Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It is time for Unearthed. If you're new to the show, this is when we talk about things that were figuratively or literally unearthed. This one covers basically the last quarter of Normally, when we record our year in Unearthed episodes, it's one of the last things that we do before we take a break. Uh. But in we started our break early because we were tired. Uh that wasn't the only reason I was tired. Uh So I finished up these episodes as the very first thing I meant to do list in one. So unlike normal, there's not just a gap of a couple of weeks where we just are never going to talk about those things. Um. So today we have a lot of updates to previous episodes, and some books and letters, some stuff about vikings and Money's and some other things too. And then part two has some of the other listener favorites and favorites of ours also, including the edibles and potables and the exclamations, so stuff to look forward next time. Also so we're going to start out with something that is not entirely typical for our Unearthed episodes. But it was really big news at the end of and so big that it would seem like, if we don't talk about it right out of the gates, some folks are going to spend the whole episode wondering if we will ever get to it. That's that monolith. Yeah. I wrote most of the stuff about the monolith before I went on break, and when I got back, I was like, does anybody even remember that monolith? At this point? It seems like it's been eons ago. It was not eons ago. It was in November and November the Utah Department of Public Safety and Utah Division of Wildlife Resources we're conducting a sheep count by helicopter, and as they were doing that, somebody noticed something strange. Upon closer investigation, it was a triangular prism that was ten or twelve feet high, made of metal held together with rivets and securely anchored into the rock. And since this thing kind of resembled the monolith from the film two thousand and one A Space Odyssey, a lot of people started talking about aliens, and although authorities tried to keep the location of this monolith's secret. It didn't take very long for people to figure out exactly where it was, and they found it on Google or satellite imagery, and soon it became clear that it was a lot newer than the things that we would usually cover on an Unearthed episodes, not an ancient historical thing. Uh. It wasn't there in August, but it was as of October of twenty six. And one hypothesis was that it was a work art, possibly by sculptor John McCracken, whose son said he liked to install his artwork in remote and unexpected places, but that doesn't really add up because McCracken died in eleven. A representative for McCracken's estate later said that it was not his work. So this announcement that this monolith had been spotted came on November twenty three, and then on the twenty eight the Bureau of Land Management reported that this quote illegally installed structure had been removed. The day before, photographer Ross Bernard's of Colorado reported that he had gone to the site with some friends to check out this monument, and that while they were there, four other people arrived, they knocked the monolith down and took the pieces away in a wheelbarrow. One of those four people reportedly said this is why you don't leave trash in the desert, and then on their way out another one of them said, leave no trace. Michael James Newlands took photos of this whole removal on his phone. People who have taken credit for this removal include Andy L. Lewis and Sylvan Christensen. Christensen sent a statement to The New York Times that they had removed the monolith to protect the area from the sightseers who had started flocking to the site pretty much as soon as people figured out where it was. Then, a similar monolith appeared in Romania on November, only to vanish on December one, and then on the second one appeared in southern California and disappeared again the next day. Four men took credit for that one on the fifth, and that was also the day that another one appeared in Joshua Tree National Park in California. Still more monoliths came and went around California. There was also one on the Isle of Wight and one outside of El Paso, Texas, and one in Finland. Matty Mo, who's the founder of the collective known as the Most Famous Artist, gave some pretty cag interviews in which he didn't exactly take credit for the monolith but did not deny being involved with them either, and the Most Famous Artist websites been listing monolithts for sale for the price of forty dollars. As of when we are recording this, that listing says that it is sold out. I mean, who doesn't want a dollar monoliths? I have that d i y thing where I'm like, if I wanted it, I just make it myself skod. Honestly, this whole thing has become increasingly silly since then. A gingerbread monolith, my personal favorite, appeared in San Francisco on Christmas Day, among other things. Yeah, we may not know the true nature of that first one that was cited and who was responsible for it, but I liked that people took the idea and ran with it in cookie form. Yeah, when it initially showed up, before people figured out how recently it had appeared, I was thinking it might turn out to be like some piece of a movie set from some classical film. We would get to talk about that, and no it was not that. Uh. And then when I got back to my desk on January fourth and was like, any updates on that modelith in the time that I was not at work, Well, there was a gingerbread one. Um, it's the whole thing, and that that's This is not the only disappearing and reappearing object that happened at the end of last year, and other news have disappearing and reappearing things. A few years ago, someone put a two meter or seven foot tall wooden sculpture on the ridge of Grutten Mountain in southern Bavaria. The sculpture was of a fallust. There's no real documentation of how it came to be there, but the local story is that somebody got this gigantic statue of a pallast as a gag gift and did not want it, so they hauled it up the mountain and just left it there. Then in late November, without ex planation, someone chopped it down and took it away. As was the case with the Utah Monolith. It is not clear who this sculpture actually belonged to, so that means it's also not clear whether an actual crime was committed, but authorities were investigating. Yeah, earlier I said this was a disappearing and reappearing thing, but it's really it's just appearing and then disappearing. There was no reappearance of it yet yet. See we see moving on to things that are a little more typical of of Unearthed. We have lots of fines that are related to past episodes of this show. So we've had some previous updates on Unearthed about efforts to find mass graves that are connected to the nineteen twenty one massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We covered that massacre on the show in We also replayed it as a Saturday Classic. More recently, I think in October, Oklahoma state Archaeologist Carrie Stackleback and now that a team had found human remains at Oaklawn Cemetery. It was one of the sites they were investigating at that time. They found the remains of one or possibly two people at a site where it's believed that eighteen victims of the massacre had been buried. In October, Peru's Culture Ministry announced the discovery and conservation of a thirty seven meter that's about a hundred and twenty foot long gia glyph in the Nasca Desert. It's about two thousand years old and in the shape of a cat. It was discovered during planning for a new path that would lead up to an observation tower. So Peru's chief archaeologist for the Nasca Lines told reporters that this glyph actually pre dates the Nasca culture that is credited with creating the other glyphs in the area. This cat glyph dates back to the late Paracas era, which is between five hundred b c E and two hundred c E, while the Nasca culture that is associated with the other lines spans from two hundred to seven hundred C. Because of its age and its position on the slope, this cat glyph had eroded to the point that was just barely visible. And if you look at pictures of this glyph, it seems stylistically much different from many of the other Nasca lines. I will confess that when I first saw pictures, I said, that's one of hoax. Someone went into pure um. It is not clear whether that difference in style is because of its origins in an earlier era or because of that recent cleaning and restoration. Our episode on the Nasca lines, so you can get more context for all of this came out in Moving On. According to research that was published in December, analysis of mummified baboons that were found in ancient Egyptian temples might help pinpoint the location of the Kingdom of Poot. A team from Dartmouth College analyzed isotope composition of these mummies and that analysis suggested that their origins were from a region that includes parts of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia and Yamen. So kind of a narrowing down into that general region we talked about had Schepsu and the expeditions to put on the show in July of next up, three metal detectorists have found a shipment of arms that was meant for the Jacobite uprising of seventeen forty five, which we covered on the show in twos sixteen. This find was on the shores of Lockerberlock, near a ruined croft house that had belonged to Bonnie Prince Charlie's tutor. It included at least two hundred musket balls and it's believed that they are part of a shipment that arrived not long after the Battle of Colloden. These metal detectorists had the permission of the landowner to be there and they reported their find to Treasure Trove in Scotland and that's the official organization for handling finds that might have some kind of archaeological or historical important in Scotland. Next up, divers in the Baltic Sea have found a German Enigma machine from World War Two. Divers on assignment from environmental group with WWF found it while looking for abandoned fishing nets. The person who spotted it actually first thought it was an old typewriter. The Enigma machine is expected to undergo a year long restoration process before being put on display in a museum. Prior Hosts did a series of episodes on cryptography during World War Two. In September, we have a couple of updates to previous Unearthed episodes. In our Fall Unearthed last year, we talked about the discovery of thirteen unopened coffins that were found in a burial well in Sakara, Egypt. These were estimated to be years old. Their wooden coffins found in very good condition, with much of the original painting on the exterior still very clearly visible. Work on these is of course still ongoing, and in October Greg Lewis, New Zealand's ambassador to Egypt, shared a video of one of them being opened for the first time. This was part of an unveiling of that earlier find, which is actually much larger than that was originally reported as thirteen coffins. As of October, fifty nine coffins had been discovered, which were believed to belong to priests and senior officials. By November, that number of discovered coffins had risen to a hundred, and they had also found funerary masks and forty gilded statues. Officials had also started x raying the mummies to try to visualize their structures and figure out how they had been preserved. Some of the openings of these coffins and the x raying processes that have gone along along the way, have been carried out publicly to try to help offset the pandemics impact on the Egyptian tourism industry. In Unearthed in March, we talked about some glassy matter that was found at the site of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year seventy nine, and that glassy matter was believed to be part of a person's brain. Further research into this find has actually uncovered the fact that there are intact neurons preserved in that glassy material. According to a paper published in October, the rapid cooling of the volcanic material allowed those neurons to be preserved in this way. So cool. Yeah. When I was looking at this, I was like, is this the same brain? Yes. We will move on to the books and letters after we take a quick sponsor break. Next up we have the category of books and letters, and first up. In November of the correspondence between authors J. M. Berry and Robert Louis Stevenson was published in a book titled A Friendship Letters Robert Louis Stevenson and J. M. Barry. Most of Stevenson's letters in this correspondence had already been published, so they were not really new, but Barry's side of the conversation had not been published. A lot of the chatter about this described Barry's letters as having been lost, but as is so often the case in these episodes, that is not really the right way to describe this situation. The letters were in the Boneke Library at Yale University, and they were cataloged there. But somehow people didn't make the connection between that catalog box of letters and Berry's unpublished correspondents. Dr Michael Shaw, who realized what they were after being unable to buy a copy, was quoted by The Guardian is saying when I first saw them, I didn't realize that these were lost letters. I just assumed they had been published and I didn't know about them. Yeah, the letters were there the whole time. Folks just didn't quite realize that they were not ones that were widely publicly available. Of course they were published, I just never stumbled across them. So these letters chronicle not only the two writers intense affection and even love for each other, but also Stevenson's influence on Barry's work, with phrases and images making their way into various stories and his novel Peter Pan next up. In December, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation released a statement that the three hundred forty character cipher attributed to the Zodiac Killer, which was sent to the San Francisco Chronicle in November of nineteen sixty nine, has been cracked. This cipher is one of four attributed to the killer, and it was the first one to be submitted to the FBI. Before this point, only one of the other cipher's had been solved. Five murders from the late nineteen sixties are attributed to the Zodiac Killer, whose identity is still not known. So this solution to the cipher was the work of three private citizens. Software developer David ore in Check, applied mathematicians Sam Blake, and warehouse operator and computer programmer Yarl von Ikey, who used a code breaking program to test more than six fifty thousand possible solutions. They're decoding found some of the same themes as the killers other communications, including this idea that these murders were about collecting slaves to take to the afterlife. The decoded cipher also misspelled the word paradise, and it had some rather convoluted phrasing. I feel like this would have been way bigger news if there were less going on in the world. You would think, right, Yeah, it was one of those things that I saw a brief headline of same, saw nothing further about. Uh, forgot totally about it. Then heard somebody mention it on a podcast while I was out on break and I emailed myself like Zodiac Killer cipher, so I would remember to put it in here. In September, to move on to another subject, thieves stole a scroll of poetry that had been written by Mao Zandong. They stole this from the Hong Kong apartment of art collector Fush and Shao. This was part of a really enormous heist, with an estimated value in the Hong Kong Press as being worth four billion Hong Kong dollars. The US Press estimated the value of the stolen items as five hundred million U S dollars. At the time, Fush and Shaw was away from Hong Kong because of the pandemic. The scroll was sold for just five hundred dollars in Hong Kong currency, with the buyer believing that it was a forgery. It was recovered in October, by which point it had been cut in half. It originally measured about nine feet that's about two point eight meters long, and the buyer, who was arrested for handling stolen property, reportedly found it too long to display the way they wanted. And in our last find Underbooks and Letters, research at the European Synchrotron radiation facility has looked at the composition of inks that were used to write on Egyptian papyrus. These papyride date back to the years one hundred to two hundred, and most of the writing on them is in black, but red ink is used for things like the heading or words that require some kind of special emphasis. They discovered that the inks contained lead, but not as a pigment. Instead, lead seems to have acted as a drying agent, encircling particles of ochre and adhering them to the papyrus. This pre day to similar technique used to dry oil paints during the Renaissance in Europe by hundreds of years. Moving on, in this installment of unearthed, we once again have a few finds related to Vikings. The first is that DNA testing has solved some mysteries about a Viking era burial site known as the Gerdrip Grave near russ Killed, Denmark. This burial site was discovered about forty years ago and it was not clear whose remains they were or why they were buried together. The remains seems to belong to a man and a woman, and for a time it was believed that the man was enslaved and had been killed as a sacrifice, because he seems to have been hanged and bound. The woman's remains had been covered in large stones. Based on that DNA analysis their mother and son, and while a lot about their deaths and their burials is still unclear, one hypothesis is that they are figures described in the Icelandic Sagas the sorceress Katla and her son Odd. In the Sagas, Kotla was stoned to death and Odd was hanged. To be clear, the female remains in this grave were covered in heavy stones, but the remains themselves do not show evidence of being stoned or pressed to death. Yet. The Sagas are sort of like epic accounts of the settlement of Iceland, which are both um. They're both literary and historical, so there are elements of them that are rooted in factual accuracy and then parts of them that are more mythologized. And this burial site also includes a weapon, which was a lance, and this was one of the first examples of a weapon being included in a grave that was identified as belonging to a set of female remains. But based on this idea that the bodies may belong to Catala and odd There's another idea that has arisen, which is that maybe is it a it is a sorceress's staff. Next up, the remains of a twelve year old temple known as a God House have been found in Norway. This was a temple that would have been dedicated to old Norse gods, and while other examples had previously been unearthed in Sweden and Denmark, this is the first such find in Norway. This find includes the temples foundations, and it seems to have been a later addition to a settlement that included at least two long houses that were first built between two thousand and years ago. Other finds that the site that were related to the Godhouse include remains of animal sacrifices and cooking pits that would have been used for religious feasts. Ground penetrating radar studies and yellowstad in southeastern Norway have discovered that there is a lot of other stuff surrounding a Viking burial ship. There. Viking burial ships have, if you listen, come up on on Earth before this one was discovered. In In addition to the ship, there are a buried feast hall and a cult temple, along with at least thirteen burial mounds. These are close to Yell Mound, which is a burial mound that had already been excavated and studied, So it is possible that this whole area was an important ritual and burial site, and that the ship was placed there because of its established use for burial mounds. Yeah. I tried to figure out whether we had ACKed about this specific ship before. I'm not actually sure. I'm not either. I can't remember if it came up in our Yelling Stones episode. Yeah. Yeah, we've definitely talked about burial ships before, but whether whether this specific one has come up is not as clear. Over the summer, there was also a team of archaeologists who were really racing to excavate this ship because it was being destroyed by a fungus. And in our last bit of Viking news, a team in central Norway has excavated the grave of a woman dating back to the Viking era. This find was unexpected because there aren't any other graves nearby. Some of the items buried with the woman include a three lobed brooch and hundreds of tiny beads so small that the team had to buy mosquito netting to have something fine enough to sift them out from the soil. Although the beads were mostly found around the body's right shoulder, it isn't clear if they were part of a necklace or a piece of clothing or something else entirely. Just like the idea of like needing to go get some mosquito netting to get these tiny, tiny, tiny beads, We're going to shift gears now and talk about some mummies. According to research that was reported in the journal Analytical Chemistry, researchers have found a new, non destructive technique that uses electron paramagnetic resonance to analyze bitumen in ancient Egyptian mummies. Before this point, most methods that were used to study bet uman required researchers to collect a small sample of it and then that sample was destroyed over the course of the tests. This process doesn't destroy anything, and rather than examining the bitumen itself as a whole, this technique analyzes some of its components, which are byproducts of the decomposition of plant matter. But tuman is the compound that gives mummies their dark color, and it can be found in natural deposits, or it can be made from subs is like bees, wax, fat, and resin, and this analysis can help determine exactly where the bitumen came from and how old it is because of the specific byproducts used in the tests, It can also confirm whether they came from a marine source like the Dead Sea or a land source like a tar pit. It can also help researchers confirm whether a mummy has been restored at some point during its history. In other news, during the Roman Era in Egypt, which spanned from about the first century b c e To the third century CE, that was common for members of the upper class to have a mummy portrait. That was the portrait of the person on a wooden board that would be attached to their mummy. Many of these have been found in the Phyume basin and are described as the Phyume Mommy portraits. This find isn't a mummy portrait, though, it's an earring found in the Roman city of Daletem in southeast Bulgaria. Archaeologists found the earring while excavating the remains of the city's public baths, wedged between two tiles, and the earring is identical or at least extremely similar to one depicted on Phayu mummy portraits of at least two women. I loved this. I loved the lost earring and the fact that it's in these two different portraits and just sort of the wondering like, is this the exact same earring? Is it just a really similar earring? Was this just a really popular earring line that everyone was it the hot earring of the season and other Fiume portrait News Researchers at the University of Utah have analyzed a tiny, tiny, tiny speck of pigments on the portrait known as Portrait of a Bearded Man. In this portrait, the pigment was used for the clay vey or the purple stripes that indicated a person's high status. This particle, I said tiny so many times. It's because it was only fifty krons in diameter, and it was sent to the team at the College of Minds and Earth Sciences at the University of Utah between two glass slides. In transit, this particle shifted by about a millimeter, so it took a while for them to actually find it in the slides to analyze it because it was so small shifted this tiny amount. After analysis using energy dispersive X ray fluorescence analysis, electron microscopy diffraction, and ADAM probe tomography, they concluded that the pigment was made with dye mixed with clay or silica, known as a lake pigment. They also found evidence of beeswax binder, and there's still some uncertainty about how the dye was made. Although they did conclude that the purple pigment had been synthesized in a lead container and it was not made from the purple dye that came from your X snails, it's not clear whether cro meum in the sample was intentionally included there or if it was a byproduct of some other ingredients. Now we're just going to take a quick break before we moved on to some other unearth things. Next up, we have a few finds that I have loosely grouped together as prehistory. They are not all from the exact same time period, but they're from before the start of the written record in the areas where they were found. First up, a local resident named Roman Novac was out picking mushrooms in northern Morabia when he stumbled upon a Bronze age sword along with an x Both of these have been dated to about and even though the region where they were found was really sparsely populated at that time, they do appear to be local rather than something that was ought in by, say, an army that was just passing through the area. In other news, according to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in October, the first human arrival in the Bahamas may have led to the extinction of several species of birds through the newly arrived humans hunting them directly because of habitat loss related to that human arrival, or, in the case of a giant barn owl and a giant eagle, because their prey species disappeared or became harder to find. These conclusions came from a ten year study of more than seven thousand fossils. In many cases, there was about a hundred year overlap between the arrival of the humans and the disappearance of the birds, disappearances not really explained by any other changes to the environment that the researchers could find. In some cases, the birds did survive, but only on some of the islands. For example, the Abaco parrot lives only on two islands in the Bahama Us, and there are islands in between them that also would have supported similar habitats. The team were able to find fossils of those parrots on islands where that species currently does not live and other news. According to research published in the Journal of Human Evolution, Homo sapiens did not, as was previously believed, invent the first barbed bone point that inventor was probably really Homo orectus about eight hundred thousand years ago. This came from a study of a set of fifty two different animal bones from East Africa's al du Gorge. One of these was carved with three barbs and a curved tip, and it doesn't seem to have been made to attached to any kind of a handle or a shaft, so it's unclear how this point would have been used Before this. The oldest known barbed bone points were much younger, only about ninety thousand years ago. These points were attached to shafts and probably used to fish or to hunt other prey. It is one of those parts that I wrote before going out a break, and when I came back to my desk, I was like is this right. Are these numbers are right? That I put an extra zero somewhere, because that's a huge difference. Note that is it's correct. Uh, we have recapped this next thing we're going to talk about a little bit before, but it's been a while, so to touch on it again. Anytime archaeologists are trying to draw conclusions about human remains based on the things that were buried with them, there are layers of assumptions at work, like how sex and gender worked in that particular society and why that society chose to bury specific items with specific people. As one example, it's pretty easy to conclude that a person who was buried with a sword was a warrior, but it's also possible that a sword had a ceremonial or a symbolic purpose that didn't have anything to do with combat. So, no matter how careful and thoughtful we are when we try to think about these things, our own experiences and our own societies and our own perspectives influence how we interpret these kinds of fines. Sometimes there is other information that we can use to back up these assumptions and conclusions, for example, written records or artwork, or in the case of that sword where patterns in the person's remains that suggest that they saw a lot of combat while they were alive, but sometimes it's just a lot more nebulous. All of that said, research published in the journal Science Advances suggests that gender roles and hunter gatherer societies and the America's might not have been strictly delineated along the lines of men hunted and women gathered, which I know is a thing that I learned and many other people learned in school. The three start started with the discovery of what appeared to be the burial site of a female hunter, which dated back about nine thousand years. This find was unearthed in Peru, and researchers started trying to figure out whether they was a relatively unique situation or whether there were other similar burial sites. They looked at four hundred twenty nine skeletons from one hundred seven late Pleistocene in early Holocene burial sites across the America's Twenty seven of those one d seven skeletons were buried with tools that would have been used to hunt big game. Of those, eleven were female and sixteen were male. The eleven female skeletons came from ten different burial sites, and the sixteen males came from fifteen sites, so this pattern wasn't confined to one particular time in place. The sex of the skeletons was determined by both the morphology of the bones and analysis of dental enamel proteins. So this is adding to an increasing body of work that suggests that the whole men hunted, women gathered binary doesn't exactly hold up, and a lot of that binary idea really came from the assumptions of eighteenth and nineteenth century archaeologists and anthropole lologists who didn't have very robust methods of figuring out the sex of skeletons, but could draw conclusions about what sex the skeletons were based on what was buried with them. I love when science evolves me too. Uh. There's a whole podcast about this whole idea UM from the podcast seen on radio. They did a series. One of their seasons was called Men, and it was basically about where patriarchy came from UM and this idea that it's really reductive to imagine that men hunted and when women gathered, like they talk about that being way more reductive than could really have worked in Prehistoric Society's A team from the National Museum of Natural History in France, the University of the Bosque Country in Spain, and other institutions has published a study in the journal Scientific Reports that concludes that Neanderthal's intentionally buried they're dead. That's a conclusion that has been suggested in earlier work, but it wasn't considered a conclusive conclusion. So this research involved forty seven bones, all belonging to the same Neanderthal child who was approximately two years old when they died and who lived about forty one thousand years ago, and there are several pieces of evidence at this burial site that added up to the conclusion that this child had been intentionally buried very soon after their death. The stratification layers in the soil in the area are inclined to the northeast, but the child's remains were oriented to the west, so it's not a matter of like the child's body being covered in sediment gradually with the other material in the area. The bones themselves were also all together still in about the same position that they would have been at the time of burial, while animal bones in the same area from the same time are just a lot more scattered. They confirmed that the bones were Neanderthal using mitochondrial DNA analysis, and they dated them using carbon fourteen dating. While they're published findings described this as conclusive proof that Neanderthals buried they're dead. The team does also note that quote further discoveries will be necessary to understand the chronology and geographical extension of Neanderthal burial practices. And that's where we are going to leave things for part one of our Unearthed. We have lots more stuff to talk about in our next episode. Yay, do you want to talk about listener mail? I do. I also want to say we're recording this on January five. We have many days of not looking at email, So if you send us an email during like the last three weeks of December. Uh, there's just a lot of email to go through. Um So we're not trying to ignore anyone, there's just there's just a lot of it to catch up on having come back from the holidays. Um. So this one is from Laura and it is about our episode on Jim Thorpe, and Laura says, Holly and Tracy, I'm a little behind on all my podcasts at the moment, but I was elated to see a three part series on jim Thorpe. When I went looking through my yet to be downloaded list, I wrote to you guys years ago were requesting one on him right after you covered the Fort Show Indians School. Immediately downloaded them this morning and listened to while I worked, which is something I don't often do. Laura then goes on to talk about growing up pretty near jim Thorpe and says, quote, I managed one of the major tourist operations in town from two thousand seven to fourteen. Growing up in the eighties and nineties, the town of jim Thorpe was a bit of a mess. Buildings were being neglected, tourism was minimal, and yes, even the jim Thorpe Memorial, which is unfortunately a bit of a trek outside the historic tourist part of town, was greatly neglected. At the time I graduated college, moved back to the area, and started working in town. However, most of these neglected buildings were fixed up and filled with unique little galleries, restaurants, and gift shops. The sidewalks were fixed and the building facades were well on their way to being restored to their late nineteenth century glory. The Jim Thorpe tomb and memorial were restored and added on too as well, partly due to projects by students at jim Thorpe School District known as the Olympians. Having grown up in the area, everyone knew the story of Jim Thorpe and why he was buried in a town he never stepped foot in, or at least most knew the story through my interactions with tourists though, who were coming to town for a variety of reasons. I was shocked to have to continuously answer questions like who was Jim Thorpe and why does your town have a man's name, not that so many people not even recognized the name of the greatest athlete in the world. Everyone in the area closely followed all the legal battles of the past decade, with the people of the town torn between the two sides. Some felt the town deserve to keep his body, others felt he should be sent back to his family. Back when the area buried Jim Thorpe and changed its name, they were expecting at least a hospital in the National Football Hall of Fame to come out of the deal. They also helped that having the athlete would bring back tourism to an area that had been at one point one of the most popular tourists and nations of the United States, second only to Niagara Falls. But none of these things happened. Then, Lara goes on to give some topic suggestions for the podcast uh and says, anyway, I love listening to you guys. As a student, I hated history class, but I've always loved learning about local histories of locations I visited, and I'm a sucker for any museum. I've learned so much from your podcast over the past several years, and I'm looking forward to several more years to come. Laura. Thank you, Laura. Um that that description of sort of how the the tourism industry of jim Thorpe evolved over the years really matches up to what I had read previously from other folks that like did not live in the area, but knew about it and had visited it. Um having seen pictures of the town, like it looks like a super cute, little um kind of touristy place to visit when the weather is good and traveling is safe. UM. So Thank you so much Laura for sending that email. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast or history podcast at iHeart radio dot com and we are all over social media at miss in History. That is where you will find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show and the iHeart radio app and Apple Podcasts and anywhere else you get your podcasts. 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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It is time for Unearthed. If you're new to the show, this is when we talk about things that were figuratively or literally unearthed. This one covers basically the last quarter of Normally, when we record our year in Unearthed episodes, it's one of the last things that we do before we take a break. Uh. But in we started our break early because we were tired. Uh that wasn't the only reason I was tired. Uh So I finished up these episodes as the very first thing I meant to do list in one. So unlike normal, there's not just a gap of a couple of weeks where we just are never going to talk about those things. Um. So today we have a lot of updates to previous episodes, and some books and letters, some stuff about vikings and Money's and some other things too. And then part two has some of the other listener favorites and favorites of ours also, including the edibles and potables and the exclamations, so stuff to look forward next time. Also so we're going to start out with something that is not entirely typical for our Unearthed episodes. But it was really big news at the end of and so big that it would seem like, if we don't talk about it right out of the gates, some folks are going to spend the whole episode wondering if we will ever get to it. That's that monolith. Yeah. I wrote most of the stuff about the monolith before I went on break, and when I got back, I was like, does anybody even remember that monolith? At this point? It seems like it's been eons ago. It was not eons ago. It was in November and November the Utah Department of Public Safety and Utah Division of Wildlife Resources we're conducting a sheep count by helicopter, and as they were doing that, somebody noticed something strange. Upon closer investigation, it was a triangular prism that was ten or twelve feet high, made of metal held together with rivets and securely anchored into the rock. And since this thing kind of resembled the monolith from the film two thousand and one A Space Odyssey, a lot of people started talking about aliens, and although authorities tried to keep the location of this monolith's secret. It didn't take very long for people to figure out exactly where it was, and they found it on Google or satellite imagery, and soon it became clear that it was a lot newer than the things that we would usually cover on an Unearthed episodes, not an ancient historical thing. Uh. It wasn't there in August, but it was as of October of twenty six. And one hypothesis was that it was a work art, possibly by sculptor John McCracken, whose son said he liked to install his artwork in remote and unexpected places, but that doesn't really add up because McCracken died in eleven. A representative for McCracken's estate later said that it was not his work. So this announcement that this monolith had been spotted came on November twenty three, and then on the twenty eight the Bureau of Land Management reported that this quote illegally installed structure had been removed. The day before, photographer Ross Bernard's of Colorado reported that he had gone to the site with some friends to check out this monument, and that while they were there, four other people arrived, they knocked the monolith down and took the pieces away in a wheelbarrow. One of those four people reportedly said this is why you don't leave trash in the desert, and then on their way out another one of them said, leave no trace. Michael James Newlands took photos of this whole removal on his phone. People who have taken credit for this removal include Andy L. Lewis and Sylvan Christensen. Christensen sent a statement to The New York Times that they had removed the monolith to protect the area from the sightseers who had started flocking to the site pretty much as soon as people figured out where it was. Then, a similar monolith appeared in Romania on November, only to vanish on December one, and then on the second one appeared in southern California and disappeared again the next day. Four men took credit for that one on the fifth, and that was also the day that another one appeared in Joshua Tree National Park in California. Still more monoliths came and went around California. There was also one on the Isle of Wight and one outside of El Paso, Texas, and one in Finland. Matty Mo, who's the founder of the collective known as the Most Famous Artist, gave some pretty cag interviews in which he didn't exactly take credit for the monolith but did not deny being involved with them either, and the Most Famous Artist websites been listing monolithts for sale for the price of forty dollars. As of when we are recording this, that listing says that it is sold out. I mean, who doesn't want a dollar monoliths? I have that d i y thing where I'm like, if I wanted it, I just make it myself skod. Honestly, this whole thing has become increasingly silly since then. A gingerbread monolith, my personal favorite, appeared in San Francisco on Christmas Day, among other things. Yeah, we may not know the true nature of that first one that was cited and who was responsible for it, but I liked that people took the idea and ran with it in cookie form. Yeah, when it initially showed up, before people figured out how recently it had appeared, I was thinking it might turn out to be like some piece of a movie set from some classical film. We would get to talk about that, and no it was not that. Uh. And then when I got back to my desk on January fourth and was like, any updates on that modelith in the time that I was not at work, Well, there was a gingerbread one. Um, it's the whole thing, and that that's This is not the only disappearing and reappearing object that happened at the end of last year, and other news have disappearing and reappearing things. A few years ago, someone put a two meter or seven foot tall wooden sculpture on the ridge of Grutten Mountain in southern Bavaria. The sculpture was of a fallust. There's no real documentation of how it came to be there, but the local story is that somebody got this gigantic statue of a pallast as a gag gift and did not want it, so they hauled it up the mountain and just left it there. Then in late November, without ex planation, someone chopped it down and took it away. As was the case with the Utah Monolith. It is not clear who this sculpture actually belonged to, so that means it's also not clear whether an actual crime was committed, but authorities were investigating. Yeah, earlier I said this was a disappearing and reappearing thing, but it's really it's just appearing and then disappearing. There was no reappearance of it yet yet. See we see moving on to things that are a little more typical of of Unearthed. We have lots of fines that are related to past episodes of this show. So we've had some previous updates on Unearthed about efforts to find mass graves that are connected to the nineteen twenty one massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We covered that massacre on the show in We also replayed it as a Saturday Classic. More recently, I think in October, Oklahoma state Archaeologist Carrie Stackleback and now that a team had found human remains at Oaklawn Cemetery. It was one of the sites they were investigating at that time. They found the remains of one or possibly two people at a site where it's believed that eighteen victims of the massacre had been buried. In October, Peru's Culture Ministry announced the discovery and conservation of a thirty seven meter that's about a hundred and twenty foot long gia glyph in the Nasca Desert. It's about two thousand years old and in the shape of a cat. It was discovered during planning for a new path that would lead up to an observation tower. So Peru's chief archaeologist for the Nasca Lines told reporters that this glyph actually pre dates the Nasca culture that is credited with creating the other glyphs in the area. This cat glyph dates back to the late Paracas era, which is between five hundred b c E and two hundred c E, while the Nasca culture that is associated with the other lines spans from two hundred to seven hundred C. Because of its age and its position on the slope, this cat glyph had eroded to the point that was just barely visible. And if you look at pictures of this glyph, it seems stylistically much different from many of the other Nasca lines. I will confess that when I first saw pictures, I said, that's one of hoax. Someone went into pure um. It is not clear whether that difference in style is because of its origins in an earlier era or because of that recent cleaning and restoration. Our episode on the Nasca lines, so you can get more context for all of this came out in Moving On. According to research that was published in December, analysis of mummified baboons that were found in ancient Egyptian temples might help pinpoint the location of the Kingdom of Poot. A team from Dartmouth College analyzed isotope composition of these mummies and that analysis suggested that their origins were from a region that includes parts of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia and Yamen. So kind of a narrowing down into that general region we talked about had Schepsu and the expeditions to put on the show in July of next up, three metal detectorists have found a shipment of arms that was meant for the Jacobite uprising of seventeen forty five, which we covered on the show in twos sixteen. This find was on the shores of Lockerberlock, near a ruined croft house that had belonged to Bonnie Prince Charlie's tutor. It included at least two hundred musket balls and it's believed that they are part of a shipment that arrived not long after the Battle of Colloden. These metal detectorists had the permission of the landowner to be there and they reported their find to Treasure Trove in Scotland and that's the official organization for handling finds that might have some kind of archaeological or historical important in Scotland. Next up, divers in the Baltic Sea have found a German Enigma machine from World War Two. Divers on assignment from environmental group with WWF found it while looking for abandoned fishing nets. The person who spotted it actually first thought it was an old typewriter. The Enigma machine is expected to undergo a year long restoration process before being put on display in a museum. Prior Hosts did a series of episodes on cryptography during World War Two. In September, we have a couple of updates to previous Unearthed episodes. In our Fall Unearthed last year, we talked about the discovery of thirteen unopened coffins that were found in a burial well in Sakara, Egypt. These were estimated to be years old. Their wooden coffins found in very good condition, with much of the original painting on the exterior still very clearly visible. Work on these is of course still ongoing, and in October Greg Lewis, New Zealand's ambassador to Egypt, shared a video of one of them being opened for the first time. This was part of an unveiling of that earlier find, which is actually much larger than that was originally reported as thirteen coffins. As of October, fifty nine coffins had been discovered, which were believed to belong to priests and senior officials. By November, that number of discovered coffins had risen to a hundred, and they had also found funerary masks and forty gilded statues. Officials had also started x raying the mummies to try to visualize their structures and figure out how they had been preserved. Some of the openings of these coffins and the x raying processes that have gone along along the way, have been carried out publicly to try to help offset the pandemics impact on the Egyptian tourism industry. In Unearthed in March, we talked about some glassy matter that was found at the site of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year seventy nine, and that glassy matter was believed to be part of a person's brain. Further research into this find has actually uncovered the fact that there are intact neurons preserved in that glassy material. According to a paper published in October, the rapid cooling of the volcanic material allowed those neurons to be preserved in this way. So cool. Yeah. When I was looking at this, I was like, is this the same brain? Yes. We will move on to the books and letters after we take a quick sponsor break. Next up we have the category of books and letters, and first up. In November of the correspondence between authors J. M. Berry and Robert Louis Stevenson was published in a book titled A Friendship Letters Robert Louis Stevenson and J. M. Barry. Most of Stevenson's letters in this correspondence had already been published, so they were not really new, but Barry's side of the conversation had not been published. A lot of the chatter about this described Barry's letters as having been lost, but as is so often the case in these episodes, that is not really the right way to describe this situation. The letters were in the Boneke Library at Yale University, and they were cataloged there. But somehow people didn't make the connection between that catalog box of letters and Berry's unpublished correspondents. Dr Michael Shaw, who realized what they were after being unable to buy a copy, was quoted by The Guardian is saying when I first saw them, I didn't realize that these were lost letters. I just assumed they had been published and I didn't know about them. Yeah, the letters were there the whole time. Folks just didn't quite realize that they were not ones that were widely publicly available. Of course they were published, I just never stumbled across them. So these letters chronicle not only the two writers intense affection and even love for each other, but also Stevenson's influence on Barry's work, with phrases and images making their way into various stories and his novel Peter Pan next up. In December, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation released a statement that the three hundred forty character cipher attributed to the Zodiac Killer, which was sent to the San Francisco Chronicle in November of nineteen sixty nine, has been cracked. This cipher is one of four attributed to the killer, and it was the first one to be submitted to the FBI. Before this point, only one of the other cipher's had been solved. Five murders from the late nineteen sixties are attributed to the Zodiac Killer, whose identity is still not known. So this solution to the cipher was the work of three private citizens. Software developer David ore in Check, applied mathematicians Sam Blake, and warehouse operator and computer programmer Yarl von Ikey, who used a code breaking program to test more than six fifty thousand possible solutions. They're decoding found some of the same themes as the killers other communications, including this idea that these murders were about collecting slaves to take to the afterlife. The decoded cipher also misspelled the word paradise, and it had some rather convoluted phrasing. I feel like this would have been way bigger news if there were less going on in the world. You would think, right, Yeah, it was one of those things that I saw a brief headline of same, saw nothing further about. Uh, forgot totally about it. Then heard somebody mention it on a podcast while I was out on break and I emailed myself like Zodiac Killer cipher, so I would remember to put it in here. In September, to move on to another subject, thieves stole a scroll of poetry that had been written by Mao Zandong. They stole this from the Hong Kong apartment of art collector Fush and Shao. This was part of a really enormous heist, with an estimated value in the Hong Kong Press as being worth four billion Hong Kong dollars. The US Press estimated the value of the stolen items as five hundred million U S dollars. At the time, Fush and Shaw was away from Hong Kong because of the pandemic. The scroll was sold for just five hundred dollars in Hong Kong currency, with the buyer believing that it was a forgery. It was recovered in October, by which point it had been cut in half. It originally measured about nine feet that's about two point eight meters long, and the buyer, who was arrested for handling stolen property, reportedly found it too long to display the way they wanted. And in our last find Underbooks and Letters, research at the European Synchrotron radiation facility has looked at the composition of inks that were used to write on Egyptian papyrus. These papyride date back to the years one hundred to two hundred, and most of the writing on them is in black, but red ink is used for things like the heading or words that require some kind of special emphasis. They discovered that the inks contained lead, but not as a pigment. Instead, lead seems to have acted as a drying agent, encircling particles of ochre and adhering them to the papyrus. This pre day to similar technique used to dry oil paints during the Renaissance in Europe by hundreds of years. Moving on, in this installment of unearthed, we once again have a few finds related to Vikings. The first is that DNA testing has solved some mysteries about a Viking era burial site known as the Gerdrip Grave near russ Killed, Denmark. This burial site was discovered about forty years ago and it was not clear whose remains they were or why they were buried together. The remains seems to belong to a man and a woman, and for a time it was believed that the man was enslaved and had been killed as a sacrifice, because he seems to have been hanged and bound. The woman's remains had been covered in large stones. Based on that DNA analysis their mother and son, and while a lot about their deaths and their burials is still unclear, one hypothesis is that they are figures described in the Icelandic Sagas the sorceress Katla and her son Odd. In the Sagas, Kotla was stoned to death and Odd was hanged. To be clear, the female remains in this grave were covered in heavy stones, but the remains themselves do not show evidence of being stoned or pressed to death. Yet. The Sagas are sort of like epic accounts of the settlement of Iceland, which are both um. They're both literary and historical, so there are elements of them that are rooted in factual accuracy and then parts of them that are more mythologized. And this burial site also includes a weapon, which was a lance, and this was one of the first examples of a weapon being included in a grave that was identified as belonging to a set of female remains. But based on this idea that the bodies may belong to Catala and odd There's another idea that has arisen, which is that maybe is it a it is a sorceress's staff. Next up, the remains of a twelve year old temple known as a God House have been found in Norway. This was a temple that would have been dedicated to old Norse gods, and while other examples had previously been unearthed in Sweden and Denmark, this is the first such find in Norway. This find includes the temples foundations, and it seems to have been a later addition to a settlement that included at least two long houses that were first built between two thousand and years ago. Other finds that the site that were related to the Godhouse include remains of animal sacrifices and cooking pits that would have been used for religious feasts. Ground penetrating radar studies and yellowstad in southeastern Norway have discovered that there is a lot of other stuff surrounding a Viking burial ship. There. Viking burial ships have, if you listen, come up on on Earth before this one was discovered. In In addition to the ship, there are a buried feast hall and a cult temple, along with at least thirteen burial mounds. These are close to Yell Mound, which is a burial mound that had already been excavated and studied, So it is possible that this whole area was an important ritual and burial site, and that the ship was placed there because of its established use for burial mounds. Yeah. I tried to figure out whether we had ACKed about this specific ship before. I'm not actually sure. I'm not either. I can't remember if it came up in our Yelling Stones episode. Yeah. Yeah, we've definitely talked about burial ships before, but whether whether this specific one has come up is not as clear. Over the summer, there was also a team of archaeologists who were really racing to excavate this ship because it was being destroyed by a fungus. And in our last bit of Viking news, a team in central Norway has excavated the grave of a woman dating back to the Viking era. This find was unexpected because there aren't any other graves nearby. Some of the items buried with the woman include a three lobed brooch and hundreds of tiny beads so small that the team had to buy mosquito netting to have something fine enough to sift them out from the soil. Although the beads were mostly found around the body's right shoulder, it isn't clear if they were part of a necklace or a piece of clothing or something else entirely. Just like the idea of like needing to go get some mosquito netting to get these tiny, tiny, tiny beads, We're going to shift gears now and talk about some mummies. According to research that was reported in the journal Analytical Chemistry, researchers have found a new, non destructive technique that uses electron paramagnetic resonance to analyze bitumen in ancient Egyptian mummies. Before this point, most methods that were used to study bet uman required researchers to collect a small sample of it and then that sample was destroyed over the course of the tests. This process doesn't destroy anything, and rather than examining the bitumen itself as a whole, this technique analyzes some of its components, which are byproducts of the decomposition of plant matter. But tuman is the compound that gives mummies their dark color, and it can be found in natural deposits, or it can be made from subs is like bees, wax, fat, and resin, and this analysis can help determine exactly where the bitumen came from and how old it is because of the specific byproducts used in the tests, It can also confirm whether they came from a marine source like the Dead Sea or a land source like a tar pit. It can also help researchers confirm whether a mummy has been restored at some point during its history. In other news, during the Roman Era in Egypt, which spanned from about the first century b c e To the third century CE, that was common for members of the upper class to have a mummy portrait. That was the portrait of the person on a wooden board that would be attached to their mummy. Many of these have been found in the Phyume basin and are described as the Phyume Mommy portraits. This find isn't a mummy portrait, though, it's an earring found in the Roman city of Daletem in southeast Bulgaria. Archaeologists found the earring while excavating the remains of the city's public baths, wedged between two tiles, and the earring is identical or at least extremely similar to one depicted on Phayu mummy portraits of at least two women. I loved this. I loved the lost earring and the fact that it's in these two different portraits and just sort of the wondering like, is this the exact same earring? Is it just a really similar earring? Was this just a really popular earring line that everyone was it the hot earring of the season and other Fiume portrait News Researchers at the University of Utah have analyzed a tiny, tiny, tiny speck of pigments on the portrait known as Portrait of a Bearded Man. In this portrait, the pigment was used for the clay vey or the purple stripes that indicated a person's high status. This particle, I said tiny so many times. It's because it was only fifty krons in diameter, and it was sent to the team at the College of Minds and Earth Sciences at the University of Utah between two glass slides. In transit, this particle shifted by about a millimeter, so it took a while for them to actually find it in the slides to analyze it because it was so small shifted this tiny amount. After analysis using energy dispersive X ray fluorescence analysis, electron microscopy diffraction, and ADAM probe tomography, they concluded that the pigment was made with dye mixed with clay or silica, known as a lake pigment. They also found evidence of beeswax binder, and there's still some uncertainty about how the dye was made. Although they did conclude that the purple pigment had been synthesized in a lead container and it was not made from the purple dye that came from your X snails, it's not clear whether cro meum in the sample was intentionally included there or if it was a byproduct of some other ingredients. Now we're just going to take a quick break before we moved on to some other unearth things. Next up, we have a few finds that I have loosely grouped together as prehistory. They are not all from the exact same time period, but they're from before the start of the written record in the areas where they were found. First up, a local resident named Roman Novac was out picking mushrooms in northern Morabia when he stumbled upon a Bronze age sword along with an x Both of these have been dated to about and even though the region where they were found was really sparsely populated at that time, they do appear to be local rather than something that was ought in by, say, an army that was just passing through the area. In other news, according to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in October, the first human arrival in the Bahamas may have led to the extinction of several species of birds through the newly arrived humans hunting them directly because of habitat loss related to that human arrival, or, in the case of a giant barn owl and a giant eagle, because their prey species disappeared or became harder to find. These conclusions came from a ten year study of more than seven thousand fossils. In many cases, there was about a hundred year overlap between the arrival of the humans and the disappearance of the birds, disappearances not really explained by any other changes to the environment that the researchers could find. In some cases, the birds did survive, but only on some of the islands. For example, the Abaco parrot lives only on two islands in the Bahama Us, and there are islands in between them that also would have supported similar habitats. The team were able to find fossils of those parrots on islands where that species currently does not live and other news. According to research published in the Journal of Human Evolution, Homo sapiens did not, as was previously believed, invent the first barbed bone point that inventor was probably really Homo orectus about eight hundred thousand years ago. This came from a study of a set of fifty two different animal bones from East Africa's al du Gorge. One of these was carved with three barbs and a curved tip, and it doesn't seem to have been made to attached to any kind of a handle or a shaft, so it's unclear how this point would have been used Before this. The oldest known barbed bone points were much younger, only about ninety thousand years ago. These points were attached to shafts and probably used to fish or to hunt other prey. It is one of those parts that I wrote before going out a break, and when I came back to my desk, I was like is this right. Are these numbers are right? That I put an extra zero somewhere, because that's a huge difference. Note that is it's correct. Uh, we have recapped this next thing we're going to talk about a little bit before, but it's been a while, so to touch on it again. Anytime archaeologists are trying to draw conclusions about human remains based on the things that were buried with them, there are layers of assumptions at work, like how sex and gender worked in that particular society and why that society chose to bury specific items with specific people. As one example, it's pretty easy to conclude that a person who was buried with a sword was a warrior, but it's also possible that a sword had a ceremonial or a symbolic purpose that didn't have anything to do with combat. So, no matter how careful and thoughtful we are when we try to think about these things, our own experiences and our own societies and our own perspectives influence how we interpret these kinds of fines. Sometimes there is other information that we can use to back up these assumptions and conclusions, for example, written records or artwork, or in the case of that sword where patterns in the person's remains that suggest that they saw a lot of combat while they were alive, but sometimes it's just a lot more nebulous. All of that said, research published in the journal Science Advances suggests that gender roles and hunter gatherer societies and the America's might not have been strictly delineated along the lines of men hunted and women gathered, which I know is a thing that I learned and many other people learned in school. The three start started with the discovery of what appeared to be the burial site of a female hunter, which dated back about nine thousand years. This find was unearthed in Peru, and researchers started trying to figure out whether they was a relatively unique situation or whether there were other similar burial sites. They looked at four hundred twenty nine skeletons from one hundred seven late Pleistocene in early Holocene burial sites across the America's Twenty seven of those one d seven skeletons were buried with tools that would have been used to hunt big game. Of those, eleven were female and sixteen were male. The eleven female skeletons came from ten different burial sites, and the sixteen males came from fifteen sites, so this pattern wasn't confined to one particular time in place. The sex of the skeletons was determined by both the morphology of the bones and analysis of dental enamel proteins. So this is adding to an increasing body of work that suggests that the whole men hunted, women gathered binary doesn't exactly hold up, and a lot of that binary idea really came from the assumptions of eighteenth and nineteenth century archaeologists and anthropole lologists who didn't have very robust methods of figuring out the sex of skeletons, but could draw conclusions about what sex the skeletons were based on what was buried with them. I love when science evolves me too. Uh. There's a whole podcast about this whole idea UM from the podcast seen on radio. They did a series. One of their seasons was called Men, and it was basically about where patriarchy came from UM and this idea that it's really reductive to imagine that men hunted and when women gathered, like they talk about that being way more reductive than could really have worked in Prehistoric Society's A team from the National Museum of Natural History in France, the University of the Bosque Country in Spain, and other institutions has published a study in the journal Scientific Reports that concludes that Neanderthal's intentionally buried they're dead. That's a conclusion that has been suggested in earlier work, but it wasn't considered a conclusive conclusion. So this research involved forty seven bones, all belonging to the same Neanderthal child who was approximately two years old when they died and who lived about forty one thousand years ago, and there are several pieces of evidence at this burial site that added up to the conclusion that this child had been intentionally buried very soon after their death. The stratification layers in the soil in the area are inclined to the northeast, but the child's remains were oriented to the west, so it's not a matter of like the child's body being covered in sediment gradually with the other material in the area. The bones themselves were also all together still in about the same position that they would have been at the time of burial, while animal bones in the same area from the same time are just a lot more scattered. They confirmed that the bones were Neanderthal using mitochondrial DNA analysis, and they dated them using carbon fourteen dating. While they're published findings described this as conclusive proof that Neanderthals buried they're dead. The team does also note that quote further discoveries will be necessary to understand the chronology and geographical extension of Neanderthal burial practices. And that's where we are going to leave things for part one of our Unearthed. We have lots more stuff to talk about in our next episode. Yay, do you want to talk about listener mail? I do. I also want to say we're recording this on January five. We have many days of not looking at email, So if you send us an email during like the last three weeks of December. Uh, there's just a lot of email to go through. Um So we're not trying to ignore anyone, there's just there's just a lot of it to catch up on having come back from the holidays. Um. So this one is from Laura and it is about our episode on Jim Thorpe, and Laura says, Holly and Tracy, I'm a little behind on all my podcasts at the moment, but I was elated to see a three part series on jim Thorpe. When I went looking through my yet to be downloaded list, I wrote to you guys years ago were requesting one on him right after you covered the Fort Show Indians School. Immediately downloaded them this morning and listened to while I worked, which is something I don't often do. Laura then goes on to talk about growing up pretty near jim Thorpe and says, quote, I managed one of the major tourist operations in town from two thousand seven to fourteen. Growing up in the eighties and nineties, the town of jim Thorpe was a bit of a mess. Buildings were being neglected, tourism was minimal, and yes, even the jim Thorpe Memorial, which is unfortunately a bit of a trek outside the historic tourist part of town, was greatly neglected. At the time I graduated college, moved back to the area, and started working in town. However, most of these neglected buildings were fixed up and filled with unique little galleries, restaurants, and gift shops. The sidewalks were fixed and the building facades were well on their way to being restored to their late nineteenth century glory. The Jim Thorpe tomb and memorial were restored and added on too as well, partly due to projects by students at jim Thorpe School District known as the Olympians. Having grown up in the area, everyone knew the story of Jim Thorpe and why he was buried in a town he never stepped foot in, or at least most knew the story through my interactions with tourists though, who were coming to town for a variety of reasons. I was shocked to have to continuously answer questions like who was Jim Thorpe and why does your town have a man's name, not that so many people not even recognized the name of the greatest athlete in the world. Everyone in the area closely followed all the legal battles of the past decade, with the people of the town torn between the two sides. Some felt the town deserve to keep his body, others felt he should be sent back to his family. Back when the area buried Jim Thorpe and changed its name, they were expecting at least a hospital in the National Football Hall of Fame to come out of the deal. They also helped that having the athlete would bring back tourism to an area that had been at one point one of the most popular tourists and nations of the United States, second only to Niagara Falls. But none of these things happened. Then, Lara goes on to give some topic suggestions for the podcast uh and says, anyway, I love listening to you guys. As a student, I hated history class, but I've always loved learning about local histories of locations I visited, and I'm a sucker for any museum. I've learned so much from your podcast over the past several years, and I'm looking forward to several more years to come. Laura. Thank you, Laura. Um that that description of sort of how the the tourism industry of jim Thorpe evolved over the years really matches up to what I had read previously from other folks that like did not live in the area, but knew about it and had visited it. Um having seen pictures of the town, like it looks like a super cute, little um kind of touristy place to visit when the weather is good and traveling is safe. UM. So Thank you so much Laura for sending that email. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast or history podcast at iHeart radio dot com and we are all over social media at miss in History. That is where you will find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show and the iHeart radio app and Apple Podcasts and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.