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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. This week was our latest installment of Unearthed. It sure was. It was a weird one to work on. I feel like I've said this half of the Unearthed installments lately. This one was weird because I started working on it And then we went to Germany and the Czech Republic. Yeah, we did. And then I returned a week later and got back to work on it. I didn't review what I had written before we left. And so when I got done with all of it and went to read through all of it to make sure I didn't make mistakes, I was like, I have no recollection of these things from before we went to another country. That's the trick for me, even over the course of a couple days. Like, I always want to write a little bit ahead. Yeah. But then I'm often like, I don't remember this. No. This is one of the reasons why, if I'm able to, which is often not possible, if I can have an episode drafted on Friday, and then I can come back to it on Monday, I can... catch things I would not have caught otherwise, because I've forgotten what I meant to say. Right. Reading it with fresher eyes. But often that just, that's often not how it works at all. A weird pattern emerged in these episodes. It is super, super normal to have outlets pick up a story months or even years later. Like, sometimes we'll get an email from somebody saying, hey, this is a really cool thing from Unearthed. And it is a website that has written about something that the actual thing, the paper, was two or three years ago. Sometimes two or three years ago, and we talked about it two or three years ago. I'm not faulting this hypothetical person, just saying, like, a lot of times, like, that's normal. What happened that was weird this time was I kept finding news releases from the institutions that, you know, their faculty or their staff or their institute or whatever did this work. New news releases coming out as though the paper was newly published. And it's, that's something that we already talked about previously. So I kept being like, wait, didn't we already talk about how Utsi's microbiome has cold weather microbes in it? Didn't we already talk about being able to find dates for French cave art because it turned out there was carbon in some of the pigment. Didn't we already talk about people taking wolves to an island and raising them there, and we don't really know why? It was odd, and it was one of those things where the first time it happened, I was like, oh, this is just a weird fluke. But I started to kind of question... My mental acuity, because I was like, didn't we already talk about this? No, this press release is brand new. And then I would follow the link to the paper, and the paper would be from sometimes last year, sometimes not even like earlier this year. It was very strange. I just had a terrifying thought. What is your terrifying thought? Is this the result of PR being handed over to AI modules? Oh, I hope not. Where they're just scraping everything that's been going on for... I hope not. I hope not, too. Please, no. My thought was more, still not a great thought, but less scary than, is AI doing this? Was, is it that there's economic urgency to try to get more eyes onto things? Are people feeling like they need to get more funding and they didn't get enough attention last time, so they're going to try again? Which speaks more to... The state of scientific funding that we are living through right now versus offloading press releases to AI, hypothetically. I hope not. That's just where my doomy brain went. Yeah. I thought you were going to make a joke about whether it was because they shut down the... whichever particle collider it was. Oh, no. Thought you were going to make a goof about it. No. I remember you said you had some things that you had thoughts about. Oh, I had so many. One, the Hannibal crossing the Alps thing with elephants was interesting to me because I remembered, I don't know if you were awake for this part, on the bus when we were in the Alps recently. Oh, yeah. And our guide Peter was saying that, you know, a lot of the routes that are now roads, were pathways, they were thousands of years old. And I'm like, I wonder if any of these, not those that we were specifically on, but like, if any of that would have been a factor in that whole elephant decision thing of like, well, this is a route that's established. I don't want to crash through random stuff with my elephants. Just a thought. And I didn't look deeper into those kinds of questions at all. One of the other things that I think is fascinating is I don't have any big insights on it, but every time it comes up, it's like my brain, which has read a lot of things and has encountered many things in the world, still has that moment of just awe where I go, wow. Which is how scientists are able to date water vessels by studying the planks and figuring out What year those trees were cut down. Yeah. This is the stuff that just makes my brain lock up. Like, I can't even fathom. Yeah, yeah. How you get to that point of expertise. Yeah. I'm sure glad of it, and I'm certainly in awe of it. But every time it comes up, I'm still just like, how? Yeah. There's a whole field that is basically the study of tree rings and what we can learn from them. It's pretty cool. Sorcery. The field is sorcery. I know it's science. I understand. I just don't understand the science. Also, the phrase blood mortar should be a band name if it's not already. Okay. Somebody get on it. Yeah. It's terrific. Okay. Okay. Peter DeHoke. I was waiting for that one, yeah. Maybe he didn't want that guy in his painting. Why are you putting it there? My understanding is he was not the one that took it out of the painting, that it happened later. I could be misunderstanding, though. That's a different thing. Yeah. There have been a number of times on Earth where there has been a painting that was in a museum. somebody found some element of the painting scandalous and they painted over it. And now conservators have gone back and they have removed that and they have restored it to its original thing. This, at least as I understand it, I could be misunderstanding something, but, like, as I understand it, like, this was not that, that it had been scrubbed out and they used this other one as a model to basically restore it to its original appearance. Ah, well, in that case, hooray. But I did not understand that to be the case, so I was like... Yeah, I don't think he was the one who removed it. Here is my other thing, and I think I've talked about this before. Man, we did a whole season on Criminilia on Art Heist, and let me tell you, museums and galleries do not have their security game together. Correct. More of them are better than used to be, but there are so many instances where it's like, a guy just walked in and took a thing off the wall, and then he got on his bike and vanished, and it's like, what? Yeah. Yeah. There have been a couple of times that when I've been compiling all the stuff for Unearthed, I have compiled a series of heists. And I'm like, number one, it's upsetting. Like, somebody's just walking away with this art. Number two, it was the same thing over and over. Like, and then this art got stolen, and then this art got stolen, and then this art got stolen. There's, like, not a resolution to any of it. Yeah. So the one that we talked about this time that was like, and then the landlord found it. And I'm very curious about exactly how the artwork got to the, like, was the person who was renting that apartment the person who took it? Right, that was my first thought, is like... Did somebody give it to them as a gift? Did the person, like, just... Somebody stole it from the gallery, did that person then sell it, and then it winds up in a thrift shop later, and somebody buys the thing and hangs it on their... Who knows? Right. I can imagine a million scenarios. Well, and especially in that case, because it is a print, so it's not like an original canvas... And just in case people don't know, artists will often make their own prints of things, and those are very valuable in and of themselves, but not the same thing. But to, like, somebody that maybe isn't that versed in art, they just think, like, it's a mass-produced print. Yeah. They may think they're just buying something that, you know, is completely just a reproduction copy that's licensed or legal in some way. I wouldn't even think twice about it. Why not? Nah. Tooth jewelry. Yes. Because, you know, a lot of people, I mean, still make tooth jewelry. I have a friend whose mom... used all their baby teeth to make jewelry. Like little rings, earrings, bracelets, etc. I have a couple friends whose parents have done that. I mean, I think it's more out of phase now. Like the parents of people my age, I'm in my mid-50s, like might have done it. But I also wonder if like someday someone will be like, we found this ring. It's got three baby teeth in it, but it's from three different babies. What's going on? They're siblings. They're just siblings. It's You know what I mean? This is the thing people were doing. Yeah. We talk about the tooth jewelry and on the one hand, it's like, ooh, scary. And on the other, I'm like, this could probably have the most benign, fairly boring explanation to it. Yeah. I also don't know how many other people other than me get kind of creeped out by the teeth thing sometimes. Might just be me. I'm only laughing because I think about when we recorded the Bell Witch episode years ago, and I just said, one of the theories is that she's looking for her tooth, and you were like, whoa! I was thinking about that, too. And there was, at the time, there was somebody who got so upset at how freaked out that I was on it. They were like, I wish they wouldn't do Halloween episodes at all because they're clearly uncomfortable with what they're talking about. And I was like, just the teeth creeped me out. Also, like, I love the Halloween episodes. Yeah, they're a lot of fun. I've been into all the murder stories lately, so, you know. Yeah, I think those were all my notes. Art, security, tooth jewelry. Right. And painting. And paintings. Yeah. That also, though, made me think when we were just now talking and you illuminated what I had missed in the initial discussion, not to once again reference the Vatican, but I will. The Vatican museums, do you remember how many of their pieces of statuary have fig leaves that were added on to sculptures? Oh, yeah. Because there was a phase where it was like, no, don't show that. Yeah. You can't show human genitalia. And it's like, I understand that there are times when people become more squinky about such things than others. But I get real irate about people altering an artist. Yeah. You don't have to like it, but that doesn't give you the right to mess with it. Yeah. Yeah, I get it. Art. Preserve art. It's important. It's important. Well, whatever's happening on your weekend, if it involves getting to go see some art, I hope it's so good. Maybe get a little snack afterward. Nice cup of coffee or tea. I love to have a little snack in the museum cafe when there is one. So good. Whatever you've got going on, I hope it goes as well as possible. We will be back with a brand new episode on Monday. And we'll have a Saturday Classic tomorrow. 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.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. This week was our latest installment of Unearthed. It sure was. It was a weird one to work on. I feel like I've said this half of the Unearthed installments lately. This one was weird because I started working on it And then we went to Germany and the Czech Republic. Yeah, we did. And then I returned a week later and got back to work on it. I didn't review what I had written before we left. And so when I got done with all of it and went to read through all of it to make sure I didn't make mistakes, I was like, I have no recollection of these things from before we went to another country. That's the trick for me, even over the course of a couple days. Like, I always want to write a little bit ahead. Yeah. But then I'm often like, I don't remember this. No. This is one of the reasons why, if I'm able to, which is often not possible, if I can have an episode drafted on Friday, and then I can come back to it on Monday, I can... catch things I would not have caught otherwise, because I've forgotten what I meant to say. Right. Reading it with fresher eyes. But often that just, that's often not how it works at all. A weird pattern emerged in these episodes. It is super, super normal to have outlets pick up a story months or even years later. Like, sometimes we'll get an email from somebody saying, hey, this is a really cool thing from Unearthed. And it is a website that has written about something that the actual thing, the paper, was two or three years ago. Sometimes two or three years ago, and we talked about it two or three years ago. I'm not faulting this hypothetical person, just saying, like, a lot of times, like, that's normal. What happened that was weird this time was I kept finding news releases from the institutions that, you know, their faculty or their staff or their institute or whatever did this work. New news releases coming out as though the paper was newly published. And it's, that's something that we already talked about previously. So I kept being like, wait, didn't we already talk about how Utsi's microbiome has cold weather microbes in it? Didn't we already talk about being able to find dates for French cave art because it turned out there was carbon in some of the pigment. Didn't we already talk about people taking wolves to an island and raising them there, and we don't really know why? It was odd, and it was one of those things where the first time it happened, I was like, oh, this is just a weird fluke. But I started to kind of question... My mental acuity, because I was like, didn't we already talk about this? No, this press release is brand new. And then I would follow the link to the paper, and the paper would be from sometimes last year, sometimes not even like earlier this year. It was very strange. I just had a terrifying thought. What is your terrifying thought? Is this the result of PR being handed over to AI modules? Oh, I hope not. Where they're just scraping everything that's been going on for... I hope not. I hope not, too. Please, no. My thought was more, still not a great thought, but less scary than, is AI doing this? Was, is it that there's economic urgency to try to get more eyes onto things? Are people feeling like they need to get more funding and they didn't get enough attention last time, so they're going to try again? Which speaks more to... The state of scientific funding that we are living through right now versus offloading press releases to AI, hypothetically. I hope not. That's just where my doomy brain went. Yeah. I thought you were going to make a joke about whether it was because they shut down the... whichever particle collider it was. Oh, no. Thought you were going to make a goof about it. No. I remember you said you had some things that you had thoughts about. Oh, I had so many. One, the Hannibal crossing the Alps thing with elephants was interesting to me because I remembered, I don't know if you were awake for this part, on the bus when we were in the Alps recently. Oh, yeah. And our guide Peter was saying that, you know, a lot of the routes that are now roads, were pathways, they were thousands of years old. And I'm like, I wonder if any of these, not those that we were specifically on, but like, if any of that would have been a factor in that whole elephant decision thing of like, well, this is a route that's established. I don't want to crash through random stuff with my elephants. Just a thought. And I didn't look deeper into those kinds of questions at all. One of the other things that I think is fascinating is I don't have any big insights on it, but every time it comes up, it's like my brain, which has read a lot of things and has encountered many things in the world, still has that moment of just awe where I go, wow. Which is how scientists are able to date water vessels by studying the planks and figuring out What year those trees were cut down. Yeah. This is the stuff that just makes my brain lock up. Like, I can't even fathom. Yeah, yeah. How you get to that point of expertise. Yeah. I'm sure glad of it, and I'm certainly in awe of it. But every time it comes up, I'm still just like, how? Yeah. There's a whole field that is basically the study of tree rings and what we can learn from them. It's pretty cool. Sorcery. The field is sorcery. I know it's science. I understand. I just don't understand the science. Also, the phrase blood mortar should be a band name if it's not already. Okay. Somebody get on it. Yeah. It's terrific. Okay. Okay. Peter DeHoke. I was waiting for that one, yeah. Maybe he didn't want that guy in his painting. Why are you putting it there? My understanding is he was not the one that took it out of the painting, that it happened later. I could be misunderstanding, though. That's a different thing. Yeah. There have been a number of times on Earth where there has been a painting that was in a museum. somebody found some element of the painting scandalous and they painted over it. And now conservators have gone back and they have removed that and they have restored it to its original thing. This, at least as I understand it, I could be misunderstanding something, but, like, as I understand it, like, this was not that, that it had been scrubbed out and they used this other one as a model to basically restore it to its original appearance. Ah, well, in that case, hooray. But I did not understand that to be the case, so I was like... Yeah, I don't think he was the one who removed it. Here is my other thing, and I think I've talked about this before. Man, we did a whole season on Criminilia on Art Heist, and let me tell you, museums and galleries do not have their security game together. Correct. More of them are better than used to be, but there are so many instances where it's like, a guy just walked in and took a thing off the wall, and then he got on his bike and vanished, and it's like, what? Yeah. Yeah. There have been a couple of times that when I've been compiling all the stuff for Unearthed, I have compiled a series of heists. And I'm like, number one, it's upsetting. Like, somebody's just walking away with this art. Number two, it was the same thing over and over. Like, and then this art got stolen, and then this art got stolen, and then this art got stolen. There's, like, not a resolution to any of it. Yeah. So the one that we talked about this time that was like, and then the landlord found it. And I'm very curious about exactly how the artwork got to the, like, was the person who was renting that apartment the person who took it? Right, that was my first thought, is like... Did somebody give it to them as a gift? Did the person, like, just... Somebody stole it from the gallery, did that person then sell it, and then it winds up in a thrift shop later, and somebody buys the thing and hangs it on their... Who knows? Right. I can imagine a million scenarios. Well, and especially in that case, because it is a print, so it's not like an original canvas... And just in case people don't know, artists will often make their own prints of things, and those are very valuable in and of themselves, but not the same thing. But to, like, somebody that maybe isn't that versed in art, they just think, like, it's a mass-produced print. Yeah. They may think they're just buying something that, you know, is completely just a reproduction copy that's licensed or legal in some way. I wouldn't even think twice about it. Why not? Nah. Tooth jewelry. Yes. Because, you know, a lot of people, I mean, still make tooth jewelry. I have a friend whose mom... used all their baby teeth to make jewelry. Like little rings, earrings, bracelets, etc. I have a couple friends whose parents have done that. I mean, I think it's more out of phase now. Like the parents of people my age, I'm in my mid-50s, like might have done it. But I also wonder if like someday someone will be like, we found this ring. It's got three baby teeth in it, but it's from three different babies. What's going on? They're siblings. They're just siblings. It's You know what I mean? This is the thing people were doing. Yeah. We talk about the tooth jewelry and on the one hand, it's like, ooh, scary. And on the other, I'm like, this could probably have the most benign, fairly boring explanation to it. Yeah. I also don't know how many other people other than me get kind of creeped out by the teeth thing sometimes. Might just be me. I'm only laughing because I think about when we recorded the Bell Witch episode years ago, and I just said, one of the theories is that she's looking for her tooth, and you were like, whoa! I was thinking about that, too. And there was, at the time, there was somebody who got so upset at how freaked out that I was on it. They were like, I wish they wouldn't do Halloween episodes at all because they're clearly uncomfortable with what they're talking about. And I was like, just the teeth creeped me out. Also, like, I love the Halloween episodes. Yeah, they're a lot of fun. I've been into all the murder stories lately, so, you know. Yeah, I think those were all my notes. Art, security, tooth jewelry. Right. And painting. And paintings. Yeah. That also, though, made me think when we were just now talking and you illuminated what I had missed in the initial discussion, not to once again reference the Vatican, but I will. The Vatican museums, do you remember how many of their pieces of statuary have fig leaves that were added on to sculptures? Oh, yeah. Because there was a phase where it was like, no, don't show that. Yeah. You can't show human genitalia. And it's like, I understand that there are times when people become more squinky about such things than others. But I get real irate about people altering an artist. Yeah. You don't have to like it, but that doesn't give you the right to mess with it. Yeah. Yeah, I get it. Art. Preserve art. It's important. It's important. Well, whatever's happening on your weekend, if it involves getting to go see some art, I hope it's so good. Maybe get a little snack afterward. Nice cup of coffee or tea. I love to have a little snack in the museum cafe when there is one. So good. Whatever you've got going on, I hope it goes as well as possible. We will be back with a brand new episode on Monday. And we'll have a Saturday Classic tomorrow. 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.
