# Unearthed! In July 2026, Part 2

An episode of [Stuff You Missed in History Class](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/283605519), 22 Jul 2026, 45 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/cfb428ef-eafc-44d0-9d09-ae2701747e6f/d344ab50-c9c9-4d85-be02-b48e015f1f44/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=fb626e1f-112c-4246-a40d-ae2701747e7d

The wrap up of things unearthed in the second quarter of 2026 includes the potpourri category, lots of books and letters, shipwrecks, and neanderthals. Research: • Addley, Esther. “Solstice-aligned 5,000-year-old monument ‘once in a lifetime find’, say archaeologists.” The Guardian. 6/17/2026. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jun/18/solstice-aligned-monument-archaeology-wiltshire-stonehenge-prototype • Anderson, Sonja. “These 600-Year-Old Chinese Surgical Instruments Are Coated in an Early Local Anesthetic—Carefully Extracted From a Poisonous Plant.” Smithsonian. 5/29/2026. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/these-600-year-old-chinese-surgical-instruments-are-coated-in-an-early-local-anestheticcarefully-extracted-from-a-poisonous-plant-180988865/ • Archaeology Magazine. “Copper Part From Illicit 19th Century Still Discovered in Scotland.” 5/12/2026. https://archaeology.org/news/2026/05/12/copper-part-from-illicit-19th-century-still-discovered-in-scotland/ • Associated Press Copenhagen. “Archaeologists discover wreck of Danish warship sunk by Nelson 225 years ago.” The Guardian. 4/2/2026. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/apr/02/archaeologists-discover-wreck-danish-warship-sunk-admiral-nelson • Bassi, Margherita. “After Nearly 80 Years of Doubt, Scientists Say a Spear Lodged Between Elephant Ribs Offers Evidence That Neanderthals Hunted Big Game.” Smithsonian. 4/10/2026. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/after-nearly-80-years-of-doubt-scientists-say-a-spear-lodged-between-elephant-ribs-offers-evidence-that-neanderthals-hunted-big-game-180988522/ • Baum, Stephanie and Robert Egan. “Bolivian mummy rewrites scarlet fever's past, suggesting killer bacterium circulated centuries before colonization.” EurekAlert. 4/15/2026. https://phys.org/news/2026-04-bolivian-mummy-rewrites-scarlet-fever.html • Blackwood, Emma. “Baby fossils reveal link between human and Neanderthal development.” University of Queensland. Via EurekAlert. 6/19/2026. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1132850 • Blair, Elizabeth. “Decades-old, newly restored Smithsonian carousel reopens — to children’s delight.” WAMU. 4/25/2026. https://wamu.org/story/26/04/25/decades-old-newly-restored-smithsonian-carousel-reopens-to-childrens-delight/ • Blake, Elissa. “New evidence reveals a millennium-old dingo was ritually buried, and cared for, along the Darling (Baaka) River in Australia.” University of Sydney. Via EurekAlert. 5/18/2026. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1128408 • Cerino, Marco. “Appeals court clears Trump's path to alter Philadelphia slavery exhibit at historic site.” Philadelphia Tribune. 6/18/2026. https://www.phillytrib.com/news/local_news/appeals-court-clears-trumps-path-to-alter-philadelphia-slavery-exhibit-at-historic-site/article_8ac83e65-6a6d-4db1-91c4-074f98c96a74.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=email&utm_campaign=user-share • Clark, Gaby. “Climate and competition alone cannot explain Neanderthal extinction, study finds.” Phys.org. 4/23/2026. https://phys.org/news/2026-04-climate-competition-neanderthal-extinction.html • Clark, Gaby. “Did Neanderthals use rhinoceros teeth as tools?” Phys.org. 6/18/2026. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-neanderthals-rhinoceros-teeth-tools.html • Clark, Gaby. “Nondestructive DNA sampling reveals 1,300 years of secrets in historic parchments.” Phys.org. 5/18/2026. https://phys.org/news/2026-05-nondestructive-dna-sampling-reveals-years.html • Clark, Gaby. “Surprising diversity found among Europe's last Neanderthals.” Leiden University. Via Phys.org. 6/24/2026. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-diversity-europe-neanderthals.html • Cummings, Mike. “Medici brothers' remains reveal Renaissance-era malaria strains, closing the book on a murder mystery.” Phys.org. 6/30/2026. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-medici-brothers-reveal-renaissance-era.html • Defranceschi, Laura. “Ötzi and his microbiome: a 5,300-year-old relationship.” Eurac Research. Via EurekAlert. 6/2/2026.…

## Transcript

[0:01] Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
[0:04] Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm tra
[0:14] Speaker 1: CV Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. This is Part two
[0:18] Speaker 1: of the latest installment of Unearthed. We have in this
[0:23] Speaker 1: second part this week so many books and letters. I
[0:27] Speaker 1: don't think we've ever had this many things to file
[0:30] Speaker 1: under books and letters in one episode before. There are
[0:33] Speaker 1: so many we have to take a break in the middle.
[0:36] Speaker 1: We've also got some shipwrecks and some Neanderthals, and we're starting,
[0:41] Speaker 1: as always with the things, the random things that I
[0:44] Speaker 1: call potpoury, and we're gonna jump right in with toilets.
[0:49] Speaker 1: We have talked about Roman latrines carrying evidence of pathogens
[0:53] Speaker 1: on other installments of Unearthed, especially parasites like tapeworm. There's
[0:59] Speaker 1: a lot of interesting finds that happen in these places.
[1:02] Speaker 1: A team in Poland has examined human waste remains from
[1:05] Speaker 1: Roman toilets dating back to the second through the fourth
[1:09] Speaker 1: century CE and found the expected parasites, but they also
[1:14] Speaker 1: found the Protozoan parasite cryptos Paridium, which until now has
[1:19] Speaker 1: been believed to have originated in Central America. It's being
[1:23] Speaker 1: described as the earliest reliable evidence of cryptosparritium in the region,
[1:28] Speaker 1: and of course evidence that it was in Europe prior
[1:31] Speaker 1: to contact with the Americas. When I first saw the
[1:35] Speaker 1: headline that was something like researchers find parasites and Roman toilets,
[1:40] Speaker 1: I was like, no, can't, we are aware the Romans
[1:45] Speaker 1: were full of parasites. But then I said, Okay, this
[1:48] Speaker 1: one's actually interesting and new. Next, researchers have identified a
[1:54] Speaker 1: glass bottle found in York, England in nineteen eighty three
[1:58] Speaker 1: or nineteen eighty four, which dates back to the second century,
[2:02] Speaker 1: as a coal bottle kohl, the substance used to line
[2:09] Speaker 1: the eyes in Egyptian culture. This is the first and
[2:14] Speaker 1: only one of these ever found in Roman Britain. The
[2:18] Speaker 1: style matches bottles that were made in Egypt, and coal
[2:21] Speaker 1: was used almost exclusively in Egypt and Sudan in this era.
[2:25] Speaker 1: It also was not really traded far beyond that region.
[2:29] Speaker 1: The bottle shape and size make it really impractical for
[2:32] Speaker 1: most other uses, so conclusion it is a coal bottle.
[2:37] Speaker 1: How did it get there? The area where this was
[2:40] Speaker 1: found was a rubbish dump in the second century, but
[2:43] Speaker 1: it is as Tracy said, unclear exactly how it would
[2:47] Speaker 1: have ended up there. It is possible that it belonged
[2:50] Speaker 1: to a Roman soldier, either one from Egypt or one
[2:54] Speaker 1: who had spent a significant amount of time there before
[2:57] Speaker 1: arriving in Britain. Kind of a good reminder that while
[3:01] Speaker 1: this we don't know for sure how it got there,
[3:04] Speaker 1: the Roman Empire was a multicultural, multi ethnic empire and
[3:08] Speaker 1: that included Roman Britain. Next, researchers examining Ming Dynasty surgical
[3:15] Speaker 1: tools dating back about six hundred years have discovered that
[3:19] Speaker 1: they were treated with a numbing agent. This was a
[3:23] Speaker 1: topical anesthetic that was likely made from plant secretions. That
[3:27] Speaker 1: residue on the tool contained trace amounts of aconatine, which
[3:32] Speaker 1: is found in plants like monkshood and wolf Spain. Creating
[3:36] Speaker 1: this anesthetic would have required people to figure out how
[3:39] Speaker 1: to extract these toxic compounds from the plants without harming themselves,
[3:45] Speaker 1: and then how to reduce their toxicity so that they
[3:48] Speaker 1: created a numbing substance without that substance causing other issues
[3:54] Speaker 1: like poisoning the patient. According to this research, this weakening
[3:59] Speaker 1: process was done by soaking the plants in urine black
[4:03] Speaker 1: soybean soup or vinegar. And lastly, according to research published
[4:08] Speaker 1: in the Journal I Science, Cardinal Giovanni de Medici and
[4:12] Speaker 1: Grand Duke Francesco de Medici both died of malaria. This
[4:17] Speaker 1: was already believed to be their cause of death, but
[4:19] Speaker 1: there were also persistent arguments that the two men had
[4:23] Speaker 1: really been poisoned, because the mediciese are just associated with poison.
[4:27] Speaker 1: Researchers came to this conclusion by analyzing the brothers skeletons,
[4:32] Speaker 1: finding evidence of two different species of malaria parasite. One
[4:37] Speaker 1: was a novel strain of Plasmodium falcaparum, which causes the
[4:41] Speaker 1: deadliest form of human malaria today. I guess it's within
[4:45] Speaker 1: the realm of possibility that they had malaria and were poisoned.
[4:49] Speaker 1: The malaria was actually poisoned, and Brom just making it.
[4:54] Speaker 1: People love to like they love the cloud of mystery
[4:58] Speaker 1: and drama around the medicies, and I think that feeds it. Yeah.
[5:03] Speaker 1: Now we're going to move on to so many books
[5:05] Speaker 1: and letters that, as I said at the top of
[5:06] Speaker 1: the show, we're going to have to take a break.
[5:08] Speaker 1: Part way through a papyrus fragment from the archives of
[5:12] Speaker 1: the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo have been
[5:16] Speaker 1: found to contain thirty previously unpublished verses by Empedocles. Empedocles
[5:24] Speaker 1: was a pre Socratic philosopher who lived around the fifth
[5:27] Speaker 1: century BCE. These verses have now been published in a book.
[5:31] Speaker 1: Its title is in French but means Empedocles of Cairo,
[5:35] Speaker 1: along with the translation and a commentary. This previously unknown
[5:40] Speaker 1: fragment is the first original text that we have from
[5:43] Speaker 1: edpedocles work, rather than a summary or a quotation from
[5:47] Speaker 1: a later philosopher like Plato or Aristotle. Analysis of the
[5:52] Speaker 1: original text suggests that it's the source of a passage
[5:55] Speaker 1: Plutarch wrote in the second century CE, and that it
[5:59] Speaker 1: also influences other philosophers, again including Plato and Aristotle. A
[6:04] Speaker 1: press release from the University of the Edge characterized the
[6:08] Speaker 1: importance of this find in this way that I really
[6:11] Speaker 1: love quote. Imagine that in a few centuries time all
[6:15] Speaker 1: that remains of Victor Hugo are excerpts from lemisrob in
[6:19] Speaker 1: school textbooks, the musical Notre Dame de Perie and the
[6:24] Speaker 1: program for a performance of the play. Or Noting the
[6:28] Speaker 1: discovery of a few pages from an original edition of
[6:31] Speaker 1: Hugo's work would then be a momentous event. And speaking
[6:36] Speaker 1: of previously unpublished writings, Professor Christiente Orno of the University
[6:41] Speaker 1: of Wurtzburg discovered two previously unknown sermons by Augustine of
[6:46] Speaker 1: Hippo while deciphering a twelfth century manuscript housed in a
[6:51] Speaker 1: monastery in Poland. The manuscript was known to contain works
[6:56] Speaker 1: by Saint Augustine, but not that two of the six
[6:59] Speaker 1: works were previously undiscovered. An edition of these texts is
[7:03] Speaker 1: expected to be published sometime this year next. Two fragments
[7:08] Speaker 1: of a steely were found at the Wilsong Palace in
[7:11] Speaker 1: what's now yung Ju, South Korea. One of them was
[7:15] Speaker 1: found at the palace site in nineteen thirty seven, and
[7:18] Speaker 1: the other was found during excavations of a moat surrounding
[7:22] Speaker 1: the palace in twenty twenty. In twenty twenty four, researchers
[7:26] Speaker 1: noted that there were some similarities between those two pieces,
[7:29] Speaker 1: and further research revealed that they were made of similar stone,
[7:34] Speaker 1: and ultimately a three D scan of each of the
[7:36] Speaker 1: two fragments showed that they had a broken edge and
[7:39] Speaker 1: they would fit back together like puzzle pieces. This steely
[7:43] Speaker 1: dates back to the Scilly Kingdom around the fourth or
[7:46] Speaker 1: fifth century, and fitting these two pieces together has allowed
[7:50] Speaker 1: researchers to read a character that was previously illegible because
[7:54] Speaker 1: it was broken in two. It is not enough, though,
[7:58] Speaker 1: for a full interpretation of the steel. It is a
[8:01] Speaker 1: small bit of a larger inscription, with only a few
[8:04] Speaker 1: characters visible. The ones that are included are words like tribute, white, heaven,
[8:11] Speaker 1: and call, which was the character that had been broken
[8:15] Speaker 1: through the middle. These fragments are on display at the
[8:18] Speaker 1: Gyanju National Museum until August. Archaeologists in Egypt have found
[8:24] Speaker 1: a fragment of Homer's Iliad under the wrappings of a
[8:27] Speaker 1: mummy that was found during excavations in late twenty twenty five.
[8:32] Speaker 1: This piece of Homer's Iliad appears to have been intentionally
[8:36] Speaker 1: included in the mummification process, making it the first known
[8:40] Speaker 1: Greek literary text to be used in such a way.
[8:44] Speaker 1: This particular passage is from book two of the Iliad,
[8:47] Speaker 1: in a section known as the Catalog of Ships. Right now,
[8:51] Speaker 1: the reason for its use in the mummification process is unclear.
[8:56] Speaker 1: The team leading the work gave a statement to Smithsonian
[8:59] Speaker 1: Magazine saying they were studying and proposing various hypotheses. I
[9:03] Speaker 1: personally hope it just turns out he loved it. Yeah.
[9:07] Speaker 1: My hypothesis is this person really really loved either Homer
[9:12] Speaker 1: or boats Uh huh. Next. Three historians have worked together
[9:17] Speaker 1: to decipher a secret diplomatic letter dating back to the
[9:21] Speaker 1: end of the fifteenth century. This letter was written by
[9:25] Speaker 1: Toledo nobleman Pedro de Ayala, who was a diplomat in
[9:29] Speaker 1: service to fernand the second of Aragon and Isabella the
[9:32] Speaker 1: First of Castile, and he wrote this letter from Scotland
[9:37] Speaker 1: in fourteen ninety six after being sent there to try
[9:40] Speaker 1: to negotiate a peace agreement between Scotland and England. This
[9:45] Speaker 1: letter is eleven pages long. Now that it's been deciphered,
[9:48] Speaker 1: we know it contains all kinds of information about the
[9:51] Speaker 1: court of Henry the seventh of England and James the
[9:54] Speaker 1: fourth of Scotland, and the voyages of John Cabot to
[9:58] Speaker 1: North America, as well as other subject This text, when
[10:02] Speaker 1: it was written was partially encrypted using symbols, and the
[10:06] Speaker 1: same letters were sometimes represented by multiple different symbols, which
[10:11] Speaker 1: made the deciphering process challenging. This research has been published
[10:16] Speaker 1: as an open access paper in the Journal of Renaissance Studies.
[10:21] Speaker 1: Speaking of Letters, eight letters from John Keats to Fanny
[10:25] Speaker 1: Brawn were discovered to be missing back in nineteen eighty nine,
[10:29] Speaker 1: and they have now been found and returned to the
[10:31] Speaker 1: Whitney family. The letters had been previously in a volume
[10:36] Speaker 1: owned by John Hay Whitney, who died in nineteen eighty two,
[10:40] Speaker 1: and they were part of a set of letters that
[10:42] Speaker 1: had been broken up and auctioned off to multiple people
[10:46] Speaker 1: back in eighteen eighty five. These letters were rediscovered after
[10:50] Speaker 1: someone tried to sell a book at B and B
[10:53] Speaker 1: Rare Books in New York in twenty twenty five. The
[10:57] Speaker 1: store owners were suspicious and looked up the book in
[10:59] Speaker 1: a stolen art database called the Art Loss Register, and
[11:03] Speaker 1: also got in touch with Susan J. Wolfson, a literature
[11:07] Speaker 1: professor at Princeton, New York's Antiquities Trafficking Unit also started
[11:12] Speaker 1: an investigation, leading to the discovery and return of not
[11:16] Speaker 1: just the John Keats volume, but also sixteen other books
[11:20] Speaker 1: that had been part of the Whitney collection. While the
[11:24] Speaker 1: investigation is ongoing, the man who tried to sell the book,
[11:27] Speaker 1: said he inherited them from his grandfather, so the circumstances
[11:32] Speaker 1: of the book's original disappearance are still unclear. Multiple people
[11:37] Speaker 1: involved with this find have described it as very meaningful,
[11:41] Speaker 1: including Wolfson, who called it the find of a lifetime,
[11:44] Speaker 1: and various members of the Whitney family. The Keats letters
[11:48] Speaker 1: were auctioned off in June, and according to reporting in
[11:51] Speaker 1: Smithsonian Magazine, the proceeds were to be donated to the
[11:55] Speaker 1: Whitney Family Foundation. Lucy Monroe of King's College, London had
[12:00] Speaker 1: found documents confirming the location of the house William Shakespeare
[12:04] Speaker 1: purchased in London in sixteen thirteen, three years before he died.
[12:09] Speaker 1: These documents include a plan of the Blackfriars Precinct created
[12:13] Speaker 1: in the aftermath of the sixteen sixty six Great Fire
[12:16] Speaker 1: of London. This plan shows the layout and size of
[12:20] Speaker 1: the house, as well as the building surrounding it. Monroe
[12:24] Speaker 1: also found documents relating to the sale of the property
[12:27] Speaker 1: by Shakespeare's granddaughter later on, showing that it remained in
[12:30] Speaker 1: the family until sixteen sixty five. According to this plan,
[12:36] Speaker 1: part of the Blackfriar's House is now the site of
[12:39] Speaker 1: five Saint Andrew's Hill, and that's the nineteenth century building
[12:43] Speaker 1: that now has a historical blue plaque that says that
[12:46] Speaker 1: in sixteen thirteen Shakespeare purchase lodgings near the site. Now
[12:51] Speaker 1: we know that it was actually on the site right there.
[12:56] Speaker 1: We are going to take a quick sponsor break and
[12:58] Speaker 1: then we're going to have more books in Letters. Our
[13:10] Speaker 1: next Book in Letter find is that scholars from Trinity College,
[13:14] Speaker 1: Dublin who were working at the National Central Library of Rome,
[13:18] Speaker 1: found a previously unknown copy of the oldest known poem
[13:23] Speaker 1: in the English language, that is Cadman's Hymn. It was
[13:27] Speaker 1: found in a rediscovered copy of Historia Ecclesiastica, which was
[13:31] Speaker 1: written by the Venerable Beade. The Venerable Bead was a
[13:34] Speaker 1: monk who lived in the eighth century. This rediscovered manuscript
[13:39] Speaker 1: is a fairly early copy of Beade's work, and it
[13:41] Speaker 1: was transcribed in the early ninth century. It is the
[13:45] Speaker 1: third oldest copy of Cadman's Hymn in existence. And this
[13:50] Speaker 1: is a short poem. It's only nine lines long and
[13:53] Speaker 1: it's attributed to a cowharder known as Cadman. According to
[13:57] Speaker 1: the lore around this poem, Cadman was ill literate, and
[14:00] Speaker 1: this poem was divinely inspired. While it was written in
[14:04] Speaker 1: Old English, many of the surviving copies of it are
[14:08] Speaker 1: in Latin, sometimes with the Old English text included as
[14:11] Speaker 1: a margin note or at the end. Older copies of
[14:15] Speaker 1: the Venerable Bead's Historia Ecclesiastica include a Latin version of
[14:19] Speaker 1: the poem, but it appears that the transcriber of this
[14:23] Speaker 1: copy replaced the Latin version with the original Old English one,
[14:27] Speaker 1: or was copying from a version of the manuscript that
[14:30] Speaker 1: had already done that. This suggests that people who were
[14:34] Speaker 1: copying this text roughly one hundred years after Bed finished
[14:38] Speaker 1: his history, thought the Old English version was important enough
[14:42] Speaker 1: to include, rather than the religious and scholarly default of Latin.
[14:47] Speaker 1: Next to, the Danish National Museum has embarked on an
[14:50] Speaker 1: effort to digitize and analyze its collection of cuneiform tablets
[14:54] Speaker 1: in a project called Hidden Treasures the National Museum's cuneiform collection.
[15:01] Speaker 1: These tablets come from what's now Iraq and Syria, and
[15:04] Speaker 1: some of them are at least four thousand years old.
[15:08] Speaker 1: Until now, the museum's focus has been largely on preserving
[15:13] Speaker 1: these clay tablets, not on deciphering them, so knowledge of
[15:17] Speaker 1: what's actually written on a lot of them is very recent.
[15:21] Speaker 1: Some of the ones that have been analyzed so far
[15:23] Speaker 1: include three thousand year old tablets from the city of Hama,
[15:27] Speaker 1: which include a lot of medical treatments, magical incantations, and
[15:32] Speaker 1: an anti witchcraft ritual. There is a copy of a
[15:36] Speaker 1: list of rulers that includes a reference to the legendary
[15:40] Speaker 1: king Gilgamesh from the Epic of Gilgamesh, and there's also
[15:43] Speaker 1: a receipt for beer. Researchers at North Carolina State University
[15:48] Speaker 1: have developed a non destructive method for analyzing parchment manuscripts.
[15:54] Speaker 1: Parchment is made from animal skins, so cellular material can
[15:58] Speaker 1: provide a lot of information about what kind of animal
[16:01] Speaker 1: the skin came from, and when and where the animal
[16:04] Speaker 1: lived over time. This can also contribute to knowledge of
[16:08] Speaker 1: animal husbandry practices in the places where the parchment was prepared.
[16:13] Speaker 1: This technique involves swabbing parchment with the same sort of
[16:17] Speaker 1: brush that's used to collect cellular material from humans during
[16:20] Speaker 1: PAP tests. If you've had a PAP test and you're
[16:24] Speaker 1: in disbelief that this is a non destructive method, I
[16:27] Speaker 1: know it does not feel good. A lot of the time,
[16:30] Speaker 1: but it is collecting the cellular material without harming the parchment,
[16:35] Speaker 1: so the fears about causing damage to manuscripts has really
[16:39] Speaker 1: been a barrier to this kind of research into their
[16:42] Speaker 1: materials before now, so researchers are hopeful that this project,
[16:47] Speaker 1: which involved non destructive sampling from ninety one different parchment manuscripts,
[16:51] Speaker 1: will help gain some trust in this method. It's more
[16:55] Speaker 1: bathroom talk for me. Archaeologists in Germany have found a
[16:59] Speaker 1: note book in a medieval latrine. So unlike today's paper notebooks,
[17:04] Speaker 1: which would probably be ruined if you drop them in
[17:06] Speaker 1: a latrine, don't do that. This one was made from
[17:10] Speaker 1: leather and wood, very tightly bound, and eight of its
[17:14] Speaker 1: ten pages were coded in wax. This wax would have
[17:18] Speaker 1: made the pages erasable, so the person using them could
[17:21] Speaker 1: mark their notes with the stylus and then refresh the
[17:24] Speaker 1: wax to reuse the page, and they also, as a consequence,
[17:28] Speaker 1: helped preserve the notebook while it was in that latrine.
[17:31] Speaker 1: This notebook is small, It's about the size of the
[17:34] Speaker 1: palm of the hand. The pages are largely still legible,
[17:38] Speaker 1: and the notebook seems to have belonged to a merchant
[17:41] Speaker 1: in what's now Paderborn roughly seven hundred years ago. The
[17:45] Speaker 1: pages are written in Latin in a cursive style that
[17:48] Speaker 1: was popular from about the late thirteenth to early fourteenth centuries.
[17:52] Speaker 1: Researchers are hoping to analyze the visible text and to
[17:56] Speaker 1: see whether earlier layers of wax might still be legible
[18:00] Speaker 1: if they use the right imaging technologies. They are also
[18:04] Speaker 1: going to research the leather binding, which is decorated with
[18:07] Speaker 1: embossed Lili's. Researchers from Heidelberg University have deciphered a Roman
[18:13] Speaker 1: cursed tablet made of lead, dating back to about the
[18:17] Speaker 1: second century and found in what is now the Netherlands.
[18:20] Speaker 1: Its text is not in Latin, like most of the
[18:23] Speaker 1: cursed tablets that have been found in Northern Europe. It's
[18:26] Speaker 1: in Ancient Greek written in an Egyptian style. The text
[18:32] Speaker 1: was deciphered with the help of reflectance transformation imaging, which
[18:36] Speaker 1: involves taking multiple pictures of something through different lighting conditions,
[18:41] Speaker 1: and then those images can be combined into one that
[18:44] Speaker 1: can be adjusted with different variations in the lighting to
[18:47] Speaker 1: see different parts of the surface and variations in the surface.
[18:52] Speaker 1: So that includes things like the etchings on this tablet,
[18:55] Speaker 1: which are incredibly hard to see with the unaided eye.
[18:58] Speaker 1: Looking at pictures of this thing, I almost mistook it
[19:02] Speaker 1: for leather because it is so worn. This cursed tablet
[19:06] Speaker 1: includes magical symbols along with the names of two women
[19:11] Speaker 1: and two men who are referred to as fellow slaves.
[19:15] Speaker 1: It's not clear whether the four enslaved people were working
[19:18] Speaker 1: together to curse someone, or if this is an account
[19:23] Speaker 1: of the curse being against the four of them. The
[19:27] Speaker 1: plan for this tablet is for it to be displayed
[19:29] Speaker 1: at the Herelin Museum and for the text to be
[19:32] Speaker 1: made part of a scholarly publication so that it's available
[19:35] Speaker 1: for other people to study. The idea of virtually unrolling
[19:40] Speaker 1: scrolls has come up on several installments of on Earth.
[19:44] Speaker 1: That's using CT scanning, X rays and other imaging techniques,
[19:48] Speaker 1: along with other technologies to read what is written on
[19:52] Speaker 1: scrolls that are too delicate or damage to physically unroll
[19:55] Speaker 1: without destroying them. One that made the news in June
[19:59] Speaker 1: was just scroll that was badly damaged in the eruption
[20:02] Speaker 1: of Mount Vesuvius in the year seventy nine. This is
[20:06] Speaker 1: the first time that researchers have fully unwrapped a whole
[20:09] Speaker 1: scroll and recovered all the text from it, although analysis
[20:13] Speaker 1: of that text is still in progress. We talked about
[20:17] Speaker 1: the partial unrolling of this scroll back in twenty twenty three.
[20:21] Speaker 1: The virtually unrolled scroll has text covering about one point
[20:26] Speaker 1: five meters or four point nine feet written across twenty columns.
[20:31] Speaker 1: It is being described and a lot of reporting as
[20:34] Speaker 1: having been deciphered with AI, and this is a great
[20:38] Speaker 1: example of how blanket use of the term AI is
[20:42] Speaker 1: kind of muddying the distinctions between all the different kinds
[20:45] Speaker 1: of technology that are described with this label. This is
[20:49] Speaker 1: not in any way a case of researchers putting an
[20:53] Speaker 1: inscription through a chatbot and having it spit out a translation.
[20:57] Speaker 1: Researchers trained the AI to recognize ink that the unaided
[21:02] Speaker 1: I cannot easily differentiate from the charred surface of the scroll,
[21:08] Speaker 1: and then once the AI had figured out which parts
[21:12] Speaker 1: of it were inc eight qualified paparologists, all of them
[21:16] Speaker 1: being actual human beings, analyzed those renderings. Computer science professor
[21:22] Speaker 1: Brent Seals, who's been a big part of the Vesuvius
[21:24] Speaker 1: challenge that this work is part of, put it this
[21:27] Speaker 1: way quote. This is no longer just about imaging or
[21:30] Speaker 1: machine learning. Now we need experts who can read, edit,
[21:35] Speaker 1: and understand what they are saying. Our last bit of
[21:39] Speaker 1: books and letters is also a music find. The National
[21:43] Speaker 1: Library of France has found a previously unknown manuscript by
[21:47] Speaker 1: volfgang Amadeus Mozart, written in collaboration with a student in
[21:52] Speaker 1: a stack of anonymous manuscripts. This discovery came about thanks
[21:57] Speaker 1: to curator Francois Pierre Goy examined the manuscript and thinking
[22:01] Speaker 1: something seemed familiar about it. Goy had been recently examining
[22:06] Speaker 1: manuscripts that were known to be Mozart's work, get started
[22:10] Speaker 1: to look a little familiar. This manuscript likely dates back
[22:14] Speaker 1: to when Mozart was tutoring Marie Luise Philippine de Bonnier
[22:18] Speaker 1: de Guin, whose father thought that she could be trained
[22:22] Speaker 1: to be a composer. She played the harp and her
[22:25] Speaker 1: father played the flute, and he wanted pieces that the
[22:28] Speaker 1: two of them could play together. The National Library of
[22:32] Speaker 1: France announced this find on June nineteenth, and the compositions
[22:36] Speaker 1: made their debut three days later in a performance that
[22:39] Speaker 1: was broadcast on Radio France. Harpis Nicolatuliez and floutist Mattild
[22:45] Speaker 1: Carderini had to rehearse in secret to prepare for this performance.
[22:49] Speaker 1: Armann Brenzing, the director of the Mozart Library at the
[22:52] Speaker 1: International MOZARTIAM Foundation in Salzburg, Austria, told The New York
[22:57] Speaker 1: Times that this is the most important Mozart discovery in decades.
[23:03] Speaker 1: I really love the idea of the musicians having to
[23:05] Speaker 1: secretly rehearse this before it was announced so no one
[23:09] Speaker 1: can hear it. But then now we're moving on from
[23:12] Speaker 1: the books and letters to the shipwrecks. Marine archaeologists have
[23:17] Speaker 1: found the Danibrog, which was sunk in the Battle of
[23:20] Speaker 1: Copenhagen in eighteen oh one. As was the case with
[23:25] Speaker 1: some of the fines off of Copenhagen that we talked
[23:27] Speaker 1: about in our last installment of Unearthed, this was at
[23:31] Speaker 1: the site of new housing which is going to be
[23:34] Speaker 1: built on an island that will be made in Copenhagen Harbor.
[23:37] Speaker 1: So divers are working to recover as many artifacts from
[23:41] Speaker 1: this ship as possible before the whole area becomes a
[23:44] Speaker 1: construction site. Next, the University of Cadiz has embarked on
[23:49] Speaker 1: a project called Project Heracles to identify shipwrecks in a
[23:53] Speaker 1: bay near the north end of the Strait of Gibraltar.
[23:56] Speaker 1: This area is home to the Pillars of Hercules, thus
[23:59] Speaker 1: the project's name. As of April, the project had identified
[24:04] Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty one archaeological sites in the bay
[24:07] Speaker 1: and one hundred thirty four of them were shipwrecks. So far,
[24:12] Speaker 1: thirty four of the shipwrecks have been documented. Twenty three
[24:15] Speaker 1: of those are Roman ships, twenty four are from the
[24:18] Speaker 1: early Modern period, and others are kind of scattered across history.
[24:23] Speaker 1: The oldest dates to the Punic era in the fifth
[24:26] Speaker 1: century BCE. The researchers are making virtual models and three
[24:31] Speaker 1: hundred and sixty degree videos of the sites to make
[24:34] Speaker 1: them more accessible to the public, and of course this
[24:37] Speaker 1: is an ongoing project. Next divers off the coast of Cornwall, England,
[24:43] Speaker 1: may have discovered the US Coast Guard cutter Tampa, which
[24:47] Speaker 1: sank in nineteen eighteen after being torpedoed by a German submarine.
[24:52] Speaker 1: The Tampa had been escorting other ships back and forth
[24:55] Speaker 1: between Gibraltar and the UK when it was sunk one
[24:59] Speaker 1: hundred and thirty one, when sailors were on board the Tampa,
[25:02] Speaker 1: making this the largest loss of life for the US
[25:05] Speaker 1: Navy due to marine combat during World War One. Divers
[25:10] Speaker 1: had been looking for the ship and had gone on
[25:12] Speaker 1: nine unsuccessful dives before finding it in April. The ship
[25:17] Speaker 1: is in deep water, so they were not able to
[25:19] Speaker 1: stay very long before needing to return to the surface,
[25:23] Speaker 1: probably less than fifteen minutes. It is hoped that future
[25:26] Speaker 1: dives will be able to collect more evidence and conclusively
[25:30] Speaker 1: determine the ship's identity. Yeah, it basically took them so
[25:33] Speaker 1: long to acclimate to the depths that they were getting
[25:36] Speaker 1: to that once they were down there, they did not
[25:39] Speaker 1: have a lot of time left. The USS Herring was
[25:43] Speaker 1: sunk by a Japanese shore battery in nineteen forty four
[25:47] Speaker 1: after attacking and sinking two Japanese merchant ships. The Herring
[25:51] Speaker 1: was a submarine and all eighty three of its crew
[25:54] Speaker 1: members were killed when it sank. A Russian expedition found
[25:58] Speaker 1: a vessel that was believed to be the Herring in
[26:01] Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, and the US Naval History and Heritage Command
[26:05] Speaker 1: confirmed the ship's identity this year and in slightly different
[26:10] Speaker 1: and very cool shipwreck news, Scientists at Alto University in
[26:15] Speaker 1: Finland have used surplus pieces of a seventeenth century shipwreck
[26:20] Speaker 1: to make dresses. The wreck was found in twenty nineteen
[26:24] Speaker 1: under the parking lot of a hotel that was being renovated.
[26:28] Speaker 1: Wood from the wreck was expected to be discarded, so
[26:32] Speaker 1: researchers salvage that would, processed it into a silky fiber
[26:36] Speaker 1: using a process called ion cell, and then spun that
[26:39] Speaker 1: fiber into yarn. The dresses were machine knit as one intact,
[26:45] Speaker 1: seamless piece, with the pattern made with the help of
[26:48] Speaker 1: an evolutionary algorithm software tool. Another thing in this installment
[26:53] Speaker 1: of on Earth that's under the label of AI but
[26:56] Speaker 1: similarly not a large language bottle chatbot. So yeah, these
[27:01] Speaker 1: are like two identical Maxi dresses. One was sent to
[27:05] Speaker 1: the Ulu Art Museum for an exhibition called Tomorrow's Wardrobe,
[27:10] Speaker 1: which I looked at briefly and is full of a
[27:13] Speaker 1: number of very cool and funky dresses. The other was
[27:17] Speaker 1: sent to Alto University for a forthcoming exhibit called Designs
[27:21] Speaker 1: for a Cooler Planet. Otherwood from the wreck has also
[27:26] Speaker 1: been used to create a hand shaped art exhibit called
[27:29] Speaker 1: Atti's Palm. We are gonna pause here for one more
[27:33] Speaker 1: sponsor break before we wrap up on Earth for the quarter.
[27:46] Speaker 1: There was so much research about Neanderthals over the last
[27:51] Speaker 1: few months. Of all the extinct species of humans, Neanderthals
[27:55] Speaker 1: are our closest relative, and they come up almost every
[27:58] Speaker 1: episode of On Earth, but I don't think we have
[28:00] Speaker 1: ever had this many different papers and articles in one session. First,
[28:07] Speaker 1: researchers in Germany have re examined findings from an amateur
[28:11] Speaker 1: archaeological dig that was carried out in nineteen forty eight.
[28:15] Speaker 1: One of the things that was found was an eight
[28:17] Speaker 1: foot long wooden sphere between the ribs of the skeleton
[28:21] Speaker 1: of a straight tusked elephant. This find dated back one
[28:25] Speaker 1: hundred and twenty five thousand years, at which point only
[28:29] Speaker 1: Neanderthals were known to live in the area, so of
[28:32] Speaker 1: course it had to be a Neanderthal spear. The spine
[28:35] Speaker 1: was kind of controversial, though, especially since an amateur carried
[28:39] Speaker 1: it out. An obvious interpretation was that Neanderthals had hunted
[28:44] Speaker 1: the elephant and had used that spear to kill it,
[28:48] Speaker 1: But at that time researchers also thought of Neanderthals's primitive
[28:52] Speaker 1: scavengers not capable of hunting, so some argued that the
[28:56] Speaker 1: spear was really a digging tool and that its discovery
[29:00] Speaker 1: with the bones was just a coincidence. This new research,
[29:05] Speaker 1: published in the journal's Scientific Reports, has found cut marks
[29:09] Speaker 1: on the elephant's ribs and spines, suggesting that it was
[29:13] Speaker 1: butchered while it was fresh. Analysis of the teeth suggests
[29:17] Speaker 1: that the elephant died at the age of about thirty,
[29:20] Speaker 1: meaning it was an adult in its prime. We have
[29:24] Speaker 1: also talked about other research suggesting that Neanderthal's eight elephant meat.
[29:29] Speaker 1: All of this adds up to suggest the interpretation that
[29:33] Speaker 1: Neanderthals intentionally hunted this elephant, meaning the spear was probably
[29:37] Speaker 1: a hunting weapon, not a digging tool that just happened
[29:41] Speaker 1: to wind up near some elephant bones. In addition to
[29:44] Speaker 1: the outdated idea that Neanderthals were primitive scavengers, there's been
[29:49] Speaker 1: a general perception that they were less intelligent than Homo sapiens.
[29:54] Speaker 1: A couple of recent studies challenged this idea as well.
[29:58] Speaker 1: One study published in side Ice Advances builds on earlier
[30:02] Speaker 1: work about human genetics and language abilities. This led to
[30:06] Speaker 1: research into the human genome and genetic regulatory elements known
[30:11] Speaker 1: as human ancestor quickly evolved regions that have an outsized
[30:16] Speaker 1: influence on language ability. It turns out that the Neanderthal
[30:21] Speaker 1: genome includes some of these same genetic elements, the same
[30:25] Speaker 1: ones that are in human beings today, so they were
[30:27] Speaker 1: present before Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens diverged from a common ancestor.
[30:34] Speaker 1: That means the capability for language might also be a
[30:36] Speaker 1: lot older that was previously thought. Other research published in
[30:41] Speaker 1: the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that
[30:45] Speaker 1: while Homo sapiens and Neanderthals had differently shaped skulls, that
[30:50] Speaker 1: doesn't mean Neanderthals had significantly different brains or cognitive abilities
[30:55] Speaker 1: than the Homo sapiens that existed at the same time.
[30:58] Speaker 1: The researchers point out that there's a lot of variation
[31:01] Speaker 1: in today's brain anatomy. They compared the brains of ethnic Han,
[31:06] Speaker 1: Chinese people, and Americans with European ancestry, finding that in
[31:11] Speaker 1: most regions of the brain there is a bigger difference
[31:14] Speaker 1: between people of Chinese and European ancestry than there would
[31:17] Speaker 1: have been between Neanderthals and early modern humans. And another
[31:22] Speaker 1: study published in Royal Society Open Science examined ancient baby
[31:28] Speaker 1: teeth and bones and concluded that Neanderthals grew and developed
[31:32] Speaker 1: in their very early years similarly to the way modern
[31:35] Speaker 1: humans do, suggesting there might also be other similarities. Next,
[31:41] Speaker 1: another paper published in Scientific Reports concludes that Neanderthals hunted
[31:46] Speaker 1: European pond turtles primarily not for their meat, but for
[31:50] Speaker 1: their shells, which they used to make tools. The shells
[31:54] Speaker 1: that were analyzed had scrape and cut marks on the insides,
[31:58] Speaker 1: suggesting that the meat and organs were thoroughly removed and
[32:02] Speaker 1: the insides of the shells were cleaned. But these turtles
[32:05] Speaker 1: are very small, so this process wouldn't have yielded much
[32:09] Speaker 1: edible meat, leading to the idea that they probably were
[32:12] Speaker 1: not a major food source. The resulting shells could have
[32:16] Speaker 1: been useful as containers or scoops, and turtle shells have
[32:20] Speaker 1: been found in locations that Neanderthals probably used for rendering Greece.
[32:24] Speaker 1: This paper also documents the hunting of turtles much farther
[32:28] Speaker 1: north than was previously known. The idea that a particular
[32:32] Speaker 1: food source wouldn't have yielded much food comes up relatively
[32:36] Speaker 1: often in these kinds of articles, so it's like, Oh,
[32:39] Speaker 1: these clams would have been really small, it would have
[32:42] Speaker 1: been really inefficient to be trying to get the meat
[32:45] Speaker 1: from them. And I don't know if I fully believed
[32:48] Speaker 1: that argument, because maybe the turtles were really delicious, maybe
[32:52] Speaker 1: it was in fashion sort of to have turtle. We
[32:54] Speaker 1: don't really know, but that's sort of the general conclusion here.
[32:59] Speaker 1: Something else Neanderthals may have used as tools was rhinoceros teeth.
[33:04] Speaker 1: This conclusion comes from the study of fossil rhinoceros teeth
[33:08] Speaker 1: that had unusual marks and fractures. This research involved analyzing
[33:14] Speaker 1: those fossilized teeth as well as experiments done with modern
[33:18] Speaker 1: rhinoceros teeth, including using the modern teeth to retouched stone
[33:23] Speaker 1: tools and for things like napping and for other tasks.
[33:27] Speaker 1: Researchers concluded that Neanderthals probably used rhinoceros teeth primarily as
[33:32] Speaker 1: percussion tools, and that they preferred using the teeth of
[33:36] Speaker 1: older animals, possibly because those older teeth were flatter due
[33:41] Speaker 1: to wear and that made them easier to handle. Research
[33:45] Speaker 1: published in the journal Plus one suggests that Neanderthals had
[33:49] Speaker 1: the understanding and the manual dexterity to treat tooth infections
[33:53] Speaker 1: by drilling into a tooth and removing diseased pulp. This
[33:58] Speaker 1: conclusion comes from examining of one nearly sixty thousand year
[34:02] Speaker 1: old molar. A hole drilled into the center of the
[34:06] Speaker 1: tooth goes into the pulp cavity, and the microscopic grooves
[34:10] Speaker 1: in the hole are similar to ones made by stone
[34:13] Speaker 1: point tools found in the same cave as the tooth.
[34:17] Speaker 1: The tooth also has wear patterns that would have been
[34:20] Speaker 1: made after the tooth was drilled while the person was
[34:23] Speaker 1: still alive, suggesting they lived for some time after going
[34:27] Speaker 1: through this procedure or enduring this procedure since it would
[34:32] Speaker 1: have been very, very painful. If this interpretation is correct,
[34:36] Speaker 1: this is the world's oldest successful dental treatment that we
[34:40] Speaker 1: know of. An ongoing topic of research into Neanderthals is
[34:44] Speaker 1: what exactly caused them to become extinct. A modeling study
[34:49] Speaker 1: published in Quaternary Science Reviews suggests that neither changes in
[34:54] Speaker 1: the climate nor increased competition with Homo sapiens can fully
[34:59] Speaker 1: account for neanders Tall's extinction. Instead, it concludes that increased
[35:04] Speaker 1: networks among groups of Homo Sapiens might have given them
[35:08] Speaker 1: an advantage that the Neanderthals did not have. With greater
[35:12] Speaker 1: networks of allies and relatives, groups of Homo sapiens who
[35:16] Speaker 1: started to struggle due to something like climate or natural disasters,
[35:21] Speaker 1: or demographic changes or some other reason would have had
[35:24] Speaker 1: more options for places they could go, communities they could
[35:28] Speaker 1: join and find support. That kind of thing. Arianne Burke,
[35:32] Speaker 1: a professor in the Department of Anthropology at universi de
[35:35] Speaker 1: de Montreal and head of the Quebec based Hominin Dispersal's
[35:39] Speaker 1: research group, led this study. In Burke's words, quote, these
[35:44] Speaker 1: networks act as a safety net. They allow for the
[35:47] Speaker 1: exchange of information on resources and animal migrations, the forming
[35:52] Speaker 1: of partnerships, and temporary access to other territories in the
[35:56] Speaker 1: event of a crisis. Research published in the PC of
[36:00] Speaker 1: the National Academy of Sciences comes to a slightly different
[36:04] Speaker 1: conclusion about the Neanderthal extinction, and that's the declining genetic
[36:09] Speaker 1: diversity may have played a role. This lack of genetic
[36:12] Speaker 1: diversity could have made different groups of Neanderthals more susceptible
[36:17] Speaker 1: to those same kinds of changes in climate or natural disasters.
[36:21] Speaker 1: That were referenced in the earlier study. This conclusion comes
[36:24] Speaker 1: from analysis of mitochondrial DNA among Neanderthals at six sites
[36:29] Speaker 1: in Belgium, France, Germany, and Serbia. On the other hand,
[36:34] Speaker 1: other research published in the journal Nature examined genetic data
[36:38] Speaker 1: from twenty seven Neanderthals from what's now Belgium and France
[36:42] Speaker 1: from shortly before they became extinct and concluded that they
[36:45] Speaker 1: were more diverse than was previously thought. Yeah, I did
[36:49] Speaker 1: not try to compare those two studies line by line,
[36:52] Speaker 1: but came to slightly different conclusions. We have one final
[36:56] Speaker 1: thing before we wrap up. On the fourth of July,
[36:59] Speaker 1: the United States Domestic Policy Council issued one hundred and
[37:03] Speaker 1: sixty two page report called Saving America's Story. How ideological
[37:07] Speaker 1: capture at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History
[37:12] Speaker 1: erases our heritage. Since this happened in July, it is
[37:17] Speaker 1: normally something that we would talk about in our next
[37:19] Speaker 1: installment of Unearthed, But given the scope of this and
[37:22] Speaker 1: the connections to things that we have already been talking
[37:25] Speaker 1: about on Unearthed, it seemed weird to just not mention
[37:29] Speaker 1: it at all. I have not read this report in
[37:32] Speaker 1: its entirety, because again it was issued on July fourth,
[37:36] Speaker 1: and I heard about it on July fifth, and we
[37:39] Speaker 1: are recording this installment of Unearthed on July seventh. I
[37:44] Speaker 1: spent the entirety of July sixth writing about all of
[37:48] Speaker 1: the things that I had already flagged to talk about.
[37:51] Speaker 1: There was no time left for AE hundred and sixty
[37:54] Speaker 1: two page Smithsonian Report rabbit Hole. It was a long,
[37:59] Speaker 1: long day just with the work that already needed to
[38:02] Speaker 1: be done. Besides that, But here is the crux to
[38:06] Speaker 1: quote from the report. Quote, as this report shows, the
[38:10] Speaker 1: Museum purportedly presents America as a problematic country, irredeemably conceived,
[38:16] Speaker 1: founded by deeply flawed men, and still operating today as
[38:20] Speaker 1: an instrument of systemic racism and oppression. In the museum's
[38:24] Speaker 1: currents telling, the country is above all defined by white supremacy, slavery, conquest, exclusion, hierarchy, racism, xenophobia, misogyny,
[38:32] Speaker 1: and systemic injustice. The report identifies a broad pattern. The
[38:36] Speaker 1: founders are minimized, if not entirely excluded, Traditional patriotic narratives
[38:41] Speaker 1: are treated with suspicion, if not outright contempt, and the
[38:45] Speaker 1: basic symbols and stories that once helped unify Americans are
[38:48] Speaker 1: presented not as reasons for gratitude and inspiration, but as
[38:51] Speaker 1: objects to be inherently questioned, dismantled, problematized, and reinterpreted to
[38:57] Speaker 1: achieve ideological ends. So, to reiterate something that we said
[39:02] Speaker 1: more than a year ago when we started talking about
[39:04] Speaker 1: the restoring truth and sanity to American History Executive Order,
[39:09] Speaker 1: this idea that the purpose of history is patriotism and
[39:14] Speaker 1: national pride, as suggested by that passage, that is an ideology.
[39:22] Speaker 1: The kinds of changes that are being promoted through these
[39:25] Speaker 1: kinds of publications and government orders are attempts to erase
[39:29] Speaker 1: our heritage. There is only one heritage that is of
[39:33] Speaker 1: interest to the people who wrote this paper. What's being
[39:37] Speaker 1: erased with the kinds of changes that are made to
[39:41] Speaker 1: these museums and other sites is largely the heritage of
[39:44] Speaker 1: anybody who is not white, or Christian, or probably male.
[39:48] Speaker 1: As I said, I've not read this entire thing, but
[39:51] Speaker 1: the bits that I did look at in order to
[39:53] Speaker 1: write this paragraph are full of bad faith readings and
[39:56] Speaker 1: cherry picked out of context examples. So I just want
[39:59] Speaker 1: to say straightforwar. We stand with the Smithsonian, and we
[40:02] Speaker 1: stand with all of the historians and archivists and librarians
[40:06] Speaker 1: and researchers and teachers who are out there trying to
[40:09] Speaker 1: do accurate and nuanced and non whitewashed history in the
[40:13] Speaker 1: face of all of this nonsense. Amen, I also feel like,
[40:18] Speaker 1: I know I invoke William Blake all the time, but
[40:22] Speaker 1: his whole thing of like you cannot be truly good
[40:25] Speaker 1: unless you have known evil. Like if you are just
[40:28] Speaker 1: a good and innocent thing that is never tempted and
[40:30] Speaker 1: never faces you know dark things or does anything bad,
[40:36] Speaker 1: that's really meaningless. What makes people great is rising above
[40:42] Speaker 1: all of that and like living through it and knowing
[40:44] Speaker 1: they want to be better. So essentially this is like
[40:48] Speaker 1: would you like the most bland, pap version of this
[40:53] Speaker 1: that offers no ideological growth in terms of like how
[40:57] Speaker 1: we could be better than our forbear and learn from
[41:01] Speaker 1: their mistakes and overall the country gets better and better. Yeah,
[41:04] Speaker 1: it's just like this is for four year olds. Come on. Yeah.
[41:08] Speaker 1: One of the things that this report explicitly takes objection
[41:12] Speaker 1: to is somebody saying that loving America is complicated, And
[41:15] Speaker 1: I'm like, if loving America is not complicated for you.
[41:18] Speaker 1: I don't understand what you're doing like I just don't.
[41:23] Speaker 1: I just don't I have. I didn't pick this on
[41:30] Speaker 1: purpose to go along with that final statement. It just
[41:32] Speaker 1: happens to be the next unread listener mail that I
[41:37] Speaker 1: have in the in the stack, and it is from Kiki,
[41:39] Speaker 1: and it is about Shenandoah National Park and black Work.
[41:44] Speaker 1: We discussed the many complexities of the establishment of Shenandoah
[41:49] Speaker 1: National Park in that episode. I love our national parks
[41:53] Speaker 1: so much, there are also complexities in their history that
[41:58] Speaker 1: make loving them complicated. So Kiki wrote, hello to you both.
[42:04] Speaker 1: I'm writing today because I finally have some pictures of
[42:06] Speaker 1: fun of the memorials for those displaced by the park.
[42:09] Speaker 1: This one is in Augusta County outside Grand Caverns. I
[42:13] Speaker 1: took my six and four year old to see the
[42:15] Speaker 1: caverns and then we headed back home via the Blue
[42:17] Speaker 1: Ridge Parkway. They loved the whole trip, even the mountain road.
[42:21] Speaker 1: They were not as interested in the history as I hoped,
[42:24] Speaker 1: and due to a problem with my backup battery, I
[42:26] Speaker 1: was not able to play your shows during the trip.
[42:28] Speaker 1: This time, they both want to see more caverns, so
[42:32] Speaker 1: I'm sure I'll get another chance to play them the
[42:34] Speaker 1: episodes soon. When I was an elementary school late nineteen nineties,
[42:38] Speaker 1: we had a day camp with another school system and
[42:41] Speaker 1: we're busted out to Madison County in Virginia, where we
[42:44] Speaker 1: learned about science, music, history, and art within whatever theme
[42:48] Speaker 1: they picked. One year, I was lucky enough to be
[42:50] Speaker 1: in the history class, and we learned about the Shenandoah
[42:53] Speaker 1: Valley and spent time learning about the creation of the
[42:56] Speaker 1: Shenandoah National Park. We spoke with rangers and visited one
[43:00] Speaker 1: of the few houses not torn down inside the park.
[43:03] Speaker 1: It was extremely interesting, and I'm glad to say it
[43:05] Speaker 1: was not something I missed in history class. Finally, I'm
[43:08] Speaker 1: doing a catchup right now, and I just listened to
[43:10] Speaker 1: your embroidery episodes. I was amazed to hear about blackwork
[43:13] Speaker 1: because I just watched a video of someone hand embroidering it.
[43:17] Speaker 1: Here's a link to Bernadette Banner recreating Renaissance underwear complete
[43:22] Speaker 1: with blackwork collar. I don't know if you to are fans,
[43:25] Speaker 1: but she makes such lovely recreations for pat tax have
[43:28] Speaker 1: this meme of our new cat Yari who literally ran
[43:32] Speaker 1: into our house in May demanding hugs and is now
[43:34] Speaker 1: the best kiddie we could hope for. He's named for
[43:36] Speaker 1: a cat like cryptid beast from New Zealand. Hope that
[43:40] Speaker 1: heat is not getting you down this summer, your faithful listener, Kiki.
[43:44] Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Kiki for this email. Thank you
[43:47] Speaker 1: for adorable kitty cat pictures. The cat distribution system really
[43:52] Speaker 1: went hard on that one. Yeah, I like the cat
[43:56] Speaker 1: just running inside the house. The cat that I had
[43:59] Speaker 1: for many, many years is starting from my childhood, is
[44:01] Speaker 1: a cat who just arrived in our backyard one day
[44:06] Speaker 1: for whatever reason. Outlook is really just not wanting to
[44:11] Speaker 1: open the pictures at full size. They're right there, but oh,
[44:14] Speaker 1: here we go. So it is a plaque that is
[44:19] Speaker 1: the Augusta Memorial. It's in memory of Augusta County families
[44:24] Speaker 1: who were displaced in the creation of Shenandoah National Park,
[44:29] Speaker 1: and then a couple of other sites that have other
[44:32] Speaker 1: interpretive information. In an adorable kitty cat making, I'm going
[44:36] Speaker 1: to say a kind of goofy face. I love it best.
[44:40] Speaker 1: So thank you, thank you so much, Kiki. If you
[44:44] Speaker 1: would like to send us a note, we're at History
[44:46] Speaker 1: podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find the very
[44:51] Speaker 1: long source list of these unearthed episodes at our website
[44:54] Speaker 1: which is Missed Inhistory dot com, and you can subscribe
[44:57] Speaker 1: to our show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else
[44:59] Speaker 1: too to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History
[45:08] Speaker 1: Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
[45:12] Speaker 1: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
[45:16] Speaker 1: to your favorite shows.

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