Hey, before we get started on the episode today, we have a live show coming up real soon. We sure do. It's very very soon, in fact, next week, so if you are in the Indianapolis area or surrounding, you might want to get on it. Yeah. So we will be at the Eugene and Maryland Click Indiana History Center in Indianapolis. We are going to be talking about Jean Stratton Porter, who I am just getting the ball rolling on actually writing this episode and I'm so excited about it. That is Friday, July nineteenth, seven thirty to eight thirty p m. Indiana History Center. You can get tickets at Indiana History dot org. We are very excited to be back at the Indiana History Center. So we hope we see you all there, all your smiling faces, to have a fun night of history. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. This is part two of our regular installment of Unearthed, where we talk about things that have been literally or figuratively unearthed over the past few months. In part two of our July twenty twenty four installment. We're going to talk about some animals, some shipwrecks, and some medicine stuff. As we often do, We're gonna start with some things that I thought were cool or interesting, but they don't really fit easily into a category. And I've always been calling that potpourri because I used to watch a lot of Jeopardy. So starting once again with the pop poury. Archaeologists working in collaboration with the Aboriginal can unities on the island of Jiguru on the Great Barrier Reef have found shards of pottery that date back to two thousand and three thousand years ago, centuries before the arrival of Europeans in the area. Prior to this point, archaeologists had widely concluded that Aboriginal peoples in Australia did not make pottery before the arrival of Europeans. Other pieces of pottery had been found on the island in two thousand and nine and twenty twelve, but at that time it was clear only that they were made from local materials, not when they were made. So this collaborative effort between archaeologists and the indigenous community led to the excavation of a three foot by three foot midden and in layers between sixteen and thirty two inches below the surface, archaeologists found eighty two fragments of pottery. Although these pieces are really small, they very clearly came from shaped vessels that had some decorative elements like pigments and incized lines on them, and they dated back to between one thy eight hundred and fifteen years old and two THY nine hundred and fifty years old, making them the oldest conclusively dated pieces of pottery in Australia, and they were made from locally sourced clay, definitely clay from somewhere in northeastern Australia, possibly from this island itself. This time period overlaps with when the Lupita people were known to be making pottery in Papua New Guinea. The Lapita people are also known to have influenced pottery traditions among much of this part of the Pacific, so the paper's authors have concluded that there was an exchange of culture, knowledge, and pottery making between the Aboriginal people of Jiguru and the Lapita people. Aboriginal people today have also described Jaguru as a sacred place and a place for trading, and this research also suggests that Australia was connected to maritime trading network thousands of years ago. Yeah, this has been described as kind of rewriting, but we know about Aboriginal history away from one in which nobody is making pottery to one in which Aboriginal people were part of this shared community in this part of the world with a lot of knowledge exchange. The paper on this was published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, and its conclusion points out that these findings quote challenge racist and colonialist stereotypes of Aboriginal communities as lacking complexity and innovation, and contribute to a robust and nuanced understanding of the deep knowledges and complex technologies of Indigenous Australians. Moving on. According to research published in the journal Plus one in April, people in northwestern Saudi Arabia made their home in a large lava tube for about seven thousand years, with people using the tube in phases from the Neolith period to the Bronze Age, that's from about ten thousand years ago to about thirty five hundred years ago. There's rock art in this lava tube depicting cattle, sheep, goats and dogs, along with animal remains, suggesting that the people who used this shelter were pastoralists. This tube is situated along a pastoral route connecting oases, and according to isotopic analysis, the animals primarily grazed on the local vegetation rather than being fed some kind of fodder. So this is the earliest known evidence of people living in a lava tube in Arabia, and the paper's authors have noted that these kinds of tubes are really plentiful, but they haven't really been the subject of much archaeological study yet, so this is an opportunity for a lot more discoveries next. In a find that got a lot of attention in April, a dentist visiting their parents' home in Europe spotted what looks like part of a jawbone still containing some teeth in the travertine tile used for the floor in a recent remodel. There's not really much to add to this besides that it's interesting. The dentists declined to give their real name or much detail on their parents for the sake of protecting everyone's privacy, but they did say in a Reddit comment that the tile was quarried in Turkya. Yeah, this is one of those things that I included because I think people might be like, why didn't you talk about that tile. Travertine tile is made from sedimentary limestone, and it typically forms near hot springs. The quarry where this tile probably came from contains stones that's roughly a million years old. There's a range there, but that's kind of in the middle. It's really not uncommon for this kind of tile to contain some kind of fossils. But you know, definitely a little surprising to look at it and see what is clearly the arc of a homited job boon. Hey dead, someone's teeth are in your floor. It's a little bit weird. Researchers in Greece have confirmed that a thirty five hundred year old suit of Mycenaean armor would have held up in combat. They did this by recruiting thirteen volunteers from the Marines of the Hellenic Armed Forces, dressing them in replica versions of the armor and Bronze Age weapons, and having them go through a simulated Bronze Age combat for eleven hours. Sources for developing this combat protocol included archaeological evidence as well as Homer's iliad. They also developed a software model called the Late Bronze Age Warrior Model to test whether the armour would have been usable in different environmental conditions, and they placed it in an online data repository so it would be freely available for others to use. I always love an eleven hour historical larp, well, which I mean in the best way, not in any kind of yeah, when we try to figure out whether something would have worked in the past by trying to get modern people to do it. Moving on, During the colonial era in Massachusetts and other parts of North America, enslaved and free black people selected a leader to do things like settle disputes among themselves and act as a representative to the white government and other leaders. Different communities used different titles for the person in this role, including things like a governor and king. Enslaved people did not have the right to vote in official government elections, so this was often something that happened through discussion or consensus on a festival day or a holiday in which enslaved people were allowed a day off from work, or sometimes on the same day that white people were voting in their elections. The first time this is recorded as happening in Massachusetts was in seventeen forty one, and in twenty twenty two Massa choose its lawmakers designated the third Saturday in July as Negro election Day in recognition of this tradition and its history. So, with that context in mind, archaeologists working in Lynn, Massachusetts, which is on the coast northeast of Boston, believe they found the home of one such person, known as King Pompey. Pompey is believed to have been born in West Africa before being trafficked to North America, where he was enslaved by Daniel Mansfield. The second Pompy, was freed sometime in the seventeen fifties, bought two acres of property on the Saugus River and built a home there, and he hosted an annual holiday sort of gathering for enslaved and free black people who lived in Lynn and neighboring towns. Archaeologists used in eighteen twenty nine map and property records, along with modern data like light oar surveys, to search for the site of Pompey's homestead. The site is on private property, but it is possible to sign or a display about the homestead can be put up at Lynn Town Hall or at Saugus Ironworks National Historic Site in the neighboring town of Saugus. And our last bit of miscellaneous potpourri finds it seems like every time, or at least a lot of time that I do unearthed, there's some kind of news coverage that gets on my nerves, and this time that news coverage is about Rapanui, also called Easter Island. Research published in the journal Science Advances used things like satellite and near infrared imaging to identify areas where lithic mulching or rock gardening was used on the island before the arrival of Europeans. Lithic mulching is a method of subsistence farming that can increase the nutrients that are available in the soil and also help it retain moisture. That's really important somewhere like Rapanui, where the soil is volcanic and heavily weathered. This work was carried out with the permission of the Mauhenua indigenous community on Rapanui with a collaborator from the island. According to this data, the total area used for rock gardening was only a fifth of what even the most conservative studies had previously estimated. The team then used this data to project how many people the island could support with this much gardening space, estimating that number at about three thousand. This means that when Europeans arrived on the island for the first time in the eighteenth century, they would have been seeing it at its population peak, not after an ecological collapse had caused its population to drop precipitously. So where this gets annoying is that a lot of the news coverage of this research presented it as newly and even uniquely upending the popular story that the inhabitants of Rapanui had committed a so called eco side by deforested the island in order to create and move the massive statues that it's most famous for today. So I saw a lot of headlines that said things like Easter Island did not collapse from over use of resources. After all, study suggests this is really not a new idea. Though this paper adds to a growing and very well established body of evidence contradicting the whole eco side narrative. This is a body of evidence that has been growing for more than two decades. One of the people who popularized the eco side idea was Jared Diamond in the book Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Terry Hunt and Carl Lippo, who are two of the authors cited on this new paper, contributed a chapter to the book questioning Collapse, Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire. That book came out in two thousand and nine as a direct response to Diamond's book. Their chapter was called Ecological Catastrophe and Collapse the Myth of Ecoside on Rapanui Easter Island. So that book, responding to the book Collapse, came out fifteen years ago. You can even see this whole progression on our podcast in the archive in two episodes that are so old that Holly and I were not even on them. One is a two thousand and eight episode that cites Diamond's work, and then there's a follow up in twenty twelve with that update citing the new work at that point by Hunt and Lippo. So I understand that the purpose of headlines is to get people to click the article, but a lot of people don't, and it really feels like continuing to reframe this as a brand new, first ever questioned idea means we're just never going to get away from this outdated thought that there was an ecoside collapse involved. It's like the part of me that gets sort of chagrined is like, we're kind of just continuing to badmount the people of Revenui for something they didn't do. Yeah, in the interest of clicks. Yes, this is one of many cases where it's like, I understand that this is new information to some people. Things are always new information to some people. But I get frustrated when when I see the same thing repeated by folks who have been writing in this space for a really long time, right and should already have the experience to be more nuanced with what they are writing about. Let's take a break to let me cool off from that whole diatribe I just had, and then we will talk about some animals. Now, we are going to have a f if you find relating to animals. We are going to start with a fine that involves Tasmanian devils, the Putukinti Kurama and Pinakura Aboriginal Corporation or PKKP has been working to excavate sites in Jucken Gorge in Western Australia after Rio Tinto mining company destroyed rock shelters there with blasting back in twenty twenty. These sites were known to have a very deep cultural significance and history dating back at least forty six thousand years, so their destruction by the mining company sparked a huge outcry and a lot of conversations in Australia about the mining industry and how it should interact with the Aboriginal communities who were the traditional owners of the land being mined. The work that has been going on at this site recently is part of an agreement that PKKP reached with after this blasting. Archaeologists working at the site have found a Tasmanian devil tooth, one believed to be connected to trading that took place at the site, since Tasmanian devils are not known to have ever lived in the area. This site is in the northwestern part of Western Australia and the nearest Tasmanian devils lived far to the southwest about three thousand years ago. Other finds at the site include braided human hair and shell beads. Genetic testing of a similar braid found in twenty fourteen suggested a genetic link with the Aboriginal people living there today. Next, archaeologists in Mexico were excavating what they thought was a wall until they found a trio of lids which would have been used as part of Maya beekeeping practices. These lids were used to plug holes in hollow logs that served as homes for sacred stingless bees, So these logs kind of replicated the hollow tree trunks that bees would typically nest in. The lids were made from limestone, and one of them's in pretty good condition, but the other two are very worn. They date back before the Spanish conquest of Mexico, so sometime between nine fifty and the early fifteen hundreds. This is a fine that could have also gone in the update section in part one, we also have an episode on the history of beekeeping that came out in May of twenty twenty. We're going to run that as a Saturday Classic. It talks a bit about indigenous beekeeping in Mesoamerica. This discovery was also found during work ahead of the project known as the Maya Train that has come up on previous installments of unearthed Archaeologists in France have been excavating a site that dates back to the medieval period, sometime in the fifth or sixth centuries, but they've also found a series of pits that are much older, dating all the way back to between one hundred BCE and one hundred CE. Only two of the nine pits they've found have been excavated so far, and they've been found to contain horse bones. These horses seem to have been buried carefully, with one of the pits containing the bodies of ten horses arranged in two rows and two layers. Including the pits that haven't been excavated yet, it's likely that the site contains the skeletons of at least twenty eight horses. We don't really know what happened to these horses, but the two prevailing theories are that they were either sacrificed for some kind of religious reason, or they were killed in battle in the Gallic Wars in which Julius Caesar conquered this area in what's now France. The burial sites have some similarities to some other animal graves in areas where these battles took place, but the researchers have really stressed that all of these possible explanations are just speculation at this point. And lastly, we have a thing that's sort of animal adjacent. Researchers are looking to log books kept by nineteenth century whalers as another source of information about climate change. There are more than four thousand of these books still in existence, kept by whalers operating out of New England, and they record basic information about things like wind and rain. While this research is still in its early stages, it's possible that it can help confirm things like modeling techniques and digital analysis that are used to suggest what the weather was like in the past. Sometimes whaling ships also traveled into parts of the ocean where merchant and military vessels really didn't, so these can provide some information about parts of the planet where the historical data has not been as robust. At the same time, though, the captains of many whaling ships were keeping notes every day about the weather, but those notes typically were not all that exact. Most of the time, there weren't instruments on board to measure things very precisely, so these log books kind of add to an existing body of information that also includes things like tree rings and ice core studies and written records from other sources to kind of make a more complete view of what the climate was like in the past and how it is changing. Speaking of ships, let's talk about some shipwrecks. The grim Shunden has made three different appearances on onearthed before today. This was a Danish warship that sank in fourteen ninety five, and there have been numerous dives to study it over the last decade. The most recent dives to the wreck have involved extensive photographic documentation and mapping, as well as documenting the contents of a chest containing equipment that was used to make ammunition. Divers first spotted that chest in twenty nineteen, but its contents were not closely examined until this spring. The chest and its content have been through a lot of deterioration. There's a lot of corrosion, but it is clear that there are lead plates, molds, and cans that might have contained gunpowder. In spite of the deterioration, this chest has been described as an important discovery for learning more about medieval military technology. Researchers are also conserving items that were brought up from the wreck on previous dives, including cleaning and restoring fragments of mail shirts. Researchers have been studying cargo that washed ashore on Bellino Beach in Portugal during a series of storms in the twenty teens, and this cargo included hundreds of objects made from pewter and brass, including lots and lots of plates, as well as some cutlery and tankards. There were objects made from other materials as well, including a few iron swords and axe heads, stone cannonballs, a few fragments of pottery, and some wooden pieces that are likely from the ship itself. Research published back in twenty fourteen had suggested that these objects might have come from the NASA Sonora d Rosa, which was a merchant ship sailing from the Canary Islands that sank in fifteen seventy seven. This new research does not conclusively rule out that possibility, but it does suggest that this might have been a ship that was built on the Iberian Peninsula but sailed on this voyage from somewhere much farther north than the Canary Islands. They based that conclusion based on the specifics of all the cargo on board. Because the plates were very similar to one another with similar artists' markings, it seems likely that they were all made in the same place and then loaded together onto the ship as one shipment. On a somewhat similar note, archaeologists are working with large collections of ceramic items in Australia and Indonesia to try to identify the source of so called orphaned objects from shipwrecks. These are objects that have been brought up from REX sites and sold on the private market, meaning there's no information a lot of the time about exactly what wreck they came from or where that wreck even was. This currently has involved examining every object to try to piece together not only its origin, but also how it came to be removed from the ocean floor and sold in the first place. Sometimes this happens through individual divers who remove objects from REX, but it can also be the result of things like commercial salvage operations. So the idea is to try to identify the individual items, but also to build a richer understanding of the history and cultural heritage associated with all of these different shipwrecks, particularly ones that are associated with the maritime silk road. This is a work in progress at this point, and there are also some ethical questions for researchers to wrestle with reason that there hasn't been a lot of widespread study of these kinds of orphaned objects before now. It's concerns that focusing on them could wind up legitimizing the removal of objects from wrecks that should be protected. Next, the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society has announced the discovery of the wreck of the steamship Adela Shores, which disappeared in May of nineteen oh nine. At the time, Lake Superior was icy, so the Adela Shores was following behind a larger vessel called the Daniel J. Morrel. Not long after the ships rounded a peninsula called Whitefish Point, the Adela Shores disappeared from the Daniel J. Morreles view. It really was not clear what happened at the time, but the ship was presumed to have sunk, with its fourteen crew believed to be lost. In twenty twenty one, a wreck was spotted about forty miles northwest of Whitefish Point using side scanning sonar. A follow up up with a remote operated vehicle showed a vessel that matched the size and design of the Adella Shores. The Historical Society made the announcement of the discovery on May first, which was the one hundred and fifteenth anniversary of its sinking. Although their press release on the find says one hundred and twelve years, that one hundred and twelve would line up with twenty twenty one, the year it was identified, rather than twenty twenty four, the year it was announced. That adds an odd note to a quote in the release explaining that three years passed between the identification and the announcement because a lot of research goes into each release. Yeah. I was like, then, why is the one twelve there in the headline? Some poor copy editor was like, I think this is right. I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist, but part of me is like, one hundred and fifteen is a nice round number. Next, the Lost fifty two project has come up a couple of times on Unearthed. That's the effort to find the fifty two US submarines that were lost during World War II. The US Navy awarded the project's founder, Tim Taylor, its Navy Distinguished Public Service Award for this effort in twenty twenty one. In May, the US Navy announced the discovery of another of these submarines, the USS Harder. The Harder had been hunting Japanese warships in the Pacific when it was hit by a depth charge in August of nineteen forty four. Another submarine in the area searched for the Harder without success, and it was presumed lost. On January second, nineteen forty five, the Lost fifty two project spotted the Harder off the coast of Luzon in the Philippines at a depth of about three thousand meters and reported its findings to the US Naval History and Heritage Command, which confirmed those findings. This is the seventh wreck found by the Lost fifty two project. And lastly, in twenty twenty two, we did a two parter on Ernest Shackleton's expeditions to Antarctica after the wreck of his show Endurance was discovered there. In June, researchers announced the discovery of another wreck associated with Shackleton, and that's the quest. So, as we mentioned at the end of that two parter, Shackleton tried to mount another voyage to Antarctica after the failed endurance expedition. It's failed in that they did not get to their goal, but there was a whole dramatic rescue story involved that could also be described as successful. They arrived on South Georgia Island aboard the Quest for this next attempted voyage on January fourth of nineteen twenty two, and then the next day, Shackleton died of a heart attack at the age of forty seven. He died in his bunk aboard the Quest. We did not say what happened to the Quest, though it remained in service until being wrecked in sea ice off the northeastern coast of Canada on May fifth, nineteen sixty two. Although the Quest sank, all of the crew aboard were rescued. The team spotted the wreckage using sonar after searching for five days aboard the research vessel Leeway Odyssey. Now we'll take another sponsor break before we close out this Unearthed with some medical stuff. We are finishing up this installment of Unearthed with some medical fines. First, archaeologists in Poland have found a prosthetic device called a Paldal observator dating back to the eighteenth century. The prosthesis was found during archaeological work at the crypt in the church of Saint Francis of Assisi in Crackout. That work took place in twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen, but the find was not announced until now. The person who used this prosthesis had a cleft palate, meaning the roof of their mouth didn't close completely during gestation. Today, a cleft palates are often closed surgically, but some people also use an observator over the roof of their mouth for various reasons. This prosthesis is the oldest known of its kind. It's about one point two inches or three point one centimeters long, made of a metallic plate covered in a woolen pad. There are also traces of yellow and green on the pad that may have come from copper and gold, which might have been included for antimicrobial purposes. Next, archaeologists working at the necropolis at Abyseir, Egypt, say they have found evidence that scribes in ancient Egypt experienced work related injuries. This came from the study of the remains of sixty nine adult men who died between twenty seven hundred and twenty one Pint eighty BCE. Thirty of those were known to be scribes. The scribes had a higher incidence of damage to their hips, jaws, and thumbs, and a lot of them showed signs of osteoarthritis, particularly in the joints on their right side and their neck. A lot of them had damage to their knees and legs that would be consistent with spending a lot of time sitting cross legged or squatting on one leg, which are positions that scribes are often depicted in in ancient artwork, and that jaw damage might be attributed to chewing on their writing tools. It is possible that this research could help archaeologists identify people as scribes when we don't already know that that is what they did for a living. Research published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology in March describes the discovery of a calcified gallbladder in bones exhumed at the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum. This condition is also called a porcelain gallbladder because it causes the gallbladder to take on a color similar to white porcelain. At first, researchers were not sure what this was. That seemed like it might be a calcified cyst or a gallstone, but both of those things would have been really too small to answer the question. A surgeon who had seen calcified gallbladders in living patients ultimately made the identification. This discovery came as part of the Asylum Hill project, which started after human remains were discovered ahead of construction at what is now the University of Mississippi Medical Center. As many as seven thousand people were buried at Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum, which was in operation from eighteen fifty five to nineteen thirty five, and this project seeks to oversee any development done in this area and make sure that those who were buried there are respectfully memorialized. I feel like this site has come up on Unearthed before, but I did not go to the old outlines to check. Next, we have a few finds that are related to infectious diseases. According to research published in the journal Current Biology, English red squirrels acted as a host for leprosy, which is also known as Hanson's disease during the medieval period. This research was focused on the city of Winchester, which was connected to the fur trade and also home to a Leprosarium, or a hospital for people with leprosy during the medieval period. Researchers found a strain of the bacterium that causes this disease in squirrels from Winchester that were closely related to some of the strains that were also circulating in people there. So this research suggests that the disease was moving between humans and red squirrels in Winchester during the medieval period. This is the earliest identification of an animal host for leprosy. So far, we have talked about the Black Death on a number of installments on Earth, including various research about which animals may have harbored the fleas believed to have transmitted the disease to humans. A laboratory study published in the journal Plos Biology suggests another vector, human body lace. This research builds on an earlier study that suggested that plague's transmission rates during the Black Death likely would have involved fleas, but probably would have also involved a parasite that circulated among humans, rather than primarily from animals to humans. Body lice, which are different from head lice, are already associated with the spread of some other diseases, including endemic typhus. If you're really sensitive about blood, maybe skip ahead for the next fifteen or thirty seconds. This study involved contaminating blood with your cenniapestis bacteria, which is what causes plague, and then feeding that to lice through a membrane that mimicked humans. Then the lice were fed uninfected blood through another clean membrane. Afterward, the science detected the bacteria in the previously uninfected blood, as well as in the mouths, digestive tracts, and feces of the lice. I personally think this whole experiment sounds really cool. I understand it might be too much for other folks. All of this happened in a lab, not in actual living people, so we don't know for sure if the same thing would happen out in the world. I too think it is cool. Although can you imagine describing that job to someone at like a cocktail part? Yeah, what do you do? Uh uh oh, I'm trying to get into the detail on that. There's probably a blanket answer, like, oh, I work in a laboratory the end. According to research published in the journal Viruses, researchers have found fragments of three different types viruses in fifty thousand year old Neanderthal bones. These are viruses that cause diseases in modern humans, adenavirus, which usually causes colds, herpes virus, and human papilloma virus or HPV. If these findings are confirmed, this would be the oldest discovery of viruses that cause diseases in humans. Something we don't really know is whether these viruses would have caused diseases in the Neanderthals that had contracted them, like would they have had symptoms would it have caused health effects for them if they did become sick, though, it suggests that the disease, including diseases that could also infect Homo sapiens, could have been one of the reasons for Neanderthals eventually dying out. And lastly, according to a study published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine, doctors in ancient Egypt may have tried to surgically treat a person's brain tumor. This came from research on the skull believed to be of a man between the ages of thirty and thirty five, dating back to between twenty six eighty seven and twenty three forty five BCE. This skull was already known to show evidence of cancerous lesions, but using microscope and computerized tomography scans, researchers also found cut marks made by a sharp tool on areas next to these lesions. It's not completely clear whether these cuts were made during the person's lifetime and an effort to treat or ressect the tumor, or whether it was as part of an autopsy. Either way, though these cuts were made about one thousand years before the earliest known written descriptions of cancer that's in the medical text known as the Ebers Papyrus, seems like regardless of what was happening, people were at least trying to study this and figure out what was going on. Researchers also examined a second skull from someone who died roughly two thousand years later between sixty three and three forty three BCE. This one is believed to have belonged to a woman who died after the age of fifty and who also showed evidence of a tumor that led to bone destruction. Beyond that, the person's skull showed evidence of two traumatic injuries, one of which seems to have happened at close range with a sharp weapon. This skull suggested that the person had gone through some kind of treatment for their physical trauma that allowed them to survive a serious skull injury. Yeah, definitely seems like some kind of attempts at surgical treatments for this astonishingly long ago. So that's unearthed. Do you have some more listener mail? I do have some more listener mail. This is from Genessa, and Janessa wrote after our episode on Maria Erosa and Banana Ketchup, and Janessa wrote, Hello, Tracy and Holly, I just listened to your podcast on Maria y and I was surprised to hear about her part in helping the prisoners of the Santomas interment camp. My grandfather was just a boy when he and his family were imprisoned there. Here's a link to a page my great aunt put together about our family and the prison camp. I had never heard of her, or Banana Ketchup for that matter, and I'm so touched by her bravery that might have helped my family members survive. I will definitely be buying the children's book about her so my daughter can learn about this incredible woman in history. For pet Tax, we have our three beautiful black and white kittens. In back is Rocky, middle as Molly, in front as Francis, plus our tortoise, Totoro. I love all of this so much. Thank you for all your hard work making this such a fantastic podcast, Genessa. Let's open some animal. Oh my goodness, this tortoise. I am not sure what type of plant food object. It looks like maybe a little piece of squash is what the color of maybe lemon? I'm not actually sure, but this tortoise is taking a big old bite of whatever it is. I'm very into that. Let's look at these three kittens, oh, three cats. They're all curled together in one bed. My two cats who are siblings from the same litter. They used to curl up together in the same bed all the time, and they don't really do that much anymore. And I don't know if I just need to get a bigger bed or if they're tired of each other's faces. We had a thing because you know, we had two sets of brothers for a long time, like two sets of litter mats, and they also stopped sleeping with their littermates, and they kind of switched it up, and one Siamese went with one great cat in each bed. Yeah, And I think cats just do their they just shift their sleeping arrangements periodically. I do have to put them in a different room when I am recording podcasts because Onyx, after literal years of having no problem with this, Onyx learned that she could stretch up as far as possible and bang on the doorknob with her paw while yelling, and so it became necessary to put her somewhere else during podcast recording. And often her sister goes with her, and occasionally I will open the door to that room and they are curled together in one little ball of cat, which is always very sweet. So thank you so much, Danessa for this email. Thank you for sending this link. We've talked before about like how touching it can be to hear from folks who have a personal connection to something that we have talked about on the show. If you would like to send us a note, we're at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com and you can subscribe to the podcast 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.

Hey, before we get started on the episode today, we have a live show coming up real soon. We sure do. It's very very soon, in fact, next week, so if you are in the Indianapolis area or surrounding, you might want to get on it. Yeah. So we will be at the Eugene and Maryland Click Indiana History Center in Indianapolis. We are going to be talking about Jean Stratton Porter, who I am just getting the ball rolling on actually writing this episode and I'm so excited about it. That is Friday, July nineteenth, seven thirty to eight thirty p m. Indiana History Center. You can get tickets at Indiana History dot org. We are very excited to be back at the Indiana History Center. So we hope we see you all there, all your smiling faces, to have a fun night of history. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. This is part two of our regular installment of Unearthed, where we talk about things that have been literally or figuratively unearthed over the past few months. In part two of our July twenty twenty four installment. We're going to talk about some animals, some shipwrecks, and some medicine stuff. As we often do, We're gonna start with some things that I thought were cool or interesting, but they don't really fit easily into a category. And I've always been calling that potpourri because I used to watch a lot of Jeopardy. So starting once again with the pop poury. Archaeologists working in collaboration with the Aboriginal can unities on the island of Jiguru on the Great Barrier Reef have found shards of pottery that date back to two thousand and three thousand years ago, centuries before the arrival of Europeans in the area. Prior to this point, archaeologists had widely concluded that Aboriginal peoples in Australia did not make pottery before the arrival of Europeans. Other pieces of pottery had been found on the island in two thousand and nine and twenty twelve, but at that time it was clear only that they were made from local materials, not when they were made. So this collaborative effort between archaeologists and the indigenous community led to the excavation of a three foot by three foot midden and in layers between sixteen and thirty two inches below the surface, archaeologists found eighty two fragments of pottery. Although these pieces are really small, they very clearly came from shaped vessels that had some decorative elements like pigments and incized lines on them, and they dated back to between one thy eight hundred and fifteen years old and two THY nine hundred and fifty years old, making them the oldest conclusively dated pieces of pottery in Australia, and they were made from locally sourced clay, definitely clay from somewhere in northeastern Australia, possibly from this island itself. This time period overlaps with when the Lupita people were known to be making pottery in Papua New Guinea. The Lapita people are also known to have influenced pottery traditions among much of this part of the Pacific, so the paper's authors have concluded that there was an exchange of culture, knowledge, and pottery making between the Aboriginal people of Jiguru and the Lapita people. Aboriginal people today have also described Jaguru as a sacred place and a place for trading, and this research also suggests that Australia was connected to maritime trading network thousands of years ago. Yeah, this has been described as kind of rewriting, but we know about Aboriginal history away from one in which nobody is making pottery to one in which Aboriginal people were part of this shared community in this part of the world with a lot of knowledge exchange. The paper on this was published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, and its conclusion points out that these findings quote challenge racist and colonialist stereotypes of Aboriginal communities as lacking complexity and innovation, and contribute to a robust and nuanced understanding of the deep knowledges and complex technologies of Indigenous Australians. Moving on. According to research published in the journal Plus one in April, people in northwestern Saudi Arabia made their home in a large lava tube for about seven thousand years, with people using the tube in phases from the Neolith period to the Bronze Age, that's from about ten thousand years ago to about thirty five hundred years ago. There's rock art in this lava tube depicting cattle, sheep, goats and dogs, along with animal remains, suggesting that the people who used this shelter were pastoralists. This tube is situated along a pastoral route connecting oases, and according to isotopic analysis, the animals primarily grazed on the local vegetation rather than being fed some kind of fodder. So this is the earliest known evidence of people living in a lava tube in Arabia, and the paper's authors have noted that these kinds of tubes are really plentiful, but they haven't really been the subject of much archaeological study yet, so this is an opportunity for a lot more discoveries next. In a find that got a lot of attention in April, a dentist visiting their parents' home in Europe spotted what looks like part of a jawbone still containing some teeth in the travertine tile used for the floor in a recent remodel. There's not really much to add to this besides that it's interesting. The dentists declined to give their real name or much detail on their parents for the sake of protecting everyone's privacy, but they did say in a Reddit comment that the tile was quarried in Turkya. Yeah, this is one of those things that I included because I think people might be like, why didn't you talk about that tile. Travertine tile is made from sedimentary limestone, and it typically forms near hot springs. The quarry where this tile probably came from contains stones that's roughly a million years old. There's a range there, but that's kind of in the middle. It's really not uncommon for this kind of tile to contain some kind of fossils. But you know, definitely a little surprising to look at it and see what is clearly the arc of a homited job boon. Hey dead, someone's teeth are in your floor. It's a little bit weird. Researchers in Greece have confirmed that a thirty five hundred year old suit of Mycenaean armor would have held up in combat. They did this by recruiting thirteen volunteers from the Marines of the Hellenic Armed Forces, dressing them in replica versions of the armor and Bronze Age weapons, and having them go through a simulated Bronze Age combat for eleven hours. Sources for developing this combat protocol included archaeological evidence as well as Homer's iliad. They also developed a software model called the Late Bronze Age Warrior Model to test whether the armour would have been usable in different environmental conditions, and they placed it in an online data repository so it would be freely available for others to use. I always love an eleven hour historical larp, well, which I mean in the best way, not in any kind of yeah, when we try to figure out whether something would have worked in the past by trying to get modern people to do it. Moving on, During the colonial era in Massachusetts and other parts of North America, enslaved and free black people selected a leader to do things like settle disputes among themselves and act as a representative to the white government and other leaders. Different communities used different titles for the person in this role, including things like a governor and king. Enslaved people did not have the right to vote in official government elections, so this was often something that happened through discussion or consensus on a festival day or a holiday in which enslaved people were allowed a day off from work, or sometimes on the same day that white people were voting in their elections. The first time this is recorded as happening in Massachusetts was in seventeen forty one, and in twenty twenty two Massa choose its lawmakers designated the third Saturday in July as Negro election Day in recognition of this tradition and its history. So, with that context in mind, archaeologists working in Lynn, Massachusetts, which is on the coast northeast of Boston, believe they found the home of one such person, known as King Pompey. Pompey is believed to have been born in West Africa before being trafficked to North America, where he was enslaved by Daniel Mansfield. The second Pompy, was freed sometime in the seventeen fifties, bought two acres of property on the Saugus River and built a home there, and he hosted an annual holiday sort of gathering for enslaved and free black people who lived in Lynn and neighboring towns. Archaeologists used in eighteen twenty nine map and property records, along with modern data like light oar surveys, to search for the site of Pompey's homestead. The site is on private property, but it is possible to sign or a display about the homestead can be put up at Lynn Town Hall or at Saugus Ironworks National Historic Site in the neighboring town of Saugus. And our last bit of miscellaneous potpourri finds it seems like every time, or at least a lot of time that I do unearthed, there's some kind of news coverage that gets on my nerves, and this time that news coverage is about Rapanui, also called Easter Island. Research published in the journal Science Advances used things like satellite and near infrared imaging to identify areas where lithic mulching or rock gardening was used on the island before the arrival of Europeans. Lithic mulching is a method of subsistence farming that can increase the nutrients that are available in the soil and also help it retain moisture. That's really important somewhere like Rapanui, where the soil is volcanic and heavily weathered. This work was carried out with the permission of the Mauhenua indigenous community on Rapanui with a collaborator from the island. According to this data, the total area used for rock gardening was only a fifth of what even the most conservative studies had previously estimated. The team then used this data to project how many people the island could support with this much gardening space, estimating that number at about three thousand. This means that when Europeans arrived on the island for the first time in the eighteenth century, they would have been seeing it at its population peak, not after an ecological collapse had caused its population to drop precipitously. So where this gets annoying is that a lot of the news coverage of this research presented it as newly and even uniquely upending the popular story that the inhabitants of Rapanui had committed a so called eco side by deforested the island in order to create and move the massive statues that it's most famous for today. So I saw a lot of headlines that said things like Easter Island did not collapse from over use of resources. After all, study suggests this is really not a new idea. Though this paper adds to a growing and very well established body of evidence contradicting the whole eco side narrative. This is a body of evidence that has been growing for more than two decades. One of the people who popularized the eco side idea was Jared Diamond in the book Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Terry Hunt and Carl Lippo, who are two of the authors cited on this new paper, contributed a chapter to the book questioning Collapse, Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire. That book came out in two thousand and nine as a direct response to Diamond's book. Their chapter was called Ecological Catastrophe and Collapse the Myth of Ecoside on Rapanui Easter Island. So that book, responding to the book Collapse, came out fifteen years ago. You can even see this whole progression on our podcast in the archive in two episodes that are so old that Holly and I were not even on them. One is a two thousand and eight episode that cites Diamond's work, and then there's a follow up in twenty twelve with that update citing the new work at that point by Hunt and Lippo. So I understand that the purpose of headlines is to get people to click the article, but a lot of people don't, and it really feels like continuing to reframe this as a brand new, first ever questioned idea means we're just never going to get away from this outdated thought that there was an ecoside collapse involved. It's like the part of me that gets sort of chagrined is like, we're kind of just continuing to badmount the people of Revenui for something they didn't do. Yeah, in the interest of clicks. Yes, this is one of many cases where it's like, I understand that this is new information to some people. Things are always new information to some people. But I get frustrated when when I see the same thing repeated by folks who have been writing in this space for a really long time, right and should already have the experience to be more nuanced with what they are writing about. Let's take a break to let me cool off from that whole diatribe I just had, and then we will talk about some animals. Now, we are going to have a f if you find relating to animals. We are going to start with a fine that involves Tasmanian devils, the Putukinti Kurama and Pinakura Aboriginal Corporation or PKKP has been working to excavate sites in Jucken Gorge in Western Australia after Rio Tinto mining company destroyed rock shelters there with blasting back in twenty twenty. These sites were known to have a very deep cultural significance and history dating back at least forty six thousand years, so their destruction by the mining company sparked a huge outcry and a lot of conversations in Australia about the mining industry and how it should interact with the Aboriginal communities who were the traditional owners of the land being mined. The work that has been going on at this site recently is part of an agreement that PKKP reached with after this blasting. Archaeologists working at the site have found a Tasmanian devil tooth, one believed to be connected to trading that took place at the site, since Tasmanian devils are not known to have ever lived in the area. This site is in the northwestern part of Western Australia and the nearest Tasmanian devils lived far to the southwest about three thousand years ago. Other finds at the site include braided human hair and shell beads. Genetic testing of a similar braid found in twenty fourteen suggested a genetic link with the Aboriginal people living there today. Next, archaeologists in Mexico were excavating what they thought was a wall until they found a trio of lids which would have been used as part of Maya beekeeping practices. These lids were used to plug holes in hollow logs that served as homes for sacred stingless bees, So these logs kind of replicated the hollow tree trunks that bees would typically nest in. The lids were made from limestone, and one of them's in pretty good condition, but the other two are very worn. They date back before the Spanish conquest of Mexico, so sometime between nine fifty and the early fifteen hundreds. This is a fine that could have also gone in the update section in part one, we also have an episode on the history of beekeeping that came out in May of twenty twenty. We're going to run that as a Saturday Classic. It talks a bit about indigenous beekeeping in Mesoamerica. This discovery was also found during work ahead of the project known as the Maya Train that has come up on previous installments of unearthed Archaeologists in France have been excavating a site that dates back to the medieval period, sometime in the fifth or sixth centuries, but they've also found a series of pits that are much older, dating all the way back to between one hundred BCE and one hundred CE. Only two of the nine pits they've found have been excavated so far, and they've been found to contain horse bones. These horses seem to have been buried carefully, with one of the pits containing the bodies of ten horses arranged in two rows and two layers. Including the pits that haven't been excavated yet, it's likely that the site contains the skeletons of at least twenty eight horses. We don't really know what happened to these horses, but the two prevailing theories are that they were either sacrificed for some kind of religious reason, or they were killed in battle in the Gallic Wars in which Julius Caesar conquered this area in what's now France. The burial sites have some similarities to some other animal graves in areas where these battles took place, but the researchers have really stressed that all of these possible explanations are just speculation at this point. And lastly, we have a thing that's sort of animal adjacent. Researchers are looking to log books kept by nineteenth century whalers as another source of information about climate change. There are more than four thousand of these books still in existence, kept by whalers operating out of New England, and they record basic information about things like wind and rain. While this research is still in its early stages, it's possible that it can help confirm things like modeling techniques and digital analysis that are used to suggest what the weather was like in the past. Sometimes whaling ships also traveled into parts of the ocean where merchant and military vessels really didn't, so these can provide some information about parts of the planet where the historical data has not been as robust. At the same time, though, the captains of many whaling ships were keeping notes every day about the weather, but those notes typically were not all that exact. Most of the time, there weren't instruments on board to measure things very precisely, so these log books kind of add to an existing body of information that also includes things like tree rings and ice core studies and written records from other sources to kind of make a more complete view of what the climate was like in the past and how it is changing. Speaking of ships, let's talk about some shipwrecks. The grim Shunden has made three different appearances on onearthed before today. This was a Danish warship that sank in fourteen ninety five, and there have been numerous dives to study it over the last decade. The most recent dives to the wreck have involved extensive photographic documentation and mapping, as well as documenting the contents of a chest containing equipment that was used to make ammunition. Divers first spotted that chest in twenty nineteen, but its contents were not closely examined until this spring. The chest and its content have been through a lot of deterioration. There's a lot of corrosion, but it is clear that there are lead plates, molds, and cans that might have contained gunpowder. In spite of the deterioration, this chest has been described as an important discovery for learning more about medieval military technology. Researchers are also conserving items that were brought up from the wreck on previous dives, including cleaning and restoring fragments of mail shirts. Researchers have been studying cargo that washed ashore on Bellino Beach in Portugal during a series of storms in the twenty teens, and this cargo included hundreds of objects made from pewter and brass, including lots and lots of plates, as well as some cutlery and tankards. There were objects made from other materials as well, including a few iron swords and axe heads, stone cannonballs, a few fragments of pottery, and some wooden pieces that are likely from the ship itself. Research published back in twenty fourteen had suggested that these objects might have come from the NASA Sonora d Rosa, which was a merchant ship sailing from the Canary Islands that sank in fifteen seventy seven. This new research does not conclusively rule out that possibility, but it does suggest that this might have been a ship that was built on the Iberian Peninsula but sailed on this voyage from somewhere much farther north than the Canary Islands. They based that conclusion based on the specifics of all the cargo on board. Because the plates were very similar to one another with similar artists' markings, it seems likely that they were all made in the same place and then loaded together onto the ship as one shipment. On a somewhat similar note, archaeologists are working with large collections of ceramic items in Australia and Indonesia to try to identify the source of so called orphaned objects from shipwrecks. These are objects that have been brought up from REX sites and sold on the private market, meaning there's no information a lot of the time about exactly what wreck they came from or where that wreck even was. This currently has involved examining every object to try to piece together not only its origin, but also how it came to be removed from the ocean floor and sold in the first place. Sometimes this happens through individual divers who remove objects from REX, but it can also be the result of things like commercial salvage operations. So the idea is to try to identify the individual items, but also to build a richer understanding of the history and cultural heritage associated with all of these different shipwrecks, particularly ones that are associated with the maritime silk road. This is a work in progress at this point, and there are also some ethical questions for researchers to wrestle with reason that there hasn't been a lot of widespread study of these kinds of orphaned objects before now. It's concerns that focusing on them could wind up legitimizing the removal of objects from wrecks that should be protected. Next, the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society has announced the discovery of the wreck of the steamship Adela Shores, which disappeared in May of nineteen oh nine. At the time, Lake Superior was icy, so the Adela Shores was following behind a larger vessel called the Daniel J. Morrel. Not long after the ships rounded a peninsula called Whitefish Point, the Adela Shores disappeared from the Daniel J. Morreles view. It really was not clear what happened at the time, but the ship was presumed to have sunk, with its fourteen crew believed to be lost. In twenty twenty one, a wreck was spotted about forty miles northwest of Whitefish Point using side scanning sonar. A follow up up with a remote operated vehicle showed a vessel that matched the size and design of the Adella Shores. The Historical Society made the announcement of the discovery on May first, which was the one hundred and fifteenth anniversary of its sinking. Although their press release on the find says one hundred and twelve years, that one hundred and twelve would line up with twenty twenty one, the year it was identified, rather than twenty twenty four, the year it was announced. That adds an odd note to a quote in the release explaining that three years passed between the identification and the announcement because a lot of research goes into each release. Yeah. I was like, then, why is the one twelve there in the headline? Some poor copy editor was like, I think this is right. I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist, but part of me is like, one hundred and fifteen is a nice round number. Next, the Lost fifty two project has come up a couple of times on Unearthed. That's the effort to find the fifty two US submarines that were lost during World War II. The US Navy awarded the project's founder, Tim Taylor, its Navy Distinguished Public Service Award for this effort in twenty twenty one. In May, the US Navy announced the discovery of another of these submarines, the USS Harder. The Harder had been hunting Japanese warships in the Pacific when it was hit by a depth charge in August of nineteen forty four. Another submarine in the area searched for the Harder without success, and it was presumed lost. On January second, nineteen forty five, the Lost fifty two project spotted the Harder off the coast of Luzon in the Philippines at a depth of about three thousand meters and reported its findings to the US Naval History and Heritage Command, which confirmed those findings. This is the seventh wreck found by the Lost fifty two project. And lastly, in twenty twenty two, we did a two parter on Ernest Shackleton's expeditions to Antarctica after the wreck of his show Endurance was discovered there. In June, researchers announced the discovery of another wreck associated with Shackleton, and that's the quest. So, as we mentioned at the end of that two parter, Shackleton tried to mount another voyage to Antarctica after the failed endurance expedition. It's failed in that they did not get to their goal, but there was a whole dramatic rescue story involved that could also be described as successful. They arrived on South Georgia Island aboard the Quest for this next attempted voyage on January fourth of nineteen twenty two, and then the next day, Shackleton died of a heart attack at the age of forty seven. He died in his bunk aboard the Quest. We did not say what happened to the Quest, though it remained in service until being wrecked in sea ice off the northeastern coast of Canada on May fifth, nineteen sixty two. Although the Quest sank, all of the crew aboard were rescued. The team spotted the wreckage using sonar after searching for five days aboard the research vessel Leeway Odyssey. Now we'll take another sponsor break before we close out this Unearthed with some medical stuff. We are finishing up this installment of Unearthed with some medical fines. First, archaeologists in Poland have found a prosthetic device called a Paldal observator dating back to the eighteenth century. The prosthesis was found during archaeological work at the crypt in the church of Saint Francis of Assisi in Crackout. That work took place in twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen, but the find was not announced until now. The person who used this prosthesis had a cleft palate, meaning the roof of their mouth didn't close completely during gestation. Today, a cleft palates are often closed surgically, but some people also use an observator over the roof of their mouth for various reasons. This prosthesis is the oldest known of its kind. It's about one point two inches or three point one centimeters long, made of a metallic plate covered in a woolen pad. There are also traces of yellow and green on the pad that may have come from copper and gold, which might have been included for antimicrobial purposes. Next, archaeologists working at the necropolis at Abyseir, Egypt, say they have found evidence that scribes in ancient Egypt experienced work related injuries. This came from the study of the remains of sixty nine adult men who died between twenty seven hundred and twenty one Pint eighty BCE. Thirty of those were known to be scribes. The scribes had a higher incidence of damage to their hips, jaws, and thumbs, and a lot of them showed signs of osteoarthritis, particularly in the joints on their right side and their neck. A lot of them had damage to their knees and legs that would be consistent with spending a lot of time sitting cross legged or squatting on one leg, which are positions that scribes are often depicted in in ancient artwork, and that jaw damage might be attributed to chewing on their writing tools. It is possible that this research could help archaeologists identify people as scribes when we don't already know that that is what they did for a living. Research published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology in March describes the discovery of a calcified gallbladder in bones exhumed at the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum. This condition is also called a porcelain gallbladder because it causes the gallbladder to take on a color similar to white porcelain. At first, researchers were not sure what this was. That seemed like it might be a calcified cyst or a gallstone, but both of those things would have been really too small to answer the question. A surgeon who had seen calcified gallbladders in living patients ultimately made the identification. This discovery came as part of the Asylum Hill project, which started after human remains were discovered ahead of construction at what is now the University of Mississippi Medical Center. As many as seven thousand people were buried at Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum, which was in operation from eighteen fifty five to nineteen thirty five, and this project seeks to oversee any development done in this area and make sure that those who were buried there are respectfully memorialized. I feel like this site has come up on Unearthed before, but I did not go to the old outlines to check. Next, we have a few finds that are related to infectious diseases. According to research published in the journal Current Biology, English red squirrels acted as a host for leprosy, which is also known as Hanson's disease during the medieval period. This research was focused on the city of Winchester, which was connected to the fur trade and also home to a Leprosarium, or a hospital for people with leprosy during the medieval period. Researchers found a strain of the bacterium that causes this disease in squirrels from Winchester that were closely related to some of the strains that were also circulating in people there. So this research suggests that the disease was moving between humans and red squirrels in Winchester during the medieval period. This is the earliest identification of an animal host for leprosy. So far, we have talked about the Black Death on a number of installments on Earth, including various research about which animals may have harbored the fleas believed to have transmitted the disease to humans. A laboratory study published in the journal Plos Biology suggests another vector, human body lace. This research builds on an earlier study that suggested that plague's transmission rates during the Black Death likely would have involved fleas, but probably would have also involved a parasite that circulated among humans, rather than primarily from animals to humans. Body lice, which are different from head lice, are already associated with the spread of some other diseases, including endemic typhus. If you're really sensitive about blood, maybe skip ahead for the next fifteen or thirty seconds. This study involved contaminating blood with your cenniapestis bacteria, which is what causes plague, and then feeding that to lice through a membrane that mimicked humans. Then the lice were fed uninfected blood through another clean membrane. Afterward, the science detected the bacteria in the previously uninfected blood, as well as in the mouths, digestive tracts, and feces of the lice. I personally think this whole experiment sounds really cool. I understand it might be too much for other folks. All of this happened in a lab, not in actual living people, so we don't know for sure if the same thing would happen out in the world. I too think it is cool. Although can you imagine describing that job to someone at like a cocktail part? Yeah, what do you do? Uh uh oh, I'm trying to get into the detail on that. There's probably a blanket answer, like, oh, I work in a laboratory the end. According to research published in the journal Viruses, researchers have found fragments of three different types viruses in fifty thousand year old Neanderthal bones. These are viruses that cause diseases in modern humans, adenavirus, which usually causes colds, herpes virus, and human papilloma virus or HPV. If these findings are confirmed, this would be the oldest discovery of viruses that cause diseases in humans. Something we don't really know is whether these viruses would have caused diseases in the Neanderthals that had contracted them, like would they have had symptoms would it have caused health effects for them if they did become sick, though, it suggests that the disease, including diseases that could also infect Homo sapiens, could have been one of the reasons for Neanderthals eventually dying out. And lastly, according to a study published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine, doctors in ancient Egypt may have tried to surgically treat a person's brain tumor. This came from research on the skull believed to be of a man between the ages of thirty and thirty five, dating back to between twenty six eighty seven and twenty three forty five BCE. This skull was already known to show evidence of cancerous lesions, but using microscope and computerized tomography scans, researchers also found cut marks made by a sharp tool on areas next to these lesions. It's not completely clear whether these cuts were made during the person's lifetime and an effort to treat or ressect the tumor, or whether it was as part of an autopsy. Either way, though these cuts were made about one thousand years before the earliest known written descriptions of cancer that's in the medical text known as the Ebers Papyrus, seems like regardless of what was happening, people were at least trying to study this and figure out what was going on. Researchers also examined a second skull from someone who died roughly two thousand years later between sixty three and three forty three BCE. This one is believed to have belonged to a woman who died after the age of fifty and who also showed evidence of a tumor that led to bone destruction. Beyond that, the person's skull showed evidence of two traumatic injuries, one of which seems to have happened at close range with a sharp weapon. This skull suggested that the person had gone through some kind of treatment for their physical trauma that allowed them to survive a serious skull injury. Yeah, definitely seems like some kind of attempts at surgical treatments for this astonishingly long ago. So that's unearthed. Do you have some more listener mail? I do have some more listener mail. This is from Genessa, and Janessa wrote after our episode on Maria Erosa and Banana Ketchup, and Janessa wrote, Hello, Tracy and Holly, I just listened to your podcast on Maria y and I was surprised to hear about her part in helping the prisoners of the Santomas interment camp. My grandfather was just a boy when he and his family were imprisoned there. Here's a link to a page my great aunt put together about our family and the prison camp. I had never heard of her, or Banana Ketchup for that matter, and I'm so touched by her bravery that might have helped my family members survive. I will definitely be buying the children's book about her so my daughter can learn about this incredible woman in history. For pet Tax, we have our three beautiful black and white kittens. In back is Rocky, middle as Molly, in front as Francis, plus our tortoise, Totoro. I love all of this so much. Thank you for all your hard work making this such a fantastic podcast, Genessa. Let's open some animal. Oh my goodness, this tortoise. I am not sure what type of plant food object. It looks like maybe a little piece of squash is what the color of maybe lemon? I'm not actually sure, but this tortoise is taking a big old bite of whatever it is. I'm very into that. Let's look at these three kittens, oh, three cats. They're all curled together in one bed. My two cats who are siblings from the same litter. They used to curl up together in the same bed all the time, and they don't really do that much anymore. And I don't know if I just need to get a bigger bed or if they're tired of each other's faces. We had a thing because you know, we had two sets of brothers for a long time, like two sets of litter mats, and they also stopped sleeping with their littermates, and they kind of switched it up, and one Siamese went with one great cat in each bed. Yeah, And I think cats just do their they just shift their sleeping arrangements periodically. I do have to put them in a different room when I am recording podcasts because Onyx, after literal years of having no problem with this, Onyx learned that she could stretch up as far as possible and bang on the doorknob with her paw while yelling, and so it became necessary to put her somewhere else during podcast recording. And often her sister goes with her, and occasionally I will open the door to that room and they are curled together in one little ball of cat, which is always very sweet. So thank you so much, Danessa for this email. Thank you for sending this link. We've talked before about like how touching it can be to hear from folks who have a personal connection to something that we have talked about on the show. If you would like to send us a note, we're at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com and you can subscribe to the podcast 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.