Unearthed! in Spring 2024, Part 2

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. This is part two of
our regular installment of our Unearthed series, where we talk
about things that have been literally and figuratively unearthed over

(00:25):
the last few months. Today's episode is going to have
the books and letters, a lot of fashion and cosmetics
related stuff, whole out of medical finds, some shipwrecks, and
of course we are going to start where we often
start in part two, which is stuff that doesn't really
go into a good category, which I call potpoury. So

(00:47):
back in October, police in northern Ireland were notified of
a body that appeared to be that of a teenage boy.
This has turned out to be not a recent murder victim,
but a bog body. It's roughly two thousand to two thousand,
five hundred years old, now nicknamed the Balachi Boy. His
cause of death is unknown, but officials were reportedly astonished

(01:09):
that this wasn't the victim of a recent crime. Some
of the skin was intact and described as pink, not
as the leathery brown look that folks often associate with
bog bodies. This body was found on land owned by
the Department of Agriculture and it was sent to National
Museums Northern Ireland for further study. The whole area was

(01:31):
treated as a crime scene and then they were like, oh,
it's this is not a crime though at least not
a crime that happens the statute of limitation and this
is over for bog bodies. If it was a crime,
the person that did this crime is long gone. Yes.
So next in January, a crew dredging the Vistilla River
in Poland pulled up a medieval era sword. This has

(01:56):
a very long blade and a pommel that shaped sort
of like an and there's an inscription along the blade
that looks like the name Albert. There have been at
least one hundred and seventy other swords discovered that have
this inscription, so you know, it's believed to maybe be
the name of the sword maker or some other identifying mark.

(02:16):
This is a Frankish name, and these swords were made
in Western Europe in what's now northern France, but most
of them have been found in Scandinavia, so a lot
of sources are describing this as a Viking sword. A
tsunami may have struck part of northern Europe eight thousand
years ago. Based on research done through the University of York,

(02:38):
this tsunami would have followed an underwater landslide known as
the Stroga, which happened near Norway, with the resulting tsunami
striking the coast of what's now Northumberland. There was already
archaeological evidence suggesting that the population of this region declined
sharply around this time, and this could provide an explanation
of why the population of the island of Great Britain

(03:01):
was very small, and most people in this area were
living along the coast, so the death toll and impact
on settlements would have been severe. Moving on, a metal
detectorist found a three hundred year old thimble under a
tree in Pembrokeshire, Wales, back in November of twenty twenty,
and that thimble has now been declared a treasure. The

(03:24):
thimble is highly decorated, It was made in two pieces
and it's covered in a zigzag pattern with an inscription
that reads like still and Love Ever around the bottom.
I love that sentiment and I also love how it
is spelled because like is lyke and still only has
one L on it. I love it. The UK's Treasure

(03:46):
Act of nineteen ninety six requires items declared to be
treasures to be offered for sale to museums. The fate
of this thimble was not certain when we recorded this,
but the Tenbee Museum and Art Gallery, which is not
far from where the thimble was found, has expressed interest
in it. And lastly, a Roman dodecahedron has been found

(04:08):
in England during a dig at the Lincolnshire village of
Norton Disney. About one hundred of these twelve sided objects,
most of them with little knobs on the corners, have
been found across Europe, with more than thirty of those
in Britain. These Roman dodecahedrons have been the subject of
a number of viral videos claiming that they were used

(04:30):
to knit gloves and that dummy dumbhead historians would know
that if they just talked to some knitters. Uh. However,
only some of these have the holes that are involved
in using them to knit gloves, and a lot of
them just aren't the right size for that purpose. Plus,
these dodecahedrons date back to between the first and third

(04:52):
century CE, and the oldest knitted objects found so far
come from Egypt around the eleventh century CE. This is
a bit tricky since items made from natural fibers decay
and they aren't often preserved in the archaeological record. But
we're talking about as long as one thousand years between
when these dotecahedrons were made and when knitting is believed

(05:14):
to have developed. We do, by the way, have a
whole episode on the history of knitting for folks who
would like to know more. That was a Saturday Classic
in January twenty twenty one. Anyway, this one is about
the size of a grapefruit, and like the others, it's
not conclusively known exactly what it was for. There aren't
any references to these objects in surviving Roman texts, and

(05:37):
some of the possibilities that have been proposed include that
they were toys or were used for some kind of
a game, or that they had a religious purpose, or
that they were ammunition for weapons like slings, basically anything
you can think of that something shaped like this could
be used for. Someone has suggested that could have been

(05:58):
the use a giant game. They are really cool looking.
I understand why people are fascinated with them, but the
videos implying that historians are stupid for not knowing they
were used for knitting glove they irritate me. We're going
to move on to books and letters, and this first
one came from a tip from a listener, and our

(06:18):
apologies because we didn't note which listener. Fragments of an
eleventh century Latin psalter have been found within the bindings
of other books. This psalter also contained old English glosses
or word for word translations. Pieces of this salter were
used as reinforcing materials sometime around sixteen hundred, and a

(06:39):
number of other pieces of it have been found before. Yeah,
the materials needed to bind books were very expensive, so
repurposing books and the materials from the books into other
books super common. A newly published paper on this looks
that multiple pieces of this psalter that have been found,
including eight and leaf guards and thirteen strips that were

(07:03):
used to line the spines of other books, so twenty
one total fragments of this psalter. It's possible, but not definite,
that this was assalter that belonged to an English princess
named Gunhild who fled to Bruges after the Norman conquest
of ten sixty six. She is known to have had
a psalter which she donated to a church, and it

(07:26):
would have made sense for this psalter to have been
in Latin with old English glosses. Next, a group of
students has used AI to try to translate scrolls that
were carbonized during the eruption of Vesuvius in the year
seventy nine CE, scrolls that are much too fragile to
try to unroll and read by any other means. This

(07:47):
was part of a competition called the Vesuvius Challenge at
the University of Kentucky, and these students won the competition's
grand prize after deciphering several passages from a three dimensional
CT scan that had recently been made of one scroll.
This added up to about five percent of the total
text in that scroll, which maybe doesn't sound like much,

(08:09):
but this was meant to be more of a proof
of concept than an attempt to decipher the whole thing. Also,
that's more than we had before. Yeah. One of the
students was also part of another similar project last year. Yeah,
before we knew zero because if we tried to unroll it,
it would fall apart. So this kind of work might
be able to allow researchers to read scrolls that really

(08:31):
could not be read otherwise and thus preserve knowledge that
would otherwise be lost. But there are some concerns about
this kind of work, aside from debates about AI, which,
as I understand that, AI was more about like recognizing
what's text and what's not not on coming up with
what the words were like. It wasn't a predictive model

(08:55):
of the text as I understand it. Anyway, many of
these scrolls were found under the remains of Herculaneum, which
is surrounded by populated neighborhoods today, So if additional excavations
were done to look for more scrolls like these, they
would probably go underneath houses that are currently occupied, and
some of the residents of these homes worry about whether

(09:16):
that kind of work could destabilize the foundations of the neighborhood. Next,
it's possible that researchers have found the oldest known runs
in Denmark on the blade of a two thousand year
old iron knife, which were only visible after the blade
was cleaned and conserved. Engraved into the blade is the
word hirilla, which means small world. These runes are about

(09:39):
eight hundred years older than the Yelling runestones which we
have covered on the show before next. New radiocarbon dating
suggests that the rongorongo script used on the island of
Rapanui was developed before the arrival of Europeans on the island.
This came from a tablet currently held in a collection
in Rome that was dated to between fourteen ninety three

(10:01):
and fifteen oh nine, which was more than two hundred
years before the first European arrivals on the island. While
it is possible that this script could have been engraved
into a very old piece of wood later, it doesn't
necessarily seem likely that there would have just been an
ancient piece of wood to have this engraved on it.

(10:23):
Even though Rango rongo doesn't resemble European written languages at all,
there has been an argument that it was developed because
of the influence of Europeans, partly because Europeans didn't notice
it was being used there until eighteen sixty four. Also,
as a note, there aren't many examples of this script today,
and none of them are on Rapanui. They're all in

(10:45):
collections elsewhere. Moving on, A thirty three hundred year old
tablet was found in central Turkey last year, and it
has now been deciphered. This tablet is about the size
of a person's palm, and the writing on it is
in Cuneiform. This seems to describe an invasion during a
Hittite civil war, with the invaders being one of the

(11:06):
warring factions of Hittites. Next, back in the late eighteenth century,
bricklayers working at the Shakespeare House in Stratford upon Avon
found a religious tract hidden in the rafters. It contained
the name J. Shakespeare and has long been believed to
have belonged to William Shakespeare's father John. It's a translation

(11:27):
of an Italian text called The Last Will and Testament
of the Soul. It's sort of a religious pledge that
a person could sign their name to. Research into lots
of different surviving copies and translations of this text has
led to the conclusion that it was actually written after
John Shakespeare died. The only other J. Shakespeare it could

(11:48):
have belonged to is William Shakespeare's younger sister Joan, about
whom we know very little. This document contains references to
dying a good Catholic death, which is notable since at
that point England had become a Protestant nation where Catholics
weren't allowed to openly practice their faith. And lastly, researchers

(12:09):
have found a potential solution to preserving ancient papyrie that
are contaminated with fungus, and that is exposing them to
wassabi vapors. Researchers created mock copies of painted and unpainted
papyrus and then expose them to fungi. Exposure to wasabi
vapor completely eliminated the fungus in the painted and unpainted

(12:31):
copies without damaging the papyrus. So you're preserving all of
your stuff and clearing out things when you eat a
lot of wasabi. Is my uh, I don't know. I
did not look far enough into it to know what
led them to say maybe if we expose this to
wasabi vapors, but I love it. We are going to

(12:53):
take a quick sponsor break and then we're going to
talk about some stuff related to fashion and cosmetics. Okay,
Next we have a bunch of fines that are related
to the overalled ideas of beauty, fashion and cosmetics. First

(13:16):
in Wales, one discovery is a Roman ligula. This is
a silver spoon with a tiny, tiny bowl and a long,
thin handle that was used to remove things like perfume, makeup,
or other similar substances from long necked bottles. Most sources
describe this as a toilet spoon, with toilet meaning the

(13:39):
act of grooming, not the thing in the bathroom where
someone empties their bladder or bowels. The first article I
read about this fine did not explain that about the
name until very far down in the text, and I
was very confused. Normally, these little spoons had straight handles,
but this one has become bent at so point it

(14:01):
measures about two point five inches or six point three
centimeters long, with the bowl having a diameter of only
point two inches or five millimeters. These spoons were more
commonly made out of copper alloy, and it's possible that
the ones made from silver were used for medical purposes
because of silver's natural antimicrobial property, so removing medical preparations

(14:23):
from jars rather than cosmetics. A vial of what was
most likely lip pigment was found in southeastern Iran back
in two thousand and one after flooding unearthed a number
of objects from ancient burial sites, and this has now
been described in a paper that was in the journal
Scientific Reports. This vial was about four thousand years old

(14:47):
and the pigment in it is a very deep red
and it was made primarily from metererals like haematite, manganite
and braunite, along with some traces of other materials, all
in a base of wax and other organic substances. This
is one of the oldest discoveries of its kind, but
it has a pretty similar formulation to modern mineral based makeup.

(15:09):
The container holding the pigment is also very finely crafted,
made from a greenish chlorite and decorated with patterned incisions. Next,
a three thousand year old dress fastener was found by
a metal detectorist in Staffordshire, England, one of only seven
such fasteners ever found in England and Wales. It's shaped

(15:29):
almost like a set of finger symbols connected by a string,
although the whole thing is made of gold, so you
couldn't clap those two ends together without bending or breaking it.
It would have been used to hold a person's cloak,
skirt or dressed together. This item was probably made in Ireland.
Irish metalsmiths of this era were known for their gold work.

(15:50):
Another fastener that made news in recent months was a
medieval belt loop found in Poland. This would have been
used to hang someone's keys or a pouch from their belts,
and it was found by a metal detectorist, and it
depicts a stylized human figure attached to a rectangular mount,
and that mount is what would have been used to

(16:13):
slide the loop onto a person's belt. Next, we have
a couple of garments that were just sort of found
in boxes. One is a ceremonial robe that would have
been used by the Emperor of China in the early
nineteenth century. It was in a cardboard box tucked in
the back of a drawer after being purchased by Eric
Hyde Villiers as a gift for his father in nineteen thirteen.

(16:36):
The Villiers family is an aristocratic family with roots that
stretch back to Barbara Villiers, who had five children with
King Charles the first. Because this robe was in a
box that was protected and unopened for so long, it's
very well preserved. It's made from gold and blue silk,
decorated with twelve astronomical symbols and dragon imagery. This is

(16:58):
the type of robe that would have been worn for
twice yearly festivals at the Temple of Heaven, and it
is planned to be auctioned off in May. The other
item is a sweater that was found in a parcel
that was shipped from Tourjon in the Faroe Islands to
a recipient in Copenhagen, but it was seized by the
British Navy during the Second Battle of Copenhagen and never

(17:20):
made its way to its destination. The ship's captain was
unaware that a war had started when setting sail from port.
The sweater was made from very bright red wool. It
is still very bright and it has a black and
red floral pattern. This was accompanied by a letter in
Danish which read, in part quote, my wife sends her regards,

(17:40):
thank you for the pudding rice. She sends your fiance
this sweater in the hopes that it is not displeasing
to her. This charming discovery was part of the Prize
Papers project, which is an effort to catalog and study
an enormous amount of mail that was seized by the
British Royal Navy over a period of almost two hundred years.
There's so much unopened mail, just that as part of

(18:04):
this project. All the rest of our fashion findes are
about some kind of jewelry. First, a medieval love badge
has been found in Dankst, Poland during restoration work at
a fifteenth century port. This restoration work involved foundation work
at the port's crane, and that crane is the oldest

(18:25):
surviving port crane in Europe. This badge is shaped like
a turtle dove and it's carrying a banner that reads
emmor vincit omnia or love conquers All. Back in twenty twenty,
a fifteen hundred year old ring was found in Emerly
in southern Denmark, but the find wasn't announced until now
to allow for additional metal detecting work to take place

(18:46):
at the site where it was discovered. This ring is
made from gold with an oval garnet with four spirals
underneath the mount. Like the sword that we mentioned earlier,
this was probably Frankish in origin and worn by someone
high up in the Maravingian dynasty. This find seemed to
surprise researchers because this kind of ring typically would have

(19:08):
belonged to somebody of very high rank, and gold was
often used as a diplomatic gift, but nobody of the
rank who would be likely to have this ring is
known to have lived in the area at the right time.
An easy explanation would be that some important person lost
it while they were traveling, but there are other objects

(19:29):
found in the area that suggest that somebody very powerful
might have actually been living there, we just don't currently
know who. And Lastly, archaeologists in Turkia have found more
than one hundred ornamental objects dating back to about eleven
thousand years ago that were likely worn as jewelry in
body piercings. These were made of a range of materials

(19:51):
including limestone, obsidian, and river pedals, and about eighty five
of the objects are complete. Based on their designs, it's
likely that they were worn in ear or lower lip piercings.
There have also been human remains found in the area
with wear on their lower teeth that would likely have
happened while wearing lip jewelry. These offer the earliest documentation

(20:13):
of this kind of body modification in Southwest Asia. Next,
we are moving on to another subject, which is medicine,
and there are so many medical finds. First, there was
a lot of coverage of studies documenting ancient people with
a number of different genetic differences. The first of these

(20:33):
came through work with the thousand Ancient British Genomes Project.
Researchers in the UK found evidence of someone with Mosaic
Turner syndrome who lived about twenty five hundred years ago,
as well as someone with Jacob syndrome who lived in
the early medieval period, and three people with Kleinfelter syndrome
who each lived in different years. So in Mosaic Turner syndrome,

(20:56):
someone has one X chromosome without a second X or
Y chromosome. Jacob's syndrome involves having an additional Y chromosome
or x y Y, and Kleinfelter syndrome involves having an
additional X chromosome or xx Y. This work followed development
of new computational methods meant to pick up more variation

(21:19):
in the X and Y chromosomes in ancient DNA. We
don't really know much about the lives of the five
total people discussed in this research, who lived over a
span of time about twenty five hundred to two hundred
fifty years ago, but it does seem as though they
were buried according to the typical customs of the society
they were living in. Rick Schulton, Professor of Scientific and

(21:42):
Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Oxford, also noted this
in a press release quote, the results of this study
open up exciting new possibilities for the study of sex
in the past, moving beyond binary categories in a way
that would be impossible without the advances being made an
ancient DNA analysis. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute have

(22:05):
also been working with ancient DNA and have identified six
people who likely had Down syndrome. Five of them lived
between five thousand and two thousand, five hundred years ago,
and the six lived in the seventeenth or eighteenth century.
This conclusion is based on the fact that these six
people had an unusually large number of genetic sequences connected

(22:27):
to chromosome twenty one, which could really only be explained
by their having an additional copy of that chromosome. One
type of Down syndrome is called trisomy twenty one and
occurs when someone has three of that chromosome rather than two.
These researchers also found evidence of one person with Edward
syndrome or trisomy eighteen. Similarly to the previous study, we

(22:52):
don't really know much about the lives of these people,
and in the case of these they were sadly very brief.
One of the people with DOWNCAE lived to be about
a year old, and the rest died before that point.
Down syndrome is connected to some heart problems and other
issues that typically would have been fatal without access to
modern medicine and surgery, but in a lot of cases

(23:14):
are very treatable today. But all of these people were
also buried with care in accordance with their people's traditions
and burial practices, sometimes with some special items with their graves,
such as bead necklaces or seashells. Another ancient DNA study
has suggested an origin point for the autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis.

(23:37):
According to research published in the journal Nature, herders who
migrated to Europe from Western Eurasia carried a genetic variant
that is connected to MS. This migration happened roughly five
thousand years ago, and according to this research, these variants
became more prevalent over time, leading to an increased disease

(23:57):
risk today. Three other papers published in Nature took a
similar look at evidence for diabetes and Alzheimer's in ancient
hunter gatherer populations. If you're thinking, wasn't there also researched
about the Black Death increasing the prevalence of MS. Yes,
that was different work a couple of years ago, which
we covered on Unearthed back when it happened in yet

(24:21):
more DNA research, because there was a lot this time.
It seems as though a genetic resistance to malaria developed
in eastern Arabia around the same time that agriculture developed there,
and agriculture would have helped create an environment that would
have been home to a lot of mosquitoes, which of
course spread malaria. This research involved the remains of four

(24:44):
people who lived in what's now Bahrain somewhere between three
hundred BCE and six hundred CE. Analysis of prehistoric bone
has revealed what may be the oldest known incidence of tuberculosis,
which in this case was in Neanderthals. This is also
the first time tuberculosis has been discovered in Neanderthals. This

(25:05):
discovery came from bones dating back to about thirty five
thousand years ago in Central Europe. In addition to what
this adds to the body of knowledge, about tuberculosis. It
has also raised speculation about whether tuberculosis infections might have
contributed to the extinction of the Neanderthals. Next, research on

(25:25):
a skeleton dating to about two thousand years ago has
added a piece of data to the ongoing questions about
the origins of syphilis. One widely held belief has been
that sexually transmitted syphilis was introduced to Europe after Columbus'
voyages to the Americas and other journeys to the Americas

(25:47):
by Europeans, but there's also some data to suggest that
a similar illness was already circulating in Europe before that point.
This research involved a skeleton that had been found in
Brazil two thousand years old. It did show evidence of
a syphilis infection. This is the oldest conclusive evidence of

(26:08):
syphilis so far, but it is not a strain of
syphilis that would have been transmissible through sexual contact. Researchers
in Canada have developed a method to test for anemia
in ancient remains, something that hasn't really been possible before
since there's typically no blood to analyze. This work came
from anthropologists at McMaster University in the University of Montreal,

(26:33):
working with a hematologist. They found that living anemia patients
had microscopic gaps in their sternum and that those could
be detected in bones from archaeological sites. This discovery should
allow researchers to determine how prevalent anemia was in the past,
which could contribute to the understanding of anemia today. And lastly,

(26:55):
archaeologists have found a hollow piece of bone in the
Netherlands that dates back to the Roman era about two
thousand years ago, which was used as a container for seeds,
specifically black henmane seeds, which are poisonous but were also
used for medicinal and ceremonial purposes. Seeds like these have
been found at archaeological sites before, but this is the

(27:17):
earliest example of a time that they've been found in
a container, suggesting that they were being kept for some
kind of medical or ceremonial use. Everybody loves shipwrecks. Coming back,
We're going to take a quick sponsor break and then
we will get into shipwrecks. Time for some shipwrecks. We

(27:47):
have talked about the shipwrecks from the Franklin Expedition a
few times on the show, and there is a whole
episode on Franklin's Lost Expedition. The most recent dives to
the Rex of the Arabis and this Terror took place
in September of twenty twenty three, and then reports on
those latest dives were released earlier this year. The team

(28:09):
was able to make sixty eight dives while wearing heated
diving suits. During these dives, the team was able to
access a seaman's chest that they had been hoping to
be able to get to for years. They also brought
up a lot of tools, coins, and personal items. But
crews also noted that the condition of the Rex is
changing dramatically because of climate change. The Arabis in particular

(28:33):
is in much shallower water and faces greater threats from
changes in the currents and stronger storms that are connected
to the shifting climate. Also in Canada, a shipwreck washed
up on the shore of JT. Cheeseman Provincial Park in
Newfoundland in February, possibly after being dislodged from the ocean
floor by Hurricane Fiona. This was a thirty meter or

(28:56):
one hundred foot long ship believed to date back to
the nineteenth century. This wreck was really not in a
spot that was suitable for research the sea can really
just pound on that area, and this led to a
scramble to document as much as possible before the wreck
was damaged or pulled back out to sea by the tides.
A team was able to retrieve some pieces of this

(29:18):
treck to be analyzed in a lab so we may
know more about it later. We've got a couple of
World War One shipwreck discoveries. Divers have recovered the bell
from the USS Jacob Jones, which was sunk off of
Sicily after being torpedoed by a U boat on December sixth,
nineteen seventeen. It was brought to the surface due to

(29:39):
the threat of looting at the site. Also, a team
with the Unpathed Waters Project has identified the location of
the SS Heartdale, which was torpedoed on March thirteenth, nineteen fifteen.
The Heartdale had been carrying cargo from Scotland to Egypt.
There was some information available about the possible lane location

(30:00):
of this wreck from both surviving crew members and the
log of the U boat that had sunk it. Making
the id required sonar work combined with documentary evidence. A
wreck discovered in twenty twenty two has been identified as
the SS Nemesis, an iron hulled steamship that was lost
at sea off the coast of New South Wales, Australia

(30:22):
in nineteen oh four while carrying a load of coal.
There were thirty two people on board who lost their
lives when the ship went down in a storm. Marine
Survey Company subse professional had originally spotted this wreck, and
the identification came after an inspection with a remotely operated
vehicle and some detailed mapping of the seafloor there. The

(30:44):
whole length of this wreck has also now been surveyed
with a drop camera. Last year, the Michigan Shipwreck Research
Association discovered the wreckage of a steamship in Lake Michigan,
and earlier this year they announced that it was the
wreck of the Milwaukee. The Milwaukee collided with another ship,
the Hiccocks, on July ninth, eighteen eighty six, due to

(31:05):
poor visibility from dense fog and smoke. The only person
killed in this wreck was the Hiccock's lookout, who was
thrown overboard. The team used a combination of written records
from the time, historical weather data, and remote sensing to
find the wreckage and then followed up with a remote
operated vehicle to document the site, and then another listener

(31:27):
tip which I again forgot to put down. Who sent it?
Part of the schooner eight A Kade Damon was uncovered
on steep Hill Beach at the Crane Estate in Ipswich, Massachusetts,
possibly by a dramatic high tide that's colloquially known as
a King tide. This wreck is one hundred and fifteen
years old, and it sank in the Great Christmas Snowstorm

(31:49):
in nineteen oh nine. The Crane Estate is managed by
an organization called the Trustees of Reservations, which invited the
public to a Shipwrecked Scholars program in March and April,
something I would have gone to had I realized it
was happening before recording this, at which point it was
too late. Moving on, research published in the journal plus

(32:13):
one has documented five dugout canoes built between fifty seven
hundred and fifty one hundred BCE, found northwest of Rome
at a site called La Marmata. These represent some of
the oldest boats in the Mediterranean and provide evidence of
trade over water this far back in history. The five
canoes were built from four different types of wood and

(32:35):
some of their features are described as advanced, such as
transverse reinforcements and possibly the ability to be outfitted with
sales or support floats. And lastly, a wreck off the
Florida Keys has been identified as the HMS Tiger, which
was a British warship that had to be abandoned after
it ran aground in seventeen forty two, leaving its crew

(32:57):
temporarily stranded. Was found in nineteen ninety three and dry
Trotugus National Park, and the identification comes from an old
log book one that described how the sailors aboard had
tried to lighten the ship's load after it ran aground.
Britain and Spain were at war when this ship ran aground.
The ship had been stationed in the Keys during the

(33:19):
War of Jenkins's Ear, something that Tracy swears we've talked
about on the show before but that she could not
find in her outlines. Doesn't ring any bells for me,
so I'm like shrug. This war was interconnected with the
War of the Austrian Succession. And now we are going
to end this installment of uneartheds with three stories that
I have looped together in a category that I'm just

(33:41):
calling that's wild because they're not really related to each other,
but they sure are in my opinion. Off the Wall first.
A paper was published in the journal Archaeological Prospection last
year in which an Indonesian geologist and several co authors
concluded that the site known as Gunong Padang had been

(34:01):
built as a pyramid as long as twenty five thousand
years ago. That would make it older than the Pyramid
of Joser. We've talked about the Pyramid of Joser on
the show before, and it is believed to be the
oldest pyramid in the world. So if correct, we would
have a new oldest pyramid. This paper was immediately controversial,

(34:23):
with critics arguing that its completely groundbreaking conclusions were flatly incorrect,
and that instead the site was built on natural rock
formations that have an appearance similar to a step pyramid.
One rebuttal posted at the website Southeast Asian Archaeology read,
in part quote, a good analogy is saying scientists have
dated the soil underneath the Eiffel Tower and concluded that

(34:46):
the tower is twenty thousand years old. This led to
a whole lot of back and forth and a lot
of doubling down by the lead author until this paper
was finally retracted in March, with the journal saying quote.
Following publication of this article, concerns were raised by third
parties with expertise in geophysics, archaeology and radiocarbon dating about

(35:09):
the conclusions drawn by the authors based on the evidence reported.
This whole thing was messy and public enough that it
wound up on TikTok in a series by TikTok user
Erith Girl in her series Niche Tea, in which she
talks about drama happening in communities that you may not
be a part of. Next. Last year, the Vang Museum

(35:32):
in Amsterdam and the Pokemon Company launched a collaborative exhibit
bringing together Van Go and Pokemon. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this descended
into chaos, with tickets selling out instantly and visitors mobbing
the gift shop. In particular demand was a limited edition

(35:53):
Pokemon card called Pikachu with Gray Felt Hat, showing Pikachu
in the style of a Van Go painting wearing a
gray felt hat. It surprises me not at all that
people were relentlessly aggressive about getting this card. The exhibition
launched in September and by October the museum had stopped

(36:15):
offering the limited edition card because things had become so unmanageable.
It's called underestimating the impact of your collaboration. In January,
it was announced that four museum employees who had previously
been placed on leave had lost their jobs due to
their conduct during the exhibition. This included someone who had

(36:35):
worked for the museum for twenty five years, who, according
to reports, told visitors where they could get the cards,
which was against the rules of the event and the
museum's code of conduct. Another employee allegedly stole a box
of these limited edition cards. Yeah, it was, as I understand,
it's supposed to be like a scavenger hunt, and so

(36:55):
having an employee tell people where to go, people thought
was running a foul of the rules. I have so
many questions. I bet I have some of the same
ques talk about and behind the scenes. Finally, back in
two thousand and five, one of the original pairs of
ruby slippers from the nineteen thirty nine movie The Wizard

(37:17):
of Oz was stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in
Grand Rapids, Michigan, in a smash and grab robbery. There
was a huge search for the ruby slippers and an
offer of a million dollar reward, and the Grand Rapids
Police Department recovered them in twenty eighteen. None of that
seemed all that weird at the time. We've talked a

(37:38):
lot on Unearthed about various stuff being stolen and later recovered,
and sometimes people steal movie memorabilia, but then things got weird.
In the court proceedings of seventy six year old Terry
John Martin, who pleaded guilty to stealing the slippers, news
coverage has described him as a reformed mobster with a

(38:00):
difficult pass, doing one last score after ten years away
from his former life of crime. In January, his defense
attorney filed a statement contending that Martin had stolen the
slippers because he thought the rubies were real. He had
planned to remove the rubies and sell them off individually
so no one would be the wiser about where they

(38:21):
had come from. He abandoned this plan when a fence
brought him up to speed on the fact that the
ruby slippers were decorated with sequins and glass. Uh. I
have questions about this so many. It does not appear
that anyone tried to make any argument that he was
not able to comprehend the crime, but it seems like

(38:46):
a person should be able to see that those are
sequins on the shoes. Yeah. Martin, who was in hospice
at the time, was ultimately sentenced to time served and
a year of super release. And there's a plan to
take these shoes on kind of a world tour before
eventually auctioning them off at the end of this year.

(39:07):
Ha ha. That is not the end of the weirdness.
In March, Martin's alleged accomplice, Jerry Hall Saliterman, was charged
in conjunction with the crime. It is alleged that he
received the slippers and took possession of them, knowing that
they were stolen. He has also been charged with witness
tampering after threatening to release a sex tape of a

(39:28):
woman who had knowledge of the case if she did
not keep quiet. This just happened in mid March. It
is a wild ride and it is still ongoing. Yeah.
I feel like having just seen this sort of revenge
porn aspect of it a couple of days ago means
probably something else is going to happen between today when
we're recording this and when the episode comes out. To

(39:49):
one hundred percent, so that's unearthed for the first three
months of twenty twenty four. I have so many thoughts.
We'll talk about them Friday. Do you have a listener mail. Yes.
We've gotten some extremely delightful emails about a number of
different subjects. This particular one is going to be about
Robert rules of Order. It is from Lisa. Lisa wrote

(40:13):
and said, I listened to your episode about Henry Martin
Roberts rules of Order. I also learned about these rules
in a horse four h club. I've also been on fairboards,
horse club board, and church councils and all used these rules,
some loosely and some formally. One of these clubs have
a story you might find amusing. This club had in
its rule book that all club meetings will follow Robert's

(40:36):
rules of order. Some members had their own agenda and
started to bend these rules to manage this. My friend
on this board and I did not agree with what
they were trying to accomplish, and used Robert's rules to
write this ship. She worked as a court clerk and
let me know that hanging out with lawyers had taught
her a few things. She went to the library and
checked out the biggest Robert's Rules books she could find.

(40:58):
Then she used two colored and marked pages. One color
was for the rules they were breaking, and the other
just made the book researched. When we went to the
next meeting, after checking to make sure we knew for
sure wording and the rules we understood were correct, we
attended well armed. As the meeting started incorrectly, she made
a point of order and let them know that according

(41:20):
to Robert's rules while tapping the book. Let everybody know
the error. When it came to the topic we had
issue with, and once again she tapped the book and
let them know the problem. When she was told it
was not a problem. I read from the club rules
how we were to follow Robert's rules, and she read
the rule they were breaking. I'm sure by the time
the meeting was over everyone was tired of her tapping

(41:40):
that very important book. Eventually they got the changes made,
but they were made correctly. Attached for pet tax I
have a pick of my black barn cat who showed
up one day six years ago and has not left.
She just moved in my house. Cat is black and
white with a big personality. My husband and I are
both Ham radio ops and one day when I was

(42:01):
using the mic for one radio, I looked over and
saw my cat with a different mic and captured this
cute pick. I thought you both might enjoy. Thanks for
doing what you do. Your podcast is one of the
few my husband enjoys listening to with me. Lisa, thank
you Lisa for this email. I did enjoy the Roberts
Rules story. We may also have other Roberts Rules stories

(42:25):
later because some of them are quite fun. And I
also love the picture of this little it looks like
a textedo cat looking at the microphone. I have some
similar pictures of my cats sitting in the little podcast studio. Also,
I think I've mentioned before Opal likes to pull the
noise dampening foam off of the wall and make a

(42:47):
little bed out of it, so I have cute pictures
of her next to the microphone as though she is
a podcast host. But I also have pictures of her
in a bed made of work for me to have
to do later putting it back together. And this is
why I record in a closet with a door that
shuts yep, yep uh. She does it while I'm sitting

(43:08):
right next to her. She has no respect, So thank
you so much for that email. If you would like
to send us a note about this or any other
podcast or a history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. We're
on some social media with the username miss in History,
like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. Twitter is called x
now I guess I keep saying Twitter. You can subscribe

(43:30):
to our show on iHeartRadio app or wherever else you
like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
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