Unearthed! Autumn 2022, Part 2

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This is part two of our autumn installment of Unearthed. Part one was last week. If you're like, wait, what day of the week is it? This is normally a two part or on Monday and Wednesday. Well, we did it weird this time. Uh, this time around, we have some repatriations and some shipwrecks, some medical stuff. There was a whole lot of Viking stuff. We're gonna start, as so often, with the pot pourri done done dune. So Part two of Unearth usually starts off with some stuff that we had some hard times categorizing. That's what we're doing this time around as well. First, one of the biggest news stories of these three months involved research into seventeen eletans that were found in a well in Norwich, England in two thousand four. Radio carbon dating suggests that these people died between eleven sixty one and twelve sixteen, and DNA from six of the skeletons suggests that they had Oshkenazi Jewish ancestry, so together they suggests that these were victims of an anti Semitic massacre that was carried out by Christian soldiers who were on their way to Jerusalem for the Third Crusade in the year eleven ninety and then this massacre also had connections to the blood libel or that's the term for allegations against individual Jews or Jewish people as a whole, involving murders and ritual uses of blood. This idea is both widespread and false. It's like one of the biggest anti Semitic conspiracy theories. The first documented appearance of the blood libel was in Norwich in eleven forty four, after a boy named William died and Jewish people were accused of murdering him. This research was published as an open access paper in the journal Current Biology, and it also looks at the prevalence of genetic diseases that continue to be associated with Oshkenazi Jewish ancestry. The genomic sequencing involved in this research suggests that a population bottleneck that contributed to these genetic traits took place prior to the twelfth century, which is between four hundred and six hundred years earlier than was previously believed moving on. Archaeological work at the site of the Battle of Waterloo started in but then it had to be paused at the start of the COVID nineteen pandemic. Work has resumed this year and researchers have found bones from amputated human limbs, as well as the bones of three horses and what maybe a complete skeleton. It's likely that all of these were buried together quickly in an effort to deuced the spread of disease at a nearby field hospital. Although thousands of people were killed at the Battle of Waterloo, not very many remains have been found. One prevailing idea is that their bones were sold to make fertilizer. According to a paper published in the Journal of Conflict Archaeology in June, this may be the case, but further study is needed. Next archaeologists in China's Shanshi Province have found a small stone carving of a cocoon, probably a silkworm cocoon. This is really small, only about two point eight centimeters long and one point two centimeters wide, and it's probably around fifty two hundred years old. This is one of a lot of objects related to silkworms in some way that have been found in the area over the last century, and that includes some actual, well preserved cocoons. So this all helps document the silk industry's early history. Massive and deadly flooding struck eastern Tucky at the end of July. One of the buildings that has faced extraordinary damage is Apple Shop, which is a nonprofit cultural center that houses a huge archive of apple Lachian literature, film art, photographs, oral histories, diaries, records, and other irreplaceable items. About eight percent of apple Shops film reels and audio and video tapes have been affected by this flood. Apple Shop is also home to a media institute whose headquarters were submerged in the flood. At this point, recovery efforts involving all these archival materials are still ongoing, and it will probably take months or maybe even a year or more to just get a thorough sense of exactly what has been affected and what can be salvaged or restored. Apple Shop is not the only organization to be affected by this flood. Another is the Hindman Settlement School archives, which also include photographs, diaries, correspondents, musical instruments, and other has oracle collections and our last kind of random inclusion in this is that archaeologists working at Vindo Landa have found a mouthpiece for a musical instrument called a cornew buried under the floor of what was the Officers Clubhouse. So a cor new is a long horn that shaped in a single curve. Sometimes people described it as shaped like the letter G. So if you're playing it, the body of the instrument curls down from your mouth to roughly the hip level, and then it curves back up behind you so that the end with the bell on it is facing forward up above your head. This mouthpiece is made from a copper alloy and it dates back to sometime around the year one twenty and curators that Vindo Luanda have described it as incredibly rare. Also, the Vindolanda Trust, Newcastle University and games development studio Creative Assembly have released a browser based Vinda Landa adventure game that is free to play at Vanda Luanda Adventure dot com. I really wanted to stop what I was doing play this browser based game, and I was like, stop, stop, get back to work. You gotta get to god, get this finished. Moving on. Quite a few repatriations have made headlines over the last few months. We are not going to even talk about all of the ones that I had bookmarked because there were so so many, and we're going to start with some that involved repatriations, involving ancestors being returned to their Indigenous and Aboriginal communities. First, earlier this year, a committee at the University of North Dakota and Grand Forks made just horrifying and appalling discovery of ancestral remains in the university's collections, some of them in cardboard boxes that didn't have any identifying information on them. The university started reaching out to indigenous tribes and nations to return these ancestors and objects that are still in the diniversity's collections as well. So far, thirteen different tribes have been contacted, and that number may continue to grow. And to be clear, this is not at all unique to the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. We have talked on the show before about the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or nag PRO, which was passed in nineteen nine. More than thirty years later, there are still thousands and thousands of cultural and religious items and ancestors in museums and other institutions all around the United States. The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History has also made some returns to Aboriginal nations in Australia. There have been a few over the years. In this particular case, these remains became part of the museum's collections. In the early twentieth century. Two ancestors were returned directly to the Narunga and Garner nations, with representatives from those nations traveling to Washington you see to escort them back home. Twenty three others are currently in the care of the Australian government until they can determine exactly what nation they belong to. In terms of artwork and other objects. Germany physically returned to Benin bronzes to Nigerian authorities, while also making Nigeria the owner of roughly eleven hundred objects in four different German museums. As of when the announcement was made at the start of July, those objects were still in Germany. Those museums and the government of Nigeria still need to negotiate their return. It's possible that the negotiations will lead to some of the items staying in German museums essentially on loan. The two items that were physically returned as part of all this, we're both depictions of a previous oba of the Kingdom of Benin and they were selected as sort of representative samples of the larger collections. So it's like these two things have been returned with the promise of ongoing negotiations for those more than a thousand others. The Hornaman Museum in London has also announced that it will return seventy two items from the Kingdom of Benin to Nigeria, the first time a government funded institution in Britain has decided to do so. This includes twelve brass plaques that are considered part of the Beniin bronzes, as well as a variety of religious objects, in everyday items and other pieces of artwork. The Victoria and Albert Museum has returned part of a marble sarcophagus to Turkya. The Sidamara sarcophagus dates back to about the year to fifty and the part that was returned is known as the head of Eras. It is just what it sounds like. It is the head of a figure of Eras that was on part of the sarcophagus. British military Consul General Charles Wilson had found the sarcophagus in two and then took the head of Eras back with him to London. The sarcophagus with the returned head is now on display at the Istanbul Archaeological Museums. Harvard University has returned to pipe tomahawk belonging to Chief Standing Bear to the Ponka Tribe of Nebraska. Standing Bear had given the pipe tomahawk to Attorney John Lee Webster as a gift following their victory in the federal court case of United States x. Rail Standing Bear versus George Crook. This was an eight seven landmark civil rights case that affirmed indigenous people's personhood. Standing Bear's interpreter in this case was Suzette La Flesh, also known as Bright Eyes, who was previous podcast subjects Susan La Flesh Pacott's sister. After Webster died, this pipe tomahawk was sold to a private collector, and then it changed hands several other times before eventually winding up in the collection at Harvard. It was in the collection of the Pebody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, which has come up on the show before Standing Bear as descendants. Other members of the Ponca tribe, members of other indigenous nations, and the Nebraska legislature had all been advocating for it to be returned for more than a year. New Mexico's Albuquerque Museum has returned a collection of items dating back twenty d to twenty five hundred years to Mexico, including bowls, sculptures, and a figurine. These items had been sitting in a box in storage for about fifteen years, and they had been donated to the museum, and the dealer who sold them to that donor back in had cards tracing their origins to roadside purchases in Mexico and dealers in New England, but their prominence was very vague and it was basically like came from one of these two places, but there's no specifics. The Museum of the Bible in Washington, d c. Has returned a gospel manuscript that was in its collections to the Greek Orthodox Church. This manuscript had been looted from a Greek monastery during World War One, and the Museum of the Bible is also currently investigating its collections stolen and in authentic artifacts have come up as part of its collections. In previous installments of On Earth It's there have been a number of these. And lastly, before we take a break, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has returned a group of nearly life sized terra cotta figures known as Orpheus and the Sirens to Italy. These figures date back to the fourth century BC, and they were valued at roughly eight million dollars and considered some of the most important items in the museum's collection. J. Paul Getty bought these figures in nine six, but they had been illegally excavated and exported from Italy. We're gonna take a quick sponsor break and then we'll talk about some diseases next. We have several discoveries or aided to medicine and diseases. So first, computer assisted microtomography a k A. A micro CT scan of a fossilized skull dating back about a hundred thousand years suggests that the hunter gatherer this skull belonged to experienced chronic ear infections and a disease called labyrinthitis acificans, which caused this person's semicircular canals to calcify. That meant they probably had both vertigo and hearing loss. This person doesn't seem to have lived very long beyond the onset of the illness, possibly only a few months, although it's not fully clear whether this was related to the disease or if the person simply wasn't able to get enough food due to the effects of their illness. Next herpies. Simplex virus one, the virus that causes cold source, is extremely common, as many as three point seven billion people. That's billion with the b people around the world have it until Reese only. This virus is believed to have existed for as long as fifty thousand years, although the earliest direct genetic evidence of it dated back to just New research suggests that HSB one is much younger, maybe only five thousand years old, and the studies authors suggests that it might have started to spread along with migrations from the Eurasian steps more westward into Europe, and that it might have spread as more people were introduced to the social practice of kissing. OH. Imaging w recton would be like shaking your fists going I told you to be clear. The sample studied in this research are not that old. The oldest viral DNA sample that was part of this research dates back to about fifteen hundred years ago. Instead, the researchers looked at four DNA samples, the only four they found out of three thousand archaeological finds. They studied and compared how the virus had mutated over time. Then they used that analysis to estimate the viruses earlier origins. Yeah, that doesn't mean that only four of those three thousand people had cold sores. That it's very tricky to get DNA from really really old remains. Next researchers this actually has a bit about along those same lines. Researchers studying a one thousand year old set of skeletal remains have found the earliest documented evidence of Klein filter syndrome, which occurs when a person's sex chromosomes are x x y. This research involved DNA analysis, which was pretty difficult because of the condition of the DNA they were able to retrieve. It was like really fragile and kind of incomplete, but the skeleton itself was very well preserved. So they also analyzed the skeleton for physical traits that are associated with klient filter syndrome. This included the shape of the person's lower jaw, and that is a trait known as maxillary prognathism. Next, we've talked about various research about parasite infections throughout history, and most of the time it kind of boils down to ye people had parasites. But according to research that was announced in August, medieval clergy may have been more likely to have intestinal parasites than lay people living in the same area, even though in general members of the clergy had better hygiene and often had more sophisticated systems for managing their bodily waste. This research involved examining the soil around the pelvis is of human remains at burial sites looking for evidence of parasite eggs, and there were parasite eggs in significantly more grave sites that belonged to monks and fryers than at the other grave sites. So one possible reason for this would be that men living in monasteries and fraries grew their own food and also used their own waste as fertilizer. Were those crops, which then would have basically spread any parasitic food born stuff around among them? Yeah? Right? Gross. I put gross there in the outline yuck. There are also some contrary opinions on this. In many orders, monks took vows of poverty and were expected to live off of charitable donations, not food that they grew themselves, so it's also possible that people were donating lower quality meat that they didn't want to eat to the monks. Also gross, just a different kind the outcoming either way, uh not nots and in some more parasite news. Research published in the journal Nature Communications in July has looked at archaeological evidence of whipworm infections using fossilized feces from Viking settlements in Denmark and elsewhere. Whip Worms still exists today, and while it's mostly not an issue in wealthier countries, it affects as many as five hundred million people in other parts of the world. This research was kind of looking at trends in the infections around all of these different places through fossilized Viking poop. Those Viking whip worms are a good segue to some more Viking stuff, of which there was a preponderance. First, two different metal detectorists, independently of each other, found three pieces of a Viking sword hilt in Stavanger, Norway. The blade has not been found, but the hilt is ordinately decorated in gold and silver, with both geometric patterns and animal themes. Only about twenty of this type of sword have been found in Norway. It's being conserved at the Museum of Archaeology at the University of Stavager. Speaking of the Museum of Archaeology at the University of Stavanger, the museum recently received a donation of jewelry belonging to a Viking woman, including brooches and a string of more than fifty beads. Some of those beads were foiled in silver and gold. It is possible that this is jewelry that should have been in a boat grave that the museum examined in nineteen fifty five. This was a woman's grave that contained an axe, a heckel, a shield boss, scissors, and an iron weaving sword. But the jewelry that they would have expected to have been in this grave based on what they had seen a similar burial sites that was gone. If so, what a wild coincidence that somebody donated this jewelry that the museum expected to find in nineteen and did not bum bum bum. There is another surprising Viking find, and that is a box of costume jewelry that was sold at auction which turned out to contain a gold ring dating to the Viking Age. The buyer, realizing they had something unique, contacted archaeologists. This was probably a man's ring based on its size, but it's still not clear where it came from. It was just in a box. And then even though they think that's when it came from, like it's dated to that period, like, we don't really have a lot of very comparable rings to compare it to. A hiker in Sweden stumbled over a brooch while setting up their tent, and then this brooch turned out to be about twelve hundred years old. So when archaeologists went back to the site where this tent had been put up to try to investigate it further, they found another brooch and also evidence of a cremation burial. There are other Viking era graves that have been found in this general area, but this is actually the first one that's believed to have belonged to a woman. Research published in July concludes that high status Vikings were beaver for as a mark of status. Beavers do not live in Denmark, so beaver for probably would have been seen as a luxury item. The team concluded that the first they were looking at were from beavers based on protein analysis because the samples that they had no longer contained usable d n A. And lastly, archaeologists from Secrets of the Ice and the Museum of Cultural History and Oslo have found an iron arrowhead dating back to the Viking era. They found this arrowhead during an exploratory survey and they had undertaken that to look for objects that may have been exposed by melting ice. Secrets of the Ice has come up on unearths before. That's basically their whole thing is like looking for things that has been revealed as ice melts. This is a three bladed arrow and it's a little broader that is typical for Viking combat arrowheads, like you would need a narrower arrowhead to to pierce somebody that was wearing mail. Uh So there's like a little bit of unanswered questions around what this arrowhead might have been used for nick stuff. We have some art the Griffith Center for Social and Cultural Research and Australian Research Center for Human Evolution has been working with an Ingai traditional owners to study and interpret rock art at a rock shelter known as Marawanga. They've identified ten clusters of designs that seem to have been created in an intentional ordered sequence, which members of the Aboriginal community have identified as a Seven Sisters dreaming sequence. The dreamtime is a term that anthropologists coined to describe the worldview and cultural and religious oral traditions of Aboriginal peoples in Australia, which is also used by contemporary Aboriginal people when discussing these ideas in English. So far, this is the only known rock shelter that has one continuous narrative depicted along its entire length. Next, the Victoria and Albert Museum has been conserving an eighteenth century portrait and also the silk waistcoat that the portrait subject was wearing when it was painted, which I just thought was really cool. The painting is by Marco Benefiel and it depicts Edward Curtis of Mardike House who's wearing this brocade waistcoat with the sleeves of his outer jacket also faced in the same material that so it's got like a little matching sleeve facing and waistcoat on the brocade includes both a stylized shell pattern and pink roses with yellow leaves. The Victoria and Albert Museum acquired the painting and the waistcoat at the same time, but the outer jacket that's being worn in the portrait does not seem to have survived so dreamy. Restoration work on Vermier's The Milkmaid has revealed original elements of the picture that the artist later painted over, including a jug holder on the wall and a fire basket at the milkmaid's feet. Unlike the last time we talked about uncovered items in a Vermier painting, these don't seem to have been things that were painted over decades later, but evidence of an earlier draft in his artistic process. All this conservation work has been going on in advance of a landmark exhibition planned at the Rooks Museum next year. Yeah, I had a I was like, why do we keep having Vermeer stuff? Oh, because it's amazing. Ready for this whole bing thing. The Cincinnati Art Museum and the University of Cincinnati have been working together to determine whether a decorative tassel that was part of a dancing horse sculpture in the museum's collection is an authentic part of the artwork. This terra cotta horse is about dred years old and then the tassel gave it kind of a unicorn like appearance. While the tassel looked like it was made of the same material that the rest of the horse was, researchers at the university and determined that it was made of plaster, not terra cotta, totally different material and it was held on there with animal glue. The area under the glue was smooth, and that suggested that this was a later addition and not like a repair of an original tassel that had been broken off. So conservators have removed it and now looks like a horse instead of a unicorn. I put a sticker on it and to cap off our artwork. Several mosaics have been unearthed over the past few months. A team from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has uncovered many mosaics at the site of an ancient Jewish synagogue in Lower Galilee. This year's discoveries include the first known depictions of Deborah and jail who are described in the Book of Judges and the mosaic showing a hair, a fox, a leopard, and a wild boar eating wild grapes. These mosaics are about sixteen hundred years old. Also, a team at the ancient city of Sedra in modern Turkia has found a floor mosaic depicting the mythological hero Heracles, and a Palestinian farmer in Gaza found a huge Byzantine era floor mosaic depicting birds and animals while planting olive trees. Yeah. I like that one because the guy was like, I planted these olive trees and they didn't root. What has happened? And it turned out there was this giant. We're gonna take a quick break and come back with some edibles and potables. Okay, we have just a few edibles and potables this time around. First, ongoing work at the Cicara Necropolis and Egypt has uncovered several blocks of white cheese. This cheese dates back to sometime between SI and b C, during the dynasty. I have various curiosities about, like what the look and texture of this cheese is now, and I did not find good answers delicious. Archaeologists working north of Moravia and the Czech Republic have unearthed an entire medieval kitchen. Their finds there include an oven, a hearth, ceramic vessels, and a wooden spoon. Some of the pots were intact with their lids still on, with several looking as though they had just been cleaned and left to dry on the hearth. These probably date back to about the fifteenth century, from a house that probably belonged to a relatively affluent family, although since the home was near the town walls, it probably was not one of the richest families in the area. Next, in the ancient Mediterranean, a plant known as Sylphion or Sylphium was prized as a food source and a medicine and an aphronsiac. In the first century Planning the Elder claimed that the last surviving stalk of this plant had been given to the Emperor Nero, who had eaten it. Researchers in Turkeyo, though, believe they may have found living descendants of this plant in the form of Ferula drudiana, which is a plant with a gen thing like root that produces very bright yellow flowers. This is not the first plant put forth as a possibility for the long lost Sylfian or a related descendant plant. There have been at least three other candidates proposed since the early nineteenth century. While some researchers say that this one seems promising, others point out that it was discovered hundreds of miles away from where Sylfian was historically described as growing. Next, research involving seven thousand samples of animal fat residues for more than five hundred sites around Europe suggests that Europeans developed the ability to digest milk into adulthood in response to things like disease and famine. The ability to digest milk even after being weaned is known as lactase persistence, and it went from being a pretty uncommon genetic trait to one that was pretty widespread in Europe over just a few thousand years, which sounds like a long time, but it's a pretty short time from an evolutionary standpoint. Earlier hypotheses have focused mainly on milk's nutritional benefits, like the idea that people who were getting more calcium or other nutrients from milk had an advantage over people who didn't, which led people with lacta's persistence to survive longer. But this work suggests that people often had to drink milk because of a shortage of other types of food, and in times of famine or disease, the problems that come along with drinking milk while lactose intolerant, like crams and diarrhea, became life threatening instead of just uncomfortable and inconvenient. And lastly, a dig in Bulgaria has found the ancient equivalent of a refrigerator. This is a large chamber lined in ceramic slabs dating back to the first century. This was at the site of a military camp and still contains some animal bones that showed evidence of cooking, as well as a small part of a bowl and some pieces of charcoal. It's possible that that bowl and charcoal was really part of a sensor that was used to burn materials to keep pests out of that bridge. We are closing out this installment of unearthed with shipwrecks. A thirteenth century shipwreck located off the coast of Dorset, England has been added to England's National Heritage List. This wreck is called the Mortar Wreck, named for the mortars that were part of its cargo. In addition to the mortars, which were used to grind grain into flour, the ship was also carrying cooking pots, mugs, and carved grade stones made from Purbeck limestone. The ship was carrying uncarved stone as well. This is England's oldest known protected wreck that has a surviving hull, and shipwrecks of this age in general are really rare in the waters around England. It was discovered a couple of years ago, but now it is being threatened by shifting currents that have cleared away some of the sand that was protecting parts of the hull. A team doing routine measurements in the Trava River in Germany discovered one has turned out to be a four hundred year old shipwreck. Most of the cargo was still there as well, including about one fifty barrels. Those barrels contained quicklime, which was used to make mortar for building. It's not yet known why the ship sank, but it's possible that it ran aground during a tight turn in the river and was just too badly damaged to remain afloat. Dives to photograph and study the racks started in late and it is not yet clear what's going to happen to the wreck. It's possible that it could be removed from the river and preserved sort of shipwreck adjacent. Local lore around the Virginia Barrier Islands has maintained that the Chincka teg ponies that live on the islands are descended from horses that survived as shipwreck sometime around seventeen fifty and swam to the island when the ship went down, But another argument has been that they were descended from runaway livestock that were brought to the island much later. Research published in July suggests that the shipwreck story may be the right one, thanks to DNA research linking these horses to a fossilized horse tooth found in the Caribbean at the site of the city of Puerto Real and the island of Espaniola. Both this fossilized tooth and the horses also have connections to bronze age ponies from Spain. This horse tooth is also surprising on its own. There's lots of evidence of cows in and around Puerto Real, but horses were a lot less common, so rare that this tooth was originally thought to be a cows tooth instead of horses. Fishers off the coast of the Netherlands hauled up a carved wooden head in one of their nets, likely a figurehead from a warship dating back to the sixteenth or seventeenth century, possibly from the eight Ors War. This figurehead is in the shape of a man's head wearing a Frygian cap. The crew of the fishing ship nicknamed it Berry, the second time in this two parter of an Earth where the crew working with something gave it a nickname. Most likely, this figurehead wound up buried in sediment at the bottom of the seafloor, otherwise marine organisms probably would have eaten through it. It does look like it's in very good condition. The crew kept the head in an eel tub after they pulled it out of the water, so that it would not dry out and start to decompose before they could make it back to shore. A shipwreck found off the coast of Patagonia, maybe the whaling ship Dolphin, which set sail from Rhode Island in eighteen fifty and never returned. The remains of the wreck started to emerge from the sediment in two thousand four, and although researchers thought it might be the Dolphin, confirming that I D was a challenge in The team decided to analyze the tree rings from the ups timbers, and those rings suggested that the wood was from white oak and old growth yellow pine trees, and that the last of them were cut in eighteen forty nine. Most likely, the oak came from Massachusetts, while the pine came from somewhere in the southeast. This identification is not confirmed yet, but the tree rings do suggest that this ship would have been built along the same time as the Dolphin was. It's kind of like a circumstantial connection at this point. In nine twelve, the s S Massaba tried to warn the RMS Titanic of the iceberg that the Titanic later hit, causing the purportedly unsinkable ship to go down on its first voyage. While the Titanic did receive the message, the message never made it to the main control room. The Massaba continued to operate for another six years before being struck by a German torpedo during World War One. Twenty people aboard died when it inc A team using multi beam sonar has now positively identified the wreck of the Massada in the Irish Sea during a sweep of the area that also pointed to the remains of more than two hundred and seventy resse rex are all detailed in a newly released book titled Echoes from the Deep. Okay, so this next thing is not a whole shipwreck, but something that may point to one. A crew in the Southern North Sea, off the coast of England has recovered a large anchor that's likely somewhere between six hundred and two thousand years old. It's large enough that it probably would have come from a vessel weighing between five hundred and six hundred tons. All of the dating on it is not confirmed yet. It's possible that it was a Roman vessel, and if so, it would have been from one of the largest ships in the Roman merchant fleet. This was actually pulled out of the water in one but just announced in September and last. We've previously talked about a shipwreck off the coast of Rhode Island that maybe Captain Cook's Endeavor. In August, it was announced that would from the wreck shows evidence of a worm like mollusk known as shipworm. There's still some debate about whether this ship really is the Endeavor, and also whether the possibility that it could have been should have been announced the way that it was. This was a whole deal when it first was announced, but the evidence of shipworm in the wood has led to calls for what's left of the wreck to just be aggressively preserved. So much Unearthed this year was a lot. I have a thought about a recurring thing that maybe should be its own category going for me, Yeah, I'll talk about it already. Have listener mail for us, I do. I have listener mail from Carol who wrote to us with something to include an unearthed and then I forgot to write it down, and then I was looking for listener mail to read and went, I'll should read that because I should have put this in this episode. This is I said from Carol. Carol wrote, Dear Holly and Tracy, Hello from Canada. This article came across my news feed this morning. I thought it would share it with you as something for the next Unearthed installment in case you haven't seen it yet. And the headline of this article is why a small British museum went out of its way to repatriate Hida nation artifacts and this is about how as that headline suggests, a small British museum connected with the hide Guai Museum in British Columbia to repatriate indigenous artifacts that were in their possession, along with the growing movement to reclaim artifacts as the form of healing and reconciliation. So I read through this article and it it talks about basically how the museum had these items in their collection but had very little information about where they had come from, and so it took a lot of effort to pinpoint what nation they needed to go back to you and then to return it to the to the Haida Gwai Museum. Um Carol then moves on to say now for lunar beavers. Months back in May, I was listening to the Margaret Lucas Cavendish episode. When you began describing her blazing world and the anthropomorphic creatures including birdman, I immediately thought lunar beavers and the birdman and the great moon Hoax. I wonder whether the creator of the moon Hoax drew inspiration from Margaret. The connection certainly had me laughing at the thought. Thank you, Holly and Tracy, you bring me Joy. I find myself smiling about something in every episode, whether it's ridiculous moments and the story or your commentary. Actually a lot of it is your commentary. I enjoy your perspectives and both of your personalities. I feel your people I would really enjoy spending time with and thank you for shaping my perspectives. I very much appreciate your willingness to say we don't really know in reference to historical information. I've come to have a more critical mind when reading the news and references to the past, asking myself do they know for sure? Thank you. It reminds me that there is beauty in mystery and in the not knowing. So Carol also included pictures of kitty cat. Uh this cat's name is Momo. Um. Yes, Momo is extremely cute. Um Momo is is orange and white and is shown with this little tiger and Carol's son moved to a city far away and really missed the cat and uh so Momo was very chilled out, relaxed, relaxed cat. Um, but can sound really vocal and so they recorded Momo having a conversation and purring and like inserted them into the stuffed tiger so when you hear when you squeeze the tiger, you can hear this sounds so that the cat usually makes. And so this was a present for Carol's Sun last Christmas, and I found that whole idea to be incredibly adorable. It reminds me a little bit of when Patrick and I were dating and Leave Leave living in two different states, and we had this app that would let us put our thumb on the screen and the other person could put their thumb on the screen, and we're putting her thumbs on the screen at the same time. It's very cute. Uh So, anyway, thank you so much Carol for sending this. I had not seen this article and then I forgot to bookmarkt along with the bookmarks to go into on earths, So I'm glad I got to read this email to include this. Also, if you would like to send us a note about this for an either podcast or history podcast that I Heart radio dot com and we're all over social media and missed in history, so you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on the I Heart Radio app or a realty you'll like to get podcasts stuff you missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H