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 Frye. This is part two of our regular installment of our Unearthed series, where we talk about things that have been literally and figuratively unearthed over the last few months. Today's episode is going to have the books and letters, a lot of fashion and cosmetics related stuff, whole out of medical finds, some shipwrecks, and of course we are going to start where we often start in part two, which is stuff that doesn't really go into a good category, which I call potpoury. So back in October, police in northern Ireland were notified of a body that appeared to be that of a teenage boy. This has turned out to be not a recent murder victim, but a bog body. It's roughly two thousand to two thousand, five hundred years old, now nicknamed the Balachi Boy. His cause of death is unknown, but officials were reportedly astonished that this wasn't the victim of a recent crime. Some of the skin was intact and described as pink, not as the leathery brown look that folks often associate with bog bodies. This body was found on land owned by the Department of Agriculture and it was sent to National Museums Northern Ireland for further study. The whole area was treated as a crime scene and then they were like, oh, it's this is not a crime though at least not a crime that happens the statute of limitation and this is over for bog bodies. If it was a crime, the person that did this crime is long gone. Yes. So next in January, a crew dredging the Vistilla River in Poland pulled up a medieval era sword. This has a very long blade and a pommel that shaped sort of like an and there's an inscription along the blade that looks like the name Albert. There have been at least one hundred and seventy other swords discovered that have this inscription, so you know, it's believed to maybe be the name of the sword maker or some other identifying mark. This is a Frankish name, and these swords were made in Western Europe in what's now northern France, but most of them have been found in Scandinavia, so a lot of sources are describing this as a Viking sword. A tsunami may have struck part of northern Europe eight thousand years ago. Based on research done through the University of York, this tsunami would have followed an underwater landslide known as the Stroga, which happened near Norway, with the resulting tsunami striking the coast of what's now Northumberland. There was already archaeological evidence suggesting that the population of this region declined sharply around this time, and this could provide an explanation of why the population of the island of Great Britain was very small, and most people in this area were living along the coast, so the death toll and impact on settlements would have been severe. Moving on, a metal detectorist found a three hundred year old thimble under a tree in Pembrokeshire, Wales, back in November of twenty twenty, and that thimble has now been declared a treasure. The thimble is highly decorated, It was made in two pieces and it's covered in a zigzag pattern with an inscription that reads like still and Love Ever around the bottom. I love that sentiment and I also love how it is spelled because like is lyke and still only has one L on it. I love it. The UK's Treasure Act of nineteen ninety six requires items declared to be treasures to be offered for sale to museums. The fate of this thimble was not certain when we recorded this, but the Tenbee Museum and Art Gallery, which is not far from where the thimble was found, has expressed interest in it. And lastly, a Roman dodecahedron has been found in England during a dig at the Lincolnshire village of Norton Disney. About one hundred of these twelve sided objects, most of them with little knobs on the corners, have been found across Europe, with more than thirty of those in Britain. These Roman dodecahedrons have been the subject of a number of viral videos claiming that they were used to knit gloves and that dummy dumbhead historians would know that if they just talked to some knitters. Uh. However, only some of these have the holes that are involved in using them to knit gloves, and a lot of them just aren't the right size for that purpose. Plus, these dodecahedrons date back to between the first and third century CE, and the oldest knitted objects found so far come from Egypt around the eleventh century CE. This is a bit tricky since items made from natural fibers decay and they aren't often preserved in the archaeological record. But we're talking about as long as one thousand years between when these dotecahedrons were made and when knitting is believed to have developed. We do, by the way, have a whole episode on the history of knitting for folks who would like to know more. That was a Saturday Classic in January twenty twenty one. Anyway, this one is about the size of a grapefruit, and like the others, it's not conclusively known exactly what it was for. There aren't any references to these objects in surviving Roman texts, and some of the possibilities that have been proposed include that they were toys or were used for some kind of a game, or that they had a religious purpose, or that they were ammunition for weapons like slings, basically anything you can think of that something shaped like this could be used for. Someone has suggested that could have been the use a giant game. They are really cool looking. I understand why people are fascinated with them, but the videos implying that historians are stupid for not knowing they were used for knitting glove they irritate me. We're going to move on to books and letters, and this first one came from a tip from a listener, and our apologies because we didn't note which listener. Fragments of an eleventh century Latin psalter have been found within the bindings of other books. This psalter also contained old English glosses or word for word translations. Pieces of this salter were used as reinforcing materials sometime around sixteen hundred, and a number of other pieces of it have been found before. Yeah, the materials needed to bind books were very expensive, so repurposing books and the materials from the books into other books super common. A newly published paper on this looks that multiple pieces of this psalter that have been found, including eight and leaf guards and thirteen strips that were used to line the spines of other books, so twenty one total fragments of this psalter. It's possible, but not definite, that this was assalter that belonged to an English princess named Gunhild who fled to Bruges after the Norman conquest of ten sixty six. She is known to have had a psalter which she donated to a church, and it would have made sense for this psalter to have been in Latin with old English glosses. Next, a group of students has used AI to try to translate scrolls that were carbonized during the eruption of Vesuvius in the year seventy nine CE, scrolls that are much too fragile to try to unroll and read by any other means. This was part of a competition called the Vesuvius Challenge at the University of Kentucky, and these students won the competition's grand prize after deciphering several passages from a three dimensional CT scan that had recently been made of one scroll. This added up to about five percent of the total text in that scroll, which maybe doesn't sound like much, but this was meant to be more of a proof of concept than an attempt to decipher the whole thing. Also, that's more than we had before. Yeah. One of the students was also part of another similar project last year. Yeah, before we knew zero because if we tried to unroll it, it would fall apart. So this kind of work might be able to allow researchers to read scrolls that really could not be read otherwise and thus preserve knowledge that would otherwise be lost. But there are some concerns about this kind of work, aside from debates about AI, which, as I understand that, AI was more about like recognizing what's text and what's not not on coming up with what the words were like. It wasn't a predictive model of the text as I understand it. Anyway, many of these scrolls were found under the remains of Herculaneum, which is surrounded by populated neighborhoods today, So if additional excavations were done to look for more scrolls like these, they would probably go underneath houses that are currently occupied, and some of the residents of these homes worry about whether that kind of work could destabilize the foundations of the neighborhood. Next, it's possible that researchers have found the oldest known runs in Denmark on the blade of a two thousand year old iron knife, which were only visible after the blade was cleaned and conserved. Engraved into the blade is the word hirilla, which means small world. These runes are about eight hundred years older than the Yelling runestones which we have covered on the show before next. New radiocarbon dating suggests that the rongorongo script used on the island of Rapanui was developed before the arrival of Europeans on the island. This came from a tablet currently held in a collection in Rome that was dated to between fourteen ninety three and fifteen oh nine, which was more than two hundred years before the first European arrivals on the island. While it is possible that this script could have been engraved into a very old piece of wood later, it doesn't necessarily seem likely that there would have just been an ancient piece of wood to have this engraved on it. Even though Rango rongo doesn't resemble European written languages at all, there has been an argument that it was developed because of the influence of Europeans, partly because Europeans didn't notice it was being used there until eighteen sixty four. Also, as a note, there aren't many examples of this script today, and none of them are on Rapanui. They're all in collections elsewhere. Moving on, A thirty three hundred year old tablet was found in central Turkey last year, and it has now been deciphered. This tablet is about the size of a person's palm, and the writing on it is in Cuneiform. This seems to describe an invasion during a Hittite civil war, with the invaders being one of the warring factions of Hittites. Next, back in the late eighteenth century, bricklayers working at the Shakespeare House in Stratford upon Avon found a religious tract hidden in the rafters. It contained the name J. Shakespeare and has long been believed to have belonged to William Shakespeare's father John. It's a translation of an Italian text called The Last Will and Testament of the Soul. It's sort of a religious pledge that a person could sign their name to. Research into lots of different surviving copies and translations of this text has led to the conclusion that it was actually written after John Shakespeare died. The only other J. Shakespeare it could have belonged to is William Shakespeare's younger sister Joan, about whom we know very little. This document contains references to dying a good Catholic death, which is notable since at that point England had become a Protestant nation where Catholics weren't allowed to openly practice their faith. And lastly, researchers have found a potential solution to preserving ancient papyrie that are contaminated with fungus, and that is exposing them to wassabi vapors. Researchers created mock copies of painted and unpainted papyrus and then expose them to fungi. Exposure to wasabi vapor completely eliminated the fungus in the painted and unpainted copies without damaging the papyrus. So you're preserving all of your stuff and clearing out things when you eat a lot of wasabi. Is my uh, I don't know. I did not look far enough into it to know what led them to say maybe if we expose this to wasabi vapors, but I love it. We are going to take a quick sponsor break and then we're going to talk about some stuff related to fashion and cosmetics. Okay, Next we have a bunch of fines that are related to the overalled ideas of beauty, fashion and cosmetics. First in Wales, one discovery is a Roman ligula. This is a silver spoon with a tiny, tiny bowl and a long, thin handle that was used to remove things like perfume, makeup, or other similar substances from long necked bottles. Most sources describe this as a toilet spoon, with toilet meaning the act of grooming, not the thing in the bathroom where someone empties their bladder or bowels. The first article I read about this fine did not explain that about the name until very far down in the text, and I was very confused. Normally, these little spoons had straight handles, but this one has become bent at so point it measures about two point five inches or six point three centimeters long, with the bowl having a diameter of only point two inches or five millimeters. These spoons were more commonly made out of copper alloy, and it's possible that the ones made from silver were used for medical purposes because of silver's natural antimicrobial property, so removing medical preparations from jars rather than cosmetics. A vial of what was most likely lip pigment was found in southeastern Iran back in two thousand and one after flooding unearthed a number of objects from ancient burial sites, and this has now been described in a paper that was in the journal Scientific Reports. This vial was about four thousand years old and the pigment in it is a very deep red and it was made primarily from metererals like haematite, manganite and braunite, along with some traces of other materials, all in a base of wax and other organic substances. This is one of the oldest discoveries of its kind, but it has a pretty similar formulation to modern mineral based makeup. The container holding the pigment is also very finely crafted, made from a greenish chlorite and decorated with patterned incisions. Next, a three thousand year old dress fastener was found by a metal detectorist in Staffordshire, England, one of only seven such fasteners ever found in England and Wales. It's shaped almost like a set of finger symbols connected by a string, although the whole thing is made of gold, so you couldn't clap those two ends together without bending or breaking it. It would have been used to hold a person's cloak, skirt or dressed together. This item was probably made in Ireland. Irish metalsmiths of this era were known for their gold work. Another fastener that made news in recent months was a medieval belt loop found in Poland. This would have been used to hang someone's keys or a pouch from their belts, and it was found by a metal detectorist, and it depicts a stylized human figure attached to a rectangular mount, and that mount is what would have been used to slide the loop onto a person's belt. Next, we have a couple of garments that were just sort of found in boxes. One is a ceremonial robe that would have been used by the Emperor of China in the early nineteenth century. It was in a cardboard box tucked in the back of a drawer after being purchased by Eric Hyde Villiers as a gift for his father in nineteen thirteen. The Villiers family is an aristocratic family with roots that stretch back to Barbara Villiers, who had five children with King Charles the first. Because this robe was in a box that was protected and unopened for so long, it's very well preserved. It's made from gold and blue silk, decorated with twelve astronomical symbols and dragon imagery. This is the type of robe that would have been worn for twice yearly festivals at the Temple of Heaven, and it is planned to be auctioned off in May. The other item is a sweater that was found in a parcel that was shipped from Tourjon in the Faroe Islands to a recipient in Copenhagen, but it was seized by the British Navy during the Second Battle of Copenhagen and never made its way to its destination. The ship's captain was unaware that a war had started when setting sail from port. The sweater was made from very bright red wool. It is still very bright and it has a black and red floral pattern. This was accompanied by a letter in Danish which read, in part quote, my wife sends her regards, thank you for the pudding rice. She sends your fiance this sweater in the hopes that it is not displeasing to her. This charming discovery was part of the Prize Papers project, which is an effort to catalog and study an enormous amount of mail that was seized by the British Royal Navy over a period of almost two hundred years. There's so much unopened mail, just that as part of this project. All the rest of our fashion findes are about some kind of jewelry. First, a medieval love badge has been found in Dankst, Poland during restoration work at a fifteenth century port. This restoration work involved foundation work at the port's crane, and that crane is the oldest surviving port crane in Europe. This badge is shaped like a turtle dove and it's carrying a banner that reads emmor vincit omnia or love conquers All. Back in twenty twenty, a fifteen hundred year old ring was found in Emerly in southern Denmark, but the find wasn't announced until now to allow for additional metal detecting work to take place at the site where it was discovered. This ring is made from gold with an oval garnet with four spirals underneath the mount. Like the sword that we mentioned earlier, this was probably Frankish in origin and worn by someone high up in the Maravingian dynasty. This find seemed to surprise researchers because this kind of ring typically would have belonged to somebody of very high rank, and gold was often used as a diplomatic gift, but nobody of the rank who would be likely to have this ring is known to have lived in the area at the right time. An easy explanation would be that some important person lost it while they were traveling, but there are other objects found in the area that suggest that somebody very powerful might have actually been living there, we just don't currently know who. And Lastly, archaeologists in Turkia have found more than one hundred ornamental objects dating back to about eleven thousand years ago that were likely worn as jewelry in body piercings. These were made of a range of materials including limestone, obsidian, and river pedals, and about eighty five of the objects are complete. Based on their designs, it's likely that they were worn in ear or lower lip piercings. There have also been human remains found in the area with wear on their lower teeth that would likely have happened while wearing lip jewelry. These offer the earliest documentation of this kind of body modification in Southwest Asia. Next, we are moving on to another subject, which is medicine, and there are so many medical finds. First, there was a lot of coverage of studies documenting ancient people with a number of different genetic differences. The first of these came through work with the thousand Ancient British Genomes Project. Researchers in the UK found evidence of someone with Mosaic Turner syndrome who lived about twenty five hundred years ago, as well as someone with Jacob syndrome who lived in the early medieval period, and three people with Kleinfelter syndrome who each lived in different years. So in Mosaic Turner syndrome, someone has one X chromosome without a second X or Y chromosome. Jacob's syndrome involves having an additional Y chromosome or x y Y, and Kleinfelter syndrome involves having an additional X chromosome or xx Y. This work followed development of new computational methods meant to pick up more variation in the X and Y chromosomes in ancient DNA. We don't really know much about the lives of the five total people discussed in this research, who lived over a span of time about twenty five hundred to two hundred fifty years ago, but it does seem as though they were buried according to the typical customs of the society they were living in. Rick Schulton, Professor of Scientific and Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Oxford, also noted this in a press release quote, the results of this study open up exciting new possibilities for the study of sex in the past, moving beyond binary categories in a way that would be impossible without the advances being made an ancient DNA analysis. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute have also been working with ancient DNA and have identified six people who likely had Down syndrome. Five of them lived between five thousand and two thousand, five hundred years ago, and the six lived in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. This conclusion is based on the fact that these six people had an unusually large number of genetic sequences connected to chromosome twenty one, which could really only be explained by their having an additional copy of that chromosome. One type of Down syndrome is called trisomy twenty one and occurs when someone has three of that chromosome rather than two. These researchers also found evidence of one person with Edward syndrome or trisomy eighteen. Similarly to the previous study, we don't really know much about the lives of these people, and in the case of these they were sadly very brief. One of the people with DOWNCAE lived to be about a year old, and the rest died before that point. Down syndrome is connected to some heart problems and other issues that typically would have been fatal without access to modern medicine and surgery, but in a lot of cases are very treatable today. But all of these people were also buried with care in accordance with their people's traditions and burial practices, sometimes with some special items with their graves, such as bead necklaces or seashells. Another ancient DNA study has suggested an origin point for the autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis. According to research published in the journal Nature, herders who migrated to Europe from Western Eurasia carried a genetic variant that is connected to MS. This migration happened roughly five thousand years ago, and according to this research, these variants became more prevalent over time, leading to an increased disease risk today. Three other papers published in Nature took a similar look at evidence for diabetes and Alzheimer's in ancient hunter gatherer populations. If you're thinking, wasn't there also researched about the Black Death increasing the prevalence of MS. Yes, that was different work a couple of years ago, which we covered on Unearthed back when it happened in yet more DNA research, because there was a lot this time. It seems as though a genetic resistance to malaria developed in eastern Arabia around the same time that agriculture developed there, and agriculture would have helped create an environment that would have been home to a lot of mosquitoes, which of course spread malaria. This research involved the remains of four people who lived in what's now Bahrain somewhere between three hundred BCE and six hundred CE. Analysis of prehistoric bone has revealed what may be the oldest known incidence of tuberculosis, which in this case was in Neanderthals. This is also the first time tuberculosis has been discovered in Neanderthals. This discovery came from bones dating back to about thirty five thousand years ago in Central Europe. In addition to what this adds to the body of knowledge, about tuberculosis. It has also raised speculation about whether tuberculosis infections might have contributed to the extinction of the Neanderthals. Next, research on a skeleton dating to about two thousand years ago has added a piece of data to the ongoing questions about the origins of syphilis. One widely held belief has been that sexually transmitted syphilis was introduced to Europe after Columbus' voyages to the Americas and other journeys to the Americas by Europeans, but there's also some data to suggest that a similar illness was already circulating in Europe before that point. This research involved a skeleton that had been found in Brazil two thousand years old. It did show evidence of a syphilis infection. This is the oldest conclusive evidence of syphilis so far, but it is not a strain of syphilis that would have been transmissible through sexual contact. Researchers in Canada have developed a method to test for anemia in ancient remains, something that hasn't really been possible before since there's typically no blood to analyze. This work came from anthropologists at McMaster University in the University of Montreal, working with a hematologist. They found that living anemia patients had microscopic gaps in their sternum and that those could be detected in bones from archaeological sites. This discovery should allow researchers to determine how prevalent anemia was in the past, which could contribute to the understanding of anemia today. And lastly, archaeologists have found a hollow piece of bone in the Netherlands that dates back to the Roman era about two thousand years ago, which was used as a container for seeds, specifically black henmane seeds, which are poisonous but were also used for medicinal and ceremonial purposes. Seeds like these have been found at archaeological sites before, but this is the earliest example of a time that they've been found in a container, suggesting that they were being kept for some kind of medical or ceremonial use. Everybody loves shipwrecks. Coming back, We're going to take a quick sponsor break and then we will get into shipwrecks. Time for some shipwrecks. We have talked about the shipwrecks from the Franklin Expedition a few times on the show, and there is a whole episode on Franklin's Lost Expedition. The most recent dives to the Rex of the Arabis and this Terror took place in September of twenty twenty three, and then reports on those latest dives were released earlier this year. The team was able to make sixty eight dives while wearing heated diving suits. During these dives, the team was able to access a seaman's chest that they had been hoping to be able to get to for years. They also brought up a lot of tools, coins, and personal items. But crews also noted that the condition of the Rex is changing dramatically because of climate change. The Arabis in particular is in much shallower water and faces greater threats from changes in the currents and stronger storms that are connected to the shifting climate. Also in Canada, a shipwreck washed up on the shore of JT. Cheeseman Provincial Park in Newfoundland in February, possibly after being dislodged from the ocean floor by Hurricane Fiona. This was a thirty meter or one hundred foot long ship believed to date back to the nineteenth century. This wreck was really not in a spot that was suitable for research the sea can really just pound on that area, and this led to a scramble to document as much as possible before the wreck was damaged or pulled back out to sea by the tides. A team was able to retrieve some pieces of this treck to be analyzed in a lab so we may know more about it later. We've got a couple of World War One shipwreck discoveries. Divers have recovered the bell from the USS Jacob Jones, which was sunk off of Sicily after being torpedoed by a U boat on December sixth, nineteen seventeen. It was brought to the surface due to the threat of looting at the site. Also, a team with the Unpathed Waters Project has identified the location of the SS Heartdale, which was torpedoed on March thirteenth, nineteen fifteen. The Heartdale had been carrying cargo from Scotland to Egypt. There was some information available about the possible lane location of this wreck from both surviving crew members and the log of the U boat that had sunk it. Making the id required sonar work combined with documentary evidence. A wreck discovered in twenty twenty two has been identified as the SS Nemesis, an iron hulled steamship that was lost at sea off the coast of New South Wales, Australia in nineteen oh four while carrying a load of coal. There were thirty two people on board who lost their lives when the ship went down in a storm. Marine Survey Company subse professional had originally spotted this wreck, and the identification came after an inspection with a remotely operated vehicle and some detailed mapping of the seafloor there. The whole length of this wreck has also now been surveyed with a drop camera. Last year, the Michigan Shipwreck Research Association discovered the wreckage of a steamship in Lake Michigan, and earlier this year they announced that it was the wreck of the Milwaukee. The Milwaukee collided with another ship, the Hiccocks, on July ninth, eighteen eighty six, due to poor visibility from dense fog and smoke. The only person killed in this wreck was the Hiccock's lookout, who was thrown overboard. The team used a combination of written records from the time, historical weather data, and remote sensing to find the wreckage and then followed up with a remote operated vehicle to document the site, and then another listener tip which I again forgot to put down. Who sent it? Part of the schooner eight A Kade Damon was uncovered on steep Hill Beach at the Crane Estate in Ipswich, Massachusetts, possibly by a dramatic high tide that's colloquially known as a King tide. This wreck is one hundred and fifteen years old, and it sank in the Great Christmas Snowstorm in nineteen oh nine. The Crane Estate is managed by an organization called the Trustees of Reservations, which invited the public to a Shipwrecked Scholars program in March and April, something I would have gone to had I realized it was happening before recording this, at which point it was too late. Moving on, research published in the journal plus one has documented five dugout canoes built between fifty seven hundred and fifty one hundred BCE, found northwest of Rome at a site called La Marmata. These represent some of the oldest boats in the Mediterranean and provide evidence of trade over water this far back in history. The five canoes were built from four different types of wood and some of their features are described as advanced, such as transverse reinforcements and possibly the ability to be outfitted with sales or support floats. And lastly, a wreck off the Florida Keys has been identified as the HMS Tiger, which was a British warship that had to be abandoned after it ran aground in seventeen forty two, leaving its crew temporarily stranded. Was found in nineteen ninety three and dry Trotugus National Park, and the identification comes from an old log book one that described how the sailors aboard had tried to lighten the ship's load after it ran aground. Britain and Spain were at war when this ship ran aground. The ship had been stationed in the Keys during the War of Jenkins's Ear, something that Tracy swears we've talked about on the show before but that she could not find in her outlines. Doesn't ring any bells for me, so I'm like shrug. This war was interconnected with the War of the Austrian Succession. And now we are going to end this installment of uneartheds with three stories that I have looped together in a category that I'm just calling that's wild because they're not really related to each other, but they sure are in my opinion. Off the Wall first. A paper was published in the journal Archaeological Prospection last year in which an Indonesian geologist and several co authors concluded that the site known as Gunong Padang had been built as a pyramid as long as twenty five thousand years ago. That would make it older than the Pyramid of Joser. We've talked about the Pyramid of Joser on the show before, and it is believed to be the oldest pyramid in the world. So if correct, we would have a new oldest pyramid. This paper was immediately controversial, with critics arguing that its completely groundbreaking conclusions were flatly incorrect, and that instead the site was built on natural rock formations that have an appearance similar to a step pyramid. One rebuttal posted at the website Southeast Asian Archaeology read, in part quote, a good analogy is saying scientists have dated the soil underneath the Eiffel Tower and concluded that the tower is twenty thousand years old. This led to a whole lot of back and forth and a lot of doubling down by the lead author until this paper was finally retracted in March, with the journal saying quote. Following publication of this article, concerns were raised by third parties with expertise in geophysics, archaeology and radiocarbon dating about the conclusions drawn by the authors based on the evidence reported. This whole thing was messy and public enough that it wound up on TikTok in a series by TikTok user Erith Girl in her series Niche Tea, in which she talks about drama happening in communities that you may not be a part of. Next. Last year, the Vang Museum in Amsterdam and the Pokemon Company launched a collaborative exhibit bringing together Van Go and Pokemon. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this descended into chaos, with tickets selling out instantly and visitors mobbing the gift shop. In particular demand was a limited edition Pokemon card called Pikachu with Gray Felt Hat, showing Pikachu in the style of a Van Go painting wearing a gray felt hat. It surprises me not at all that people were relentlessly aggressive about getting this card. The exhibition launched in September and by October the museum had stopped offering the limited edition card because things had become so unmanageable. It's called underestimating the impact of your collaboration. In January, it was announced that four museum employees who had previously been placed on leave had lost their jobs due to their conduct during the exhibition. This included someone who had worked for the museum for twenty five years, who, according to reports, told visitors where they could get the cards, which was against the rules of the event and the museum's code of conduct. Another employee allegedly stole a box of these limited edition cards. Yeah, it was, as I understand, it's supposed to be like a scavenger hunt, and so having an employee tell people where to go, people thought was running a foul of the rules. I have so many questions. I bet I have some of the same ques talk about and behind the scenes. Finally, back in two thousand and five, one of the original pairs of ruby slippers from the nineteen thirty nine movie The Wizard of Oz was stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in a smash and grab robbery. There was a huge search for the ruby slippers and an offer of a million dollar reward, and the Grand Rapids Police Department recovered them in twenty eighteen. None of that seemed all that weird at the time. We've talked a lot on Unearthed about various stuff being stolen and later recovered, and sometimes people steal movie memorabilia, but then things got weird. In the court proceedings of seventy six year old Terry John Martin, who pleaded guilty to stealing the slippers, news coverage has described him as a reformed mobster with a difficult pass, doing one last score after ten years away from his former life of crime. In January, his defense attorney filed a statement contending that Martin had stolen the slippers because he thought the rubies were real. He had planned to remove the rubies and sell them off individually so no one would be the wiser about where they had come from. He abandoned this plan when a fence brought him up to speed on the fact that the ruby slippers were decorated with sequins and glass. Uh. I have questions about this so many. It does not appear that anyone tried to make any argument that he was not able to comprehend the crime, but it seems like a person should be able to see that those are sequins on the shoes. Yeah. Martin, who was in hospice at the time, was ultimately sentenced to time served and a year of super release. And there's a plan to take these shoes on kind of a world tour before eventually auctioning them off at the end of this year. Ha ha. That is not the end of the weirdness. In March, Martin's alleged accomplice, Jerry Hall Saliterman, was charged in conjunction with the crime. It is alleged that he received the slippers and took possession of them, knowing that they were stolen. He has also been charged with witness tampering after threatening to release a sex tape of a woman who had knowledge of the case if she did not keep quiet. This just happened in mid March. It is a wild ride and it is still ongoing. Yeah. I feel like having just seen this sort of revenge porn aspect of it a couple of days ago means probably something else is going to happen between today when we're recording this and when the episode comes out. To one hundred percent, so that's unearthed for the first three months of twenty twenty four. I have so many thoughts. We'll talk about them Friday. Do you have a listener mail. Yes. We've gotten some extremely delightful emails about a number of different subjects. This particular one is going to be about Robert rules of Order. It is from Lisa. Lisa wrote and said, I listened to your episode about Henry Martin Roberts rules of Order. I also learned about these rules in a horse four h club. I've also been on fairboards, horse club board, and church councils and all used these rules, some loosely and some formally. One of these clubs have a story you might find amusing. This club had in its rule book that all club meetings will follow Robert's rules of order. Some members had their own agenda and started to bend these rules to manage this. My friend on this board and I did not agree with what they were trying to accomplish, and used Robert's rules to write this ship. She worked as a court clerk and let me know that hanging out with lawyers had taught her a few things. She went to the library and checked out the biggest Robert's Rules books she could find. Then she used two colored and marked pages. One color was for the rules they were breaking, and the other just made the book researched. When we went to the next meeting, after checking to make sure we knew for sure wording and the rules we understood were correct, we attended well armed. As the meeting started incorrectly, she made a point of order and let them know that according to Robert's rules while tapping the book. Let everybody know the error. When it came to the topic we had issue with, and once again she tapped the book and let them know the problem. When she was told it was not a problem. I read from the club rules how we were to follow Robert's rules, and she read the rule they were breaking. I'm sure by the time the meeting was over everyone was tired of her tapping that very important book. Eventually they got the changes made, but they were made correctly. Attached for pet tax I have a pick of my black barn cat who showed up one day six years ago and has not left. She just moved in my house. Cat is black and white with a big personality. My husband and I are both Ham radio ops and one day when I was using the mic for one radio, I looked over and saw my cat with a different mic and captured this cute pick. I thought you both might enjoy. Thanks for doing what you do. Your podcast is one of the few my husband enjoys listening to with me. Lisa, thank you Lisa for this email. I did enjoy the Roberts Rules story. We may also have other Roberts Rules stories later because some of them are quite fun. And I also love the picture of this little it looks like a textedo cat looking at the microphone. I have some similar pictures of my cats sitting in the little podcast studio. Also, I think I've mentioned before Opal likes to pull the noise dampening foam off of the wall and make a little bed out of it, so I have cute pictures of her next to the microphone as though she is a podcast host. But I also have pictures of her in a bed made of work for me to have to do later putting it back together. And this is why I record in a closet with a door that shuts yep, yep uh. She does it while I'm sitting right next to her. She has no respect, So thank you so much for that email. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast or a history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. We're on some social media with the username miss in History, like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. Twitter is called x now I guess I keep saying Twitter. You can subscribe to our show on iHeartRadio app or wherever else you 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 Frye. This is part two of our regular installment of our Unearthed series, where we talk about things that have been literally and figuratively unearthed over the last few months. Today's episode is going to have the books and letters, a lot of fashion and cosmetics related stuff, whole out of medical finds, some shipwrecks, and of course we are going to start where we often start in part two, which is stuff that doesn't really go into a good category, which I call potpoury. So back in October, police in northern Ireland were notified of a body that appeared to be that of a teenage boy. This has turned out to be not a recent murder victim, but a bog body. It's roughly two thousand to two thousand, five hundred years old, now nicknamed the Balachi Boy. His cause of death is unknown, but officials were reportedly astonished that this wasn't the victim of a recent crime. Some of the skin was intact and described as pink, not as the leathery brown look that folks often associate with bog bodies. This body was found on land owned by the Department of Agriculture and it was sent to National Museums Northern Ireland for further study. The whole area was treated as a crime scene and then they were like, oh, it's this is not a crime though at least not a crime that happens the statute of limitation and this is over for bog bodies. If it was a crime, the person that did this crime is long gone. Yes. So next in January, a crew dredging the Vistilla River in Poland pulled up a medieval era sword. This has a very long blade and a pommel that shaped sort of like an and there's an inscription along the blade that looks like the name Albert. There have been at least one hundred and seventy other swords discovered that have this inscription, so you know, it's believed to maybe be the name of the sword maker or some other identifying mark. This is a Frankish name, and these swords were made in Western Europe in what's now northern France, but most of them have been found in Scandinavia, so a lot of sources are describing this as a Viking sword. A tsunami may have struck part of northern Europe eight thousand years ago. Based on research done through the University of York, this tsunami would have followed an underwater landslide known as the Stroga, which happened near Norway, with the resulting tsunami striking the coast of what's now Northumberland. There was already archaeological evidence suggesting that the population of this region declined sharply around this time, and this could provide an explanation of why the population of the island of Great Britain was very small, and most people in this area were living along the coast, so the death toll and impact on settlements would have been severe. Moving on, a metal detectorist found a three hundred year old thimble under a tree in Pembrokeshire, Wales, back in November of twenty twenty, and that thimble has now been declared a treasure. The thimble is highly decorated, It was made in two pieces and it's covered in a zigzag pattern with an inscription that reads like still and Love Ever around the bottom. I love that sentiment and I also love how it is spelled because like is lyke and still only has one L on it. I love it. The UK's Treasure Act of nineteen ninety six requires items declared to be treasures to be offered for sale to museums. The fate of this thimble was not certain when we recorded this, but the Tenbee Museum and Art Gallery, which is not far from where the thimble was found, has expressed interest in it. And lastly, a Roman dodecahedron has been found in England during a dig at the Lincolnshire village of Norton Disney. About one hundred of these twelve sided objects, most of them with little knobs on the corners, have been found across Europe, with more than thirty of those in Britain. These Roman dodecahedrons have been the subject of a number of viral videos claiming that they were used to knit gloves and that dummy dumbhead historians would know that if they just talked to some knitters. Uh. However, only some of these have the holes that are involved in using them to knit gloves, and a lot of them just aren't the right size for that purpose. Plus, these dodecahedrons date back to between the first and third century CE, and the oldest knitted objects found so far come from Egypt around the eleventh century CE. This is a bit tricky since items made from natural fibers decay and they aren't often preserved in the archaeological record. But we're talking about as long as one thousand years between when these dotecahedrons were made and when knitting is believed to have developed. We do, by the way, have a whole episode on the history of knitting for folks who would like to know more. That was a Saturday Classic in January twenty twenty one. Anyway, this one is about the size of a grapefruit, and like the others, it's not conclusively known exactly what it was for. There aren't any references to these objects in surviving Roman texts, and some of the possibilities that have been proposed include that they were toys or were used for some kind of a game, or that they had a religious purpose, or that they were ammunition for weapons like slings, basically anything you can think of that something shaped like this could be used for. Someone has suggested that could have been the use a giant game. They are really cool looking. I understand why people are fascinated with them, but the videos implying that historians are stupid for not knowing they were used for knitting glove they irritate me. We're going to move on to books and letters, and this first one came from a tip from a listener, and our apologies because we didn't note which listener. Fragments of an eleventh century Latin psalter have been found within the bindings of other books. This psalter also contained old English glosses or word for word translations. Pieces of this salter were used as reinforcing materials sometime around sixteen hundred, and a number of other pieces of it have been found before. Yeah, the materials needed to bind books were very expensive, so repurposing books and the materials from the books into other books super common. A newly published paper on this looks that multiple pieces of this psalter that have been found, including eight and leaf guards and thirteen strips that were used to line the spines of other books, so twenty one total fragments of this psalter. It's possible, but not definite, that this was assalter that belonged to an English princess named Gunhild who fled to Bruges after the Norman conquest of ten sixty six. She is known to have had a psalter which she donated to a church, and it would have made sense for this psalter to have been in Latin with old English glosses. Next, a group of students has used AI to try to translate scrolls that were carbonized during the eruption of Vesuvius in the year seventy nine CE, scrolls that are much too fragile to try to unroll and read by any other means. This was part of a competition called the Vesuvius Challenge at the University of Kentucky, and these students won the competition's grand prize after deciphering several passages from a three dimensional CT scan that had recently been made of one scroll. This added up to about five percent of the total text in that scroll, which maybe doesn't sound like much, but this was meant to be more of a proof of concept than an attempt to decipher the whole thing. Also, that's more than we had before. Yeah. One of the students was also part of another similar project last year. Yeah, before we knew zero because if we tried to unroll it, it would fall apart. So this kind of work might be able to allow researchers to read scrolls that really could not be read otherwise and thus preserve knowledge that would otherwise be lost. But there are some concerns about this kind of work, aside from debates about AI, which, as I understand that, AI was more about like recognizing what's text and what's not not on coming up with what the words were like. It wasn't a predictive model of the text as I understand it. Anyway, many of these scrolls were found under the remains of Herculaneum, which is surrounded by populated neighborhoods today, So if additional excavations were done to look for more scrolls like these, they would probably go underneath houses that are currently occupied, and some of the residents of these homes worry about whether that kind of work could destabilize the foundations of the neighborhood. Next, it's possible that researchers have found the oldest known runs in Denmark on the blade of a two thousand year old iron knife, which were only visible after the blade was cleaned and conserved. Engraved into the blade is the word hirilla, which means small world. These runes are about eight hundred years older than the Yelling runestones which we have covered on the show before next. New radiocarbon dating suggests that the rongorongo script used on the island of Rapanui was developed before the arrival of Europeans on the island. This came from a tablet currently held in a collection in Rome that was dated to between fourteen ninety three and fifteen oh nine, which was more than two hundred years before the first European arrivals on the island. While it is possible that this script could have been engraved into a very old piece of wood later, it doesn't necessarily seem likely that there would have just been an ancient piece of wood to have this engraved on it. Even though Rango rongo doesn't resemble European written languages at all, there has been an argument that it was developed because of the influence of Europeans, partly because Europeans didn't notice it was being used there until eighteen sixty four. Also, as a note, there aren't many examples of this script today, and none of them are on Rapanui. They're all in collections elsewhere. Moving on, A thirty three hundred year old tablet was found in central Turkey last year, and it has now been deciphered. This tablet is about the size of a person's palm, and the writing on it is in Cuneiform. This seems to describe an invasion during a Hittite civil war, with the invaders being one of the warring factions of Hittites. Next, back in the late eighteenth century, bricklayers working at the Shakespeare House in Stratford upon Avon found a religious tract hidden in the rafters. It contained the name J. Shakespeare and has long been believed to have belonged to William Shakespeare's father John. It's a translation of an Italian text called The Last Will and Testament of the Soul. It's sort of a religious pledge that a person could sign their name to. Research into lots of different surviving copies and translations of this text has led to the conclusion that it was actually written after John Shakespeare died. The only other J. Shakespeare it could have belonged to is William Shakespeare's younger sister Joan, about whom we know very little. This document contains references to dying a good Catholic death, which is notable since at that point England had become a Protestant nation where Catholics weren't allowed to openly practice their faith. And lastly, researchers have found a potential solution to preserving ancient papyrie that are contaminated with fungus, and that is exposing them to wassabi vapors. Researchers created mock copies of painted and unpainted papyrus and then expose them to fungi. Exposure to wasabi vapor completely eliminated the fungus in the painted and unpainted copies without damaging the papyrus. So you're preserving all of your stuff and clearing out things when you eat a lot of wasabi. Is my uh, I don't know. I did not look far enough into it to know what led them to say maybe if we expose this to wasabi vapors, but I love it. We are going to take a quick sponsor break and then we're going to talk about some stuff related to fashion and cosmetics. Okay, Next we have a bunch of fines that are related to the overalled ideas of beauty, fashion and cosmetics. First in Wales, one discovery is a Roman ligula. This is a silver spoon with a tiny, tiny bowl and a long, thin handle that was used to remove things like perfume, makeup, or other similar substances from long necked bottles. Most sources describe this as a toilet spoon, with toilet meaning the act of grooming, not the thing in the bathroom where someone empties their bladder or bowels. The first article I read about this fine did not explain that about the name until very far down in the text, and I was very confused. Normally, these little spoons had straight handles, but this one has become bent at so point it measures about two point five inches or six point three centimeters long, with the bowl having a diameter of only point two inches or five millimeters. These spoons were more commonly made out of copper alloy, and it's possible that the ones made from silver were used for medical purposes because of silver's natural antimicrobial property, so removing medical preparations from jars rather than cosmetics. A vial of what was most likely lip pigment was found in southeastern Iran back in two thousand and one after flooding unearthed a number of objects from ancient burial sites, and this has now been described in a paper that was in the journal Scientific Reports. This vial was about four thousand years old and the pigment in it is a very deep red and it was made primarily from metererals like haematite, manganite and braunite, along with some traces of other materials, all in a base of wax and other organic substances. This is one of the oldest discoveries of its kind, but it has a pretty similar formulation to modern mineral based makeup. The container holding the pigment is also very finely crafted, made from a greenish chlorite and decorated with patterned incisions. Next, a three thousand year old dress fastener was found by a metal detectorist in Staffordshire, England, one of only seven such fasteners ever found in England and Wales. It's shaped almost like a set of finger symbols connected by a string, although the whole thing is made of gold, so you couldn't clap those two ends together without bending or breaking it. It would have been used to hold a person's cloak, skirt or dressed together. This item was probably made in Ireland. Irish metalsmiths of this era were known for their gold work. Another fastener that made news in recent months was a medieval belt loop found in Poland. This would have been used to hang someone's keys or a pouch from their belts, and it was found by a metal detectorist, and it depicts a stylized human figure attached to a rectangular mount, and that mount is what would have been used to slide the loop onto a person's belt. Next, we have a couple of garments that were just sort of found in boxes. One is a ceremonial robe that would have been used by the Emperor of China in the early nineteenth century. It was in a cardboard box tucked in the back of a drawer after being purchased by Eric Hyde Villiers as a gift for his father in nineteen thirteen. The Villiers family is an aristocratic family with roots that stretch back to Barbara Villiers, who had five children with King Charles the first. Because this robe was in a box that was protected and unopened for so long, it's very well preserved. It's made from gold and blue silk, decorated with twelve astronomical symbols and dragon imagery. This is the type of robe that would have been worn for twice yearly festivals at the Temple of Heaven, and it is planned to be auctioned off in May. The other item is a sweater that was found in a parcel that was shipped from Tourjon in the Faroe Islands to a recipient in Copenhagen, but it was seized by the British Navy during the Second Battle of Copenhagen and never made its way to its destination. The ship's captain was unaware that a war had started when setting sail from port. The sweater was made from very bright red wool. It is still very bright and it has a black and red floral pattern. This was accompanied by a letter in Danish which read, in part quote, my wife sends her regards, thank you for the pudding rice. She sends your fiance this sweater in the hopes that it is not displeasing to her. This charming discovery was part of the Prize Papers project, which is an effort to catalog and study an enormous amount of mail that was seized by the British Royal Navy over a period of almost two hundred years. There's so much unopened mail, just that as part of this project. All the rest of our fashion findes are about some kind of jewelry. First, a medieval love badge has been found in Dankst, Poland during restoration work at a fifteenth century port. This restoration work involved foundation work at the port's crane, and that crane is the oldest surviving port crane in Europe. This badge is shaped like a turtle dove and it's carrying a banner that reads emmor vincit omnia or love conquers All. Back in twenty twenty, a fifteen hundred year old ring was found in Emerly in southern Denmark, but the find wasn't announced until now to allow for additional metal detecting work to take place at the site where it was discovered. This ring is made from gold with an oval garnet with four spirals underneath the mount. Like the sword that we mentioned earlier, this was probably Frankish in origin and worn by someone high up in the Maravingian dynasty. This find seemed to surprise researchers because this kind of ring typically would have belonged to somebody of very high rank, and gold was often used as a diplomatic gift, but nobody of the rank who would be likely to have this ring is known to have lived in the area at the right time. An easy explanation would be that some important person lost it while they were traveling, but there are other objects found in the area that suggest that somebody very powerful might have actually been living there, we just don't currently know who. And Lastly, archaeologists in Turkia have found more than one hundred ornamental objects dating back to about eleven thousand years ago that were likely worn as jewelry in body piercings. These were made of a range of materials including limestone, obsidian, and river pedals, and about eighty five of the objects are complete. Based on their designs, it's likely that they were worn in ear or lower lip piercings. There have also been human remains found in the area with wear on their lower teeth that would likely have happened while wearing lip jewelry. These offer the earliest documentation of this kind of body modification in Southwest Asia. Next, we are moving on to another subject, which is medicine, and there are so many medical finds. First, there was a lot of coverage of studies documenting ancient people with a number of different genetic differences. The first of these came through work with the thousand Ancient British Genomes Project. Researchers in the UK found evidence of someone with Mosaic Turner syndrome who lived about twenty five hundred years ago, as well as someone with Jacob syndrome who lived in the early medieval period, and three people with Kleinfelter syndrome who each lived in different years. So in Mosaic Turner syndrome, someone has one X chromosome without a second X or Y chromosome. Jacob's syndrome involves having an additional Y chromosome or x y Y, and Kleinfelter syndrome involves having an additional X chromosome or xx Y. This work followed development of new computational methods meant to pick up more variation in the X and Y chromosomes in ancient DNA. We don't really know much about the lives of the five total people discussed in this research, who lived over a span of time about twenty five hundred to two hundred fifty years ago, but it does seem as though they were buried according to the typical customs of the society they were living in. Rick Schulton, Professor of Scientific and Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Oxford, also noted this in a press release quote, the results of this study open up exciting new possibilities for the study of sex in the past, moving beyond binary categories in a way that would be impossible without the advances being made an ancient DNA analysis. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute have also been working with ancient DNA and have identified six people who likely had Down syndrome. Five of them lived between five thousand and two thousand, five hundred years ago, and the six lived in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. This conclusion is based on the fact that these six people had an unusually large number of genetic sequences connected to chromosome twenty one, which could really only be explained by their having an additional copy of that chromosome. One type of Down syndrome is called trisomy twenty one and occurs when someone has three of that chromosome rather than two. These researchers also found evidence of one person with Edward syndrome or trisomy eighteen. Similarly to the previous study, we don't really know much about the lives of these people, and in the case of these they were sadly very brief. One of the people with DOWNCAE lived to be about a year old, and the rest died before that point. Down syndrome is connected to some heart problems and other issues that typically would have been fatal without access to modern medicine and surgery, but in a lot of cases are very treatable today. But all of these people were also buried with care in accordance with their people's traditions and burial practices, sometimes with some special items with their graves, such as bead necklaces or seashells. Another ancient DNA study has suggested an origin point for the autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis. According to research published in the journal Nature, herders who migrated to Europe from Western Eurasia carried a genetic variant that is connected to MS. This migration happened roughly five thousand years ago, and according to this research, these variants became more prevalent over time, leading to an increased disease risk today. Three other papers published in Nature took a similar look at evidence for diabetes and Alzheimer's in ancient hunter gatherer populations. If you're thinking, wasn't there also researched about the Black Death increasing the prevalence of MS. Yes, that was different work a couple of years ago, which we covered on Unearthed back when it happened in yet more DNA research, because there was a lot this time. It seems as though a genetic resistance to malaria developed in eastern Arabia around the same time that agriculture developed there, and agriculture would have helped create an environment that would have been home to a lot of mosquitoes, which of course spread malaria. This research involved the remains of four people who lived in what's now Bahrain somewhere between three hundred BCE and six hundred CE. Analysis of prehistoric bone has revealed what may be the oldest known incidence of tuberculosis, which in this case was in Neanderthals. This is also the first time tuberculosis has been discovered in Neanderthals. This discovery came from bones dating back to about thirty five thousand years ago in Central Europe. In addition to what this adds to the body of knowledge, about tuberculosis. It has also raised speculation about whether tuberculosis infections might have contributed to the extinction of the Neanderthals. Next, research on a skeleton dating to about two thousand years ago has added a piece of data to the ongoing questions about the origins of syphilis. One widely held belief has been that sexually transmitted syphilis was introduced to Europe after Columbus' voyages to the Americas and other journeys to the Americas by Europeans, but there's also some data to suggest that a similar illness was already circulating in Europe before that point. This research involved a skeleton that had been found in Brazil two thousand years old. It did show evidence of a syphilis infection. This is the oldest conclusive evidence of syphilis so far, but it is not a strain of syphilis that would have been transmissible through sexual contact. Researchers in Canada have developed a method to test for anemia in ancient remains, something that hasn't really been possible before since there's typically no blood to analyze. This work came from anthropologists at McMaster University in the University of Montreal, working with a hematologist. They found that living anemia patients had microscopic gaps in their sternum and that those could be detected in bones from archaeological sites. This discovery should allow researchers to determine how prevalent anemia was in the past, which could contribute to the understanding of anemia today. And lastly, archaeologists have found a hollow piece of bone in the Netherlands that dates back to the Roman era about two thousand years ago, which was used as a container for seeds, specifically black henmane seeds, which are poisonous but were also used for medicinal and ceremonial purposes. Seeds like these have been found at archaeological sites before, but this is the earliest example of a time that they've been found in a container, suggesting that they were being kept for some kind of medical or ceremonial use. Everybody loves shipwrecks. Coming back, We're going to take a quick sponsor break and then we will get into shipwrecks. Time for some shipwrecks. We have talked about the shipwrecks from the Franklin Expedition a few times on the show, and there is a whole episode on Franklin's Lost Expedition. The most recent dives to the Rex of the Arabis and this Terror took place in September of twenty twenty three, and then reports on those latest dives were released earlier this year. The team was able to make sixty eight dives while wearing heated diving suits. During these dives, the team was able to access a seaman's chest that they had been hoping to be able to get to for years. They also brought up a lot of tools, coins, and personal items. But crews also noted that the condition of the Rex is changing dramatically because of climate change. The Arabis in particular is in much shallower water and faces greater threats from changes in the currents and stronger storms that are connected to the shifting climate. Also in Canada, a shipwreck washed up on the shore of JT. Cheeseman Provincial Park in Newfoundland in February, possibly after being dislodged from the ocean floor by Hurricane Fiona. This was a thirty meter or one hundred foot long ship believed to date back to the nineteenth century. This wreck was really not in a spot that was suitable for research the sea can really just pound on that area, and this led to a scramble to document as much as possible before the wreck was damaged or pulled back out to sea by the tides. A team was able to retrieve some pieces of this treck to be analyzed in a lab so we may know more about it later. We've got a couple of World War One shipwreck discoveries. Divers have recovered the bell from the USS Jacob Jones, which was sunk off of Sicily after being torpedoed by a U boat on December sixth, nineteen seventeen. It was brought to the surface due to the threat of looting at the site. Also, a team with the Unpathed Waters Project has identified the location of the SS Heartdale, which was torpedoed on March thirteenth, nineteen fifteen. The Heartdale had been carrying cargo from Scotland to Egypt. There was some information available about the possible lane location of this wreck from both surviving crew members and the log of the U boat that had sunk it. Making the id required sonar work combined with documentary evidence. A wreck discovered in twenty twenty two has been identified as the SS Nemesis, an iron hulled steamship that was lost at sea off the coast of New South Wales, Australia in nineteen oh four while carrying a load of coal. There were thirty two people on board who lost their lives when the ship went down in a storm. Marine Survey Company subse professional had originally spotted this wreck, and the identification came after an inspection with a remotely operated vehicle and some detailed mapping of the seafloor there. The whole length of this wreck has also now been surveyed with a drop camera. Last year, the Michigan Shipwreck Research Association discovered the wreckage of a steamship in Lake Michigan, and earlier this year they announced that it was the wreck of the Milwaukee. The Milwaukee collided with another ship, the Hiccocks, on July ninth, eighteen eighty six, due to poor visibility from dense fog and smoke. The only person killed in this wreck was the Hiccock's lookout, who was thrown overboard. The team used a combination of written records from the time, historical weather data, and remote sensing to find the wreckage and then followed up with a remote operated vehicle to document the site, and then another listener tip which I again forgot to put down. Who sent it? Part of the schooner eight A Kade Damon was uncovered on steep Hill Beach at the Crane Estate in Ipswich, Massachusetts, possibly by a dramatic high tide that's colloquially known as a King tide. This wreck is one hundred and fifteen years old, and it sank in the Great Christmas Snowstorm in nineteen oh nine. The Crane Estate is managed by an organization called the Trustees of Reservations, which invited the public to a Shipwrecked Scholars program in March and April, something I would have gone to had I realized it was happening before recording this, at which point it was too late. Moving on, research published in the journal plus one has documented five dugout canoes built between fifty seven hundred and fifty one hundred BCE, found northwest of Rome at a site called La Marmata. These represent some of the oldest boats in the Mediterranean and provide evidence of trade over water this far back in history. The five canoes were built from four different types of wood and some of their features are described as advanced, such as transverse reinforcements and possibly the ability to be outfitted with sales or support floats. And lastly, a wreck off the Florida Keys has been identified as the HMS Tiger, which was a British warship that had to be abandoned after it ran aground in seventeen forty two, leaving its crew temporarily stranded. Was found in nineteen ninety three and dry Trotugus National Park, and the identification comes from an old log book one that described how the sailors aboard had tried to lighten the ship's load after it ran aground. Britain and Spain were at war when this ship ran aground. The ship had been stationed in the Keys during the War of Jenkins's Ear, something that Tracy swears we've talked about on the show before but that she could not find in her outlines. Doesn't ring any bells for me, so I'm like shrug. This war was interconnected with the War of the Austrian Succession. And now we are going to end this installment of uneartheds with three stories that I have looped together in a category that I'm just calling that's wild because they're not really related to each other, but they sure are in my opinion. Off the Wall first. A paper was published in the journal Archaeological Prospection last year in which an Indonesian geologist and several co authors concluded that the site known as Gunong Padang had been built as a pyramid as long as twenty five thousand years ago. That would make it older than the Pyramid of Joser. We've talked about the Pyramid of Joser on the show before, and it is believed to be the oldest pyramid in the world. So if correct, we would have a new oldest pyramid. This paper was immediately controversial, with critics arguing that its completely groundbreaking conclusions were flatly incorrect, and that instead the site was built on natural rock formations that have an appearance similar to a step pyramid. One rebuttal posted at the website Southeast Asian Archaeology read, in part quote, a good analogy is saying scientists have dated the soil underneath the Eiffel Tower and concluded that the tower is twenty thousand years old. This led to a whole lot of back and forth and a lot of doubling down by the lead author until this paper was finally retracted in March, with the journal saying quote. Following publication of this article, concerns were raised by third parties with expertise in geophysics, archaeology and radiocarbon dating about the conclusions drawn by the authors based on the evidence reported. This whole thing was messy and public enough that it wound up on TikTok in a series by TikTok user Erith Girl in her series Niche Tea, in which she talks about drama happening in communities that you may not be a part of. Next. Last year, the Vang Museum in Amsterdam and the Pokemon Company launched a collaborative exhibit bringing together Van Go and Pokemon. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this descended into chaos, with tickets selling out instantly and visitors mobbing the gift shop. In particular demand was a limited edition Pokemon card called Pikachu with Gray Felt Hat, showing Pikachu in the style of a Van Go painting wearing a gray felt hat. It surprises me not at all that people were relentlessly aggressive about getting this card. The exhibition launched in September and by October the museum had stopped offering the limited edition card because things had become so unmanageable. It's called underestimating the impact of your collaboration. In January, it was announced that four museum employees who had previously been placed on leave had lost their jobs due to their conduct during the exhibition. This included someone who had worked for the museum for twenty five years, who, according to reports, told visitors where they could get the cards, which was against the rules of the event and the museum's code of conduct. Another employee allegedly stole a box of these limited edition cards. Yeah, it was, as I understand, it's supposed to be like a scavenger hunt, and so having an employee tell people where to go, people thought was running a foul of the rules. I have so many questions. I bet I have some of the same ques talk about and behind the scenes. Finally, back in two thousand and five, one of the original pairs of ruby slippers from the nineteen thirty nine movie The Wizard of Oz was stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in a smash and grab robbery. There was a huge search for the ruby slippers and an offer of a million dollar reward, and the Grand Rapids Police Department recovered them in twenty eighteen. None of that seemed all that weird at the time. We've talked a lot on Unearthed about various stuff being stolen and later recovered, and sometimes people steal movie memorabilia, but then things got weird. In the court proceedings of seventy six year old Terry John Martin, who pleaded guilty to stealing the slippers, news coverage has described him as a reformed mobster with a difficult pass, doing one last score after ten years away from his former life of crime. In January, his defense attorney filed a statement contending that Martin had stolen the slippers because he thought the rubies were real. He had planned to remove the rubies and sell them off individually so no one would be the wiser about where they had come from. He abandoned this plan when a fence brought him up to speed on the fact that the ruby slippers were decorated with sequins and glass. Uh. I have questions about this so many. It does not appear that anyone tried to make any argument that he was not able to comprehend the crime, but it seems like a person should be able to see that those are sequins on the shoes. Yeah. Martin, who was in hospice at the time, was ultimately sentenced to time served and a year of super release. And there's a plan to take these shoes on kind of a world tour before eventually auctioning them off at the end of this year. Ha ha. That is not the end of the weirdness. In March, Martin's alleged accomplice, Jerry Hall Saliterman, was charged in conjunction with the crime. It is alleged that he received the slippers and took possession of them, knowing that they were stolen. He has also been charged with witness tampering after threatening to release a sex tape of a woman who had knowledge of the case if she did not keep quiet. This just happened in mid March. It is a wild ride and it is still ongoing. Yeah. I feel like having just seen this sort of revenge porn aspect of it a couple of days ago means probably something else is going to happen between today when we're recording this and when the episode comes out. To one hundred percent, so that's unearthed for the first three months of twenty twenty four. I have so many thoughts. We'll talk about them Friday. Do you have a listener mail. Yes. We've gotten some extremely delightful emails about a number of different subjects. This particular one is going to be about Robert rules of Order. It is from Lisa. Lisa wrote and said, I listened to your episode about Henry Martin Roberts rules of Order. I also learned about these rules in a horse four h club. I've also been on fairboards, horse club board, and church councils and all used these rules, some loosely and some formally. One of these clubs have a story you might find amusing. This club had in its rule book that all club meetings will follow Robert's rules of order. Some members had their own agenda and started to bend these rules to manage this. My friend on this board and I did not agree with what they were trying to accomplish, and used Robert's rules to write this ship. She worked as a court clerk and let me know that hanging out with lawyers had taught her a few things. She went to the library and checked out the biggest Robert's Rules books she could find. Then she used two colored and marked pages. One color was for the rules they were breaking, and the other just made the book researched. When we went to the next meeting, after checking to make sure we knew for sure wording and the rules we understood were correct, we attended well armed. As the meeting started incorrectly, she made a point of order and let them know that according to Robert's rules while tapping the book. Let everybody know the error. When it came to the topic we had issue with, and once again she tapped the book and let them know the problem. When she was told it was not a problem. I read from the club rules how we were to follow Robert's rules, and she read the rule they were breaking. I'm sure by the time the meeting was over everyone was tired of her tapping that very important book. Eventually they got the changes made, but they were made correctly. Attached for pet tax I have a pick of my black barn cat who showed up one day six years ago and has not left. She just moved in my house. Cat is black and white with a big personality. My husband and I are both Ham radio ops and one day when I was using the mic for one radio, I looked over and saw my cat with a different mic and captured this cute pick. I thought you both might enjoy. Thanks for doing what you do. Your podcast is one of the few my husband enjoys listening to with me. Lisa, thank you Lisa for this email. I did enjoy the Roberts Rules story. We may also have other Roberts Rules stories later because some of them are quite fun. And I also love the picture of this little it looks like a textedo cat looking at the microphone. I have some similar pictures of my cats sitting in the little podcast studio. Also, I think I've mentioned before Opal likes to pull the noise dampening foam off of the wall and make a little bed out of it, so I have cute pictures of her next to the microphone as though she is a podcast host. But I also have pictures of her in a bed made of work for me to have to do later putting it back together. And this is why I record in a closet with a door that shuts yep, yep uh. She does it while I'm sitting right next to her. She has no respect, So thank you so much for that email. 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