Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson
Speaker 2: and I'm Holly Frye. This is time for the latest
Speaker 2: installment of Unearthed. I feel like I said those words
Speaker 2: in a weird order, but it's okay. We're going to
Speaker 2: power through. If you are brand new to the show,
Speaker 2: Unearthed is when we talk about things that have been
Speaker 2: literally or figuratively unearthed over the last few months. So
Speaker 2: that's what we're going to talk about all week long,
Speaker 2: and today we are going to talk about medical things,
Speaker 2: books and letters, some oldest things, and some smells. I
Speaker 2: did not realize we were going to have a smells category,
Speaker 2: and we actually wound up with fewer smells and expected,
Speaker 2: which is that's a story for Friday. We will start,
Speaker 2: as we usually do with updates to past episodes. We
Speaker 2: don't actually have that many this time, comparatively fewer updates
Speaker 2: than the last several episodes of Unearthed. Also, I don't
Speaker 2: have any new updates regarding things like the President's House site,
Speaker 2: oh or the other ongoing issues here in the US
Speaker 2: with like the field of history and education and those
Speaker 2: kinds of things that we've been talking about a lot
Speaker 2: on or Unearthed over the last year. A lot of
Speaker 2: our updates, though, are frequent flyers on Unearthed.
Speaker 1: And we are kicking off those updates with several finds
Speaker 1: from Pompeii. Researchers have used reflectance transformation imaging to identify
Speaker 1: seventy nine previously undetected inscriptions on a corridor that connected
Speaker 1: Pompey's theaters to the city Central Street via Stabyana. Reflectance
Speaker 1: transformation imaging captures images under multiple lighting angles, making it
Speaker 1: possible to see very faint scratches that aren't detectable to
Speaker 1: the unaided eye. This corridor has been studied before. More
Speaker 1: than two hundred inscriptions had already been found there, including
Speaker 1: various love notes and pleas to the goddess Venus for
Speaker 1: her favor in matters of the heart. One of the
Speaker 1: newly discovered inscriptions is on that theme. It starts off
Speaker 1: with the words Erato loves uh and then I don't
Speaker 1: know how that person was going to finish that inscription.
Speaker 1: Who does Erado love?
Speaker 2: We don't great question? Or what there's it could be
Speaker 2: kidney pies, we don't know. I was thinking pickles for
Speaker 2: some reason. There's also a sketch of two gladiators fighting.
Speaker 2: These seventy nine newly discovered inscriptions add to those more
Speaker 2: than two hundred that have already been found. This is
Speaker 2: growing body of knowledge. Other researchers have used isotope analysis
Speaker 2: to examine carbonate deposits in parts of Pompey's water infrastructure,
Speaker 2: like they're aqueducts, well shafts, and water towers, as well
Speaker 2: as the pools of public baths. They found that the
Speaker 2: groundwater in the wells was highly mineralized thanks to the
Speaker 2: volcanic deposits that they were drilled through.
Speaker 1: That wouldn't have been very good as drinking water and
Speaker 1: was mainly used in the baths. But this same research
Speaker 1: concluded that the bathing water wasn't renewed very often, so
Speaker 1: it also would not have been very hygienic.
Speaker 2: Yeah. They made comparisons to other Roman Empire cities as
Speaker 2: having much cleaner baths. Made it sound like POMPEII was
Speaker 2: just a little behind the times and how clean to
Speaker 2: keep that water just.
Speaker 1: A new sense to the word community.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Lastly, in November of last year, archaeologists from
Speaker 2: Herculaneum Archaeological Parks started work at another site that was
Speaker 2: also destroyed in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. That's Torre
Speaker 2: del Greco on the coast northwest of Pompeii. In February,
Speaker 2: they announced that they had excavated a small but very
Speaker 2: highly decorated room there. The walls of this room have
Speaker 2: figurative elements and bars of cinnabar red paint against a
Speaker 2: dark background, and these figurative elements include herons and a
Speaker 2: golden candelabra. The room also contained three highly decorated cyste
Speaker 2: which are essentially boxes, and architectural elements that were of
Speaker 2: very good quality. There is speculation that this room was
Speaker 2: being used for storage for things that were part of
Speaker 2: an ongoing construction project when the volcano erupted. Having recently
Speaker 2: helped a friend who bought a new house paint the
Speaker 2: interior of a bedroom closet, it cracks me up that
Speaker 2: this probably a closet storage space had very highly decorated walls.
Speaker 1: We could talk about this on behind the scenes.
Speaker 2: There could be so many behind the scenes conversations this week.
Speaker 2: Moving on. Stonehenge got its own entire episode of the
Speaker 2: show back in twenty fourteen, when news broke about a
Speaker 2: lot of new findings there and we realized we did
Speaker 2: not have an existing Stonehenge episode to update. One of
Speaker 2: the things we talked about in that episode and probably
Speaker 2: other installments of On Earth since then, was debate about
Speaker 2: exactly how the somewhat smaller stones known as bluestones got
Speaker 2: to the Stonehenge site. Some of those stones are believed
Speaker 2: to have been moved from hundreds of miles away, and
Speaker 2: one hypothesis has been that the stones might have been
Speaker 2: carried closer to the Stonehenge site by glaciers. This research
Speaker 2: examined microscopic mineral grains found in rivers near Salisbury Plain
Speaker 2: in southern England, that's where Stonehenge is located. They focused
Speaker 2: on more than five hundred zircon crystal to see if
Speaker 2: any of them could have been associated with the presence
Speaker 2: of glaciers. They concluded that they did not, meaning that
Speaker 2: the bluestones were moved to Salisbury Plane through intentional human effort.
Speaker 2: We also have an update on the natural Mummy, popularly
Speaker 2: known as Utsey the Iceman, who lived sometime between thirty
Speaker 2: three fifty and thirty one oh five BCE. Previous hosts
Speaker 2: of the show did an episode on Utsy back in
Speaker 2: twenty twelve, and it seems like he has been on
Speaker 2: almost every episode of Unearthed. According to a pre print
Speaker 2: paper that was published at the end of last year,
Speaker 2: Utsey was probably infected with a cancer causing strain of
Speaker 2: the human paploma virus known as HPV sixteen. According to
Speaker 2: this research, the ustashim Man probably was infected with this
Speaker 2: as well. The ustashim Man is the name used for
Speaker 2: a forty five thousand year old fossil remains that it's
Speaker 2: not It's not like a whole mummified body like with Utsi.
Speaker 2: It's a smaller set of remains that was found in Siberia.
Speaker 2: This means that HPV has existed essentially for all of
Speaker 2: human history. One hypothesis for how HPV made its way
Speaker 2: into human beings was that it first infected Neanderthals and
Speaker 2: was passed to humans through interbreeding. The ostashim Man has
Speaker 2: Neanderthal DNA in his lineage. That doesn't conclusively confirm that hypothesis,
Speaker 2: but it means that it is at least possible. Since
Speaker 2: this is a preprint paper, as Tracy mentioned, it has
Speaker 2: not yet been.
Speaker 1: Through peer review.
Speaker 2: Moving on, in our last installment of Unearthed, we talked
Speaker 2: about a gold Tudor era pendant that was in the
Speaker 2: shape of a heart that had come up on a
Speaker 2: previous episode of On Earth's as well. At that point,
Speaker 2: this Tutor heart was on display at the British Museum
Speaker 2: and the museum was trying to raise three point five
Speaker 2: million pounds or about four point seven million dollars to
Speaker 2: purchase it. That fundraising effort was successful and it was
Speaker 2: announced in February that this pendant will be staying in
Speaker 2: the museum. And lastly, in March, newspapers started covering a
Speaker 2: report from the University of East Anglia about research into
Speaker 2: King Harold's journey to the Battle of Hastings that's long
Speaker 2: been described as a two hundred mile march, but medieval
Speaker 2: history professor Tom License argues that it's a misunderstanding of
Speaker 2: the Anglo Saxon Chronicle. The Anglo Saxon Chronicle says that
Speaker 2: Harold's ships quote came home, which has been interpreted as
Speaker 2: Harold having dismissed them back to all of their original
Speaker 2: home ports, but according to License, the word home meant
Speaker 2: the fleet's home base in London and Harold continued to
Speaker 2: use the fleet from there. So this press release just
Speaker 2: came out on March twentieth, just a couple of weeks
Speaker 2: before we are recording this, and he was scut to
Speaker 2: present on this research at a conference four days after that.
Speaker 2: He also has a book on Harold that is coming
Speaker 2: out in August, so that's not really available for people
Speaker 2: to read yet. So at this point it's really early
Speaker 2: for historians to thoroughly respond to these arguments. But there's
Speaker 2: already been some controversy with other historians noting that this
Speaker 2: entire interpretation, at least in terms of what's publicly available
Speaker 2: when we were working on this installment of on Earthed,
Speaker 2: it all basically hinges on the interpretation of one word.
Speaker 1: Next, we're going to move on to some medical things.
Speaker 1: Research published in the Journal of Archaeological Science has examined
Speaker 1: a mass grave associated with the Plague of Justinian that
Speaker 1: started in the sixth century. The burial site was in
Speaker 1: the hippodrome of the city of Jiaj in what's now Jordan.
Speaker 2: According to DNA research conducted on the remains that were
Speaker 2: buried there, this burial site did represent the dead from
Speaker 2: a single event. It was not people who died in
Speaker 2: a community over a long period of time. The team
Speaker 2: studied DNA from the teeth of these plague victims and
Speaker 2: found that they were demographically very diverse, suggesting that this
Speaker 2: disease struck the whole population. It did not really differentiate
Speaker 2: with people's social status, or age or sex. This is
Speaker 2: the first known Mediterranean mass grave associated with the plague
Speaker 2: of Justinian.
Speaker 1: Research published in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports has
Speaker 1: examined the contents of a nineteen hundred year old glass
Speaker 1: vial called an unguitarium, which was found in a tomb
Speaker 1: in western Turkia. They identified fecal biomarkers as well as
Speaker 1: an organic compound known as carvacrol, which is found in
Speaker 1: essential oils from herbs. The conclusion this was feces mixed
Speaker 1: with time, probably to disguise the smell. Medical preparations made
Speaker 1: from feces are described by the Roman physician in Galen
Speaker 1: and in the work of Pliny the Elder. This is
Speaker 1: the first direct physical evidence for these kinds of remedies
Speaker 1: being used in the Greco Roman era and in our
Speaker 1: last medical find.
Speaker 2: Neanderthals may have used birch bark tar for medicinal purposes,
Speaker 2: and that tar might have been effective. We do know
Speaker 2: that Neanderthals made birch tar. There's archaeological evidence of this
Speaker 2: going back almost two hundred thousand years, and there are
Speaker 2: also indigenous methods of making birch tar that go back
Speaker 2: thousands of years and have survived until today, so not
Speaker 2: associated with the Neanderthals, but ancient uses of birch tar.
Speaker 2: Researchers used three different techniques to produce tar from two
Speaker 2: species of birch, downy birch and silver birch. Then they
Speaker 2: tested these batches of tar against two pathogens Staphylococcus arius
Speaker 2: and E. Colime, and the birch tar was effective against
Speaker 2: staff ari but not against decline, and one method seemed
Speaker 2: less effective than the others. Burning downy birch material and
Speaker 2: letting the tar condense onto a fireproof stone didn't produce
Speaker 2: much tar, and what little tar there was was not
Speaker 2: effective against anything. So this of course is not definitive
Speaker 2: proof that Neanderthals were using birch tar medicinally, but there
Speaker 2: is archaeological evidence suggesting that Neanderthals used plants medicinally, so
Speaker 2: we know they used plants for medicine. We know they
Speaker 2: made birch tar. It's at least in the realm of
Speaker 2: possibility that they used birch tar as medicine. We'll take
Speaker 2: a quick sponsor break and then come back for some
Speaker 2: books and letters. We will pick up this installment of
Speaker 2: on Earth with some books and letters. Ostraca are bits
Speaker 2: of potter that were often used sort of like notepaper
Speaker 2: in ancient Egypt. An excavation at Athribis in Lower Egypt
Speaker 2: has unearthed thirteen thousand ostraca, bringing the total number of
Speaker 2: them found out that site to forty three thousand, so
Speaker 2: many pieces of pottery used like post it notes. Basically,
Speaker 2: people lived at this site for more than one thousand years,
Speaker 2: and it was also home to a necropolis and a
Speaker 2: temple complex. So the ostcra that have been found here
Speaker 2: really range in age. They are from as early as
Speaker 2: the third century BCE to as late as the eleventh
Speaker 2: century CE.
Speaker 1: They also represent a number of languages. The oldest fragments
Speaker 1: are tax receipts written in Demotic script, which was used
Speaker 1: for both business and literary purposes. There are also fragments
Speaker 1: with writing in Arabic, Greek, hieratic and coptic as well
Speaker 1: as hieroglyphics. There are also lots of pottery for fragments
Speaker 1: at the site that have nothing written on them. Together,
Speaker 1: this group of fragments are helping scholars understand how life
Speaker 1: and Athrobisk changed over the many centuries that it was occupied.
Speaker 1: Moving on, I don't include a ton of like many
Speaker 1: years overdue, library books, stories and unearthed because after a
Speaker 1: while they start to sound really repetitive. Unless there's something
Speaker 1: really special about the book, it can seem like the
Speaker 1: same exact story over and over. This one, though it
Speaker 1: has another layer. A copy of Harry the Dirty Dog
Speaker 1: that had been checked out by a little boy was
Speaker 1: due back at the Chantilly Regional Library in Virginia in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty nine. It did not get turned back in,
Speaker 1: and now, as an adult, this man found the book
Speaker 1: on a shelf while he was looking for something to
Speaker 1: read to his own son while visiting his parents. That
Speaker 1: shelf that he found the book on was not in Virginia,
Speaker 1: though it wasn't even the United States. It was in Greece.
Speaker 1: His parents were diplomats, and after leaving the Washington, DC area,
Speaker 1: they went back to Greece. And the des Syria, Japan,
Speaker 1: and the Netherlands before going back to Greece once again,
Speaker 1: and that book apparently went with them. Harry the Dirty
Speaker 1: Dog has now been turned back into the library and
Speaker 1: it looks like it is in very good condition, especially
Speaker 1: considering that it went through multiple international moves. I feel
Speaker 1: like this book is better traveled than many people I know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they took very good care of it. Also, I
Speaker 2: feel like books that have been sitting quietly on my
Speaker 2: shelves have had more awar than this book seems to.
Speaker 1: Next.
Speaker 2: Back in the nineteen thirties, archaeologists found remnants of Roman
Speaker 2: era writing tablets at a site in what's now tongarin Burgloon, Belgium.
Speaker 2: Additional tablets were discovered in twenty thirteen. It brought the
Speaker 2: total number of tablets to eighty five. When these tablets
Speaker 2: were originally used back in the Roman Era, they had
Speaker 2: a thin coating of wax on them and then people
Speaker 2: used a sharp stylus to write on the wax. They
Speaker 2: were reusable. People could remove that wax layer and put
Speaker 2: down a new layer to write something else. When these
Speaker 2: were unearthed, what the wax was gone and it did
Speaker 2: not look like there was any kind of legible writing
Speaker 2: left on the wood.
Speaker 1: These tablets were rediscovered in a museum collection in twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: and deciphering them was an extremely challenging process. At this point,
Speaker 1: the wood is completely dried out, so it could be
Speaker 1: hard to distinguish intentionally made marks from just natural variations
Speaker 1: in the wood. The wax layer that was used on
Speaker 1: these tablets was so thin, so it was easy for
Speaker 1: a stylist to go through it and mark the wood underneath.
Speaker 1: Some of the tablets contained legal documents, and this seemed
Speaker 1: to be done intentionally to make the text more permanent.
Speaker 1: But in more informal documents that wasn't necessarily true, so
Speaker 1: the marks made through the wax just weren't always consistent,
Speaker 1: and since the tablets were reusable, there were overlapping markings
Speaker 1: from different lines of text. Many of the tablets had
Speaker 1: been broken in half and thrown into a well, apparently
Speaker 1: an intentional attempt to make them eligible. I don't know
Speaker 1: why I love that detail. This is like tearing up
Speaker 1: a paper, but you'd have to break it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, those were like the legal contracts that weren't valid anymore,
Speaker 2: that would have been put through a shredder but nope,
Speaker 2: they were broken in half and thrown down a well.
Speaker 2: Looking at these became kind of an early pandemic era
Speaker 2: project for people. They spent a lot of time looking
Speaker 2: at all these writing tablets through magnifying glasses and microscopes
Speaker 2: lit from multiple directions. The team used high resolution photographs
Speaker 2: and other imaging technologies well, and they were able to
Speaker 2: find legible text on about half of these tablets. As
Speaker 2: Holly just said, a lot of the ones that had
Speaker 2: been intentionally broken and thrown into the well, those had
Speaker 2: contained things like legal contracts other official documents. But other
Speaker 2: tablets which were found in a heap more like in
Speaker 2: a midden place that people just threw their refuse those
Speaker 2: included things like student writing exercises and a draft of
Speaker 2: an inscription for a statue of Emperor Carcela.
Speaker 1: In the words of the abstract of a book that
Speaker 1: was published detailing all of this quote. The tablets not
Speaker 1: only provide concrete information about religious, judicial, and administrative practices,
Speaker 1: but they also enhance our understanding of the complex processes
Speaker 1: of Romanization and Latinization in the northwestern civitates and municipia
Speaker 1: of the Roman Empire.
Speaker 2: Moving on, British infant treatman. Shadrack Byfield was the author
Speaker 2: of a narrative of a Light Company soldier's service and
Speaker 2: that was published in England in eighteen forty and it
Speaker 2: recounted his experiences fighting in the War of eighteen twelve,
Speaker 2: including the amputation of his forearm after being hit by
Speaker 2: a musket ball. This book, that's it's long been known,
Speaker 2: not a surprise. It has been a source for historians
Speaker 2: writing about the British military, or the War of eighteen twelve,
Speaker 2: or the Great Lakes region where he fought. But a
Speaker 2: Cambridge University historian has unearthed another book by Byfield in
Speaker 2: the Western Reserve Historical Society's library in Cleveland, Ohio. This
Speaker 2: one was called History and Conversion of a British Soldier
Speaker 2: and it was published in eighteen fifty one. The copy
Speaker 2: in the Historical Society library is the only one known
Speaker 2: to have survived until today. My understanding is like this
Speaker 2: was in the library catalog, Like they knew the book
Speaker 2: was in the library, but nobody had made the connection
Speaker 2: to the fact that this was the same person and
Speaker 2: that he had written another book. The whole book has
Speaker 2: been transcribed and published as an open access document at
Speaker 2: the University of Cambridge Libraries and Archives website, and it's
Speaker 2: very different from his earlier memoir. It's focused more on
Speaker 2: information about his life that we did not know before,
Speaker 2: including what his life was like after he returned to England.
Speaker 2: Researchers working with paleolithic objects dating back to between thirty
Speaker 2: four thousand and forty five thousand years ago have concluded
Speaker 2: that they contain a precursor to written language. These objects
Speaker 2: were mostly found in caves in what is now Germany,
Speaker 2: and they're covered in repeating sequences of notches, dots, and crosses.
Speaker 2: The objects are made of materials like mammoth tusk, and
Speaker 2: they date back tens of thousands of years before the
Speaker 2: earliest known writing systems of qunea form and hieroglyphics. They
Speaker 2: also predate the precursors to either of those systems, so
Speaker 2: researchers weren't trying to decode or decipher these markings. They
Speaker 2: were measuring the signs and looking for patterns in them,
Speaker 2: and after analyzing more than three thousand signs on two
Speaker 2: hundred and sixty objects, they concluded that the patterns of
Speaker 2: markings had a similar level of information density to the
Speaker 2: earliest proto Cuneiform tablets found in Mesopotamia. It's also clear
Speaker 2: that these markings were not meant to represent the sounds
Speaker 2: of a spoken language, since the repetitions involved do not
Speaker 2: follow the same patterns that known languages do. The suggests
Speaker 2: that the precursors to written languages may have been developing
Speaker 2: a lot earlier than was previously thought.
Speaker 1: Alterations made to a thirty three hundred year old papyrus
Speaker 1: are being described as having fixed a mistake with white out.
Speaker 1: The scroll is a copy of the Book of the
Speaker 1: Dead that was made for a scribe named Ramos. It
Speaker 1: was being prepared for a museum exhibit when curators realized
Speaker 1: that the body of a jackal headed god had been
Speaker 1: made to look thinner by adding a line of white
Speaker 1: paint to the sides of its body and parts of
Speaker 1: its legs. Researchers used a three D digital microscope to
Speaker 1: figure out what kinds of pigments were used in this
Speaker 1: white paint, and found that it had a different makeup
Speaker 1: from the white paint used in other parts of the papyrus.
Speaker 1: It also contained some flex of yellow paint, which would
Speaker 1: have helped it blend into the color of the papyrus
Speaker 1: at the time it was originally painted. It does not
Speaker 1: look that blended today little photo retouching. Yeah, maybe this
Speaker 1: jackal headed god was very vain.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the way the pigments and the papyrus have each aged,
Speaker 2: it does not really look blended today, but it would
Speaker 2: have been a much closer match at the time. Moving on,
Speaker 2: a researcher from the French National Center for Scientific Research
Speaker 2: or CNRS has found a page from the Archimedes Palimpsest
Speaker 2: that was believed to have been lost. The Palimpsest is
Speaker 2: a tenth century Greek manuscript containing multiple treatises by Archimedes,
Speaker 2: who lived in the third century BCE, so some of
Speaker 2: the texts that are included in this palimpsyst are very rare.
Speaker 2: In the thirteenth century, part of the manuscript was erased
Speaker 2: so the parchment that it was written on could be reused.
Speaker 2: That was a very common practice. The manuscript also changed
Speaker 2: hands several times after its leaves were photographed in nineteen
Speaker 2: oh six, and at some point three of the leaves
Speaker 2: that were documented in those photographs disappeared.
Speaker 1: The rediscovered page is one of those missing leaves. It
Speaker 1: contains part of Archimedes' Treatise on the Sphere and the Cylinder.
Speaker 1: One side is partly led, even with prayers having been
Speaker 1: written over it. The other has been obscured by a
Speaker 1: forged illumination of the prophet Daniel that was most likely
Speaker 1: added sometime in the twentieth century when a dealer was
Speaker 1: attempting to increase that page's value. Ongoing research is planned
Speaker 1: for this leave to try to reveal the text underneath
Speaker 1: this illumination. When I started reading about this, I kept
Speaker 1: reading about how there was this illumination of Daniel added
Speaker 1: sometime in the twentieth century, and I was.
Speaker 2: Like, why, why would somebody be doing that? And then
Speaker 2: I found the additional detail trying to increase its value
Speaker 2: to sell it by putting a forgery on there. Yeah,
Speaker 2: our last book find is more book adjacent. In February,
Speaker 2: repair work on the floor of Saint Peter and Paul
Speaker 2: Church in the Netherlands led to the discovery of human remains.
Speaker 2: Work is underway to try to confirm whether these are
Speaker 2: the remains of child di bactic Castle. More account to d'Artagnan.
Speaker 1: Inspiration for the character.
Speaker 2: d'Artagnan in the novel The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Duma.
Speaker 2: We got an email about this from a listener who
Speaker 2: was embarrassed to admit that they did not realize that
Speaker 2: d'Artagnan was a real person. Do not feel bad, neither
Speaker 2: did I.
Speaker 1: Really.
Speaker 2: Athos, Porthos, and Arabis were all fictionalized versions of real
Speaker 2: people too.
Speaker 1: The historical d'Artagnan died when a musket ball struck him
Speaker 1: in the throat during the Franco Dutch War in sixteen
Speaker 1: seventy three. The remains that were discovered in the church
Speaker 1: had a musketball lodged in the chest area. A coin
Speaker 1: from sixteen sixty was found in the grave as well.
Speaker 1: Perhaps we will have an update on this one at
Speaker 1: some point in the future.
Speaker 2: For now, we'll have a quick sponsor break. A lot
Speaker 2: of discoveries in the last few months have all been
Speaker 2: described as the first or oldest known, and so we
Speaker 2: are going to talk about a few of them.
Speaker 1: First.
Speaker 2: The oldest known arrow poison in the world has been
Speaker 2: found on a sixty thousand year old quartz arrowhead from
Speaker 2: a rock shelter in South Africa. This poison is plant based.
Speaker 2: It's from a plant known as boophany dishcha or gift bow.
Speaker 2: This plant still grows in the region. It is also
Speaker 2: nicknamed the bushman's poison bulb. It is a flowering plant
Speaker 2: with narrow leaves that form a fan like shape.
Speaker 1: This research has been a joint project involving scientists from
Speaker 1: both South Africa and Sweden. It's the oldest direct evidence
Speaker 1: of the use of aerow poison and it also provides
Speaker 1: evidence that bows and arrows were being used in Southern
Speaker 1: Africa much longer ago than was previously thought. Similar poisons
Speaker 1: have also been found on two hundred and fifty year
Speaker 1: old arrows that were in Swedish collections. Those had been
Speaker 1: purchased by Swedish travelers to South Africa.
Speaker 2: Next, research in the journal Science Advances has reported on
Speaker 2: the oldest known intentional cremation in Africa. This is a
Speaker 2: pyre that was built about nine thou five hundred years
Speaker 2: ago at the base of Mount Hora and what's now Malawi,
Speaker 2: and it was used to cremate the body of a
Speaker 2: woman before that body had started to decompose. There is
Speaker 2: evidence of burned bodies from much farther back in the
Speaker 2: archaeological record up to forty thousand years ago. But not
Speaker 2: of intentionally built pires. This is also one of only
Speaker 2: a very few known pires that would have been associated
Speaker 2: with a hunter gatherer culture. Cremation practices continue to be
Speaker 2: rare among most hunter gatherer cultures today because creating a
Speaker 2: fewuneral pyre requires a lot of labor, time, and fuel.
Speaker 2: This specific pire probably required about thirty kilograms of deadwood
Speaker 2: and grass. Analysis of the ash sediments and bone fragments
Speaker 2: also suggests that someone tended to the fire, disturbing it
Speaker 2: and adding more fuel over time. Next, researchers working on
Speaker 2: the island of Sulusi and Indonesia believe they have found
Speaker 2: the oldest known rock art in the world. The cave
Speaker 2: is on the island of Muna, which is a satellite
Speaker 2: island on the southern edge of Sulusi, and there's a
Speaker 2: fragmentary hand stencil that is at least sixty seven thousand,
Speaker 2: eight hundred years old. The partial stencil was modified to
Speaker 2: make it look kind of like a claw, and it
Speaker 2: is surrounded by more recent artwork. This island has come
Speaker 2: up on Unearthed before, including in twenty twenty four when
Speaker 2: the same researchers found a painting of three people surrounding
Speaker 2: a pig. That painting was an estimated fifty one thousand
Speaker 2: years old and was believed to be the oldest figurative
Speaker 2: art in the world when it was discovered. This suggests
Speaker 2: that the people who were living on the island tens
Speaker 2: of thousands of years ago had an artistically rich culture.
Speaker 2: Archaeologists have re examined a copper alloy object that was
Speaker 2: found in Egypt in the nineteen twenties, which at the
Speaker 2: time was described as an all new research suggests that
Speaker 2: it is really Egypt's oldest rotary drill, dating back to
Speaker 2: the fourth millennium BCE. This conclusion comes from examining the
Speaker 2: object under magnification, which revealed that it was used with
Speaker 2: a rotary motion rather than to just punch through things.
Speaker 1: That earlier description of the drill also noted that it
Speaker 1: was attached to some leather thong. These researchers have concluded
Speaker 1: that this leather thong was part of a bowstring that
Speaker 1: was used to power the drill. All of this suggests
Speaker 1: that people in Egypt were using these types of drills
Speaker 1: much earlier than was previously thought. Next, elk hyde from
Speaker 1: a cave in Oregon sown with a strip of cord,
Speaker 1: maybe the world's oldest soone material. This find dates back
Speaker 1: about twelve thousand years and other items found in the
Speaker 1: cave include fiber cordage, pieces of hide, and bone needles.
Speaker 1: There were also some components that were used to make
Speaker 1: wooden traps and some projectile points. It's not clear what
Speaker 1: the son el kyde was used for, but it could
Speaker 1: have been clothing or maybe some type of a bag.
Speaker 1: There have been some complexities to the study of these objects.
Speaker 1: Cougar Mountain Cave where they were found, was excavated by
Speaker 1: an amateur archaeologist who self published a book on his
Speaker 1: findings in nineteen fifty eight. When he died about forty
Speaker 1: years ago. The excavated objects were then transferred to a museum.
Speaker 1: The authors of the paper in the journal Science Advances
Speaker 1: describe his provenance reporting as incomplete, so they had to
Speaker 1: sample nearly all of the fiber and wooden items in
Speaker 1: the collection for radiocarbon dating. Research published in the Proceedings
Speaker 1: of the National Academy of Sciences has described the earliest.
Speaker 2: Known hand held wooden tools. One is a piece of
Speaker 2: alder trunk that was probably used as a digging tool
Speaker 2: and The other is a very small piece of wood
Speaker 2: that might have been used to make other tools from stone,
Speaker 2: sort of something that helped shape the stone. These were
Speaker 2: found at a site in Greece that also included butchered
Speaker 2: elephant remains, and there are approximately four hundred thirty thousand
Speaker 2: years old. That is about forty thousand years older than
Speaker 2: the previous oldest handheld wooden tools. A fragment of bone
Speaker 2: discovered in southern England back in the nineteen nineties is
Speaker 2: now believed to be Europe's earliest known elephant bone tool.
Speaker 2: It dates back roughly five hundred thousand years and it's
Speaker 2: roughly triangular in shape. It wasn't until it was examined
Speaker 2: with recent three D scanning technologies that people were able
Speaker 2: to see marks that showed that it had been intentionally shaped.
Speaker 1: It was most likely used as a hammer.
Speaker 2: There are much older elephant bone tools from other parts
Speaker 2: of the world. The oldest known anywhere in the world
Speaker 2: was found in Tanzania and is about one point five
Speaker 2: million years old. This is the oldest in Europe. Part
Speaker 2: of this has to do with the time it took
Speaker 2: for humanity to migrate beyond Africa into these parts of Europe.
Speaker 1: A single find in Anatolia is two oldest things. It's
Speaker 1: Anatolia's oldest indigo dyed textile and the oldest use of
Speaker 1: nal bending or single needle knitting. This piece dates back
Speaker 1: to between nineteen fifteen and seventeen forty five BCE, and
Speaker 1: it is not just the oldest but also the only
Speaker 1: example of now bending or now binding, depending on how
Speaker 1: you like it, that's ever found in the region. It
Speaker 1: was found in a space that looks like it was
Speaker 1: a weaving workshop. There were also spindle whirls, loom weights,
Speaker 1: and needles there. The presence of sophisticated textiles and the
Speaker 1: use of the color blue suggests that this workshop was
Speaker 1: making luxury textiles for the very wealthy and our.
Speaker 2: Last oldest thing. An archivist at the Woods Whole Oceanographic Institution,
Speaker 2: which I learned while working on this people pronounce as Whoey,
Speaker 2: may have found the world's oldest recording of a whale song.
Speaker 2: Back in nineteen forty nine, Hui researchers used a gray autograph,
Speaker 2: which was usually used for taking dictation, to record underwater
Speaker 2: sounds in the ocean near Bermuda. At the time, they
Speaker 2: really didn't know what they were hearing on these recordings,
Speaker 2: and so they ultimately ended up just mark as fish noises.
Speaker 2: Archivist Ashley Jester was digitizing these fish noises back in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty five and recognized the whale song. It has
Speaker 2: now been identified as coming from a humpback whale. This
Speaker 2: recording was made on March seventh, nineteen forty nine, and
Speaker 2: lucky you, you can listen to it on who He's
Speaker 2: YouTube channel. To close out part one of this installment
Speaker 2: of on Earth, we have three fines related to smells.
Speaker 2: Some of them are also kind of updates, so it's
Speaker 2: like we're circling back to the start of the episode.
Speaker 2: A year ago, we talked about research that focused on
Speaker 2: the smells of Egyptian mummies which had the potential to
Speaker 2: pinpoint substances that had been used in mummification rituals without
Speaker 2: doing invasive testing on the mummies. This work that we
Speaker 2: talked about earlier involved both chemical analysis and a panel
Speaker 2: of human beings who smelled the mummies in In March,
Speaker 2: a new paper was published in the Journal of Archaeological
Speaker 2: Science that was based on this same basic idea of
Speaker 2: mummy smells. It analyzed volatile organic compounds that were being
Speaker 2: given off by mummies, including ones associated with particular smells.
Speaker 2: To work out the ingredients in the balms that these
Speaker 2: mummies were mommified with.
Speaker 1: Researchers used a pair of techniques to do this. Using
Speaker 1: headspace solid phase micro extraction, they captured volatile gases from
Speaker 1: the air around the mummies. Then they created profiles of
Speaker 1: the organic compounds involved through a process called gas chromatography
Speaker 1: slash quadruple time of light mass spectrometry. Don't ask me
Speaker 1: to tell you what that is, but they conducted these
Speaker 1: tests on thirty five samples from nineteen different mummies.
Speaker 2: One of the press releases that I read about this
Speaker 2: only had acronyms, and so I was like, what is
Speaker 2: that stamp for? Though, the ingredients that they identified using
Speaker 2: these techniques fell into four main groups, fats and oils,
Speaker 2: bees wax, plant resins, and bitumen. These ingredients appeared in
Speaker 2: different proportions that changed over time. For example, later recipes
Speaker 2: tended to be more complex, and they tended to have
Speaker 2: more resins in bitumen, which would have been more expensive
Speaker 2: ingredients than the fats and oils or the beeswax. Sometimes
Speaker 2: different recipes were also used to modify different parts of
Speaker 2: the same body at.
Speaker 1: Least you a lay person's ear. The chemical analysis involved
Speaker 1: with this sounds a bit more complex than what we
Speaker 1: talked about last year, but it was still described as
Speaker 1: suitable for initial work. Further study on these mummies could
Speaker 1: still require the use of physical samples for analysis. Museums
Speaker 1: have also started using chemistry to recreate sense from history.
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty three, we talked about the recreation of
Speaker 1: sense from the mummification process. Popular thing to be working
Speaker 1: with smells u and that was planned for use in
Speaker 1: an exhibition at the Mozguard Museum in Denmark. That planned
Speaker 1: project did happen. The scent was ultimately called the Scent
Speaker 1: of the Afterlife and museum visitors were able to experience
Speaker 1: it through a scent diffusing station. A scented card with
Speaker 1: the same scent was also used as part of visitor
Speaker 1: tours a museum. Auguste Kessner and Hanover. And lastly, we're
Speaker 1: going back to POMPEII in something else that could have
Speaker 1: gone in the updates section. Research published in the journal
Speaker 1: Antiquity has examined what incense used in Pompeii was made
Speaker 1: of a lot of incense burners had been unearthed at Pompeii,
Speaker 1: but most of them don't still have ash residues associated
Speaker 1: with the burning of incense.
Speaker 2: That's not the case with the two burners that were
Speaker 2: part of this study, one of which is described as
Speaker 2: a cup it looks sort of like a goblet. The
Speaker 2: other is described as a hemispherical bowl decorated with three
Speaker 2: human figures around the rim. The team took tiny samples
Speaker 2: of the ash from each of these sensors. The cup
Speaker 2: contained charred bits of woody plants like oak and laurel,
Speaker 2: which may have been meant to honor the gods Jupiter
Speaker 2: and Apollo. The bowl contained plants and some material that
Speaker 2: might have come from grapes that was possibly in the
Speaker 2: form of either vinegar or wine. There are some bits
Speaker 2: of material in there also that may have been frankincense,
Speaker 2: which is made of tree sap. This contributes to knowledge
Speaker 2: about religious and ritual practices in Pompeii and about trading networks,
Speaker 2: since some of the aromatic substances would have come from
Speaker 2: Africa or Asia. We are going to talk about more
Speaker 2: stuff next time, but right now, do you want to
Speaker 2: talk about listener?
Speaker 1: May I do I?
Speaker 2: Have a listener mail from Stacy. Stacy wrote, Hi, Holly
Speaker 2: and Tracy, a longtime listener, first time emailer. I wanted
Speaker 2: to thank you both for your work on the podcast.
Speaker 2: It's the one I'm always recommending to people. But I'm
Speaker 2: finally writing to specifically thank you for the recent episode
Speaker 2: on Elizabeth Bisland because it pushed me to get off
Speaker 2: my petuit and finally read the biography of Leftcatioharn that
Speaker 2: I randomly bought in Little Tokyo years ago but have
Speaker 2: left languishing far too long. The book is called The Outsider,
Speaker 2: The Life and Work of Leftkadio Hearn, the man who
Speaker 2: introduced voodoo, creole cooking, and Japanese ghosts to the world.
Speaker 2: I know you too love a long title, so I
Speaker 2: wanted to write it all down. Personally, I think the
Speaker 2: life of Left Coatioharn is indeed interesting enough to merit
Speaker 2: its own episode. But I'm only halfway through the book
Speaker 2: and I had to share some other connections that I
Speaker 2: find interesting. When Hearn was working as a reporter in
Speaker 2: Cincinnati and the eighteen seventies, he covered a couple of
Speaker 2: gruesome murders and guests who helped him out with the
Speaker 2: woodcut illustrations to accompany his stories. Frank Duvenik I recognized
Speaker 2: his name and searched on Lyne to confirm that he
Speaker 2: was indeed the previous podcast subject of further interest to
Speaker 2: me is another connection and my suggestion for a future episode.
Speaker 2: Hearn was apparently a big fan of writer Eta Hoffman,
Speaker 2: who wrote, among other things, the novella from which Chaikowsky
Speaker 2: adapted The Nutcracker. I myself, I am a big fan
Speaker 2: of Canadian writer Robertson Davies, who once made Eta Hoffman
Speaker 2: a character in one of his novels who was stuck
Speaker 2: in limbo having to watch modern day artists adapt one
Speaker 2: of his untapped works into a new opera. Anyway, at
Speaker 2: the time I discovered Robertson Davies, there was no Internet,
Speaker 2: and I assumed Eta Hoffman was a made up character.
Speaker 2: It was only later that I learned he was an
Speaker 2: actual person, a Gothic fantasy and horror author who lived
Speaker 2: in the eighteenth century. As far as I can tell,
Speaker 2: it makes perfect sense that Leftcadio Hearn was a Hoffman fan. Anyway,
Speaker 2: I was tickled by these connections and wanted to thank
Speaker 2: you for giving me the incentive I needed to actually
Speaker 2: pick up the loft Coatio, hearn biography and began reading.
Speaker 2: I was delighted when I heard him mentioned in the
Speaker 2: Elizabeth Bisland episode and got to experience the most fleeting
Speaker 2: of human emotions, the brief false impression that I was
Speaker 2: a smarty pants for having heard of Lofcadio heard previously.
Speaker 2: Thank you for the work you do for my pet
Speaker 2: tax I am including picks of our kitties, Billy Bones,
Speaker 2: sweet black Kitty, Moxie, the one by the knitted frog dissection,
Speaker 2: and Leah, our three legged wonder kitty appropriately sitting on
Speaker 2: the Millennium falcon rug. Thank you again and keep up
Speaker 2: the good work. Thank you Stacy for this great email
Speaker 2: and for great cat pictures. I always love pictures of
Speaker 2: black kitties. They are great. This last one looks a
Speaker 2: little sleepy and the knitted uh the knitted dissected frog
Speaker 2: is also very fun in the background of one of
Speaker 2: the pictures. Thank you again, Stacy for this. I am
Speaker 2: delighted that you got to feed this biography. Eta Hoffman
Speaker 2: came up in our episode on the Nutcracker, and I
Speaker 2: don't remember if I really learned much about him, aside
Speaker 2: from the fact that he had written that novella. Now
Speaker 2: I'm more curious. So if you would like to send
Speaker 2: us a note, we're at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2: And if you would like to see our show notes
Speaker 2: that includes an innumerable number of articles for our episode
Speaker 2: of on Earth, that is at our website missinhistory dot com,
Speaker 2: and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio
Speaker 2: app and anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts.
Speaker 2: Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 2: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.