A Fanciful History of Unicorns

You probably know exactly what animal we mean when we say “unicorn,” but descriptions and depictions of unicorns have shifted over the millennia. Some lore has roots in sightings of real animals that people have found difficult to describe, or that have been misinterpreted. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly fry Back. When
we went to Paris in twenty nineteen, which just it
feels like eons ago and maybe something that happened on

(00:24):
another planet. At this point, I saw the lady in
the unicorn tapestries that the muse de Cluny, and these
tapestries are beautiful. After I looked at the tapestries and
then I went through the entire rest of the museum,
I went back into the tapestry room and just sat
with them for a while. After we got back to

(00:47):
the US, I kept trying and failing to figure out
how to do an episode on these tapestries, and then
it finally dawned on me that looking at unicorns more
broadly might be the way to go, rather than trying
to like intricately describe tapestries with our words on an

(01:10):
audio podcastst we will be talking about the tapestries, but
more of a general history of unicorns. Just a heads
up though that the history of unicorn lore includes a
lot of lore about people hunting them and towards the
end of this episode will also be covering some modern
history that touches on animal cruelty. You probably know exactly

(01:34):
what animal we mean when we say unicorn, but spelling
it out to level set is actually kind of tricky
because descriptions and depictions of unicorns have shifted a lot
over the millennia. Even something very very basic like saying
a mythical magical quadruped that has only one horn does
not necessarily always work. Case in point, the paleolithic art

(01:57):
in Lasco Cave network in France spell seventeen thousand years old,
and one particular animal depicted there has been nicknamed the unicorn,
and sometimes that's described as the oldest depiction of a
unicorn in the world. This is in the main chamber
of those caves that's known as the rotunda or the
Hall of the Bulls, and the animal in question has

(02:19):
four legs and a sagging belly and a kind of
squarish head. But in spite of its nickname and the
fact that people like to say it's the oldest depiction
of a unicorn, it definitely has two very long, straight horns.
It is so clearly two horns rather than one that
I went down a huge and unsuccessful rabbit hole trying

(02:40):
to figure out who first called it the unicorn and
why they did that? Like was there a shadow? Was
the cave all art? Like? What was happening? I am
not the only person to find this naming weird. French
archaeologist Annette Lemming Empereire, who specialized in cave art, called
the unicorn quote most inappropriately named in her book on

(03:03):
these paintings. Even though those two horns raised some questions
about the unicorn Moniker, this doesn't really look like a
real animal, and it's the only animal depiction in the
Lisco Caves that isn't readily identifiable as something specific like
a horse or a stag or a bull. Some sources
describe it as almost feline. Overall, it is not as

(03:26):
skilled or elegant in its execution as other artwork in
the cave, so it's possible that it's just an early
piece of work by someone who wasn't experienced. But there's
also speculation that it was intentionally obscured in some way
and that it depicts a person dressed as an animal,
or maybe that it shows an animal that is mythical
or imaginary. Another early depiction more clearly shows a one

(03:52):
horned animal, but there is still some speculation involved. This
is found on seals from the Indus Valleys realization, also
known as the Harappan Civilization. This is the earliest known
civilization on the Indian subcontinent, and it existed from roughly
dred b c. We talked about the civilization a bit

(04:14):
in our episode on Mohenjo Daro, which was one of
its most important cities. These seals are small, they're usually square,
and they are carved from stone in a way that
would leave a clear positive imprint if you press it
into a soft substance like clay. One of the most
common motifs on these seals is usually described as a unicorn.

(04:37):
It's a quadruped with a body a little like an
rix or an ox, and it's shown in profile with
a single long horn growing from its head just in
front of the ear. There's been some speculation that this
is a depiction of a real animal that actually had
two horns. You just can't see it on the seal
because the second horn is hidden behind the other one.

(05:00):
At the same time, though these animals usually have all
four of their legs visible, and other animals on other
seals do have two horns with both of the horns visible.
So at this point it's generally believed that these seals
depict only one horn because the animal being shown had
only one horn, and also that this might be a

(05:22):
mythical animal rather than a living one. Unfortunately, the script
that's on a lot of these seals cannot help answer
this question because scholars haven't figured out how to read
it yet. I imagine us cracking the code and it
just being like, not relevant to the nige at all.
An early depiction that definitely shows an animal with only

(05:44):
one horn is a small brass statue from the Omlash
culture and what's now Iran, dating back to the eighth
or ninth century BC. This is a stylized goat like
quadruped with one sort of sweeping flame like horn at
the center of its head. It was found among some
grave goods, but we really do not know its significance.

(06:05):
One element of unicorn lore that we will talk about
more in a bit is the idea that a unicorn
is a magical beast who can only be captured by
a virtuous maiden. And it's possible that, like the Indus
Valley seals. This lore has roots on the Indian subcontinent.
The Hindu epic poem Mahabharata was composed in Sanskrit and

(06:28):
probably written down for the first time some time between
three hundred b c E and three hundred c E,
although it's circulated orally before that. This is both a
historical and a religious text, and it includes lots of
stories and folk tales. One of these is about a
rishi or an enlightened sage named Riscius Ringa, whose mother

(06:49):
was a celestial being cursed to take the form of
a dome. Riscius Ringo was born with deer horns and
raised by another sage who kept him secluded, teaching him
phila sofie and holy texts away from society. After a
drought and a famine struck a nearby kingdom, the king's
advisers told him that the only way to bring back
the rain was to find a rishi who had never

(07:12):
seen a woman, and to marry that rishi to his daughter.
The king's daughter lured Rischia Sringa out of the forest,
and when they arrived back at the palace, the rain began.
This is really the barest outline of this story. Riches
Ringa is sometimes described as having one horn and sometimes two,
and sometimes his name is translated to something like gazelle horn.

(07:36):
But some scholars trace a through line from this and
other myths and stories from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism to
the unicorn hunt stories of medieval Europe in which a
virgin tames or helps to capture or kill a unicorn.
We should note, though, that this very basic virgin capture
idea might go all the way back to one of

(07:56):
the world's oldest works of literature, which is the epic
of Gilgamesh, in which a woman seduces the wild man
inky Do, although the woman in that case is not
usually described as virtuous. The Chinning from Chinese mythology is
sometimes called a Chinese unicorn. It has a body like
a deer, covered with scales like a dragon, and a

(08:17):
tail like an ox. These creatures are mystical and magical,
described as so benevolent that they don't even harm the
grass as they walk. They are associated with both the
births and the deaths of sages and emperors, but the
idea that they're a Chinese unicorn is something of a misnomer.
While they are sometimes depicted as having only one horn,

(08:38):
many many depictions have two horns or more. There are
similar animals in the mythology of other parts of Asia
with similar names, including the kirn in Japan and the
guillen in Thailand. The earliest descriptions of unicorns in the
Greek and Roman world also have Asian roots, which we
will get to after a quick sponsor break. Many European

(09:09):
descriptions of unicorns from the medieval period and later traced
back to the work of Catisus of Natos, who was
a Greek physician and historian who lived around four b C.
And Ktisius's description goes back to what is now India.
To be clear, Catius had not been to India. He

(09:29):
lived in and traveled through Persia for about seventeen years
while working as court physician to Achimanid kings Darius the
second and Artisserxes the second. He met people who had
traveled and traded along the Silk Road, and he wrote
what he heard from them in his book Indica. This
book is believed to be the first Greek work entirely

(09:50):
about India. It wasn't particularly accurate Thoughts left Artisserses service
around or three seven b c e and went back
to Greece. That was only after that point that he
wrote his Indica, along with a similar book that was
on Persia. A lot of what he wrote was probably

(10:11):
second hand at best. He learned it from people whose
travels might not have taken them all that close to
the Indian subcontinent. He also documented stories from myths and
epic poems as though they were just straightforward fat. To
make matters worse, we don't have a complete copy of
the Indica today, we just have fragments and quotes from

(10:32):
it in the work of later writers, many of whom
really thought he was a crackpot. In the Indicatsias describes
quote certain wild asses there as big as a horse
or bigger, as well as being strong and so fast
that no other animal can outrun them. Catsius describes these
animals as white with a crimson head, with a horn

(10:54):
growing from their brow that's half a cubit in length.
That's works out too approximately nine inches or twenty three centimeters.
The horn is white at the bottom, black in the middle,
and crimson at the tip. According to Ctesius, the meat
of these animals is too bitter to eat, but they
are hunted for their horns and their ankle bones or talus's.

(11:16):
If somebody drinks from a cup made out of the horn,
they're immune to poison and to seizures. The animals talus bone,
also called the astragolis, is exceptionally beautiful and heavy, which
is important because these bones were used to make dice
for both divination and gaming. In Ktisius's account, this wild
ass cannot be captured alive, so people hunt them by

(11:40):
surrounding them in a pasture when they're with their young,
and then using arrows and javelins. There are a lot
of opinions about exactly what animal Ktisis might have been
describing here. Poet and professor O'Dell Shepherd published a book
called The Lore of the Unicorn in nine that's still
cited today, and he can louted that Catsius conflated three

(12:02):
different animals, a wild ass, a rhinoceros, and a cheru
also called the Tibetan antelope. Others conclude that it is
just one animal, a badly described rhinoceros, and that Catsius
thought the horn was multicolored because he had seen rhinoceros
horn cups that were decorated that way. One of the
question marks here involves that talus bone. Although Catsius did

(12:26):
not say he had personally ever seen one of these animals,
he did say he had seen it's a stragg list.
He described it as looking like the astragg list of
an ox. Typically, the ankle bones of hoofed animals were
the ones that were used to make dice, and oxen
have hooves, so that makes sense. But a rhinoceros does

(12:48):
not have hooves, and if Catsius saw one of their
talus bones, he probably would not have described it as
the most beautiful as stragglers he had ever seen, which
is what he said about the unicorn. But own, I mean,
you know, tasteberries. Writing a few decades later, Aristotle was
dismissive of Catsius's work, but he's still referenced to the

(13:11):
quote Indian ass. In his The History of Animals, he
wrote quote, some animals have horns, others have none. Most
of those with horns also have cloven feet, as the ox,
the stag, and the goat. We have never seen an
animal with a solid hoof with two horns, and there
are only a few that have a solid hoof and
one horn, as the Indian ass and the orix. Of

(13:34):
all animals with a solid hoof, the Indian ass alone
has a talus. It is not clear what animal Aristotle
was talking about when he mentioned the orix here, since
the orax is a real animal and it has two horns.
But the history of animals reinforced this idea that in India,
and maybe also in Africa, since Orax has lived there,

(13:54):
there was a unique animal that had only one horn,
whose horn had some special property eives. In general, one
horned animals were clearly seen as remarkable and worthy of note.
Julius Caesar's commentaries on the Gallic Wars, written around fifty
b C, includes descriptions of the strange animals of the

(14:14):
Hersinian forest. One is an animal that has the shape
of an ox and a deer, but with one horn
branched like a hand, stretching out from its forehead in
between its ears. Sometimes this gets kind of distilled. To
Julius Caesar said there were unicorns in Germany. Plenty of

(14:40):
the Elder's Natural History, published in seventy seven CE, describes
an Indian animal with one horn in a way that
seems to have come from Catsius's earlier writing, but he
goes on to say that people in India hunt quote
a very fierce animal called the monocaros, which has the
head of stag, the feet of the elephant, and the

(15:02):
tail of the bore, while the rest of the body
is like that of the horse. It makes a deep,
lowing noise and has a single black horn which projects
from the middle of its forehead two cubits in the length.
This animal, it is said, cannot be taken alive. Later
Roman writers returned again to Catsius's description, including alien around

(15:24):
the second century. Aliens description is quite similar to the
one of Catsius, except he describes the animal's body as
red with a black horn. By about this point, an
animal called the monoceros was becoming used as a symbol
or allegory in Christian artwork. There are a whole lot

(15:44):
of depictions that today we would call unicorns that are
represented in mosaics and reliefs and tapestries and manuscript illuminations.
Unicorns came to represent purity and chastity, as well as
sometimes representing Jesus Christ. A round the year one ninety
or Tullian of Carthage wrote that the unicorns horn represented

(16:05):
the Cross. Depictions of unicorns being hunted often included wounds
that were reminiscent of Jesus Christ's wounds during his crucifixion,
and sometimes maidens that were depicted along with the unicorn
were meant to represent the Virgin Mary. By about the
third century CE, the Greek word minosterros had made its
way into translations of the Christian Bible in place of

(16:28):
the Hebrew word re m. In modern Hebrew, this is
often translated as orix, although there is some argument that
it references the now extinct rox. Just to be clear,
since we got a lot of email the last time
these came up, the rix o r y x is
an antelope with long horns. It still lives today, but
the rax a u r o c hs is a

(16:52):
bovine species that is now extinct. Over time, the Greek
word minosterros was translated as the Latin word unicornis way
back at the beginning of this episode, we talked about
epic poems in which wild men were captured by a maid,
and by the fourth century this idea had also folded

(17:12):
into the unicorn lore. Instead of being impossible to catch alive.
Unicorns were depicted as approachable only by virtuous young women.
One of the earliest appearances of this idea is in
the collection known as the Physiologists, whose author is unknown.
This is a beastiary written sometime between the second and
fourth centuries, and one passage describes the unicorn as strong

(17:37):
and fierce and capable of being caught only with the
help of a maid. In his Etymologies, Spanish cleric Isadore
of Seville wrote of the monoceros as a tremendously strong animal,
capable of killing elephants with its horn. Isadora agreed with
the author of the Physiologists. According to Isadore, that there

(17:58):
was only one way to catch it. Quote. If a
virgin girl is placed in front of a unicorn and
she bears her breast to it, all of its fierceness
will cease, and it will lay its head on her bosom,
and thus quieted, it is easily caught past podcast subject.
Hildegard of Bingen also wrote about maidens catching unicorns in
the eleventh century, with various parts of the unicorn having

(18:21):
medicinal value. Mentions of the unicorn were not exclusive to
Christian texts during this period. Islamic text described an animal
called the carcadan, which physically resembled a rhinoceros and could
be lured by a maiden. That animal's horn was also
reported to treat poisoning. During the medieval period, unicorns proliferated

(18:43):
in stories, poems, religious writings, beast theories, illuminated manuscripts just
on and on, and they were also used in heraldry,
for example, as part of the royal coat of arms
of Scotland, which included a lion on a golden shield,
supported on either side by a white unicorn bound in
a golden chain. When James the sixth of Scotland ascended

(19:04):
to the English throne as James the First in sixteen
o three, the coat of arms retained the Scottish unicorn
on one side, replacing it with a lion on the other.
The idea that the unicorns horn could cure or prevent
poisoning went all the way back to Catsius, and by
the twelfth century people were selling purported unicorn horns. These

(19:26):
were usually off white or ivory colored. They were long
and narrow and spiraled, and so valuable and rare that
they were passed down within royal and noble families will
come back to these later. By the fourteenth century, belief
in unicorns was widespread enough in Europe that people used
the term to describe very real and pretty ordinary animals.

(19:47):
Here is something Marco Polo wrote about what he saw
in Sumatra. Quote. There are wild elephants in the country,
and numerous unicorns, which are very nearly as big. They
have hair like that of a buffalo, feet like those
of an elephant, and a horn in the middle of
the forehead, which is black and very thick. They do
no mischief, however, with the horn, but with the tongue alone,

(20:09):
for this is covered all over with long and strong prickles,
And when savage with anyone, they crush him under their
knees and then rasp him with their tongue. The head
resembles that of a wild boar, and they carry it
ever bent towards the ground. They delight much to abide
in Meyer and mud. 'tis a passing, ugly beast to

(20:29):
look upon, And it's not in the least like that
which our stories tell of as being caught in the
lap of a virgin. In fact, is altogether different from
what we fancied. This is pretty clearly a description of
a Sumatran rhinoceros, although that species really has two horns,
with the larger nearer to the nose and the smaller
one often just a little nub behind it. It really

(20:52):
cracks me up that for Marco Polo it was a
shorter walk to Wow. Unicorns sure are ugly, and this
is different some other animals. We will get to the
tapestries that inspired this episode after we take another quick
sponsor break. Now we are finally to the subject that

(21:23):
prompted me to do this episode, which is tapestries, specifically
mild fleur or thousand flower tapestries. These have a background
that are almost totally covered in these tiny flowers and plants.
This style of tapestry was popular in the late fifteenth
and early sixteenth centuries in Europe, especially in France and

(21:43):
the Low Countries. There were lots of tapestries made in
this style, and there are two different sets that depict
unicorns that are still in existence today and are among
the greatest works of medieval artwork that we still have.
One which we at the top of the show is
the Lady in the Unicorn. This is a set of

(22:04):
six tapestries made around fifteen hundred. The Music de Cluny
acquired them in eighteen eighty two after they were discovered
at a chateau a couple of decades before, where they
were being damaged by dampness and rodents. Five of them
represent the five senses touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight, and
the sixth is called a Monsieur lizier or to my

(22:26):
only desire. It's named for the words displayed on a
tent shown in the tapestry. Like the name suggests, each
of them depicts a lady in a unicorn. Each one
also features a lion, and some also include other women
or other animals, or sometimes both. The plants and animals
that fill the backgrounds of these tapestries are real. They

(22:49):
show things like oak and orange trees, holly, monkeys, rabbits, dogs,
and various birds. They're also all clearly meant to be
a set. They all have the same red background. The
coat of arms of the Leaviste family is incorporated into
each of them, and the elegant lady and the unicorn

(23:09):
are always shown in a blue oval. Each of these
tapestries has the lady doing something that's associated with the
sense that is being portrayed, So in the one representing touch,
she's touching the unicorn's horn, and in sight she is
holding a mirror. It's really not known who wove these
tapestries or where or which member of the Laviste family

(23:33):
commissioned to them, which is presumably how they came to
be made, and then there's debate about how to interpret them.
Are they a meditation on the senses, is a monsour disy,
a sixth sense, or some aspect that united all of
the other senses, or just something else we haven't figured
out yet. In that tapestry, the lady is placing some

(23:55):
jewelry in a chest held by a maid, or perhaps
removing the jewelry, and we don't know what is their significance.
The other major set of unicorn tapestries is that the
met cloisters in New York City, and it is a
sequence depicting a hunt for the unicorn. There's some debate
about what order these are meant to be shown in,

(24:16):
as well as whether the ones that are generally listed
first and last are really part of that same set.
With those two included, they are the hunters enter the woods,
the unicorn purifies water, the unicorn crosses a stream, the
unicorn defense himself, the unicorn surrenders to a maiden, the

(24:37):
hunters returned to the castle, and lastly, the unicorn rests
in a garden, which is also called the unicorn in captivity.
These were probably woven between four and fifteen o five,
but they were first documented in sight in the home
of Francois the six de la Rochefuco. The tapestry stayed

(24:58):
in the La Rochuco family until the and Revolution, when
they were looted but ultimately returned. John D. Rockefeller Jr.
Bought them in nineteen twenty three and donated them to
the met Cloisters in nineteen thirty seven. With the exception
of the unicorn surrenders to the maiden, much of that
one is missing, probably due to damage. After the tapestries

(25:19):
were looted during the French Revolution. Rockefeller bought the remaining
pieces separately after learning that the family still had them
and that parts of them were being used to plug
up drafty walls. As with the lady in the Unicorn tapestries,
we don't know for sure who commissioned these or exactly
where they were made, but each of them includes the

(25:40):
letter A and a backward E, and that might be
a clue. It's possible that these are made in celebration
of the marriage of Anne of Brittany to Louis the
twelfth in fourteen ninety nine. There's debate about how to
interpret these tapestries as well. One interpretation is that the
unicorn hunt is an allegory for the crucifixion of Jesus
as Christ, and that if the unicorn rests in a

(26:03):
garden is really part of the set, it's meant to
represent the unicorn in a paradise or a unicorn that
has been resurrected. Discussions of the symbolism in these tapestries
extend not only to their subjects, but also to the
plants and the animals in the militia background. These tapestry
sets were made as European belief in unicorns as real

(26:25):
magical animals was really approaching its peak, but by the
late sixteenth century, more and more people were starting to
express some skepticism about this. One was past podcast subject
Emoise Pare, who described the unicorn as quote more imagined
than real and natural in his Book of Venoms in

(26:45):
fifteen seventy nine. His fifteen eighty two discourse on the
Unicorn expressed his doubts about both unicorns as a real
animal and cures that were supposedly made from their horns.
An anonymously pub was Rebuttal compared Parade to the devil,
and he responded by publishing retort of amboise parade to

(27:07):
the response made against his Discourse of the Unicorn. This
led to a whole huge back and forth that escalated
all the way to people denouncing him to already the
Third of France and Catherine de Medici. I love this
idea of writing papers back and forth to yell at
one another. Yeah it was. It's the slow Burn way
to be angry. Yeah it was. It was like a

(27:28):
Reddit thread. But in fifteen two. In the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, sailors from places like Italy, Spain and Britain
started voyaging farther into the Arctic searching for a passage
to Asia, and they encountered an animal that people who
lived in the far northern parts of the world already
knew about. That was the narwhale. Narwhal's have a long,

(27:51):
distinctive tooth, usually only one found most often but not exclusively,
in males. In other words, they look like a way
oh with a unicorn horn. It did not take long
for people to make the connection between this long, straight,
spiraling whale tooth and the alcorns or unicorn horns that

(28:12):
had been passed down through families as remedies for poison.
It's likely that some of these were made by other means,
like getting a tusk of something else and like boiling
it until it was soft enough to make it straighter
in spirally. But in sixteen thirteen, Caspar Bartholn, the elder

(28:32):
professor of medicine at the University of Copenhagen, started to
believe that alcorns that were being held in cabinets of
curiosities and other collections were really from narwhal's. His brother
in law, Olivorm concluded the same after comparing narwhale skeletons
with purported unicorn horns. Caspar Son Thomas compiled and synthesized

(28:56):
their research and added his own material in sixty five,
publishing it as New Observations about the unicorn. Thomas Bartolin
concluded that alcorns were real and had powerfully effective medicinal uses,
but that they were marine tusks, not the horns of
land animals, so if you needed alcorn, you should buy

(29:17):
it right from the source, that source being Scandinavian whalers.
It cracks me up because it was really like these
ones that come from an industry importance to where we live.
People didn't entirely give up on the idea of unicorns

(29:37):
as a real land animal, though. In sixteen sixty three
a unicorn skeleton was purportedly discovered in a cave in Quedlburg, Germany.
One of the people who believed that this skeleton was
the real deal was scientist and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz.
This is the person who developed differential and integral calcul

(30:00):
lists independently of Isaac Newton, so presumably a smart person.
When writing about this find, he referenced the Bartolon's earlier
work about sea creatures, but also maintained that this skeleton
was credible. It's not clear who assembled these bones and
whether they intentionally did it to be deceptive, but this
was probably an incomplete hodgepodge of mammoth and rhinoceros bones.

(30:24):
Also in the seventeenth century, Dutch cartographer Petrus Plantius introduced
a constellation called Minoceros in the northern sky, surrounded by Oriyan,
Gemini Hydra, and Canus major. Although belief in real living
unicorns eventually waned, efforts to find living specimens continued well

(30:46):
into the nineteenth century, and the scientific effort to categorize
and classify animals that we talked about in our recent
episode on the platypus that extended to the unicorn as well.
For example, George Cuvier, that's the person who thought the
platypus belonged in the same order as ant eaters and spots.
He argued that unicorns were anatomically impossible because they were

(31:09):
typically depicted as having cloven hoofs, which meant that their
skull could only produce two horns, not one. By the
twentieth century, some people had moved from looking for unicorns
to making them. Franklin Dove, biologists at the University of Maine,
published works on horn physiology in the nineteen thirties, including

(31:30):
surgically altering animals so that they would grow only one horn.
Dove had been fascinated by stories of African herders manipulating
the horns of their livestock so that they had only
one horn or many, or horns that grew in interesting shapes,
as well as herders in Nepal who had manipulated their
rams to grow only a single horn. In May of

(31:53):
nineteen thirty six, Dove published an article in Scientific Monthly
called Artificial Production of the Fabulous Unicorn. He described how
goats are born with two horn buds, and for about
the first week of their life, those buds are part
of their skin, not attached to their skull. So it
was possible to surgically move the buds from the sides

(32:14):
of the upper head to the middle so they would
be next to each other, and then they would grow
with the appearance of only one horn. Oberon Zel, also
known as Oberon Zell Ravenhart built on this work in
the nineteen seventies and eighties, applying for a patent on
a surgical procedure under the name Timothy G. Z l
In two. This patent was granted in nineteen eighty four.

(32:38):
It describes a method for surgically repositioning in animal's horn
buds so they grow at the appearance of only one horn.
In addition to this surgical technique, Zell cross different breeds
of goat so that they would have the silky hair
of an angora, but with somewhat longer legs. Zell performed
with the resulting animals at Renaissance Bears before signing a

(33:00):
contract with Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus, with
a goat named Lancelot and his brothers joining the show.
The circus maintained that Lancelot was a real, living unicorn
who had just wandered up to one of their tents
in nineteen eighty four, and the goat was one of
the circus's main acts In and eighty six. Ringling Brothers

(33:21):
faced huge criticism from animal rights groups, including the Humane
Society and the A s p c A, as well
as multiple U. S d A inspections involving these animals.
In early nine six, the animals were briefly confiscated following
allegations that the circus was violating animal rights laws that
banned the use of disfigured animals as entertainment. Purported unicorn

(33:45):
discovery still occasionally make headlines. In A sloppy English translation
of a release from the Korean Central News Agency led
to a bunch of headlines that archaeologists in Pyongyang had
discovered a unicor horns layer. There's a lot about this
story that's unclear, from the exact site that was being
described to why the English translation was worded the way

(34:08):
that it was. But what the announcement was really about
was a place called Kieran Ghoul or Kieran's Grotto, which
is associated with King Tong Young, founder of the ancient
kingdom of Cogurio, not a grotto belonging to a literal
Kieran or a layer of an actual unicorn. And of
course there are seemingly infinite unicorns and pop culture today.

(34:30):
Trying to cover all of them would be a whole
different podcast. I have one I want to talk about
in our behind the scenes just quite a unicorn. We
can do that, but a take on the unicorn story
and its medicinal value. Do you have listener mail though

(34:52):
I do. It's from Katie and it's about our recent
Unearthed where we talked about the ethics of DNA research,
and Katie wrote to say dear ally and Tracy just
wanted to write a quick note about something you mentioned
in your Unearthed part one this year and your discussion
of the DNA analysis of sitting bowls hair, you mentioned
that an ethical code for ancient DNA research was published

(35:14):
in October in Nature. That code, while a good first step,
was not without its problems and controversies. It was drafted
by a group of over sixty active ancient DNA researchers
out of a virtual meeting in However, multiple active ancient
DNA researchers, several of whom are indigenous and who are

(35:35):
extremely active in the global discussion of the ethics of
ancient DNA and indigenous DNA in particular. We're not invited
to that meeting. Just wanted to direct your attention to
some of the excellent commentary by several of those scientists
on those guidelines. See this commentary in the New York
Times as well as this response piece in Nature. Thank

(35:56):
you for all of your excellent work. Love your work
from me and Miriam Rouge too. It's from Katie. I
think Miriam Regrew is a PETS maybe, but I have not.
The picture was broken unfortunately, so yes Um, I did
not actually see any of this commentary because I had

(36:19):
been trying to figure out where whether it's to talk
in more detail about the DNA Code of Ethics that
was published late last year, and I wound up just
including it as like a one sentence aside, and I
did not look further into all of the discussion around it,
which I would have done with a longer treatment. So
I'm sorry for dropping the ball on that, and thank
you Katie for bringing my attention to it. Um. I

(36:40):
did read the New York Times commentary. I was gonna
say the response piece in Nature is behind a paywall.
Probably the commentary of the New York Times is also
behind a paywall, but I have access to the New
York Times, so um, I have not been able to
look at the response piece in Nature yet. But yeah,
the point was aid in the New York Times article

(37:01):
that like some of the voices who would be most
important to this discussion, because one of the really critical
pieces of it is thoughtfully and ethically dealing with the
DNA of indigenous people, like the researchers who are specifically
involved with in that, we're not involved in the conversation.
So thank you Katie for that note. If you would
like to send us a note about this or any

(37:22):
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(37:42):
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