Unearthed! in Autumn 2023, Part 1

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. It is time for our next installment of Unearthed. If you're new to the show, this is when we talk about things that have been literally or figurably unearthed over the last three months. In part one of this two part installment of Unearthed, we have some oldest things, some books and letters, a couple of projects that are specifically related to gender in some way, edibles and potables and animals. And then on Wednesday we will have some other stuff, including some fines that seemed particularly suited to this being October and the lead up to Halloween. As usual in these episodes, we will kick it off with some updates to things we have talked about on the show before. So back in twenty fourteen, we did an episode on the embalming and mummification rituals of ancient Egypt, and in August a team of researchers from Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology announced that they had recreated a cent that came from this process around fourteen fifty BCE. They analyzed residues from canopic jars, finding that, as expected, they contained beeswax, plant oils, fats, various tree resins, and a balsamic substance. They use these findings to formulate what they describe as the Scent of Eternity, which is planned to be used as an additional sensory element at an upcoming exhibition at the Moseguard Museum in Denmark. I sure hope they also make a strange perfume out of it. That does sound like it could be like a nice earthy kind of suing kind of yeah, yeah yeah. So next, an inventory of the art collection of King Charles the First has led to the rediscovery of one of Artemisia Gentileski's works, that is Susannah and the Elders, which was commissioned by Queen Henrietta Maria. To be clear, this is not the same Susannah and the Elders that's generally recognized as her earliest signed work. That painting was created in sixteen ten. Gentileeski painted several different versions of this scene, and this specific one dates to the sixteen thirties. This painting had been wrongly attributed to the French School in an inventory at least a century ago, and it had also darkened over time, making parts of the picture almost impossible to see. Since its rediscovery, it has been through conservation and study and it is now on display at the Queen's Drawing Room in Windsor Castle. Our episode on Artemisia Gentileski was most recently a se Saturday Classic on May sixth of this year. In September of twenty twenty, we did a six impossible episodes called There's a Book About That, in which we talked about some topics that were tricky to cover on this show because so much research would have to come from one specific book on the subject. And one of those books was The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lax, written by Rebecca Sclute, and it is about Henrietta Lax, whose cancer cells were collected without her consent while she was a patient at Johns Hopkins in nineteen fifty one. Those cells became the immortalized cell line known Ashila, which has been used in medical research and pharmaceutical development, with some companies profiting off of their products and discoveries that came directly from their work with those cells. Earlier this year, members of LAX's family reached a settlement with biotechnology company ThermoFisher Scientific, which was one of the companies that made use of LAX's cells in their work. The family's a turn has held a news conference on August first, which was LAX's birthday, and they issued a statement which read quote, members of the family of Henrietta Lax and Thermo Fisher have agreed to settle the litigation filed by Henrietta Las's estate in the U. S District Court in Baltimore. The terms of the agreement will be confidential. The parties are pleased they were able to find a way to resolve this matter outside of court and will have no further comment about the settlement. In one of our twenty twenty one installments of Unearthed, we talked about research confirming that the Slai watooth nation had sustainably harvested salmon in the Pacific Northwest for at least one thousand years. A paper published in the journal Plus one in August builds on that research. While the earlier study documented sustainable fishing for chum salmon from four hundred BC to twelve hundred CE, this study confirms that the same practices were in use both before and after that period from eight hundred and fifty BCE to sixteen fiftycee Chum salmon are susceptible to overfishing, but this research suggests that they were abundant in this part of what's now British Columbia for that entire time, meaning that the harvesting practices being used helped support a healthy population of the fish. In the latest news on the natural mummy known as Utzy, research into his DNA suggests that he was descended from people from Anatolia in what's now Turkia, and that really seems to be most of his ancestry, suggesting that most of the people in the area where he was from were all descended from Anatolian farmers, and that this community was isolated from other communities that might have had other genetic ancestry. This research also suggests that he had dark eyes and darker skin than he's generally been depicted with, and also that he may have been going bald. This genome has been sequenced before this, back in twenty twelve, but the more recent work has used more advanced methods than more available then. This was published in the journal Cell genomics under the title high Coverage Genome of the Tyrolean Iceman reveals unusually high Anatolian farmer ancestry. We've had a lot of Utsy updates on the show, and prior hosts covered him in a full episode in January of twenty twelve in an episode they titled Utsy Everyone's Favorite copper age Man. In July of twenty fourteen, we did an episode that looked at cosmetics history around the world, and we've got a find related to that. Archaeologists working at the Roman Era city of Eisenoi and Turkia have unearthed an entire cosmetics shop. This shop dates back at least two thousand years and they found a makeup palette and tools, jewelry and hair accessories. The cosmetics included makeup pigments that may have been used as blush or eyes show shadow, and the most common colors were red and pink. They also found lots of oyster shells, which were often used as holders for cosmetic pigments in the Roman Era. Next, in our July twenty twenty on Earthed, we talked about research involving Amazon Dark Earth, which are areas of dark particularly fertile soil in the Amazon. That research compared plant life that was growing in dark Earth to plant life growing outside of it found that areas in the dark Earth had richer plant diversity, a higher pH and more nutrients in the soil. In that earlier installment of Unearthed, we described this dark Earth as having been created by the region's early inhabitants, who used substances like charcoal and food waste to enrich the soil. That made it kind of surprising to read headlines from September of this year which were along the lines of ancient Amazonians intentionally created fertile dark Earth. Apparently, there's been some debate about whether Amazon dark Earth was intentionally created or was an accidental byproduct or the day to day activities of the ancient peoples who lived in the area. Well, according to research published in the journal Science Advances, the creation of Amazon dark Earth was indeed intentional. This research combined soil analysis, prior ethnographic observations, and interviews with and observations of people in modern indigenous communities. Much of the fieldwork for this took place in the Quikuru Indigenous Territory, which is home to both Quikuru ancestral sites and modern Quirkuru villages. In both modern practices and in the archaeological record, dark earth occurs in a pattern that is a bit like spokes on a wheel, with the dark earth focused on a central point and then radiating outward. Modern and ancient samples of dark earth also had a similar chemical compt position. So the researchers concluded that as we sort of took for granted in that discussion back in twenty twenty, early inhabitants of the Amazon had intentionally worked things like food scraps, charcoal, and waste into the soil, creating this carbon rich, fertile dark earth, which has remained over the course of hundreds or thousands of years. When I saw these articles about this, I was like, wait, was this question? I did not realize it might have been moving on. The third excavation in the search for victims of the nineteen twenty one Tulsa Race Masker started in September. Earlier searches have found the remains of sixty six people. We talked about the genealogical research into the identities of some of those people in our Summer Unearthed this year. This set of excavations ended on September twenty ninth, with fifty nine graves found and seven sets of remains exhumed. All but two of the graves found in this excavation were unmarked and previously unknown. The seven sets of remains that were exhumed were all in simple wooden boxes, which is what investigators had been looking for based on descriptions in news reports from the time of the massacre. The plan is to conduct forensic analysis on these remains and collect DNA samples if possible, and then to bury them in the place they were exhumed from. Viola Ford Fletcher, who survived the massacre, also wrote a book on it with her grandson Ike Howard. This book is called Don't Let Them Bury My Story, The oldest living survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre in her own words, and it was published in August. And in our last update in July, Hartwig Fisher, director of the British Museum, announced that he would be stepping down in twenty twenty four, but then he resigned in August, and that resignation came days after the museum announced that about two thousand objects had been stolen from its collection. Peter Higgs, a curator who had worked there for thirty years, was fired after allegedly selling items from the collection on eBay. Apparently, Fisher and others at the museum had been warned about the thefts in twenty twenty one, but had not taken action. The museum launched a section of its website dedicated to trying to find and recover the stolen items in September, obviously appalling it is most relevant to show updates because it means someone else will have to take up the question of the Parthenon marbles, which we covered in a two parter on in January of twenty twenty. And now we will take a quick sponsor break before we talk about some oldest things. We have several finds that are being described as the oldest or maybe as one of the oldest. First on Kodiak Island, Alaska. Archaeologists from the Alutic Museum and Archaeological Repository have unearthed some woven grass mats that are believed to be three thousand years old. This makes them the oldest well documented examples of Kodiak Elutic supiac weaving. They were found in the remains of a sod house that had burned and collapsed, and pieces of charred woven material were found under what was left of the walls of this sod house. These are beliefs who have been grass mats used for sleeping. It's likely that the practice of weaving is thousands of years older than these specific examples, but because these woven pieces were made from grass and other plant materials, it's rare to find intact examples in the archaeological record. These only survived because they had been protected by the remains of the burned building. Next, we have what may be the oldest baskets in southern Europe. These were part of a collection of objects found in a cave in Spain in the nineteenth century, but recent carbon fourteen dating has shown that these date to between ninety five hundred and sixty two hundred years ago. The baskets are on the older end of that timeline, and this is the first direct evidence of Mesolithic hunter gatherer people's making baskets like We already knew that people were making baskets after that, but not quite this early. Other objects that were also part of this collection included sandals and tools, and the sandals, which are made of grass are also among the oldest. They're roughly sixty two hundred years old, and they may be the oldest sandals ever found. Researchers in Albania believed that they have found the oldest still villages in Europe. This is on the Albanian side of Lake Ohrid and the village dates back to between six thousand and fifty eight hundred BCE. That's several hundred years older than other known stilt villages. This village seems to have been very heavily fortified. Divers found tens of thousands of spikes that were likely used for defensive purposes, but it's not clear why the people who lived at this village felt that they needed to do that. Like logically, there was obviously some kind of perceived threat, but we do not know exactly what that threat was. So if this sounded a little familiar, this is at the same lake, but it's a different stilt village than we talked about on Unearthed in twenty twenty one. That one was on the Macedonian side of Lake Orid and this one was on the Albanian side. So many stilt villages. Researchers in Zambia have found what may be the world's oldest wooden structure, one that dates back four hundred seven tventy six thousand years before the appearance of modern humans. This structure is made of a pair of logs with interconnecting notches, so sort of like Lincoln logs, and it may have been part of the foundation for a building. So this is a more complex use of wood and building than has previously been documented from this time period. A lot of the researchers who were interviewed about it expressed some surprise that pre Homo sapiens were able to construct something like this. These logs probably survived for as long as they did because they were submerged in water, so it's possible that this was not actually unusual. That other people were building similar Lincoln log like structures, but like other examples of this, have not survived until today. In our last oldest thing, archaeologists from a Fanagoria archaeological expedition have discovered one of the oldest known synagogues. Fanagoria was an ancient Greek city located on the Black Sea in what is now southern Russia. It was founded in the first century, so toward the end of the second Temple period of Jewish history. This was roughly four hundred years after the first known synagogues were established, but only about a dozen synagogues are known to have been built during the Second Temple period. This synagogue was a rectangular structure measuring twenty one by six meters that's sixty nine by twenty feet and divided into two rooms. Engravings have been discovered that include dates related to the synagogue's founding, along with the word synagogue, and religious imagery, including carvings of sort of manora like candle arrangements. There are also fragments of columns decorated with what looked like leaves. So now we're going to move on to some books and letters. Earlier this year, a donor sent some books to West Virginia University libraries and let the curator know that one of them seemed to be a library book. Once she started going through them, the curator discovered that the library book was James Clerk Maxwell's eighteen eighty one, an elementary treatise on electricity, which had been checked out from the new Bedford Free Public Library in Massachusetts. So usually when a library removes a book from its collection, it marks it in some way, like stamping it with the word discarded or withdrawn. This book didn't have any kind of marking like that, so it didn't seem like it had been officially removed from the library's collection. But it did still have one of those slips with dates stamped on it to mark when people had checked it out. I don't know if, like the youngest of our listeners, have seen these in library books, because they've mostly been replaced by computer systems now. The last stamp was a little unclear, but it had last been checked out on Valentine's Day of either nineteen oh four or nineteen oh five. That last digit is just a little bit smudgie. So the curator got in touch with the new Bedford Free Library and made arrangements to return this extremely overdue book, which is still in very good condition. The library received the book in late June, but news coverage about it didn't really start until early July. Stories on long overdue library books often talk about how much the fine would be if the library were to try to collect it. The New Bedford Free Library has capped its fines for overdue books at two dollars. This is not a Futurama moment where they go that book is now going to cost you one million, twenty seven hundred Yeah. Next. Beginning in sixteen fifteen, William Camden published Annals or the History of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth, Late Queen of England, containing all the important and remarkable passages of state, both at home and abroad during her long and prosperous reign, and that was in Latin. This was published in two parts, and it was the first official chronicle of Elizabeth's time on the throne, and Camden likely worked with other collaborators while creating it. Now researchers have used a range of imaging techniques to look at handwritten manuscripts of this book so that they could study Camden's writing process, including things that he struck out or paste it over or rewrote as he was writing it. Within the ten volumes of handwritten manuscripts, hundreds of pages were physically covered over, with the replacement pages adhered so tightly that they could not be removed to examine what was underneath without damaging the originals. William Cecil Lord Burley had asked Camden to write the Annals while Elizabeth was still living, but Lord Burley died in fifteen ninety eight, and then Elizabeth died in sixteen oh three and was succeeded by James, the sixth of Scotland. That meant that James became the person that Camden had to satisfy in terms of what he had, and some of this new research using imaging techniques to see what was under those pace that over pages, it's revealed that a lot of the changes generally made James look better than he might have looked otherwise. For example, one of Camden's revisions was the addition of Elizabeth naming James as her successor on her deathbed. James was widely regarded as her logical successor since he was the son of Elizabeth's cousin and rival, Mary, Queen of Scott's, but having Elizabeth specifically name him gave it all some additional weight. There's no other historical evidence for this happening, though, and other accounts describe Elizabeth as too ill to speak on her deathbed, so this seems like the kind of thing that Camden might have added in to please the King. Until now, Camden's work has been viewed as overall an impartial and accurate account of the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First, although in his own intro he did write quote things doubtful I have interpreted favorably, things secret and abstruse I have not pried into. But this new research suggests that James might have had a bigger influence on Camden's work than was really previously known. It's possible or even likely that James didn't ask for any of these changes directly, but that Camden was kind of censoring himself out of fear of displeasing the King. It is still to be seen whether this will lead to any new interpretations of Queen Elizabeth the First. Moving on, a framed sketch of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet walking into the sunset by illustrator E. H. Shepherd was found in a cellar drawer wrapped in a tea towel. This sketch is dated nineteen fifty eight, so more than thirty years after his original Winnie the Pooh illustrations were published, but since it is his original work and not a copy, it sold at auction for twenty seven thousand pounds. This illustration had belonged to Christopher Foyle, co founder of Foyle's Bookshop, and was found by his widow Kathy. This may have been drawn at one of a series of events called Foyle's Literary Lunches that were hosted by Christopher's aunt Christina. Frequently there would be famous literary guests at these lunches. I just loved the idea of Winnie the Pooh picture being found in its tea towel. Yes, there's something so sweet and perfect about it. And lastly, sort of book adjacent. An auction appraiser found a suffragist game called Panco Suffrages Versus Anti Suffragists in a cupboard during a home clearance. Panco is named for Emmeline Pankhurst and was a game for four, six or eight players. It's a card game with Suffrages suits in mauve and green and anti Suffrages suits in red and black. Players tried to collect full suits of six cards, and one they did, they had to call out the words that went along with that suit, like the call for One of the Suffrages suits was votes for women, and one of the anti Suffragist suits was jail, Jail, Jail. It seems like it might have been a very raucous game in some circles. These cards were illustrated by political cartoonist Edward Tennyson Reid, and they featured well known people from these suffrage and anti suffrage movements. It was distributed by the Women's Social and Political Union, which sold copies of this game for two shillings apiece. This copy of the game sold at auction for three hundred and twenty pounds in August, and it is not the only copy of this game that is still around. A search to confirm how much it sold for at auction brought up a number of other auction listings of other copies of the game from the last five or six years. I feel like if they made a commercially available copy of this and would sell like hotcakes. Yeah, I think I saw some PDFs of like all the card faces, so it might be possible to like print your own. However, we will take a break for another movement and we'll come back with some more findings. Next up, we have a couple of papers that are related to sex or gender in some way. First, a paper called sex based Parental Investment and Female Wealth Accumulation in Ancient California was published in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology in July. This was a collaboration involving the Moekma Alone tribe and researchers from universities in Utah and California. Researchers used different types of isotopes to explore how and where Alone ancestors lived as long as two thousand years ago. This research suggests that girls were breastfed for longer than boys. The team drew this conclusion by looking at isotopes in twos enamel, which suggested that girls were weaned at the age of about three years, while boys were weaned at the age of about two point six years. After being weaned, children's diets seemed to be the same regardless of their sex. The team also used isotope research to determine where people who were buried at a site in what is now the city of Santa Clara had come from, and those isotopes suggested that the women were local to the area, but the men were not together. This supports the idea that this was a matrilineal society, one in which women stayed in the village where they had been born while their male partners moved into that area. From somewhere else. The burials at the site also suggest that women were generally more wealthy than men were, because older women were usually buried with more wealth. These conclusions are based on a small number of burials, though there were twenty four sets of remains that were discovered at this burial site, twenty two of them were part of this study. Next new research has been published in the journal Scientific Reports under the title ad Lottle use equalizes female and male projectile weapon velocity. Throne spears and javelins have been around a lot longer than ad laddles have, and one hypothesis is that people started using ad lattels because it made it easier for people with a range of experience and ability to have roughly the same success as Hunters described in the press release about this research as the quote ad Lottel equalizer hypothesis. So, in working on Unearthed, I've been developing a fondness for the studies that involve getting living people to try to do something to see if it gives us a sense of how ancient people might have done it. So this time researchers had one hundred and eight people, all of them novices, a lot of them. Students from Kent State used both javelins and adladdles, and they found that using an adladdle increased the velocity of the projectile, and it also meant that the projectile's velocity was about the same regardless of the gender of the person who was using the adladdle. Of course, this doesn't prove anything one way or the other about whether ancient people's use of the adladdle varied according to gender, but it does suggest the possibility that women could have been hunters, and even that women may have been instrumental in the development of the adladdle, since it would have generally provided them with a bigger jump in performance. It also suggests that burials that include adladdles and other hunting tools might be interpreted similarly, regardless of the sex of the person buried. There yes, the sort of an argument against the idea that if a man's body is buried with hunting tools, he must have been a hunter, but if a woman's body is buried with hunting tools, that must have been symbolic. Now to move on, we have some edibles and potables, and the first one could also have gone into the section on the oldest things. Archaeologists have found the earliest evidence of curry in Southeast Asia, and by curry we mean the types of spices that are used in the dishes that Westerners often describe as curry. That is a really, really broad term that was coined by European colonists to describe all kinds of dishes that are usually served in a spice based sauce. In this case, archaeologists were working in southern Vietnam and found spices on stone tools used for pounding and grinding. Those spices included turmeric, ginger, fingerroot, sand ginger, galengal, clove, nutmeg, and cinnamon. These spices would have been brought to Vietnam from what's now India, Sri Lanka, and parts of Indonesia. So this finding suggests that people in what's now southern Vietnam were using these spices, probably in food, as long as two thousand years ago, and also that there was a maritime spice trade network spanning thousands of miles to get all of these spices to places where they were being used. It may also suggest some human migration patterns, since presumably people from South Asia brought some of these spices with them to Southeast Asia, as they either moved there or visited there. Another study of grindstones suggests that humans were processing plants into flour long before the development of agriculture, and possibly much earlier than scientists previously thought. These grindstones dated back to thirty nine thousand to forty three thousand years ago, when humans and Neanderthals were coexisting in parts of the world. One of the pestles examined may have been used by Neanderthals, suggesting that they may have known these food price techniques as well. Yet another finding of Neanderthals doing cool and interesting things that suggests they're smarter than they've long been given credit for. Next, a man digging a backyard swimming pool in Sterling, Scotland found a set of dolphin bones and a tool that was probably used to carve the dolphin's meat. These fines date back roughly eight thousand years and researchers have speculated that the dolphin washed ashore and that then local people butchered it for food. The tool that was used was made from deer antler, and it appears that its tip broke off as it was being used. And for our last food find We have talked about various conclusions drawn from the residue in vessels used to cook and store food. This time, research on metal cauldrons dating back to between thirty seven hundred and twenty nine hundred BCE suggests that people in the Caucasus were eating meat from deer, sheep and members of the cow family. That's not all that surprising, but this research also suggests that people were making feasts to feed large numbers of people at once, and this is really the earliest known example of people preparing a large feast for lots of people rather than a meal for a family or a smaller group. Now we will move on to a few animal finds to wrap up this episode. Archaeologists at Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire have found the remains of a small dog that dates back about eighteen hundred years. This dog was probably owned by a wealthy Roman family. The dog measured only about twenty centimeters or a little less than eight inches tall and had slightly bowed legs. A sketch of what the dog might have looked like kind of resembles a dot sound to me. It's got that long body and short legs. Doc sins were originally bred as hunting dogs, and they're long, narrow bodies were particularly good at getting into burrowing animals tunnels, and this site was a farm which was probably home to hunting and to other working dogs. But in news articles about this find, archaeologists have said they believe this may have been someone's pet. By this point, small dogs were definitely being kept as pets in some parts of the Roman Empire. Next, the tomb of Western Han dynasty emperor Wen has been found to contain a whole menagerie of animals, and some of them are particularly notable. There are tigers, buffalo oryx's yaks, peafowl, and monkeys, among others. There's a complete taper skeleton which was identified using its teeth and is the first complete taper skeleton found at a Chinese archaeological site. There is also a complete skeleton of a giant panda, and that's the first giant panda to be found in a Western Han emperor's mausoleum. These animals were found in twenty three sacrificial pits in an underground mausoleum that also included all kinds of food, pottery, games, and luxury goods. Basically an effort to recreate the environment of the Imperial Palace for after the emperor's death. Some of these animals were probably gifts that came to the palace from other regions, but the presence of the taper skeleton has raised some questions about whether there may have been taper in China. Two thousand years ago, it was believed that they were extinct in China. By that point, researchers planned to conduct DNA testing to confirm the animal species and to use stable isotope analysis to narrow down where they came from. Moving on, DNA research has suggested that Spanish and Portuguese colonists may have brought cattle from Africa to the Americas, rather than bringing cattle only from Spain as was previously thought. Christopher Columbus's second expedition is known to have brought Spanish cattle to the Caribbean in fourteen ninety three, and then there's a documentation of those cattles offspring, and then their offspring and so on being introduced to various Caribbean islands as well as Central and South America. So for a long time it's been believed that for centuries all the cattle in the Americas were descended from this one Spanish population, but new DNA research suggests that cattle were shipped to the Americas from Africa as well. This conclusion came from analysis on bones from archaeological sites dating back to the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Some of this is a little tricky to puzzle out, since there was ongoing trade including cattle between Spain and northern Africa, meaning that some Spanish cattle may have been interbred with cattle from parts of Africa, but researchers found some DNA that's associated only with cattle from Africa. Researchers concluded that Spanish colonists may have been bringing cattle from West Africa to the Americas by the early sixteen hundreds, more than a century earlier than was previously believed. So the assumption here is that enslaved Africans and African cattle were transported from the same parts of West Africa to the Americas. It was already known that enslaved Africans were a huge part of establishing cattle ranching in the Americas, and this would mean that those early ranchers may have been working with animals from where they lived, animals they were already familiar with how to handle. Lastly, author Julie Flavelle published a piece in Smithsonian Magazine. There relates a pretty tear jerking story about a Newfoundland dog who served on both sides of the Revolutionary War. So, first, this dog belonged to Continental Army General Richard Montgomery, who was killed at the Battle of Quebec. The dog then guarded Montgomery's body, refusing to let British soldiers near it after the battle was over. And then, according to a seventeen eighty three letter by Caroline Howe, the dog tried to dig him out of his grave. British Major General William Phillips then adopted the dog, naming him Rebel. Both Phillips and Rebel were later taken prisoner by the Continental Army. So the story goes on from there. But I started to feel like I was just paraphrasing the Smithsonian article, so I encouraged folks who are interested to go read it for themselves. It is called The Dog who Served on both Sides of the American Revolution, and it's at Smithsonian dot com. You will have more fines on Wednesday do we have listener mail in the meantime. We do have listener mail. In the meantime. We have listener mail that I have had marked to read for literal months, and for some reason I didn't read it. And this is from Robin wrote to us after we had talked about Barbette and Barbete. That's an episode that Holly did the research on. But Robin was commenting on something that I said, which is that I was really curious, like I don't really know what the vibe in Austin was like when Barbette was living versus its reputation today. So Robin wrote, Holly and Tracy loved the show as always. Thanks for always educating me during my work commutes and during the summer during my road trips. I'm writing because I listened to the Barbette and Square Dance episodes on the drive up from my dad's and coincident, late my mom moved to Austin a year after Barbett passed in nineteen seventy four. You had people like Willie Nelson and Asleep at the Wheel coming on the scene, lots of music and laid back attitudes. It was the birth of the infamous slogan other people from Texas used to describe Austin. My mom worked at an overnight diner that's since been torn down and let one of the normal patrons borrow her car overnight, and he brought it back in the morning with the entire back of the car filled with cantelopes. The perfect example of things that happened all the time that inspired keep Austin weird. I grew up to south of San Antonio, so I know how to pull a calf, but couldn't square dance to save my life. We did cumbia in school, but they weren't even real dances. It was more like someone had a radio. When it was too hot for us kids to be outside for pe, they threw us in the carpeted gym that was inside an old Nickelodeon theater from the nineteen teens. Unless run wild, and it always turned into a cumbia. I moved to Austin for college, and even as a paler than pale kid, the culture shock was real. So this sort of goes on to talk about the mix of ethnicities and races in the different neighborhoods, simultaneously embracing every type of person in certain places. So this goes on to talk more about some more recent things in Austin, how changes have been made more recently. But since my original question had about Barbett, I'm going to just move ahead to where Robin says all this to say, if Barbett had lived just a couple years longer, he could have seen Elton John perform here like my mom did, or see a time where Austin really started to blossom as the land that conservative Texas grew to hate. I also hope I see a day where the amount of money Lifeline Texans make will start to match the cost of living that's ballooned since the city has doubled in size. I hope for that. Also, this is one of the longer emails that we've gotten, and I'm just gonna wrap it up here since the Barbette and Austin Vibe part was really my curiosity. Robin also sent some pictures, which this is one of those times where the picture is bigger than my email window. So yeah, it's just some pictures with a very cute dog. Puppers always love the very cute dog. So thank you so much, Robin. I'm sorry it took me literal months to read this email that I had flagged to read months ago. I did not really realize that sort of the that the keep Austin weird sentimentality went back quite that far too, before I even was born. So thank you, thank you again for this email. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast, we're at history Podcasts aiheartradio dot com. We're all over social media and missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.