Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It is time for our next installment of Unearthed. If you're new to the show, a few times a year, we look at what has been literally or figuratively unearthed. If you are a longtime listener to the show, you have now heard me say that so many times. This time around on Unearthed, we've got some updates, some books and letters, fabrics, mummies, and just a whole bunch of stuff that involves skulls or bones, and it's not just like a burial of bones. We will start off with something that we mentioned in the behind the scenes of our most recent Unearthed episode, that happened in the window between when twenty twenty two ended and when those episodes were published, and because it already got that brief mentioned, we're just going to put it first. So, according to a bunch of early January news articles, an amateur researcher in London solved the mystery of twenty thousand year old cave paintings, specifically the meanings of dots and other markings in those paintings. The researcher, whose name is Ben Bacon, concluded that the markings represented a lunar calendar. So Bacon poured over images of cave paintings at the British Library and online, and also collaborated with two professors, one from Durham University and the other from City College London. They were focused on three specific marks that show up in a lot of these paintings. There's a vertical line and a dot, and a symbol that looks kind of like the letter why. Bacon thought maybe the why might be a reference to giving births. This looks sort of like one line is growing out of the other line. We should note not every piece of figurative European cave art from this period has these kind of markings. They're on some images but not others. And these are also not the only markings that not might appear on this kind of art. But like, this is what the focus was here. So their hypothesis was that the lines and dots represented a number of months in a lunar calendar beginning in the spring, specifically the time of year described as the bun Sison when ice and snow start melting and vegetation begins to turn green again, and if that WHY symbol appeared in a series of dots, then its position would denote the months when that animal would usually give birth. They examined more than six hundred pieces of cave art, primarily from France and Spain, and they sorted the animals that were depicted into groups, so there were rox, birds, bison, caprids, servants, fish, horses, mammoths, and rhinos. And then they noted the number and positions of these markings that were shown within these groups, and they compared all of that information to known information about when all of these animals do things like migrate and mate and give birth, and they found a strong correlation between the markings and the expected months. For example, there were fifteen depictions of URX marked with the Y symbol, and the vast majority of the time that why was in a position that would denote the second month of the year in this lunar calendar, which is roughly when RX would be expected to give birth. There are also correlations between the numbers of lines and dots and the months after the start of spring when the various animals mate, spawn, or migrate. The paper also noted that while these marks wouldn't really fit the definition of a written language, they could be classified as a sort of proto writing. Back when we briefly mentioned this and the behind the scenes episode last time, I said, I was really glad I didn't talk about it yet because there would be a little bit more time to see whether this holds up. Unlike a lot of these sort of amateur cracks the case headlines that we've talked about before on the show, this actually involves published research. It was published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, which is a peer reviewed academic journal, So this is not just someone's personal announcement of I solved it, like some of these stories often are. But there have been some criticisms. There's earlier published work that came to similar conclusions and was not cited in this paper, including a paper called Lunar Timekeeping and Upper Paleolithic Cave Art that was published in twenty twenty one in the journal Prehistoria News series. We don't currently know if the authors were aware of that earlier work or not. There are also other people who have been tweeting and blogging about this basic idea for years. Again, we don't know whether the authors had ever seen those tweets or blog posts. Also, a lot of animals give birth in what would be the second or third month of a lunar calendar, starting in the bun Sizon, so people have question whether this is really something people would need to keep up with on a calendar. Also, just in general, this paper presents a hypothesis and the support for that hypothesis, which is usually how these kinds of papers go, which means that, like conclusively solved, the case is pretty much always going to be an over cell. But that's what makes clickable things on the internet. Sure does. Now that that's out of the way, we will move on to updates. A poem copied into an eighteenth century commonplace book may be a previously unknown work by past podcast subject Phyllis Wheatley Mary Powell Potts later Mary Powell Potts Jones copied On the Day of Love Rotch into a commonplace book about fifteen years after it was written. It was attributed only to quote a Negro girl about fifteen years of age. English professor Wendy Raphael Roberts believes that this was Wheatley, largely because no one else fitting that description was publishing poetry at that time. So this poem commemorates the death of Love macy Rotch. And one of the details that calls Robert's conclusion into some question is that the copyist who put this into the Commonplace book wrote that Love macy Rotch was, in the language of the time, the poet's mistress, or in other words, her enslaver. But Philips Wheatley was enslaved by John and Susannah Wheatley, and that is something that people who knew about her and knew her poetry would have known. There's some speculation that maybe Wheatley was hired out to the Roch family while Love macy Rotch was ill, and that would have been during some years of Wheatley's life that were not very well documented. Our episode on Phyllis Wheatly came out on March fifth, twenty eighteen. Researchers may have answered a lingering question about the ancient city of Great Zimbabwe, which we covered on the show on January eighteenth, twenty seventeen. That question is how the city could have maintained a steady water supply that was large enough to support its population through both remote sensing and excavations, archaeologists have found intentionally created depressions in the landscape, which are locally known as daca pits, which would have collected water during rainy seasons and stored it for later use. Some of these pits were already known about, but this research has found evidence of a lot more of them, including ones that were in the paths of streams or other places where water can sort of seep up from the ground during periods of rain. So basically this was a water management system that incorporated a va variety of holistic methods all across the area, so it was what's described today as a landscape scale approach to conservation. Next, a collection of fifty seven letters from the National Library of France were recently decoded, something that was challenging since the people working on it didn't initially know who wrote them or when, and because there were multiple possible options for what each character might represent. Plus the team was initially thinking in terms of the wrong language, since the letters had been found in a collection of Italian papers. Turns out they were not in Italian, though they were in French, and as they started to get some of it readable based on that content, they figured out the person writing them was imprisoned. It became clear that the author of these letters was Mary, Queen of Scott's, and that this was a collection of secret letters written to her supporters that were believed to have been lost had been miscataloged at the library, something that nobody really realized until they were able to decode the contents and figure out what they said. Most of the letters were written to Michelle de Castelnain de Movsier, French ambassador to England between fifteen seventy eight and fifteen eighty four, and while this international interdisciplinary team of codebreakers has broken the cipher Mary used to write them, their contents are still in the process of being analyzed. This has been described as the most important Mary Queen of Scott's discovery in the last century. Mary Queen of Scott's has come up several times on the show, including our episode on her trial and execution that came out on December seventeenth, twenty eighteen. Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania has been working on construction at an area known as Little Roundtop to address issues with things like accessibility, erosion, and parking. Needs. A metal detector sweep head of that work revealed an unexploded artillery shell from the US Civil War. It's not all that unusual to find weaponry or ammunition at the park, but usually those are much smaller, less dangerous items, like percussion caps. Speaking to CNN, park spokesman Jason Martz said, the archaeologist who detected and unearthed this artillery shell quote laid it gently on the ground, took a picture of it, and ran for the Hills. Park staff contacted the Army's fifty fifth Ordnance Company, which moved the shell to a more isolated part of the park and safely detonated it after clearing the area and closing off the roads. We did a live show at Gettysburg in twenty nineteen, and we released a studio version of that live episode on July tenth of that year. We had a couple of technical and environmental and just noise issues during the show that made the recording of that, as it was live, not really work to distribute as an episode. Otherwise, though, we had a great time at Gettysburg. Let's take a sponsor break and then we'll do a couple more updates. In twenty twenty one, archaeologists found the likely site of the home of Ben Ross, father of Harriet Tubman, who we covered on a two parter in twenty sixteen. This was on land that was once a farm belonging to Anthony Thompson, who enslaved at least forty people there. Tubman was born on Thompson's farm, and we talked about the discovery of Ben Ross's cabin on a previous installment of unearthed. Archaeological work in this area has been ongoing, and in February, archaeologists announced that they had found African religious objects in the ruins of an enslaved overseer's house not far away from Ross's cabin. Are believed to have been a cash that would have been kept in front of the fireplace to protect the people living in the home from negative spirits. They included a glass perfume bottle stopper shaped like a heart, a copper button, and a ceramic dish. Yeah, some of the headlines about this kind of shorthanded it down to like African religious items found at Harriet Tubman's birthplace, and that's just kind of shrinking that whole farm down to her birthplace. Moving on back in twenty twenty, Congress voted to start renaming things like military bases and ships that had been given names that commemorated the Confederacy from the US Civil War. That naming process is ongoing, and one of the more recent announcements is that a guided missile cruiser previously called the USS Chancellorsville will be renamed as the USS Robert Smalls. The Battle of Chancellorsville was a major battle during the US Civil War and is sometimes described as Confederate General Roberty Lee's greatest victory. We did a two parter on Robert Small's back in February of twenty sixteen. He liberated himself and others from slavery by commandeering a ship called the Planter and then just sailing it past Confederate checkpoints and then went on to, among other things, serve in the US House of Representatives. Okay, so maybe this last thing is kind of a stretch in terms of an update. But back in February of twenty twenty, we did an episode on Paul Cuffey which was researched in part through a visit that Tracy made to the new Bedford Whaling Museum, and that museum trip also inspired the episode on Joshua Slocum, which came out in September of twenty twenty, and in January, news broke that a former employee of the new Bedford Whaling Museum had been arrested and was facing charges after allegedly stealing at least seventy five thousand dollars worth of objects from the museum's collection. More recent reporting has put that number closer to like one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. So this former employee, who was fired when the thefts were discovered, had repeatedly faced criminal charges previously related to things like theft that had happened over the last several years, and had also faced other civil and criminal charges. Some of these charges had led to guilty verdicts, including some charges for stealing. It's not totally clear whether the museum was aware of this history. In Massachusetts, it's illegal to ask about a person's criminal record on a job application, but it is legal to conduct criminal background checks during the hiring process. It's also legal for an employer to refuse to hire someone based on their criminal record if that record is related to the work that's being performed. In this case, this was someone who had keys for all of the museum's stores and access codes for all the alarms the museum, at least at my last check of all of the reporting on it. The museum has declined to comment on this due to the ongoing criminal proceedings. It also appears that the museum did not realize that items were being stolen until one of the dealers who was buying them started to become suspicious. Basically, the items that were being sold were increasingly interesting and unique. The dealer googled the seller, realized his connection to the museum, and then contacted the police. Other antiques dealers and pawnbrokers in the area had also contacted police after buying items that just seemed like they were too rare and too high quality to be in a random person's possession, but those other calls don't seem to have led to any investigation. At this point, most of the pieces have been recovered and returned to the museum. A lot of the dealers who bought them did not sell them because they realized there was just something off about the whole thing. I was fascinated by the whole story, yes, both because it was local to me and just because of the particulars of it. Now moving on to books and letters, two of which involves something inscribed into stone. First, a runestone found in Norway at a site northwest of Oslo, maybe the oldest runestone ever found. This runestone was found during archaeological work at a burial ground near the municipality of Hula in the fall of twenty twenty one, but it wasn't announced until this year, after researchers had had some time to study it and date it. It's believed that this was created sometime between the year zero and the year two fifty CE, making it Scandinavia's oldest example of writing. It's possible that some of the runes spell out the name of a person who was buried at the site where this was found. And for the other stone. The Rosetta stone is a stile with an inscription in two languages, Egyptian and Greece, and three scripts Egyptian hieroglyphics, Egyptian Demotic script, and ancient Greek. Folks may be the most familiar with the Rosetta stone because that combination of languages and scripts made it possible for modern researchers to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics, but the content of that inscription may not be as familiar. It's a decree passed by Egyptian priests in one ninety six BCE, celebrating the anniversary of the coronation of Ptolemy fifth Epiphanes. A big focus is the king's accomplishments, and one of those accomplishments is described as restoring peace following a rebellion. Excavations in northern Egypt have been looking for evidence of this rebellion, which is referenced in other inscriptions and texts besides the Rosetta Stone, but it has not been connected to many archaeological finds. Now Though, at a site north of Cairo, archaeologists have found evidence of things like burned buildings, weapons, and human remains. Coins and pottery at the site have made it possible to date this site to the time of the rebellion. This research was published in the Journal of Field Archaeology. Next, a landscaper who was clearing brush on Cape cod found a bottle containing messages believed to have been written by prisoners of war during World War II. The landscaper, named Shane Adams, donated the bottle to the historical society of sand to it and couldtuit. It's believed that the messages were written by prisoners of war who were held at Camp Edwards and who worked at another camp. Camp can do it to clean up damage from a hurricane. But it's not clear whether the bottle was meant to be thrown into the sea with the hope that someone would find it, or if it was more like a time capsule. The bottle was found upside down, sticking straight down in the sand, which may mean the latter. Yeah, it could have worked its way that way if someone threw it into the water, but it seems more likely that they mentionally put it that way. Next. Back in twenty twenty one, a video of a whale feeding on fish went viral on Instagram. This whale was sort of treading water at the surface of the ocean with their mouth wide wide open, like the upper jaws sticking out of the water at about a ninety degree angle to the lower jaw, and that lower jaw is like just above the water's surface, with the corners of their mouth far enough underwater for the fish to like swim in there and get trapped. Some of the fish also just kind of jump in there. It is very fascinating to watch. When the whale has a big mouthful of food, mouth closes back under the water. This behavior was first documented in scientific literature in twenty seventeen, and there's been some speculation that whales have only started doing this recently because of pollution, that the fish that the whales can feed on only live up near the surface now, so the whales have had to adapt to this floaty, wide open mouth style of feeding to compensate. But researchers in Australia have found what they believe are written accounts of whales doing this exact same thing two thousand years ago, specifically in Norse descriptions of sea monsters called hagufa and animals described in medieval beast series that may have inspired those accounts. So here's a description from a text called the konungs Skuzia. I'm really sorry for my pronunciation of that. After saying this fish is so big that the writer is afraid to mention it at all because it will just seem incredible, the writer describes the way it feeds this way. Quote. It is said that when these fishes want something to eat. They are in the habit of giving forth a violent belch, which brings up so much food that all sorts of fish in the neighborhood, both large and small, will rush up in the hope of getting nourishment and good fair. Meanwhile, the monster keeps its mouth opened, and inasmuch as its opening is about as wide as a sound or furd, the fishes cannot help routing in in great numbers. But as soon as its mouth and belly are full, the monster closes its mouth and thus catches and shuts in all the fishes that just previously had rushed in eagerly to seek food. And lastly, scientists in Denmark have found what they believed to be the oldest written reference to the Norse god Odin. It's on a gold disc that was found in western Denmark, and it's at least one hundred and fifty years older than the previous earliest known mention of Odin. The Runic inscription says in part he is Odin's man. This disc was found in twenty twenty, but the inscriptions significant in date were renounced this march. Let's do another quick sponsor break. Now we have some mummies most of them animal mummies. According to research published in the journal Plus one in January, researchers studied ten crocodile mummies dating back to the fifth century BCE, five of them mostly complete crocodile bodies and five of them heads, and they determined that the mummification of these crocodiles used methods that have not been found anywhere else. In this case, researchers were able to examine the actual remains of some of the mummies very closely because most of their linen wraps had already been destroyed by insects. They found that the crocodiles had been mummified without using any kind of resin, and they had not been eviscerated, so unlike what may come to mind when you think about Egyptian mummification methods. Uh We also talked about that on an episode quite a while back. So the mummies also represented two different species of crocodile, West African and Nile crocodiles. Moving on, the excavations that the tomb of Ramses the second have unnerr a lot of mummified animals, including two thousand mummified rams heads. The rams heads may have been placed there as votive offerings, and they might have been connected to a cult dedicated to Ramseys who had died roughly one thousand years before. These mummified heads seem to have been placed there and our one human mummy this time around. Egyptian scientists have used computerized tomography or CT scanning to digitally unwrap and intact twenty three hundred year old mummy, whose remains have never been unwrapped before. This mummy is nicknamed the Golden Boy and was a teenage boy of presumably high socioeconomic status. Among their findings were at least forty nine amulets of twenty one different types, meant to protect him as he moved into the afterlife. Some were made of gold or semi precious stones, and others were made of clay or they were ceramic. These amulets were arranged in three columns, folded in among the cloth wrappings, so that talk of cloth wrappings seems like a good segue into some fines related to fabrics. First, a scrap of tartan found in glen Affric Pete Bog more than forty years ago, is now believed to be the oldest known piece of true Tartan material, and it's only a little bit younger than the first written reference to tartan. That first reference is documentation of a purchase of a piece of tartan by James the third and fourteen seventy one. According to radiocarbon dating, this piece of the fabric dates back to some time between fifteen hundred and sixteen hundred. This piece of fabric is sort of a yellow tan with green, brown, and red stripes, and those intersecting stripes are what makes the fabric a true Tartan. People found this while cutting pete from the bog in the nineteen eighty next, an international team of archaeologists led by the University of Haifa has found cotton and silk fabrics dating back to about thirteen hundred years ago in the desert area known as the Arava south of the Dead Sea. These fabrics date back to the region's early Islamic period, and they were found alongside other items that would have been imported from what's now China and India. Researchers believe that the cotton fabric came from what's now India and Sudan, and that the silk likely came from China. And this all suggested that this could provide some evidence of a large trade of silk and other fabrics that was following the same general route through the area that had been previously used to carry spices. And lastly, an Inca tunic or unku was found in a cemetery in Chile. These were formal garments that were made according to standards set by the Inca Empire. Those standards applied to the garment and the fabric used to make it. This particular garment, known as the Kaleta vittor unku, was made by someone who lived hundreds of miles away from the imperial capital of Cuzco, and they followed those standards, but they also incorporated techniques in imagery representing their own local culture as it had been before it had become part of the Inca Empire in the late fifteenth century. This was published in the Journal Plus one under the title Inca Unku Imperial or Provincial State Local Relations. It's an interesting look at how with an empire as large as it was, people could both sort of tow the imperial line of how things needed to be done and also incorporate parts of their own cultures. We will close out today's episode with some fines that involve skulls and bones, starting with two different skull surgeries. The first was on a woman who seems to have undergone trepanation twice. I fear not familiar with that term. Trepanation or tripanning is one of the oldest known surgical procedures, and it involved drilling, scraping, or cutting a hole through a person's skull. While there are real medical reasons to need to do this, like to relieve pressure on someone's brain after a head injury, in earlier eras, this was often a treatment for things like mental illness or epilepsy, or the belief that someone was possessed by spirits, not so grounded in evidence based medicine. This person lived sometime between the sixth and eighth centuries, and we don't know why she underwent trepanation two different times. Her skull also showed evidence of two large abscesses near her jaw, which could have caused an infection to spread to her brain, but we can't conclusively say that the absess and the trepanation were in any way related based on how the bone had healed. She seems to have lived at least three months after the first procedure, but it appears that she did not survive the second procedure. Part of her forehead bone had been scraped away, but without going all the way through it. The other skull surgery took place much longer ago, about fifteen hundred BCE. The skull was found in a tomb in Israel in which two brothers had been buried together. The remains of both brothers show signs of chronic illnesses and some congenital differences. It appears that one brother died in his late teens or early twenties, and that a few years later the surviving brother underwent trepanation. There's no evidence of healing from that surgery, so it does not appear that he survived it. And then at that point the other brother's body was exhumed and both of the brothers were buried together. Researchers who have studied this burial have found it notable for reasons beyond this skull surgery. It appears that both of these brothers needed and received lifelong care and were given the same respect and recognition in their burial as other members of the community would have been. Next Researchers led by a professor from Texas A and M University have found what they believe is the oldest bone projectile point in the Americas. It's at least thirteen thousand, nine hundred years old, but it is not the whole projectile point. It is just the little fragment of it embedded in the bone of a Masdon and it's made from the leg bone of a different Macedon. This find is from a site in the state of Washington known as the Manis Mastodon Site, and that thirteen thousand, nine hundred year age of the projectile point is connected to something that's going to come up again in Part two on Wednesday, and that is whether the Clovis people were the first human inhabitants of North America. The projectile point is from about nine hundred years before the Clovis people are believed to have arrived in North America, and so far this is the only bone tool that dates back to before the arrival of the Clovist people. Most other tools believed to be pre Clovis are made of stone. Next, archaeologists are studying a huge number of artifacts that were found during highway work in the UK between twenty sixteen and twenty eighteen. This work was known as the A fourteen Cambridge to Huntington Improvement Scheme. The side note I love the different use of the word scheme in the UK versus how we use it here in the US. One object they have found is a comb made from a piece of human skull dating back to the Iron Age. It is believed this comb was made for ritual purposes and not for grooming, and only two other similar combs to this one have been found by British archaeologists. Both of them were found within fifteen miles or twenty four bilometers of where this one was discovered. Next, archaeologists excavating a tomb in western China have found a pair of ice skate blades made from animal bone. These are roughly thirty five hundred years old and were made to be strapped onto a person's footwear. These skates are almost identical to ones found in Europe, which could potentially suggest some kind of trade connection between the two regions. And lastly, a chess set known as the Sandomir Chessmen were believed to have been made from polished deer antlers, or possibly from bone from an exotic large animal and carved by hand, but DNA testing on them has revealed that the pieces for one side of the board were made from horsebone and the pieces for the other side were made from cowbone, except for one pawn. That one pawn was made from the bone of a red deer. To believe that this red deer piece was made later on, possibly as a replacement. I don't know why. I love the idea of both sides of the board being made from bone, but the bone of two different types of animals. It's kind of a cool convention if that's how they did it. Yeah, I have some listener mail before we close out this part of On Earth. It is from Kim. Kim wrote, Hi, Holly and Tracy, longtime listener occasional writer. Here. I'm catching up on episodes and just listen to the two parter on Irving Berlin. White Christmas was always a holiday staple in my house growing up. But I get what you said in the episode and behind the scenes about it aging both horribly and beautifully. Another song from it that I take issue with now that I'm older is the g I Wish I was back in the Army number performed by bing crosby, Danny k Rosemary Clooney, and Vera Ellen. It's a horrible representation of why women joined the service during that time, looking for a husband and only thinking about finding one while serving. It does such a disservice to all the brave women who broke barriers and served honorably. Unfortunately, it's still a stereotype that exists today. I do appreciate that it talks about missing the service and all the benefits once you leave. It's still something that's often lamented by veterans. Anyways, thank you for a wonderfully researched and informative podcast. I've cited you all on school papers before and used your sources as jumping off points for research. You keep me company on my long commute to and from work. Please see the attached pet tax of our four month old chocolate lab puppy Brew and He's a ball of energy attached to clumsy paws and floppy ears. Sincerely, Kim, This dog is so cute. My reaction when I opened this email was to say a loud give me the dog. I had not really thought about that aspect of the song. I think I mostly was like yay. Reference to the wax and I just did not thank farther into it. So yeah, thank you for noting that as well, Kim, and for sending such a cute dog picture. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast or at History Podcast from iHeartRadio dot com. We're also all over social media ad missed than History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It is time for our next installment of Unearthed. If you're new to the show, a few times a year, we look at what has been literally or figuratively unearthed. If you are a longtime listener to the show, you have now heard me say that so many times. This time around on Unearthed, we've got some updates, some books and letters, fabrics, mummies, and just a whole bunch of stuff that involves skulls or bones, and it's not just like a burial of bones. We will start off with something that we mentioned in the behind the scenes of our most recent Unearthed episode, that happened in the window between when twenty twenty two ended and when those episodes were published, and because it already got that brief mentioned, we're just going to put it first. So, according to a bunch of early January news articles, an amateur researcher in London solved the mystery of twenty thousand year old cave paintings, specifically the meanings of dots and other markings in those paintings. The researcher, whose name is Ben Bacon, concluded that the markings represented a lunar calendar. So Bacon poured over images of cave paintings at the British Library and online, and also collaborated with two professors, one from Durham University and the other from City College London. They were focused on three specific marks that show up in a lot of these paintings. There's a vertical line and a dot, and a symbol that looks kind of like the letter why. Bacon thought maybe the why might be a reference to giving births. This looks sort of like one line is growing out of the other line. We should note not every piece of figurative European cave art from this period has these kind of markings. They're on some images but not others. And these are also not the only markings that not might appear on this kind of art. But like, this is what the focus was here. So their hypothesis was that the lines and dots represented a number of months in a lunar calendar beginning in the spring, specifically the time of year described as the bun Sison when ice and snow start melting and vegetation begins to turn green again, and if that WHY symbol appeared in a series of dots, then its position would denote the months when that animal would usually give birth. They examined more than six hundred pieces of cave art, primarily from France and Spain, and they sorted the animals that were depicted into groups, so there were rox, birds, bison, caprids, servants, fish, horses, mammoths, and rhinos. And then they noted the number and positions of these markings that were shown within these groups, and they compared all of that information to known information about when all of these animals do things like migrate and mate and give birth, and they found a strong correlation between the markings and the expected months. For example, there were fifteen depictions of URX marked with the Y symbol, and the vast majority of the time that why was in a position that would denote the second month of the year in this lunar calendar, which is roughly when RX would be expected to give birth. There are also correlations between the numbers of lines and dots and the months after the start of spring when the various animals mate, spawn, or migrate. The paper also noted that while these marks wouldn't really fit the definition of a written language, they could be classified as a sort of proto writing. Back when we briefly mentioned this and the behind the scenes episode last time, I said, I was really glad I didn't talk about it yet because there would be a little bit more time to see whether this holds up. Unlike a lot of these sort of amateur cracks the case headlines that we've talked about before on the show, this actually involves published research. It was published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, which is a peer reviewed academic journal, So this is not just someone's personal announcement of I solved it, like some of these stories often are. But there have been some criticisms. There's earlier published work that came to similar conclusions and was not cited in this paper, including a paper called Lunar Timekeeping and Upper Paleolithic Cave Art that was published in twenty twenty one in the journal Prehistoria News series. We don't currently know if the authors were aware of that earlier work or not. There are also other people who have been tweeting and blogging about this basic idea for years. Again, we don't know whether the authors had ever seen those tweets or blog posts. Also, a lot of animals give birth in what would be the second or third month of a lunar calendar, starting in the bun Sizon, so people have question whether this is really something people would need to keep up with on a calendar. Also, just in general, this paper presents a hypothesis and the support for that hypothesis, which is usually how these kinds of papers go, which means that, like conclusively solved, the case is pretty much always going to be an over cell. But that's what makes clickable things on the internet. Sure does. Now that that's out of the way, we will move on to updates. A poem copied into an eighteenth century commonplace book may be a previously unknown work by past podcast subject Phyllis Wheatley Mary Powell Potts later Mary Powell Potts Jones copied On the Day of Love Rotch into a commonplace book about fifteen years after it was written. It was attributed only to quote a Negro girl about fifteen years of age. English professor Wendy Raphael Roberts believes that this was Wheatley, largely because no one else fitting that description was publishing poetry at that time. So this poem commemorates the death of Love macy Rotch. And one of the details that calls Robert's conclusion into some question is that the copyist who put this into the Commonplace book wrote that Love macy Rotch was, in the language of the time, the poet's mistress, or in other words, her enslaver. But Philips Wheatley was enslaved by John and Susannah Wheatley, and that is something that people who knew about her and knew her poetry would have known. There's some speculation that maybe Wheatley was hired out to the Roch family while Love macy Rotch was ill, and that would have been during some years of Wheatley's life that were not very well documented. Our episode on Phyllis Wheatly came out on March fifth, twenty eighteen. Researchers may have answered a lingering question about the ancient city of Great Zimbabwe, which we covered on the show on January eighteenth, twenty seventeen. That question is how the city could have maintained a steady water supply that was large enough to support its population through both remote sensing and excavations, archaeologists have found intentionally created depressions in the landscape, which are locally known as daca pits, which would have collected water during rainy seasons and stored it for later use. Some of these pits were already known about, but this research has found evidence of a lot more of them, including ones that were in the paths of streams or other places where water can sort of seep up from the ground during periods of rain. So basically this was a water management system that incorporated a va variety of holistic methods all across the area, so it was what's described today as a landscape scale approach to conservation. Next, a collection of fifty seven letters from the National Library of France were recently decoded, something that was challenging since the people working on it didn't initially know who wrote them or when, and because there were multiple possible options for what each character might represent. Plus the team was initially thinking in terms of the wrong language, since the letters had been found in a collection of Italian papers. Turns out they were not in Italian, though they were in French, and as they started to get some of it readable based on that content, they figured out the person writing them was imprisoned. It became clear that the author of these letters was Mary, Queen of Scott's, and that this was a collection of secret letters written to her supporters that were believed to have been lost had been miscataloged at the library, something that nobody really realized until they were able to decode the contents and figure out what they said. Most of the letters were written to Michelle de Castelnain de Movsier, French ambassador to England between fifteen seventy eight and fifteen eighty four, and while this international interdisciplinary team of codebreakers has broken the cipher Mary used to write them, their contents are still in the process of being analyzed. This has been described as the most important Mary Queen of Scott's discovery in the last century. Mary Queen of Scott's has come up several times on the show, including our episode on her trial and execution that came out on December seventeenth, twenty eighteen. Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania has been working on construction at an area known as Little Roundtop to address issues with things like accessibility, erosion, and parking. Needs. A metal detector sweep head of that work revealed an unexploded artillery shell from the US Civil War. It's not all that unusual to find weaponry or ammunition at the park, but usually those are much smaller, less dangerous items, like percussion caps. Speaking to CNN, park spokesman Jason Martz said, the archaeologist who detected and unearthed this artillery shell quote laid it gently on the ground, took a picture of it, and ran for the Hills. Park staff contacted the Army's fifty fifth Ordnance Company, which moved the shell to a more isolated part of the park and safely detonated it after clearing the area and closing off the roads. We did a live show at Gettysburg in twenty nineteen, and we released a studio version of that live episode on July tenth of that year. We had a couple of technical and environmental and just noise issues during the show that made the recording of that, as it was live, not really work to distribute as an episode. Otherwise, though, we had a great time at Gettysburg. Let's take a sponsor break and then we'll do a couple more updates. In twenty twenty one, archaeologists found the likely site of the home of Ben Ross, father of Harriet Tubman, who we covered on a two parter in twenty sixteen. This was on land that was once a farm belonging to Anthony Thompson, who enslaved at least forty people there. Tubman was born on Thompson's farm, and we talked about the discovery of Ben Ross's cabin on a previous installment of unearthed. Archaeological work in this area has been ongoing, and in February, archaeologists announced that they had found African religious objects in the ruins of an enslaved overseer's house not far away from Ross's cabin. Are believed to have been a cash that would have been kept in front of the fireplace to protect the people living in the home from negative spirits. They included a glass perfume bottle stopper shaped like a heart, a copper button, and a ceramic dish. Yeah, some of the headlines about this kind of shorthanded it down to like African religious items found at Harriet Tubman's birthplace, and that's just kind of shrinking that whole farm down to her birthplace. Moving on back in twenty twenty, Congress voted to start renaming things like military bases and ships that had been given names that commemorated the Confederacy from the US Civil War. That naming process is ongoing, and one of the more recent announcements is that a guided missile cruiser previously called the USS Chancellorsville will be renamed as the USS Robert Smalls. The Battle of Chancellorsville was a major battle during the US Civil War and is sometimes described as Confederate General Roberty Lee's greatest victory. We did a two parter on Robert Small's back in February of twenty sixteen. He liberated himself and others from slavery by commandeering a ship called the Planter and then just sailing it past Confederate checkpoints and then went on to, among other things, serve in the US House of Representatives. Okay, so maybe this last thing is kind of a stretch in terms of an update. But back in February of twenty twenty, we did an episode on Paul Cuffey which was researched in part through a visit that Tracy made to the new Bedford Whaling Museum, and that museum trip also inspired the episode on Joshua Slocum, which came out in September of twenty twenty, and in January, news broke that a former employee of the new Bedford Whaling Museum had been arrested and was facing charges after allegedly stealing at least seventy five thousand dollars worth of objects from the museum's collection. More recent reporting has put that number closer to like one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. So this former employee, who was fired when the thefts were discovered, had repeatedly faced criminal charges previously related to things like theft that had happened over the last several years, and had also faced other civil and criminal charges. Some of these charges had led to guilty verdicts, including some charges for stealing. It's not totally clear whether the museum was aware of this history. In Massachusetts, it's illegal to ask about a person's criminal record on a job application, but it is legal to conduct criminal background checks during the hiring process. It's also legal for an employer to refuse to hire someone based on their criminal record if that record is related to the work that's being performed. In this case, this was someone who had keys for all of the museum's stores and access codes for all the alarms the museum, at least at my last check of all of the reporting on it. The museum has declined to comment on this due to the ongoing criminal proceedings. It also appears that the museum did not realize that items were being stolen until one of the dealers who was buying them started to become suspicious. Basically, the items that were being sold were increasingly interesting and unique. The dealer googled the seller, realized his connection to the museum, and then contacted the police. Other antiques dealers and pawnbrokers in the area had also contacted police after buying items that just seemed like they were too rare and too high quality to be in a random person's possession, but those other calls don't seem to have led to any investigation. At this point, most of the pieces have been recovered and returned to the museum. A lot of the dealers who bought them did not sell them because they realized there was just something off about the whole thing. I was fascinated by the whole story, yes, both because it was local to me and just because of the particulars of it. Now moving on to books and letters, two of which involves something inscribed into stone. First, a runestone found in Norway at a site northwest of Oslo, maybe the oldest runestone ever found. This runestone was found during archaeological work at a burial ground near the municipality of Hula in the fall of twenty twenty one, but it wasn't announced until this year, after researchers had had some time to study it and date it. It's believed that this was created sometime between the year zero and the year two fifty CE, making it Scandinavia's oldest example of writing. It's possible that some of the runes spell out the name of a person who was buried at the site where this was found. And for the other stone. The Rosetta stone is a stile with an inscription in two languages, Egyptian and Greece, and three scripts Egyptian hieroglyphics, Egyptian Demotic script, and ancient Greek. Folks may be the most familiar with the Rosetta stone because that combination of languages and scripts made it possible for modern researchers to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics, but the content of that inscription may not be as familiar. It's a decree passed by Egyptian priests in one ninety six BCE, celebrating the anniversary of the coronation of Ptolemy fifth Epiphanes. A big focus is the king's accomplishments, and one of those accomplishments is described as restoring peace following a rebellion. Excavations in northern Egypt have been looking for evidence of this rebellion, which is referenced in other inscriptions and texts besides the Rosetta Stone, but it has not been connected to many archaeological finds. Now Though, at a site north of Cairo, archaeologists have found evidence of things like burned buildings, weapons, and human remains. Coins and pottery at the site have made it possible to date this site to the time of the rebellion. This research was published in the Journal of Field Archaeology. Next, a landscaper who was clearing brush on Cape cod found a bottle containing messages believed to have been written by prisoners of war during World War II. The landscaper, named Shane Adams, donated the bottle to the historical society of sand to it and couldtuit. It's believed that the messages were written by prisoners of war who were held at Camp Edwards and who worked at another camp. Camp can do it to clean up damage from a hurricane. But it's not clear whether the bottle was meant to be thrown into the sea with the hope that someone would find it, or if it was more like a time capsule. The bottle was found upside down, sticking straight down in the sand, which may mean the latter. Yeah, it could have worked its way that way if someone threw it into the water, but it seems more likely that they mentionally put it that way. Next. Back in twenty twenty one, a video of a whale feeding on fish went viral on Instagram. This whale was sort of treading water at the surface of the ocean with their mouth wide wide open, like the upper jaws sticking out of the water at about a ninety degree angle to the lower jaw, and that lower jaw is like just above the water's surface, with the corners of their mouth far enough underwater for the fish to like swim in there and get trapped. Some of the fish also just kind of jump in there. It is very fascinating to watch. When the whale has a big mouthful of food, mouth closes back under the water. This behavior was first documented in scientific literature in twenty seventeen, and there's been some speculation that whales have only started doing this recently because of pollution, that the fish that the whales can feed on only live up near the surface now, so the whales have had to adapt to this floaty, wide open mouth style of feeding to compensate. But researchers in Australia have found what they believe are written accounts of whales doing this exact same thing two thousand years ago, specifically in Norse descriptions of sea monsters called hagufa and animals described in medieval beast series that may have inspired those accounts. So here's a description from a text called the konungs Skuzia. I'm really sorry for my pronunciation of that. After saying this fish is so big that the writer is afraid to mention it at all because it will just seem incredible, the writer describes the way it feeds this way. Quote. It is said that when these fishes want something to eat. They are in the habit of giving forth a violent belch, which brings up so much food that all sorts of fish in the neighborhood, both large and small, will rush up in the hope of getting nourishment and good fair. Meanwhile, the monster keeps its mouth opened, and inasmuch as its opening is about as wide as a sound or furd, the fishes cannot help routing in in great numbers. But as soon as its mouth and belly are full, the monster closes its mouth and thus catches and shuts in all the fishes that just previously had rushed in eagerly to seek food. And lastly, scientists in Denmark have found what they believed to be the oldest written reference to the Norse god Odin. It's on a gold disc that was found in western Denmark, and it's at least one hundred and fifty years older than the previous earliest known mention of Odin. The Runic inscription says in part he is Odin's man. This disc was found in twenty twenty, but the inscriptions significant in date were renounced this march. Let's do another quick sponsor break. Now we have some mummies most of them animal mummies. According to research published in the journal Plus one in January, researchers studied ten crocodile mummies dating back to the fifth century BCE, five of them mostly complete crocodile bodies and five of them heads, and they determined that the mummification of these crocodiles used methods that have not been found anywhere else. In this case, researchers were able to examine the actual remains of some of the mummies very closely because most of their linen wraps had already been destroyed by insects. They found that the crocodiles had been mummified without using any kind of resin, and they had not been eviscerated, so unlike what may come to mind when you think about Egyptian mummification methods. Uh We also talked about that on an episode quite a while back. So the mummies also represented two different species of crocodile, West African and Nile crocodiles. Moving on, the excavations that the tomb of Ramses the second have unnerr a lot of mummified animals, including two thousand mummified rams heads. The rams heads may have been placed there as votive offerings, and they might have been connected to a cult dedicated to Ramseys who had died roughly one thousand years before. These mummified heads seem to have been placed there and our one human mummy this time around. Egyptian scientists have used computerized tomography or CT scanning to digitally unwrap and intact twenty three hundred year old mummy, whose remains have never been unwrapped before. This mummy is nicknamed the Golden Boy and was a teenage boy of presumably high socioeconomic status. Among their findings were at least forty nine amulets of twenty one different types, meant to protect him as he moved into the afterlife. Some were made of gold or semi precious stones, and others were made of clay or they were ceramic. These amulets were arranged in three columns, folded in among the cloth wrappings, so that talk of cloth wrappings seems like a good segue into some fines related to fabrics. First, a scrap of tartan found in glen Affric Pete Bog more than forty years ago, is now believed to be the oldest known piece of true Tartan material, and it's only a little bit younger than the first written reference to tartan. That first reference is documentation of a purchase of a piece of tartan by James the third and fourteen seventy one. According to radiocarbon dating, this piece of the fabric dates back to some time between fifteen hundred and sixteen hundred. This piece of fabric is sort of a yellow tan with green, brown, and red stripes, and those intersecting stripes are what makes the fabric a true Tartan. People found this while cutting pete from the bog in the nineteen eighty next, an international team of archaeologists led by the University of Haifa has found cotton and silk fabrics dating back to about thirteen hundred years ago in the desert area known as the Arava south of the Dead Sea. These fabrics date back to the region's early Islamic period, and they were found alongside other items that would have been imported from what's now China and India. Researchers believe that the cotton fabric came from what's now India and Sudan, and that the silk likely came from China. And this all suggested that this could provide some evidence of a large trade of silk and other fabrics that was following the same general route through the area that had been previously used to carry spices. And lastly, an Inca tunic or unku was found in a cemetery in Chile. These were formal garments that were made according to standards set by the Inca Empire. Those standards applied to the garment and the fabric used to make it. This particular garment, known as the Kaleta vittor unku, was made by someone who lived hundreds of miles away from the imperial capital of Cuzco, and they followed those standards, but they also incorporated techniques in imagery representing their own local culture as it had been before it had become part of the Inca Empire in the late fifteenth century. This was published in the Journal Plus one under the title Inca Unku Imperial or Provincial State Local Relations. It's an interesting look at how with an empire as large as it was, people could both sort of tow the imperial line of how things needed to be done and also incorporate parts of their own cultures. We will close out today's episode with some fines that involve skulls and bones, starting with two different skull surgeries. The first was on a woman who seems to have undergone trepanation twice. I fear not familiar with that term. Trepanation or tripanning is one of the oldest known surgical procedures, and it involved drilling, scraping, or cutting a hole through a person's skull. While there are real medical reasons to need to do this, like to relieve pressure on someone's brain after a head injury, in earlier eras, this was often a treatment for things like mental illness or epilepsy, or the belief that someone was possessed by spirits, not so grounded in evidence based medicine. This person lived sometime between the sixth and eighth centuries, and we don't know why she underwent trepanation two different times. Her skull also showed evidence of two large abscesses near her jaw, which could have caused an infection to spread to her brain, but we can't conclusively say that the absess and the trepanation were in any way related based on how the bone had healed. She seems to have lived at least three months after the first procedure, but it appears that she did not survive the second procedure. Part of her forehead bone had been scraped away, but without going all the way through it. The other skull surgery took place much longer ago, about fifteen hundred BCE. The skull was found in a tomb in Israel in which two brothers had been buried together. The remains of both brothers show signs of chronic illnesses and some congenital differences. It appears that one brother died in his late teens or early twenties, and that a few years later the surviving brother underwent trepanation. There's no evidence of healing from that surgery, so it does not appear that he survived it. And then at that point the other brother's body was exhumed and both of the brothers were buried together. Researchers who have studied this burial have found it notable for reasons beyond this skull surgery. It appears that both of these brothers needed and received lifelong care and were given the same respect and recognition in their burial as other members of the community would have been. Next Researchers led by a professor from Texas A and M University have found what they believe is the oldest bone projectile point in the Americas. It's at least thirteen thousand, nine hundred years old, but it is not the whole projectile point. It is just the little fragment of it embedded in the bone of a Masdon and it's made from the leg bone of a different Macedon. This find is from a site in the state of Washington known as the Manis Mastodon Site, and that thirteen thousand, nine hundred year age of the projectile point is connected to something that's going to come up again in Part two on Wednesday, and that is whether the Clovis people were the first human inhabitants of North America. The projectile point is from about nine hundred years before the Clovis people are believed to have arrived in North America, and so far this is the only bone tool that dates back to before the arrival of the Clovist people. Most other tools believed to be pre Clovis are made of stone. Next, archaeologists are studying a huge number of artifacts that were found during highway work in the UK between twenty sixteen and twenty eighteen. This work was known as the A fourteen Cambridge to Huntington Improvement Scheme. The side note I love the different use of the word scheme in the UK versus how we use it here in the US. One object they have found is a comb made from a piece of human skull dating back to the Iron Age. It is believed this comb was made for ritual purposes and not for grooming, and only two other similar combs to this one have been found by British archaeologists. Both of them were found within fifteen miles or twenty four bilometers of where this one was discovered. Next, archaeologists excavating a tomb in western China have found a pair of ice skate blades made from animal bone. These are roughly thirty five hundred years old and were made to be strapped onto a person's footwear. These skates are almost identical to ones found in Europe, which could potentially suggest some kind of trade connection between the two regions. And lastly, a chess set known as the Sandomir Chessmen were believed to have been made from polished deer antlers, or possibly from bone from an exotic large animal and carved by hand, but DNA testing on them has revealed that the pieces for one side of the board were made from horsebone and the pieces for the other side were made from cowbone, except for one pawn. That one pawn was made from the bone of a red deer. To believe that this red deer piece was made later on, possibly as a replacement. I don't know why. I love the idea of both sides of the board being made from bone, but the bone of two different types of animals. It's kind of a cool convention if that's how they did it. Yeah, I have some listener mail before we close out this part of On Earth. It is from Kim. Kim wrote, Hi, Holly and Tracy, longtime listener occasional writer. Here. I'm catching up on episodes and just listen to the two parter on Irving Berlin. White Christmas was always a holiday staple in my house growing up. But I get what you said in the episode and behind the scenes about it aging both horribly and beautifully. Another song from it that I take issue with now that I'm older is the g I Wish I was back in the Army number performed by bing crosby, Danny k Rosemary Clooney, and Vera Ellen. It's a horrible representation of why women joined the service during that time, looking for a husband and only thinking about finding one while serving. It does such a disservice to all the brave women who broke barriers and served honorably. Unfortunately, it's still a stereotype that exists today. I do appreciate that it talks about missing the service and all the benefits once you leave. It's still something that's often lamented by veterans. Anyways, thank you for a wonderfully researched and informative podcast. I've cited you all on school papers before and used your sources as jumping off points for research. You keep me company on my long commute to and from work. Please see the attached pet tax of our four month old chocolate lab puppy Brew and He's a ball of energy attached to clumsy paws and floppy ears. Sincerely, Kim, This dog is so cute. My reaction when I opened this email was to say a loud give me the dog. I had not really thought about that aspect of the song. I think I mostly was like yay. Reference to the wax and I just did not thank farther into it. So yeah, thank you for noting that as well, Kim, and for sending such a cute dog picture. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast or at History Podcast from iHeartRadio dot com. We're also all over social media ad missed than History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.