History, quote, rodent middens are powerful tools in paleoecology. We wanted to see how we could take this in valuable resource and expand its use to give us a big picture view of what life in the America's was like one thousand, ten thousand, or even thirty thousand years ago and measure how it has changed in the time since then. And this particular study, researchers examined twenty five pack rat and middens that were between three hundred and forty eight thousand years old the big span. Some of them were from Ohio and some of them were from northern Baja California, Mexico. And this was not a paper that was really meant to draw conclusions about human activity or impact in these two areas that were studied, at least not yet In a lot of ways, this paper was more about what people are capable of doing now with this research and what could be possible with better technology and methods in the future. So in the future researchers could use these kinds of pack rat middens to get a sense of all kinds of things, including how humans have influenced the environment over tens of thousands of years and vice versa. That paper is called Paleo Meta Genomics of North American fossil pack rat middens passed bio diversity revealed by ancient DNA. Now we have a quartet of game related things to talk about. First up, a very pretty glass game piece has been unearthed on the island of Lynda's Farn in Northumberland. It is about the size and shape of a gum drop, made of glass dark blue, with these swooping white accent lines and five white balls on the top like oversized sugar sprinkles. Uh. Those five little balls on the top may meant that the piece is meant to represent a king. The game in question was probably the board game Toffel, and while various wood and bone Toffel pieces have been found from Britain and Ireland, there is only one other glass Toffel piece from there on record. This particular piece is about twelve hundred years old and although Toffel is associated with the Vikings, it was played all over Northern Europe, and researchers believe this particular piece is actually of British origin, predating the Viking invasion of Linda's Barn. Moving On, a paper published in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology has examined a Senate board that has previously been in a collection, but nothing has been published about it. The game's in it was played in ancient Egypt for at least two thousand years. It is a little like backgammon, and its rules stayed pretty consistent during all that time. There's been some variations in the game board, though. Some of the spaces contain decorative elements that signify special functions, like if you land on this space, you have to go back to the beginning, kind of like games that we would play today. This particular board is the size and shape of a small table like probably would have been used as a table playing space. It's been in the collection of a museum in San Jose, California since nineteen forty seven, but it was not included in recent comprehensive catalogs of senate boards that have been found around the world. There's also very little known about exactly where this came from or who owned it. It just it has no documented history before that. The most recent person to buy it in like the nineteenth century, so they have had to study this board in comparison to other boards that we know about, and it's possible that this one dates back to the eighteenth dynasty before the reign of hot steps it and if that's correct, this would be the only board conclusively dated to that period. In a team at searts Boscher Mound in Turkey found a game set made of colored stones, but some of the pieces were missing. They dated the pieces to five thousand years ago, with the team that made the fine describing it as the world's oldest figurative game set. There are older games, but this may be the oldest one whose game pieces are clearly meant to represent real objects such as pigs, dogs, and pyramids. So the missing pieces from this set were found in a recent excavation. There is very little where on the pieces, so the team has concluded that this was possibly a grave gift instead of something that was actually played with. And one thing that they still don't have is the board that these pieces would have been played on. That probably would have been made of wood and it might have just rotted away. At this point, I feel this strange sense of bliss reading of out this, because have you ever had that time where you find the missing pieces of a game? Yep now project that across thousands of years of history, um and last up for games, ball games, were a big part of the Maya and Aztec societies, and continue to be so among their descendants. A team excavating an archaeological site called at La Tongo in southern Mexico say they have found the second oldest ball court ever found in that part of the world. Up until this point, archaeologists have generally associated the earliest Mesoamerican ball games with communities living along the Gulf of Mexico and in the coastal lowlands, but at La Tongo is in the Wahaka Mountains, and that suggests that ball was actually being played in the highlands earlier than previously thought. This team also found figurines at the site that may represent ball players, and their paper on the find was published in the March edition of Science Advances. UH and now we just have a little cool thing at the end. A little door was rediscovered during a renovation of the British House of Commons this year. Behind it was a lost three hundred sixty year old passageway created for the coronation of Charles the Second When it was first built. This passage was meant to allow coronation guests entry into a banquet, but from there various people used it to get into the House of Commons, including Samuel Peeps. But eventually this door was walled over. This door and the passage that it led to had been uncovered one other time in the last century, and that was while repairing bomb damage from World War Two. But then folks just kind of forgot about it until just now, in the words of Dr Hallam Smith quote, as we looked at the paneling closely, we realized there was a tiny brass keyhole that no one had really noticed before, believing it might just be an electricity cupboard. This is just like my childhood dream where you realized the little panel has a has a little keyhole in it, and there's something secret behind there. Um. Once they got back there, they found a small chamber leading into that hallway, and part of part of the chamber was covered in various graffiti left by Masons who had enclosed that particular room in eighteen fifty one. Um. Apparently these Masons were Chartists. They were part of a working class movement that called for voting in parliamentary reforms. And it just cracks me up that they left this graffiti within this little secret chamber in parliament. Um about the chartist movement cracked me up. I love it. We when we have done renovations on our house, we always leave secret messages and things that are going to get walled over. So good. Uh. Sometimes I'll have dreams that like we realize, oh, there's a door that we never opened in the house, what's back here? I kind of like that. This one is like, oh, yeah, we knew about that, we just forgot. Yes, I don't know that. The articles they got shared are kind of spectacular because there's a photo in that was in a lot of them of somebody coming through the little door. And it's not a small enough door to be kind of creepy, but it is a small enough door to be charming in my opinion. Um, it's not like when we were looking at houses and we opened a little door in an attic and there was a creepy, creepy teddy bear back. I love it. I love it. Uh. Do you have creepy or non creepy listener mail? I have non creepy listener mail? Um. It is from Caitlin and I have have a specific reason that I picked this one to read. Um. The title of the email is cats and Sewing and Caitlin says, Hi, Tracy and Holly, I teach preschool, and I'm currently furloughed because tiny germ factories and chronic illness is a dangerous combo without adding a pandemic into the mix, I'm going a little stir crazy in the house without spending my days refereeing my kiddos. So I impulse bought a sewing machine. Her name is Rose Berton. I learned to sew and made cool stuff as a theater major, but paused after graduation when I didn't have access to the costume shop anymore. My first project was a felt sharktopus for my cat, named Sharktopus, also known as Sharky see photo photos were great. Sharky is eight months old, and her favorite activities include trying to catch birds to the window, sleeping under the couch where I can't bother her as easily, and stealing nibbles of taryaki sauce from my plate. She's fuzzy and sweet and has a white spot honor tummy from where she got shaved for her spay. In regards to Emily Dickinson poems having a cadence, the first time I ever heard that was from my dad, and I thought he was a genius. His other favorite trick was to swap the lyrics of Amazing Grace, Yellow Rows of Texas and House the Rising Sun. Eight year old me was suitably impressed and entertained. Please keep staying safe and healthy, Caitlin UM. Caitlin also has some episode topic ideas in there. Thank you so much, Caitlin for this email all. I wanted to read it for so many reasons besides the one that I thought of at first. I love that the sewing machine is named rose Bert Tam. I love the trick of swapping the lyrics of these different songs UM I have before before I moved away from Atlanta, UM, I had a friend who did open mics and would like riff on UM old songs and hymns like that, just seamlessly move in and out with each other's like key and meter and all of that, and it was delightful and I loved it. But also I have also gotten out my sewing machine recently to make some masks because there's a pandemic happening and we are now being advised to cover our faces when we go out in public, and I forgot how challenging it can be to sew things with cats around. Oh yeah, I'm just used to it. Yeah, I because I do still have a sewing table, but like there's it's not a great place in our house to put it. I thought about making like a sewing corner in our basement, and that has not worked out for various reasons. So I'm I. I brought the sewing machine to the table that we eat on, and there's not a way to close that off from any cats. So it was just like constant cat wrangling while making masks. Anyway, Thank you so much, Caitlin for that email. It really delighted me in a lot of ways. UM. As always, we hope folks and their loved ones are as safe and healthy as as as possible. UM, regardless of of what's happening in your life right now, I really hope people are able to take as much care with themselves and to be as gentle with themselves as possible. I know it's a really hard time and a lot of folks are really struggling. UM, So our thoughts are with everyone. If you'd like to send us a note or some cat pictures or anything like that, we're History podcast that I heart radio dot com. We're all over social media at miss in History and that's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, kinsers on Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show in Apple podcasts, 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 Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly fry. Hey, it's time for Unearthed that because we started doing this quarterly, and it's a strange and interesting thing because it feels a little weird to do something that's just part of the normal calendar right now. So we're recording this just as a random note. Stuff is moving so fast in the world right now. We are recording this on April seven, and I don't think it's coming out until two weeks after this approximately, So Heaven only knows what will be discovered between now and this well, and also who really knows what will be happening in the world when this comes out on I think apod like it's it's a it seems like a million years from now the fastest things have been going. Um, that's aside from what I was really going to say, which is that when we do these episodes, some of the things that we are talking about our discoveries that literally just happened. They happened just now, They were announced right away. Sometimes it is published findings from digs that happened months or years earlier, or analysis of something that has happened a long time ago but only studied recently, just like the paper is what has recently happened. Either way, it seems likely at this point that when we get to July, our middle of the year Unearthed, which has been a two parter for the last couple of years, might have a little less to report given the coronavirus pandemic. So I'm just gonna enjoy this wealth of Unearthed things while we have it. Uh. In today's episode, we have some stuff that was reported during the last two weeks, of which missed the cut off for the year end Unearthed episodes. We also have some episode updates, some crime, animals and games, and the next time we're gonna have the Edibles and potables and the shipwrecks and their repatriations, along with other stuff. Kicking off with stuff that really came from the tail end of twenty nineteen, Brian Furry, archival researcher for the Making Gay History podcast Unearthed, what maybe the oldest audio recording ever made of activists Marcia P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. It's an interview conducted in nineteen seventy by Liza Cowen of the New York City radio station w b AI, when Rivera was nineteen and Johnson was just. The tape containing this interview was in the basement of the Lesbian her Story Archives in Brooklyn, New York, and the tape was just smarked STAR that stands for Street Action Transvestite Revolutionaries. That was the name of the organization that Johnson and Rivera founded in nineteen seventy. The interview was released as a bow this episode of the Making Gay History podcast, which is an oral history podcast hosted by Eric Marcus uh. This bonus episode came out on December twenty nineteen that It also includes some conversation with Brian Frey about finding this tape, like the actual process of the unearthing of the tape. We also did an episode on Sylvia Rivero which includes information about Johnson and their work with Star. Underwater archaeological excavations have uncovered the remains of a seven thousand year old sea wall off the coast of Israel. According to a paper called a submerged seven thousand year old village and sea wall demonstrate earliest known coastal defense against sea level rise. Published in December. It is the oldest such structure ever to be discovered, so, based on this team's analysis, Neolithic villagers built this wall, which is about a hundred meters long, using boulders that had to be excavated from riverbeds as far as two kilometers away from the village itself. All of that sounds like just an immense undertaking to me. Unfortunately, this seems to have offered the village only temporary protection. At some point, the village was flooded and abandoned, although it is not clear whether the villagers relocated ahead of the flooding or afterward. And other news, that team at the University of Oregon has concluded that human migration to the Caribbean islands progressed differently than has been previously and generally thought. For a geographical refresher, you can group the islands and the Caribbean very roughly into two groups, the greater Antilles, which are the larger islands like Jamaica, Cuba, and Hispaniola, and then the lesser Antilles, which are the smaller islands that extend generally southward from those larger ones. The prevailing view among most researchers has been that people started settling in the southern part of the Lesser Antilles at the spots that were closest to the South American mainland, and then moved northward from there. This team came to the opposite conclusion that they traveled to the farther away but larger Greater Antilles first and then moved south. They came to these conclusions after reevaluating two thousand, five hundred radio carbon dating results from fifty five Caribbean islands. They also concluded that this migration probably happened in two primary waves, the first one about five thousand, eight hundred years ago and the second only two thousand, five hundred years ago. The team's paper on this was published in the journal Science Advances in December. Natalie Mueller and a team from Washington University in St. Louis has been studying ancient food crops that exist in the archaeological record but have no written or oral histories describing how they were grown and used. In other words, we know these crops existed thanks to archaeological specimens, but we really don't know what it took to cultivate them properly or how people use them for food. Okay, if folks think that all you have to do is stick a seed in the ground and it grows like that works, some seeds definitely not all of them. Uh. And in this case, archaeologists in the nineteen thirties had found seed caches and dried leaves and rock shelters in Arkansas, and these seeds did not represent the maze, squash and beans that are a well known staple of indigenous cuisine in that part of North America. So that left a whole lot of questions about exactly what kind of seeds these were and how people grew and used them before those other three foods became such important staples. After meticulous efforts to get these seeds to germinate and grow, Mueller figured out how to grow to plants goosefoot and erect not weed, and realize that these two plants have a higher yield when they're grown together than they do if one has grown separately from the other. It's possible that they were as important to indigenous diets as maize eventually became. In Mueller's words, quote, the main reason I'm really interested in yield is because there's a debate within archaeology about why these plants were abandoned. We haven't had a lot of evidence about it one way or the other, but a lot of people have just kind of assumed that Maze would be a lot more productive because we grow Maze now and it's known to be one of the most productive crops in the world per unit area. The paper that came from all of this is Experimental Cultivation of Eastern North America's Lost Crops Insights into Agricultural Practice and Yield Potential, and that was published in December in the Journal of Ethnobiology. And for our last unearthed thing, that was really from December. In late December, it was announced that a cord found near the body of Utsi the Iceman was a bowstring made from animal fibers. It's now believed to be the oldest bowstring ever found. So that is both something from late twenty nineteen and are regularly scheduled. That's the update, because there's always something new about Utsi always uh Leutsy is the gifts that keeps on giving. Let's take a quick sponsor b Uh and then we'll do some of the updates of previous episodes. Back in July of twenty nineteen, we did an episode on Thomas Cook and the rise of the tourism industry. Just two months later, the Thomas Cook Group collapsed, leaving travelers stranded around the world. And a question that followed, which is when that happens with a lot of businesses when they go under, especially large businesses that have been around for a really long time, was how to save the company's archive. And this wasn't just about nostalgia for old stuff. Company archives can document not only a company's own history, but also the time and place in which the company operated and its customers and employees. They can be truly immense sources of historical information. In the case of Thomas Cook, that archive included a wealth of written records, passenger lists, brochures, letters, books, and other materials at the company produced. So a panel was convened in November often to figure out what to do with this archive, and in January it was announced that the Thomas Cook Archive would go to the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland. When the announcement was made public, the collection itself had already been moved, so it was accompanied by pictures of like where all the boxes are now? Previous hosts did an episode on Kahokia on June eleven. The general consensus on ka Hokia has been that the Mississippian peoples who built it abandoned it sometime in the mid fourteenth century, and that it remained abandoned from that point. However, according to a study published in the journal American Antiquity, while the Mississippian peoples who had lived on the site did abandon it around that time, it was repopulated in the fifteen hundreds, with people continuing to be present there for at least two hundred more years. These conclusions were based on analysis of things like fossil, pollen, char coal, and fecal remnants. Particularly important to this work, we're fecal standals from the sediment at the bottom of Horseshoe Lake, and this is not the first time that we have talked about fecal remnants in Horseshoe Lake and unearthed. In July nineteen, we talked about a team that analyzed the lake's sediment layers, including fecal components, to trace how the human population at Cokia had changed in response to things like environmental and weather conditions. We did an episode on the Hartford Circus fire in March, and we have done various updates since then about efforts to identify remains of some of the victims. This included exhuming bodies from Northwood Cemetery to analyze their DNA. In particular, the bodies of two women were exhumed to try to confirm whether either of them was Grace Dorothy Smith Fiffield, who is still classified as missing. However, based on a report from February, neither set of remains is a match to Filfield's living granddaughter, so it's possible that back in the Field's remains were misidentified and released to the wrong family. The state of Connecticut has turned to the DNA Doe Project to see if they can find a match among people who have used DNA testing services for their own DNA. Currently, there are five sets of unidentified remains buried in Northwood Cemetery, and six victims of the fire are still listed as missing. Efforts to identify remains are still ongoing, but it is a time consuming process, in part because those remains were so badly damaged in the fire. Moving on to the ongoing saga of efforts to exhume John Dillinger's remains. Members of the Dillinger family, who had taken the matter to court withdrew their lawsuit in January, so for the moment, this matter is settled and the remains will not be exhumed. However, an attorney representing Dillinger's nephew issued a statement that this nephew could still file a new challenge at some point in the future if he chose. Previous Hosts episode on Dillinger came out on December, We actually, in a rare set of circumstances, do not have a standalone exhimation section in this edition of Unearthed, because those two were really the biggest stories. I think part of the reason is, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, the months from December through March or like not as conducive to getting into the ground. During Unearthed in October, team we talked about Shamus Blackly, who had traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Peabody Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology at Harvard to collect samples of ancient yeast, and then he made bread with what he hoped was that ancient yeast and not contamination with modern yeast. He tweeted a thread on Twitter about that bread that he made that we talked about back in October. On March twenty nine of this year, he tweeted another thread about how he had made bread to quote with leavening cultures sampled from ancient Egyptian baking vessels, using ancient emmer wheat with an ancient Egyptian recipe, and using ancient Egyptian baking tools and no oven. He did this under embers in a cooking pit. It was like the last bat delicious. According to Blackley's report, and DNA analysis of the yeast starter is still forthcoming to confirm whether it really is ancient yeast. That part is really really tricky. There is wild yeast around us all the time. Yeah, I've seen several people share threads about how to try to collect wild yeast to make a starter. Yes, there have been some yeast shortages during the pandemic. I have yeast guilt related to this because I don't do a lot of baking. But I bought yeast just by accident shortly before this all started, because I was wanted to try a bread recipe in a cookbook that I have, and so I have this tiny jar of yeast to my fridge that I feel so guilty for having. Um. I feel like immediately, we have a bread machine which someone gave to us that we had not used in the year since moving here. And I was just at the point where I was like, should we get rid of the bread machine? We have not used it in a year, And then the pandemic was declared and it was much harder to get to the store and buy bread. Um. And just coincidentally, I had bought a thing of bread machine yeast sometime earlier this year, I guess. So it's like we've been making our own bread in the machine. I also have some yused guilt, although I am we are making it, like at least once a week we're making a loaf of bread. Anyway, that is not using ancient Egyptian techniques and tools. That's literally using a machine that's doing it for us. Uh. So uh. This this next thing is on a much more serious note. It is not exactly an episode update, but the Wampanoag tribes have come up in a couple of recent episodes of our show, including Paul Cuffey and King Phil War On March, the U S Secretary of the Interior, David Bernhardt, issued a decision that the mashpe Wappanog's three hundred acres of reservation land on Cape Cod would be taken out of trust and the reservation would be disestablished. The federal government had taken the land into trust in ten but afterward to federal courts issued rulings that the government had not had the authority to do that. The mashpe Wapanag tribe had a separate suit file that was still pending when the Department of the Interior's decision was announced. The tribe itself was and continues to be federally recognized. Tribal Council Chairman Cederate Cromwell was quoted as saying, quote, it feels like we've been dropped off into a new world we've never seen before. I eat in this pandemic and the way my tribe is being treated with this happening now, this is a direct, hardcore blow to dissolving and disestablishing my tribe. Cromwell and others involved also criticized the Department of the Interior for issuing this decision at four o'clock in the afternoon on a Friday during a pandemic. Representative Bill Keating, who represents the congressional district where the reservation is located, called the decision quote one of the most cruel and nonsensical acts I have seen since coming to Congress. The Secretary should be ashamed. Keating is also one of the sponsors of a bill called mashp Wampanog Tribe Reservation Reaffirmation Act, which has passed the House but not the Senate. That act would reaffirm the tribes reservation status. As of the moment that we are recording this, it is really not clear what happens next. Many of the tribe's projects had been put on hold because of the pandemic, including the establishment of a school that's part of the effort to revive the Wampanog language. Obviously, a lot of the services that would have been helpful in negotiating this process are also non essential or considered not essential and are not operating. Um. It is a deeply uncertain time for the tribe and its reservation land. In our twenty nineteen year End Unearthed, we talked about results of ground penetrating radar scans that were used to look for signs of mass graves associated with the nine massacre in Greenwood, also known as the Tulsa Race Riot. We did an episode about that massacre in and we reissued it as a Saturday Classic. Last year, during the run of HBO's Watchman TV series, which had several connecting points to that massacre, the city of Tulsa announced plans to do a test excavation at Oaklawn Cemetery. That was one of the locations where ground penetrating radar had revealed signs of a possible mass grave, something that we talked about on a previous addition. As we said of Unearthed at the last update, that excavation was planned to start on April one and go on for ten days. However, the excavation has had to be postponed we are not sure until when because of the COVID nineteen pandemic. Also earlier this year, the state of Oklahoma announced that it will require the massacre to be taught in schools. Continuing on the more serious thread of topics UH and Unearthed, in July twenty nineteen, we talked about a discovery made by Hannah Durkin of Newcastle University. Durkin had published a paper on a woman named Ridosci, who had died in nineteen thirty seven and was believed to be the last survivor of the Transatlantic slave trade in the United States. Previously, the last known survivor had been a man named Cudjo Lewis, who died in nineteen thirty five, so two years before Ridoci did. We also previously talked about the publication of Zoraneil Hurston's book Barracoon, which came from an interview that she conducted with Lewis. Well, Durkin has now found that another person outlived both Rudosci and Cudjoe Lewis. That's Matilda or Career, who died in Selma, Alabama, in January nineteen forty. She was eighty three at the time. She her mother, and her sister had all been in slaved in West Africa when Matilda was too and they were transported to the US on one of the last slave ships to arrive here in eighteen sixty. Just to repeat, because I feel like it's an important thing to keep in mind, the last known survivor of the Transatlantic slave trade and the United States died in ninety We're going to close out our updates with a couple of brief bits that were just fun. In our two part podcast on the Lumier Brothers from we talked about their short arrival of a train at Lasiota. YouTuber Dennis Sherriev used neural networks and algorithms to upscale that film to four K resolution at sixty frames per second, and it is really beautiful. Uh, this is an audio podcast, so we can't really convey how cool it is. I will say this. One of the cool things that I saw going around on Twitter of people discussing this film is that we have always kind of giggled a little bit many modern era people about how funny it was that people of the time were startled by this piece of footage and they're like, oh, but seeing it like this, I totally see how that would have happened. I think we talked in that episode about how probably that didn't really happen, but just in case, all right, like they weren't scared and run right and run away. But even so, I think most people were a little bit just like owed by it. It's literally looks like a train coming at you. And when we see it, even with our modernized used to constant um technological advances in film and television. Seeing the way it's framed and the way it's filmed, it really does feel for a second like a train is coming right now. Yeah, it's quite striking. Yeah. As I was typing this in here, I realized the sort of absurdity that I was typing into an audio podcast outline video that you can watch on the internet anyway. Lastly, this is a fun ending for these updates. Nearly hundred Girl Scouts took part in an archaeological dig at the birthplace of founder Juliette Gordon Lowe. I forgot to put in when we did that episode. It wasn't that long ago. You can find it in our archive. The dig was an advance of clearing the garden area at the birthplace for some new landscaping, and some of the items that they unearthed included household objects like nails. What a cool project, That's what I thought. I love it. Do you want to take a quick sponsor break before we dig into crime. Yeah, we're gonna have some crime after the break. There's a lot of stuff in our unearthed episodes that you could classify as criminal in one way or another, including some stuff we've already talked about. But next up we have a couple of things that fall under crime by a more straightforward definition, like you maybe might hear about on a true crime podcast. First, on ninth teen sixteen, a man named Joseph Henry Loveless escaped from custody in Idaho, where he was being held on suspicion of having brutally murdered his wife. In January of this year, headlines broke that his remains had been identified. The first piece of the remains in question was found on August nine. That was just his torso, buried in a shallow grave in a cave and found by a family looking for projectile points. His hand was found nearby, in which led authorities to conduct a more thorough search of the cave. That search unearthed other parts of the body. A part they never found was his head. Uh In twenty nineteen, law enforcement went to the DNA dough Project and tried to construct a family tree for these remains, and that connected them to one of loveless Is living grandchildren, a likely conclusion as that Loveless was murdered and dismembered in an active retribution for the grizzly murder of his wife. Uh, there are various ethical questions about things like the DNA Doughe project making connections between living people and acts of crime. I feel like that's a little bit outside the scope of what we can really talk about in the podcast, but I wanted to acknowledge there are questions. Uh, late March twenty nine or early March, in the Hague, Netherlands, Vincent van Gogh's painting Spring Garden was stolen from singer Laren Museum, which was closed because of the pandemic. Seeing as how this happened during a pandemic and just days before we recorded this, there is no other information at this time, including whether any other artwork from the museum was stolen, since this was an overnight thing. If this did happen on the morning of the thirty, that was Van Go's birthday, can I just tell you this is one of those news stories that just burned my butter Like he doesn't shock me at all. There are there are so many news stories that make me angry, but this would just set me into fits of rage. It's like, let's just like at an insult injury, not only stealing a painting, but also stealing the painting on the artist's birthday while taking advantage of a global pandemic to do. I just I feel ways there's a lot of layers there. It makes me so angry. We're gonna move on to some hopefully less outraging things involving animals. We have a whole collection of animal unearthed things coming up during our year. In Unearthed in twenty nineteen we talked about Iceland's now extinct but genetically distinct walruses, and today we have some more walrus news. According to research from the Universities of Cambridge, Oslo and Trondheim, it's possible that Greenland's Norse colonies disappeared around the fifteenth century in part because they had been over hunting the local walruses for their tusks. Walrus ivory was an important trade good in medieval Europe, and it seems as though leading up to the fourteen hundreds, the animals the Norse people were hunting in Greenland were getting smaller and smaller, and we're more likely to be female rather than male, and we're also hunted from farther and farther north on the island, suggesting that people were running out of larger male animals to hunt closer to home, and the words of Dr James H. Barrett from the University of Cambridge's Department of Archaeology quote our findings suggest that Norse hunters were forced to venture deeper into the Arctic circle for increasingly meager ivory harvests. This would have exacerbated the decline of walrus populations and consequently those sustained by the walrus trade. Barrett's co author Bastion Star, also noted that this would not have been the only factor. Other things like the Little Ice Age and unsustainable farming methods and the Black Death also would have played a part in tighten A restoration project was completed on the altar piece at the Basilica Cathedral in Kaska Viejo, Panama, which is part of Panama City today, not far from the southern end of the Panama Canal. While doing this work, it was discovered that orchid bees had built their nest in the altar piece more than two hundred years ago. This is a very solitary shy bee species. Typically, females build their nests far away from each other, and that can make it really tricky for scientists to study them like. The nests are by themselves hard to find and far apart, but during this work, restorers found at least a hundred and twenty clusters of or could be nests in this altarpiece. Some of them pre dated a fire that happened in eighteen seventy because they had been covered with gilding when the altar piece was restored after that fire. Scientists analyzed the pollen that had been preserved in these nests, and they found that they represented forty eight different plant species, which gave them a much clearer sense of the plant life around Panama City in the nineteenth century. Moving on, researchers studying twenty eight thousand, five hundred year old fossils in the Czech Republic have found evidence that supports the idea of early dog domestication. There. They used dental microware texture analysis, and doing that they sorted the dogs or dog like animals into two categories, the more wolf like and the more dog like. The more wolf like teeth had microware patterns that suggested that they had been eating mostly soft foods, like meat from mammoths. The more dog like teeth, on the other hand had marks that suggested that their diet was a lot harder and more brittle, so things like bones and hard scraps that people fed to them. The researchers called the more dog like animals protodogs, which is a very fun and cute name. I liked it. I don't I don't mean to make their research sound not important, but that's adorable. Yeah, I really liked the protodog moniker, which is a very normal thing to call an animal in this text, but it's still delighted me. Um. Something else that delights me as middens. We have talked about middens a lot on the show. These are basically trash heaps where people have thrown their various cast off broken stuff, and they often contain a wealth of information when archaeologists start studying them. But I do not think we have ever talked about ancient pac rat middens, which can preserve plant and animal materials for thousands or even tens of thousands of years. In the words of Michael Tesler, a postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History, quote, rodent middens are powerful tools in paleoecology. We wanted to see how we could take this in valuable resource and expand its use to give us a big picture view of what life in the America's was like one thousand, ten thousand, or even thirty thousand years ago and measure how it has changed in the time since then. And this particular study, researchers examined twenty five pack rat and middens that were between three hundred and forty eight thousand years old the big span. Some of them were from Ohio and some of them were from northern Baja California, Mexico. And this was not a paper that was really meant to draw conclusions about human activity or impact in these two areas that were studied, at least not yet In a lot of ways, this paper was more about what people are capable of doing now with this research and what could be possible with better technology and methods in the future. So in the future researchers could use these kinds of pack rat middens to get a sense of all kinds of things, including how humans have influenced the environment over tens of thousands of years and vice versa. That paper is called Paleo Meta Genomics of North American fossil pack rat middens passed bio diversity revealed by ancient DNA. Now we have a quartet of game related things to talk about. First up, a very pretty glass game piece has been unearthed on the island of Lynda's Farn in Northumberland. It is about the size and shape of a gum drop, made of glass dark blue, with these swooping white accent lines and five white balls on the top like oversized sugar sprinkles. Uh. Those five little balls on the top may meant that the piece is meant to represent a king. The game in question was probably the board game Toffel, and while various wood and bone Toffel pieces have been found from Britain and Ireland, there is only one other glass Toffel piece from there on record. This particular piece is about twelve hundred years old and although Toffel is associated with the Vikings, it was played all over Northern Europe, and researchers believe this particular piece is actually of British origin, predating the Viking invasion of Linda's Barn. Moving On, a paper published in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology has examined a Senate board that has previously been in a collection, but nothing has been published about it. The game's in it was played in ancient Egypt for at least two thousand years. It is a little like backgammon, and its rules stayed pretty consistent during all that time. There's been some variations in the game board, though. Some of the spaces contain decorative elements that signify special functions, like if you land on this space, you have to go back to the beginning, kind of like games that we would play today. This particular board is the size and shape of a small table like probably would have been used as a table playing space. It's been in the collection of a museum in San Jose, California since nineteen forty seven, but it was not included in recent comprehensive catalogs of senate boards that have been found around the world. There's also very little known about exactly where this came from or who owned it. It just it has no documented history before that. The most recent person to buy it in like the nineteenth century, so they have had to study this board in comparison to other boards that we know about, and it's possible that this one dates back to the eighteenth dynasty before the reign of hot steps it and if that's correct, this would be the only board conclusively dated to that period. In a team at searts Boscher Mound in Turkey found a game set made of colored stones, but some of the pieces were missing. They dated the pieces to five thousand years ago, with the team that made the fine describing it as the world's oldest figurative game set. There are older games, but this may be the oldest one whose game pieces are clearly meant to represent real objects such as pigs, dogs, and pyramids. So the missing pieces from this set were found in a recent excavation. There is very little where on the pieces, so the team has concluded that this was possibly a grave gift instead of something that was actually played with. And one thing that they still don't have is the board that these pieces would have been played on. That probably would have been made of wood and it might have just rotted away. At this point, I feel this strange sense of bliss reading of out this, because have you ever had that time where you find the missing pieces of a game? Yep now project that across thousands of years of history, um and last up for games, ball games, were a big part of the Maya and Aztec societies, and continue to be so among their descendants. A team excavating an archaeological site called at La Tongo in southern Mexico say they have found the second oldest ball court ever found in that part of the world. Up until this point, archaeologists have generally associated the earliest Mesoamerican ball games with communities living along the Gulf of Mexico and in the coastal lowlands, but at La Tongo is in the Wahaka Mountains, and that suggests that ball was actually being played in the highlands earlier than previously thought. This team also found figurines at the site that may represent ball players, and their paper on the find was published in the March edition of Science Advances. UH and now we just have a little cool thing at the end. A little door was rediscovered during a renovation of the British House of Commons this year. Behind it was a lost three hundred sixty year old passageway created for the coronation of Charles the Second When it was first built. This passage was meant to allow coronation guests entry into a banquet, but from there various people used it to get into the House of Commons, including Samuel Peeps. But eventually this door was walled over. This door and the passage that it led to had been uncovered one other time in the last century, and that was while repairing bomb damage from World War Two. But then folks just kind of forgot about it until just now, in the words of Dr Hallam Smith quote, as we looked at the paneling closely, we realized there was a tiny brass keyhole that no one had really noticed before, believing it might just be an electricity cupboard. This is just like my childhood dream where you realized the little panel has a has a little keyhole in it, and there's something secret behind there. Um. Once they got back there, they found a small chamber leading into that hallway, and part of part of the chamber was covered in various graffiti left by Masons who had enclosed that particular room in eighteen fifty one. Um. Apparently these Masons were Chartists. They were part of a working class movement that called for voting in parliamentary reforms. And it just cracks me up that they left this graffiti within this little secret chamber in parliament. Um about the chartist movement cracked me up. I love it. We when we have done renovations on our house, we always leave secret messages and things that are going to get walled over. So good. Uh. Sometimes I'll have dreams that like we realize, oh, there's a door that we never opened in the house, what's back here? I kind of like that. This one is like, oh, yeah, we knew about that, we just forgot. Yes, I don't know that. The articles they got shared are kind of spectacular because there's a photo in that was in a lot of them of somebody coming through the little door. And it's not a small enough door to be kind of creepy, but it is a small enough door to be charming in my opinion. Um, it's not like when we were looking at houses and we opened a little door in an attic and there was a creepy, creepy teddy bear back. I love it. I love it. Uh. Do you have creepy or non creepy listener mail? I have non creepy listener mail? Um. It is from Caitlin and I have have a specific reason that I picked this one to read. Um. The title of the email is cats and Sewing and Caitlin says, Hi, Tracy and Holly, I teach preschool, and I'm currently furloughed because tiny germ factories and chronic illness is a dangerous combo without adding a pandemic into the mix, I'm going a little stir crazy in the house without spending my days refereeing my kiddos. So I impulse bought a sewing machine. Her name is Rose Berton. I learned to sew and made cool stuff as a theater major, but paused after graduation when I didn't have access to the costume shop anymore. My first project was a felt sharktopus for my cat, named Sharktopus, also known as Sharky see photo photos were great. Sharky is eight months old, and her favorite activities include trying to catch birds to the window, sleeping under the couch where I can't bother her as easily, and stealing nibbles of taryaki sauce from my plate. She's fuzzy and sweet and has a white spot honor tummy from where she got shaved for her spay. In regards to Emily Dickinson poems having a cadence, the first time I ever heard that was from my dad, and I thought he was a genius. His other favorite trick was to swap the lyrics of Amazing Grace, Yellow Rows of Texas and House the Rising Sun. Eight year old me was suitably impressed and entertained. Please keep staying safe and healthy, Caitlin UM. Caitlin also has some episode topic ideas in there. Thank you so much, Caitlin for this email all. I wanted to read it for so many reasons besides the one that I thought of at first. I love that the sewing machine is named rose Bert Tam. I love the trick of swapping the lyrics of these different songs UM I have before before I moved away from Atlanta, UM, I had a friend who did open mics and would like riff on UM old songs and hymns like that, just seamlessly move in and out with each other's like key and meter and all of that, and it was delightful and I loved it. But also I have also gotten out my sewing machine recently to make some masks because there's a pandemic happening and we are now being advised to cover our faces when we go out in public, and I forgot how challenging it can be to sew things with cats around. Oh yeah, I'm just used to it. Yeah, I because I do still have a sewing table, but like there's it's not a great place in our house to put it. I thought about making like a sewing corner in our basement, and that has not worked out for various reasons. So I'm I. I brought the sewing machine to the table that we eat on, and there's not a way to close that off from any cats. So it was just like constant cat wrangling while making masks. Anyway, Thank you so much, Caitlin for that email. It really delighted me in a lot of ways. UM. As always, we hope folks and their loved ones are as safe and healthy as as as possible. UM, regardless of of what's happening in your life right now, I really hope people are able to take as much care with themselves and to be as gentle with themselves as possible. I know it's a really hard time and a lot of folks are really struggling. UM, So our thoughts are with everyone. If you'd like to send us a note or some cat pictures or anything like that, we're History podcast that I heart radio dot com. We're all over social media at miss in History and that's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, kinsers on Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show in Apple podcasts, 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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