Her with the Menagh Brown is a weekly podcast brought to you by Cynical Women Podcast Network and I Heart Radio. I'm your host, Amena Brown, and each week I'm bringing you hilarious storytelling and soulful conversation centering the stories of black, indigenous, Latino and Asian women. Each week we are going to laugh, consider and reflect upon the times. Join me as we remind each other to access joy, affect change and be inspired. Listen to her with Amina Brown on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Brian Husky.

I'm bald and I'm Charlie Sanders. I'm also bald and we want to talk to people about it. Charlie, did you know that the less hair you have, the more interesting you become? Yeah, of course everybody knows that. Oh, right. I mention them well, on our podcast Ball Talk, we interview people about being bald.

Brian, is this show just for Baldy's?

Charlie No. Harrows will enjoy this, too. I mean, the show is about perception, insecurity, vanity, just like human stuff.

You wouldn't believe the things that come out in the ball. Talk on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Welcome to stuff you missed in history class. A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson. And I'm Holly Fry. Hey, it's time for Unearthed Yohei.

This spring and our previous installment of Unearthed, we speculated on whether the covid-19 pandemic would thwart our plans to you unearthed in July.

If you have just started listening to the podcast between, I guess, April ish. And now this is when we periodically talk about things that have been literally and figuratively unearthed. And we kind of wondered whether there would be a pause on unearthing because of the pandemic. There have not been. I actually saved about as many articles over April, May and June as I did in the first three months of the year. But a lot of what I collected was a little bit repetitive or sounded really similar to a find that we just talked about recently, things like that.

So we just have a one part unearthed this time around instead of two parts. Also, just the note, there's a little thunder happening off in the distance at my house. I don't know if the microphone is going to pick any of it up, but if you're like in, you're like, what was that? It was probably protocell that rumbling those girls should eat lunch.

I mean, that happens sometimes to in honor of twenty seventeen, we talked about arts and crafts retail chain Hobby Lobby agreeing to pay a three million dollar fine and forfeit thousands of artifacts that have been smuggled into the United States. Then in Unearthed in July twenty eighteen, we discussed the repatriation of those artifacts.

Well, back in 2014, Hobby Lobby also purchased a tablet known as the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet for more than one point six million dollars. That tablet is three thousand six hundred years old, as its name suggests. It contains a portion of the Epic of Gilgamesh. After this purchase, the tablet went on display at the Museum of the Bible, which was funded by Hobby Lobby founder Steve Green. Officials from the Department of Homeland Security seized the tablet from the museum in 2019, and this May, federal authorities started formally pursuing a forfeiture order to return the tablet to Iraq, according to authorities.

Hobby Lobby representatives did ask about the tablets provenance before making the purchase. But a major auction house, which remains nameless in the paperwork, obfuscated its origins. However, Hobby Lobby also filed a lawsuit against the auction house. Christie's, which accused the auction house of, quote, deceitful and fraudulent conduct in connection to a Gilgamesh tablet seems likely it might be the same one, probably.

Also, we did not include this little tidbit in our spring time unearthed edition, which is when it happened. But back in March, it was also reported that none of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Museum of the Bible's collection are actually authentic. Vindolanda has come up on a couple of previous installments of Unearthed. That's a Roman fort just south of Hadrian's Wall. This time, curators at the Vindolanda Museum have found a toy mouse cut from leather in a bag of scraps, and it dates back to somewhere between the years 105 and 130 plus mouse's flat, about twelve point two centimeters, or four point eight inches long.

It's cut from a single piece of leather and it has little marks on it that seem to indicate hair on the mouse's body and the tail, as well as marks for the eyes.

This discovery came as a result of the covid-19 pandemic. Excavations at Vindolanda had to be postponed, so the curatorial staff at the museum spent their time, among other things, going through all of the leather pieces in the museum's collection. This collection contains more than 7000 objects, some of them things like shoes, boots and horse gear. But there are also lots and lots of patches and scraps and offcuts.

I kind of love the idea of somebody being like, well, we can't have visitors. We can't do that. Dig. I'll go through this bag of scraps here.

This mouse may have been made specifically as a child's toy. There is plenty of evidence that there were children at Vindolanda or somebody may have made it as a practical joke or just because they were bored. The plan is to put this mouse on display at the Vindolanda Museum. Maybe someone was trying to entertain a cat, maybe.

So it does seem like a good kick toy for a cat. Right. In our springtime unearthed this year, we talked about the theft of a painting by Vincent Van Gogh from the singer Larin Museum, which is in Larin, Netherlands, not in The Hague. As we said in the episode earlier this spring, Art Detective Arthur Brand received proof of life photos of the painting. He released those on June 18th. The photo shows the painting a copy of the international edition of the May 30th, 2020, New York Times and the book Master.

Chief Brand received a photo of the back of the painting as well, at this point, there's some speculation that this theft is a copycat crime. There's also like security footage, footage that became available after we recorded that earlier episode that shows that being like a pretty much fast paced smash and grab. The book that is shown in that proof of life picture is about the 2002 theft of two different. Vincent Van Gogh works from an Amsterdam museum. The newspaper that Sharon in the picture has a story on the front page titled Notes on an Art Heist from one who has done it.

And it's about the single grand theft. But it quotes extensively one of the men who was convicted of that earlier 2002 heist. This sounds like such a good movie. It's like the way that serial killers in fiction movies are portrayed as taunting the police. And except this one would be about art theft. Hmm.

I'd go to that movie to a veterinarian in England, stumbled across a stone memorializing a previous outbreak of rinderpest. An image of the stone was posted on the Nantwich farm vet's Facebook page in May. In that stone read quote, Near this place were buried 43 cows, seven calving heifers, five yearling heifers, one bull, twenty calves that died in the months of February and March 1866 of the rinderpest then raging in Cheshire belonging to John Sutton of Most in Manor.

Our episode on the eradication of rinderpest came out in April of this year. So that's just another piece of that puzzle.

Yeah, I think all of those numbers that Holly just read are correct. I was reading them off of a picture of, you know, a stone dating back to the 19th century.

There are a couple where I was like, is that a seven or a one? And a different update, which is related to multiple past episodes, including Red Summer and our one on item B, Wells Barnett, according to a new report that was issued by the Equal Justice Initiative in June, more than 6500 black Americans were lynched between 1865 and 1950. This report included 2000 that took place during reconstruction, but were not included in the organization's earlier reports.

So whenever we have talked about numbers of lynchings that have taken place in the past, like these numbers are much larger than that. In our previous installment of Unearth, we talked about a decision by the US Secretary of the Interior, David Bernat, ruling that the Mashpee Wampanoags 300 acres of reservation land on Cape Cod would be taken out of trust and the reservation disestablished. We noted in that discussion that the tribe had previously filed lawsuit that was still pending when that decision was announced.

That lawsuit was related to a 20 18 Department of the Interior decision that the tribe had not been under federal jurisdiction in 1934. Yeah, that decision about 1934 jurisdiction ties back into this whole disestablishment question. So a 45 day halt was placed on the order to disestablish the reservation. And on the last day of that order, federal Judge Paul L. Friedman issued a ruling in that earlier lawsuit, Friedman ruled that the Department of the Interior is 2018 decision was faulty, calling it, quote, arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and contrary to law.

The overall issue is still a little unsettled at this point, though, because now the Department of the Interior has to go back and reevaluate that twenty eighteen decision.

This isn't an update exactly, but it is on a similar theme. And it happened literally as Tracy was writing this paragraph. On July 9th, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision in McGirt vs. Oklahoma, which also applies to another case, Sharp versus Murphey, that the eastern half of Oklahoma is Native American land for the purpose of federal criminal law. This is a way bigger story than we can get into here. But the podcast, This Land, which is hosted by Rebecca Nagle, is an excellent resource on it.

If you want to follow up and get some more details.

Yes. I mean, in general, even before that, the ruling was announced like it had already formed an extensive body of very useful work. On the context for that, there is an episode that I think will be out by the time this episode of Unearthed comes out, but it doesn't exist as of when we are recording it. But it is specifically about the decision and the impact that it is going to have. Moving on, bones have been found in the walls of the Chapell abattoir in Paris.

This is a memorial chapel that was built in the 19th century on the site of the former Madelin Cemetery. That cemetery is where Louis the Sixteenth and Marie Antoinette were buried after being executed during the French Revolution when this chapel was built. There remains, or at least the remains people were pretty sure were theirs, had been exhumed and re-entered at the Basilica of Santini's Madeline Cemetery was one of the ones established to hold the remains of people who were guillotined during the French Revolution in the reign of terror.

It closed in 1794 and before the bones were discovered in the chapel walls, it was believed that all the remains had been removed and ultimately placed in the ossuary in the Paris catacombs.

We covered the catacombs on the show in October of 2019, but it turns out there are actually four ossuaries in the walls of the lower chapel. They may contain the remains of as many as 500 people. Some of them are among the most prominent people to be guillotined, including Madame Dubarry and Olimpia Googe. As a super quick note and changing gears quite a bit, in June, NASA announced that its headquarters building in Washington, D.C., would be named after engineer Mary Winston Jackson, who we covered on the show in February of 2019.

And in our last update for this edition of Unearthed, here's the headline from the art newspaper that is dated June 18th, 2020. Quote, Has Yale's mysterious Voynich manuscript finally been deciphered? Every time someone writes that headline, I just want to call their office and go, No, baby, no.

What follows reads pretty much like every other Voynich manuscript update we have talked about over the years, of which there have been many, which is why I say that we could say that. So it seems safe to say it is not. No, baby, no.

To answer your question, this one also seems to get a lot less traction than a lot of the previous. You know, outsider says that they have cracked the code based on the apparently specious reasoning. Yeah, I my very favorite to the ones of, like, bored hobbyist crack's Voynich manuscript in 10 days. And I'm always like, this reads like a quick weight loss.

And like it says, no, no. Oh, okay. Do you want to take a quick break before we get into some scientific stuff? Let's do. Hey, it's Bobby Bones, executive producer of Make It Up as we Go, the brand new podcast from Audio Up and I Heart Radio brought to you exclusively by Unilever's Noor and Magnum Brands. The story follows a songwriter's journey as well as the songs themselves and how they make it to country radio from executive producer Miranda Lambert and creators Scarlett Burke and Jared Goosestep, a story inspired by the competitive world of Nashville writing rooms featuring original music by Scarlett Burke, director and executive producer, featuring some of the biggest names in country, including The Cool Guy and everything now.

Nowadays, everything, just like now it's. Monday, a Saturday night, make it up as we go only on the podcast network in association with audio of media created by Scarlett Burke and Jared Goosestep. Next, as Holly alluded to before the break, we have a few things that fit at the intersection between science and history.

First, according to various headlines, you can see the 12th century murder of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, in a seventy two metre long ice core from the Swiss Italian Alps. That sentence might seem like kind of a stretch.

Sensational.

Yeah, that does kind of skip a step. Beckett was killed by four of King Henry the second knights in 11 70 after a long dispute between the archbishop and the monarch over the interplay between ecclesiastical and secular law. The king later performed an act of public penance for his role in all of this, and he also arranged and funded the construction of several monasteries. Those monasteries are really where this ice core comes in. The ice core shows an increase in lead pollution toward the end of the 12th century.

And then tax records from that same period show an uptick in English lead and silver production. So the conclusion here is that both the production and the pollution traced back to the materials that were needed for the roofs of those monasteries that were built after the murder of Thomas Beckett.

These researchers also traced correlations between lead production, atmospheric lead and other political events, wars and crusades between 11 70 and 12 20. They concluded that Britain was the major source of lead pollution during this period. And another Thomas Beckett news.

There is now a 3D rendering of the original shrine of Thomas Beckett, which was destroyed during the Protestant Reformation. This recreates what the shrine would have looked like in the year 14 zero eight, and it was released to the public for the 800 anniversary of the translation of Beckett's remains from the crypt in Canterbury Cathedral to this shrine jumping tracks once again in what has been described as a real breakthrough. A team publishing in the journal Nature has developed a new way to determine the age of pottery.

Radiocarbon dating only works on organic material, but pottery is mostly inorganic. And this means that a lot of the time people have to figure out the age of pottery by comparing it to organic materials from the same site, rather than being able to test the pottery itself. In the words of Professor Richard Evershed from the University of Bristol, who led the research team, quote, Being able to directly date archaeological pots is one of the holy grails of archaeology.

The method described in the paper accurate compound specific 14 speed dating of archaeological pottery vessels doesn't exactly say the pottery itself. It tests the lipid residues left behind when the pottery was used in food preparation. To do this, researchers have to use high resolution nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and mass spectrometry to pinpoint the residues and then to confirm that they are pure enough to provide an accurate date. The team used their method on pottery fragments that had already been precisely dated through other methods, and they found that it was extremely accurate.

It's possible that this method could narrow the date range for a piece of pottery down to a human lifespan.

This is something that was it was actually announced before our most recent Unearthed installment came out. But it was more heavily promoted just afterward. And a lot of very excited people tagged us into things on Twitter that were like, here's something you can talk about on the next Unearthed. Moving on, forestry and land. Scotland has been using drone surveys conducted by a company called Skyscape Survey to create 3D models of terrain. And in May, they announced that they had completed a survey of an earthen rampart that's known as Wallace's House.

The resulting contour model roughly matches a survey map of that same area that was published in 1857. Headlines about this work read along the lines of William Wallace Hill Fort Discovered. But this was really an aerial survey and modeling of an area that was already known and previously mapped. And though it's long been associated with William Wallace, he died in 13 05. So centuries passed between his death and the creation of that 1857 survey map. In the words of Forestry and Land Scotland archaeologist Matt Ritchie quote, Could the fort really have been built by William Wallace and his men?

I'd like to think so. And either way, the survey has added a new chapter to an old story. Yeah, sort of.

The popular lore is that it was Wallace's, but like, I haven't quite substantiated that at this point. Researchers from UC Davis have concluded that Neanderthals preferred to use the bones of specific animals when making leather working tools known as Le Soir, according to the analysis, the tools are mostly made from bovine bones. So things like Bison and Aurox, but based on other bones that were part of the same deposit, reindeer were actually the ones that were more commonly used as a food source.

So the use of bovine bones seems to have been intentional.

Reindeer bone would have been a lot more plentiful and easy to come by, but bovine bone specifically the ribs would have been larger and more rigid for making these tools.

Maybe the coolest part of all of this. The team didn't want to damage the bones, to collect samples to analyze, so they used residues from inside the plastic containers where the bones had been stored. And that was enough material to analyze through a mass spectrometer. Now we're going to move on to a few other things related to books and letters for fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls that were believed until now to be blank, have been discovered to actually contain text, just not text that's visible to the naked eye.

The government of Jordan had given these fragments to a leather expert back in the 1950s to study their composition. Seemed like good candidates to do that work because everyone thought they were blank. After that work was complete, the fragments were placed in storage and then they eventually made their way to the University of Manchester. Professor Joan Taylor was looking through the collection for items that might warrant further study and discovered a mark that looked like a possible letter. That find led a team to image fifty one scroll fragments using multispectral imaging.

Based on that work, four of the fragments do contain readable text. The largest of them contains 15 or 16 letters, including the word Shabbat or Sabbath. In other Dead Sea Scrolls news after the scrolls were first discovered in caves in 1946, they were really excavated in a methodical way, and many of them passed through an assortment of traders and dealers before being gathered for study. Plus, the scrolls have disintegrated over the last two thousand years, meaning that what we describe as the Dead Sea Scrolls is really about twenty five thousand fragments that don't necessarily carry any indication of which pieces go together or what order they were written in.

Sometimes there are newer copies of a text that can serve as a guide, but that is not always the case. So one team is trying to resolve some of this by using DNA fingerprinting to match up fragments that were written on skins that all came from the same animal. Logically, they probably go together. And it's also possible that fragments that came from closely related animals like, say, two different cows from the same herd, they might be connected as well.

The team has made some surprising discoveries, one being that fragments, including the biblical book of Jeremiah, actually came from two completely different animals, one a sheep and one a cow, suggesting that these might actually be two different copies of the same book that have been merged together during the research process.

And now we'll move on to something that's sort of book adjacent archaeologists and London may have found the remains of the Red Lion Theatre, which was the first known Purpose-built Theatre of the Elizabethan era. The theatre was built around 15 67, although its exact location has been the subject of debate. This excavation took place in advance of construction work, and it unearthed a building that roughly matches the dimensions of the Red Lion, which we know because of its being mentioned in two lawsuits in 1967 in 1069, the excavation also found the remains of other buildings built over the century or so that followed, including what may have been the Red Lion.

In that find included two beer cellars, complete with bottles and tankards. I know I love the fact that we know the dimensions of this theatre because of lawsuits.

It makes me feel less crabby about litigious people. I'm like, well, they're creating a historical record.

I also didn't go down the rabbit hole of figuring out exactly what the lawsuits were about, but I'm imagining it was the neighbors being crabby about the theater noise. And now we can just on that note, take a little quick break for a sponsor. Whenever I work on these unearthed episodes, I always wind up with some random discoveries that seem pretty cool, but they don't really fit together into a category and I just throw them into a pile that I call popery, like on Jeopardy!

This is where we are. Researchers have tried to resolve the question of whether bronze swords that have been found in various parts of Europe were made for decorative or ceremonial purposes or if they were used as weapons and they did this by making replicas of them and fighting with them. This is part of a bigger project known as the Bronze Age Combat Project.

I feel like this is the dream for so many people, if not the first time we've talked about doing stuff with replica weapons, like there was one where there were javelin throwers throwing.

But this one to me is more delightful to fighting with the bronze swords.

Oh, yeah. For this research, Rafael Hermann of the University of Goulden commissioned seven cast bronze swords and then struck them against one another in a methodical way and recorded the results, since that's not actually like combat. He also worked with some medieval combat enthusiasts who dueled with the replicas while being recorded with high speed cameras. And then the team compared the where marks from these duels to more than 2500, where Marks found on 110 actual Bronze Age swords.

So what they found was that, yes, it appears that even though bronze is a pretty soft material, that doesn't necessarily seem ideal for making swords out of these swords were actually used for fighting. The team also found that the weather patterns on those 110 Bronze Age swords were connected to the swords age and where it was found. So that suggests that there were very specific and precise fighting techniques that arose in different areas and evolved over time.

The team used similar methods to study Bronze Age, spears and shields as well. They published their results in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory in April under the title Bronze Age Swordsmanship. New insights from experiments and where analysis moving on a clay pipe found by an amateur bottle hunter in Tasmania in 2016 has turned out to be one of the oldest known depictions of the now extinct thylacine, also called the Tasmanian Tiger. It is also the first clay pipe known to have been made locally in Tasmania rather than imported to the island from somewhere else.

The pipes, age and origins are a bit of a mystery, though. The bottles it was found with date back to about 1830, suggesting it's almost 200 years old. But the pipestem is decorated with a kookaburra and Kookaburras were not introduced into Tasmania until 1983. It is possible that whoever made the pipe had lived in Australia or New Guinea, or that it actually depicts some other bird.

I learned as I was reading about this, there's a whole organization that's specifically dedicated to tracking down depictions and other evidence of of thylacines, which I just I was like, that's a great, great interest for somebody to have and pursue so excitedly.

Archaeologists near Verona, Italy, have been unearthing the floor mosaics and foundations of a Roman villa dating back to the third century. This is not actually a new discovery. The villa was first found back in the 1920s, but it wasn't excavated at that time. It did take some hunting to find it again. In more recent years, though, excavation work started in October of twenty nineteen and it continued until February. And then that had to be suspended until May because of the pandemic.

A lot of people tagged us into a Twitter thread about that that described it as what could be the year's biggest discovery. But really all the information that there is to share about it at this point is what we just said. And then like a handful of pictures, just like five pictures, I think they are really pretty. I don't want to take away from the fact that it does look like a very beautiful flower mosaic. But like at this point, it's not clear if there's something that's clearly setting it apart from the many other Roman era forms.

Mosaics that have survived until today don't really know yet. All very preliminary. In other news, archaeologists excavating a song Dynasty Tomb in China's Hunan province have unearthed a burial site of a married couple. It was pretty common for spouses to be buried together. But what makes this team more unique is the element that was described as a Ferrybridge was a small window connecting the two sections of the tomb, which is an indicator that this couple would continue their marriage in the afterlife.

Love this story so much. Me too. So sweet. I want a Ferrybridge, except I don't want to be buried.

We have we've only got one edibles and potables discovery to talk about this time around. So we're putting that one here. Research at three sites in eastern Ethiopia has revealed that halal butchering practices and Islamic dietary standards predate the first major mosques and Muslim burial sites that are there by 400 years. Those major religious sites were built around the 12th century, although it is possible that there were smaller mosques built earlier than that, which have not yet been discovered.

In addition to that find, they found evidence that Hawala, which is one of the three sites that was studied of imported fish that had been brought in from the Red Sea since they did not find the fish heads. This suggests that the fish were being processed and preserved when they were caught before being transported into the region came from Cannery Row.

Switching gears again, we have got a couple studies related to the Amazon. According to a paper published in the journal Nature, people in southwest Amazonia about 10000 years ago created what is described as artificial forest islands. Today, the area is covered by forested areas surrounded by Savannah. And the savannah is flooded from December through March. But people built mounds that would have stayed above the water level during the rainy season, allowing trees to grow. Thus the forest islands.

This conclusion followed remote sensing of 61 archaeological sites in northern Bolivia.

This adds to just a growing body of knowledge about how much people influenced the forest itself before Europeans arrived. Their research in the same area also suggests that people in the Amazon started started domesticating manioc about 11000 years ago, meaning that this region is one of the places on Earth where people started domesticating plants all at roughly the same time. It lines up with rice, domestication and what's now China grain domestication in the Middle East, bean and squash, domestication and Mesoamerica and potato and quinoa domestication in the Andes.

According to a study published in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography, soil enrichment techniques used in eastern and southern Amazonia before the arrival of Europeans continues to influence the region's biodiversity today.

Specifically, they compared Flora growing in Amazonian dark earth that's usually shortened as Hédi, and they compared it with Flora in non-native soil.

The Dark Earth was created as the region's early inhabitants used charcoal and food waste to enrich the soil.

So the researchers found that these areas with dark earth still have richer plant diversity than areas without it. Areas with Dark Earth also had a higher and more nutrients present in the soil. There are definitely some darker areas that are still being used by local and indigenous populations. But the soil also continued to be richer, with more diverse plant life and places where it hasn't been actively used in centuries. Shipwreck time, which will make some of our listeners happy. The remains of a shipwreck in York, Maine, have been tentatively identified as the defiance, which was originally built in 1750 for studying this wreck has been pretty tricky.

Its position on the beach means that it's continually being uncovered and reburied by the sea, especially after storms. Its first documented appearance was in 1958. After that, it vanished again before remerging in 1978, 2007, 2013 and 2018. Marine archaeologist Stephen Clasen worked to ID the find by sending a sample of one of the timbers to the Cornell University Tree Ring Laboratory, which suggested that it came from a tree that had been cut down in 1753. With that starting point, Clasen dug through Notari records for a match.

The defiance wrecked on York Beach in a storm in 1769, and it had initially been built in Massachusetts in 1750. For all, four of the crew that were aboard survived the wreck and interviews.

Clasen stressed the need to try to conserve what is left of this wreckage because every time it reemerges from the sand, people flocked to the area to look at it and take pictures and some of them go home with. Pieces of the wreck that they have taken as souvenirs. Happens all the time for various things. In another piece of news, a two thousand year old boat has been found under the waterfront in Port, Croatia. This is one of three similar boats that have been found on land in Croatia rather than as part of an underwater survey.

So this fine has been described as a particularly well-preserved example of a Soane ship. The wood itself has been preserved as well as the wooden nails and the rope that was used to actually. So the vessel together, although this seems to be a Roman ship, the sewing technique that was used to build it is older. The battleship USS Nevada was struck when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7th, 1941. The vessel managed to get under way before being hit again and its crew had to beach it after it was repaired.

It survived the battle of ABTA, the D-Day invasion and the invasion of Iwo Jima and Okinawa before serving as a target during atomic bomb tests after the war was over. It survived nuclear tests that Bikini Atoll and although it was radioactive at that point, it was towed to a point off the Hawaiian Islands where it continued to be used for target practice, which it continued to survive before being scuttled by an aerial torpedo in nineteen forty eight. The Navy knew its approximate location, but teams from private firms Search Incorporated and Ocean Infinity discovered the actual wreckage in May of this year.

Their ships had stayed at sea due to the coronavirus pandemic, which also put a pause on some of their other commercial work.

Yeah, I interpreted their statements about it as basically saying, well, we're out here on the ocean, let's look around.

We all want to go look for a shipwreck.

We have one repatriation to talk about this time around. The Exeter City Council in England has voted to return a collection of items that belonged to sick, sick of First Nations Chief Crowfoot to the sick, sick of first nation in Alberta, Canada. These items had been at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum. That acquisition had dated back to the signing of Treaty seven between the government of Canada and five First Nations. One of those First Nations being the six figure who are also known as the Blackfoot.

Formal negotiations for the return of the items started back in 2010, with visits from six a nation to Exeter and vice versa in 2013 and 2014.

But then the negotiations stalled. For years, a climate controlled room had already been prepared to house the regalia at Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, but the actual return has been delayed.

Like so many things we've talked about on this unearthed due to covid-19 travel restrictions, as of when we are recording this, it is uncertain when this may happen. The success of First Nation is in the middle of a spike in covid cases. Like so many indigenous and First Nations communities like things seem treacherous. Yet at this moment we have to exhumations to talk about, both of which also could have been update's. We have talked about the exhumation of Salvador Dali for paternity testing in previous installments of Unearthed in May, a Spanish court ordered a bell who had requested the exhumation in order to prove whether she was Salvador Dali's daughter to pay.

All the costs associated with it is an estimated 7000 euros. Our previous updates included the fact that the DNA tests revealed that Dolly was not her father, but not that police. Arabel had then filed an additional suit, contending that the chain of custody had been interrupted when the remains were gathered and analyzed. So she's contesting that whole thing.

Yeah, the judge did not find that to be substantiated.

In April, the Texas Historical Commission approved a plan to exhume four sets of remains from the Alamo to allow for ongoing preservation work there. The plan was to temporarily keep the remains in a collections vault and then once the work is complete to reinterred them on Alamo grounds.

There have been several controversies connected to this exhumation as different groups of people whose ancestors are buried at the Alamo have disagreed on how to proceed. One issue is DNA testing. The committee that established a protocol for how human remains should be handled at the Alamo included representatives from several federally recognized indigenous peoples, many of whom do not agree with conducting DNA testing of remains for religious or cultural reasons.

But those representatives do not include the Tap Pellom Kawi Tech Nation, which is not federally recognized. And it is possible that a third or more of the people buried at the Alamo were quite ETEC in speaking peoples. Unlike many of the other nations involved. Pelham is in favor of DNA testing in June, the Texas Historical Commission also recognized the Alamo's church as a verified cemetery, but denied requests to have the area surrounding the church recognized as an unverified cemetery that would have affected ongoing work at the Alamo Plaza.

That work is also highly controversial. I learned that there is a whole world of controversy about the Alamo and the restoration projects in the Plaza projects that is all going on right now.

And then our final thing, this, according to Tracey, is the best headline award. It wouldn't for me because of subject matter, but it is the origin of Species. Capraro ID reliably predicts sources of ancient poop. So we have talked about various discoveries that have been made through analyzing coprolites or fossilized feces on the show before.

One of the challenges in this work is figuring out exactly which species the feces came from. This can be especially challenging for researchers when they're trying to distinguish human feces from dog feces because they tend to have a similar size and composition. Prehistoric humans and dogs also often lived in the same place and eat similar food. They can even be tricky to tell them apart using DNA analysis because some ancient cultures use dogs as a food source and dogs current dogs would still do this, I'm sure have also scavenged human feces for food.

Current dogs will scavenge any animals feces.

Yeah. Any any feces. Yeah. Caparo ID tackles this problem combining analysis of the host DNA with machine learning predictions based on analysis of modern gut microbiomes to accurately determine the source of the feces. In the words of Christina, we're in her senior author of the study. Quote, One unexpected finding of our study is the realization that the archaeological record is full of dog poop.

I just felt like that was I could not end on any other story than that one, although, you know, as an animal person, that just does not surprise me.

Of course, no dog. I interpreted that as meaning there is poop that we thought was human. Right. Which is hilarious. Yeah.

Tracy, you had mentioned to me before we started that we're not doing listener mail for this one. Not exactly. Rather than trying to read any one particular email, we have gotten several emails and notes on Facebook and tweets and whatnot over the last few weeks asking about our website and we've talked about it previously on the show. But since it's been a while and since clearly folks are still like, hey, what happened to your website? I thought we would recap it again and also give folks some tips for finding stuff like finding old episodes of the show.

So basically our old website, which was full of pictures and tags and show notes and whatnot, that was custom made when we were part of a website called HowStuffWorks and had a bunch of features that had been cobbled together over many, many years from a bunch of sources, like the tags were a carryover from when our podcast website used to be on WordPress and when we stopped using WordPress, the HowStuffWorks team like Custom made a tag feature to carry all that over.

So in twenty seventeen, the HowStuffWorks podcasts spun off into our own business and then I heart radio bought that business in September of twenty eighteen. And then for more than a year after that, the remaining HowStuffWorks team kept on maintaining the old website that just could not continue forever. At some point we had to move on to the infrastructure of the company that actually owns our podcast. And so that happened. I think that was at the beginning of this year.

At this point, does that sound right? No, I think it was earlier than that. But maybe I'm wrong.

I think I feel like it was at the beginning of this year because I have a spreadsheet that has all the old tags on it and it ends December twenty nineteen. I mean, that who knows that it's all kind of blurring together. Things that happened in January of this year feel like they happened before I was born at this point.

So we were working on a solution, at least for the show notes, because we both feel like the notes are really important to show people what the sources are for all of our episodes and to give credit to everybody who has worked on those sources for doing their work. We were working out a solution for that and then a pandemic happened. And that just totally upended both the like the the logistical and the the working, like the people and the financial resources like all of that just got like somebody just just just shook the picture.

Blanket with all of that stuff on it, yeah, so I don't we don't know at this point when we will have a show, no resources. So our own thing that people can access. So easiest way to find old episodes of the show on the Internet is to Google the topic you're looking for and the words missed in history, all as part of the same search. That's actually how I was doing it with the old website. Yeah, I do that all the time.

Yeah, it works 90 to 95 percent of the time. There's a tiny number of of episodes that for some reason Google just hasn't indexed. And there are a few things that are named weirdly that don't come up. But 90 percent of the time that will work. The easiest way to scroll through a whole list of the episodes is actually to just use an app like, for example, Apple podcasts like that, that if you are subscribed to the show, we'll show you the entire archive that you can just scroll on through if you need specific shout outs for something like let's say you're working on a school project and it would really help you out to be able to see the sources for an episode.

Email us within reason. We will try to help you out. We did not have transcripts of all the old episodes, which is something that we have really wanted to have for a long time. And we don't for a lot of reasons that are outside of our control individually. But for the episodes that we did have transcripts of, I still have those transcripts. So if you need one email and and if we have it, I will send it to you.

Our email address is History podcast. I heart radio dotcom. Our previous HowStuffWorks email address is now officially finally no longer delivering email to us anymore. That continued to work for many months. So if you want to email us, that's the the one to use. It is History podcast that I heart radio dotcom. Do you have anything to add to all of that? Well, I had a question for you because I thought Apple only had three hundred episodes.

Apple only has 300 episodes in the store.

So if you're in the Apple podcast store.

Pretty much any podcast that doesn't have a lower limit manually set, it's a maximum of 300 episodes, but if you are subscribed to the show and you look in your library, it should have all of it, if you like, how I staged that question so that we would know, because I know it comes up all the time.

It does come up and I mean that.

I can't speak to how every single podcast app works because there are so many of them and most of them are free. And you can try as many as you want to find one that suits your needs. But that also means that, like, we usually can't answer individual questions about how anything besides Apple podcast works, because that's the one that's like been around the longest and is you know, that's the that's the app that's on my phone. Although I listen to podcasts like a caveman by manually thinking a click wheel iPod to a computer, I'm still somewhat befuddled by this practice, but I'm happy.

And who cares? It's not even that. It's just that I've been doing it for so long. And I especially because because of the pandemic, I'm no longer walking to go on errands nearly as much. Also, to be frank, I'm not cleaning as much. And those are the times that I usually listen to podcasts.

So I have this giant backlog of podcasts and like trying to recreate that on my phone. So listen, like a more up to date human person is just like the one thing I don't have time to. I have plenty of time. I don't have the mental space to do it right now. Fair.

I don't have the middle space for a lot of things. I'm sure that's like everyone. Again, we hope everyone is being able to take as good care of themselves as possible.

I know things are incredibly hard right now for most people in a lot of ways.

So anyway, if you'd like to write to us about this or any other podcast or history podcast that I heart radio dotcom, and then you'll also find us on social media, edmiston history, frijoles like for example, that's our Twitter name is Misted History. Our website, as we have said, is missing history dot com.

And you can subscribe to our show on the I Heart radio app and Apple podcasts.

And anywhere else you get a podcast. Stuff you missed in history class is a production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts for My Heart radio visit by her radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.