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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 Frey. It is time for our latest installment of Unearthed. If you are new to the show, this is when we talk about things that have been literally or figuratively unearthed over the last few months. Today, we have a number of medical finds, some things that are related to animals, lots and lots of books and letters. As we normally do, we are also going to start off with updates to things that we have talked about on the show before. So we talked about the Parthenon in Athens, Greece, in a two-part episode on Lord Elgin and the Parthenon sculptures that ran in January of 2020. And we talk generally about the Parthenon as an artistic and architectural marvel. But one of the details we didn't get into is that the Parthenon looks very rectangular as a structure, but it's really built with subtle curves. According to Roman writer Vitruvius, writing about 400 years after the Parthenon was built, this was intentional. The curves were used to trick the eye into seeing a regular straight structure rather than one that seems curved or sagging in the middle because of the viewer's perspective. And columns were curved with a slight bulge in the middle so that they would not appear pinched. That idea has persisted for thousands of years, but research published in Royal Society Open Science in September has called it into question. This work used modern data as well as measurements from 19th century surveys to mathematically analyze the monument's proportions and angles. And then it compared that information to what we know about how human vision and perception work. The conclusion was that it wasn't necessary to add curved elements to the Parthenon because human vision will interpret straight lines as straight when there is nothing else in our field of view to distort that interpretation. The upward curve that supposedly corrects a sagging appearance is also visible from some angles, not an invisible correction to a problem of perception. So these curves do exist, but there's no clear evidence that they were created as optical corrections. And while the columns are slightly thicker in the middle, they only bulge outward by 18 millimeters. That's less than three quarters of an inch, and that's too small of a variation to make a difference to something as huge as those columns. The paper's title sums all of this up as the illusion of illusions. There are no optical corrections in the Parthenon. Next, on New Year's Eve 2025, we did an episode about a New Year's Eve dinner that was held in a model of an Iguanodon. which was being built for London's Crystal Palace Park. In that episode, we talked about how the dinosaur sculptures that were built for the park had been scattered and they had fallen into disrepair, but that restorations were underway. As of July of this year, that project is complete. The dinosaurs have all been restored to their original 19th century appearance, or at least as close as possible to that 19th century appearance. Consequently, they have now been removed from Historic England's Heritage at Risk Register. Our episode on the ancient city of Mohenjo-daro in the Indus River Valley came out all the way back in April of 2018. We mentioned briefly that it seemed to be a city of egalitarian wealth. This idea is supported by recent research into the city and published in the journal Antiquity. According to this research, as Mohenjo-daro grew and matured, its wealth became even more evenly distributed, with houses for the richest getting smaller over time, while houses for poorer people actually got a bit larger. This is the opposite of how most known societies have worked as they transitioned from small farming communities to larger cities. Typically, wealth disparities got bigger, not smaller, during that shift to a bigger, more urban settlement. But according to this research, in its last years as a thriving urban center, wealth inequalities at Mohenjo-Daro were comparable to those found in very small farming settlements. Archaeologists also haven't discovered evidence of palaces or similar structures at Mohenjo-daro that would have been built and used only by super wealthy people. In the words of Dr. Adam Green from the University of York's Department of Archaeology and Department of Environment and Geography, as quoted in Science Daily, quote, While ancient Egyptians were building pyramids for god-kings and the Greeks were constructing massive palaces at Knossos, the people of the Indus were building something entirely different. Instead of gold-filled tombs and huge temples, Mohenjo-daro focused on sophisticated brick-lined drains and organized street layouts. Instead of allowing the perks of society to accumulate with a tiny elite, the city's amenities were widely distributed amongst the everyday households. Moving on, in March of this year, we did an episode on Hercules Posey, who was enslaved at George Washington's home of Mount Vernon and at the President's House in Philadelphia. In that episode, we talked about how the President's House site became part of the National Park System, including a slavery memorial, and the removal of interpretive panels and other materials from that site. We have talked about other legal developments and other back and forth since then, including an absolute last minute update to our last installment of Unearthed, which was in the middle of the night on July 14th and 15th of this year, where the exhibit was removed and replaced. While we have not seen the new panels ourselves, critics have described them as minimizing and whitewashing the issue of slavery and instead focusing on early U.S. history more broadly. There is apparently no longer a major focus on the nine people who were enslaved at the site. Recognizing and commemorating those nine people had been a central focus of the earlier exhibit. After that happened, the city of Philadelphia filed a petition for the Third Circuit Court to re-hear the case, and in early September, the court denied that request. On a similar note, we ended our last installment of Unearthed by talking about a federal report that was called Saving America's Story, How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage, which was released on the 4th of July. A couple of days after we recorded those episodes, the National Council on Public History issued a statement on that report, saying in part, quote, This unserious and distorted document violates the professional ethics and values that have guided history institutions, museums, and cultural organizations for generations. It also fails to reflect the basic and fundamental standards of scholarship, including an accurate interpretation of the full evidentiary record. The statement went on to say, quote, NCPH rejects authoritarian efforts to rewrite and and simplify our rich and complex history. We reject the Trump administration's attempt to control knowledge. We reject efforts to silence the voices of communities of color, immigrants, and LGBTQ plus individuals. We reject the dismissal of intellectual freedom, expertise, and collaboration. Neither of us is a member of the National Council on Public History, but I think of all the professional membership organizations for historians, that one is the most in line with what we do because the field of public history is all about Public Education on History Outreach to Public People. And so I would just like to say right on regarding that statement. For our last update, the Uffizi Galleries in Florence have announced a major two-year restoration and renovation project. expected to cost almost $ 58 million. Museum staff have called this effort unprecedented in scale and depth and something that will affect nearly every space in the museum. Plans include new cooling towers and climate control systems, which are increasingly important as average temperatures in Florence climb due to global warming. A few weeks after that announcement, staff at the Uffizi had to relocate Caravaggio's 1596 painting Bacchus, after sudden torrential rains caused a leak around a window in the gallery. That painting was in a glass case and it was not harmed, although a museum visitor's video of the leak does look quite alarming. The leak also did not affect any of the other artworks in the gallery. But boy, it sure made it clear that they need to renovate. Yeah. We talked about the Uffizi galleries on May 18th, 2026. And we're going to take a quick sponsor break before we talk about more Unearthed. Now we have some medical finds. First, there is research into the question of how smallpox was carried to the continent of Australia. There have been two primary hypotheses for this one. One, that smallpox was introduced to the northern part of the continent through fishers from Indonesia. And the other, that it was carried to Australia aboard the first fleet, which arrived from Britain in 1788. According to this research, with the available data, computer modeling didn't support the idea that smallpox was introduced by Indonesian fishers. But the first fleet idea had its own problems. The biggest was being that those ships traveled for months, and if someone on board had been carrying smallpox, an outbreak would have been long over by the time the ships arrived in Australia. There are also no records of a smallpox outbreak on board any of the first fleet ships. But it's possible, but definitely not confirmed, that one or more of the surgeons traveling with the fleet was carrying smallpox material to be used in variolation. While this does seem like a reasonable possibility, there is no direct evidence of it, and also no evidence of an intentional effort to introduce smallpox to the indigenous population. Yeah, the indigenous population of Australia specifically. That's the only indigenous population we're talking about here. Some of the same researchers have also published another paper suggesting that Australia had a much higher population before Europeans arrived than was previously believed. Earlier estimates have been between 200,000 and 800,000 people. But these researchers believe the population was more like 2 million to 3 million people. That means the estimated death toll for the Indigenous peoples of Australia was also much larger than was previously believed. These researchers estimated that a median of 2.4 million additional people may have died due to disease, violence, and broader social impacts. That is an estimated 93% of the Indigenous population in the first 80 years after the first fleet arrived. Next, researchers in the Netherlands have examined the skeletons of children who worked at dairy farms and industrial factories there between the 1600s and 1800s, and they found evidence of damage to their spines and other bones apparently caused by doing grueling work from a very young age. These people ranged in age from 4 to 25 when they died. And while the oldest of them could have been considered adults, they still had joint and bone issues that are typically associated with people who are much older than that. The children who worked on farms were particularly affected. Children as young as nine spent hours hauling heavy pails of milk and cheese molds. The children who worked in industrial factories also had problems, but they weren't as pronounced. They were doing work like spinning, sewing, and weaving, which was repetitive and fatiguing, but not as strenuous. Writing on this research noted that while the Netherlands eventually banned child labor, the United Nations Children's Fund estimates that 137.6 million children were forced into labor worldwide in 2024. Research published in the journal Nature suggests that that bubonic plague caused outbreaks among small groups of hunter-gatherers as long as 5,500 years ago. Historically, plague has more often been associated with densely populated communities where the disease could easily spread. But this research found evidence of early forms of plague in genetic material extracted from teeth found in four Siberian burial sites that were connected to hunter-gatherer communities. The team found Yersinia pestis DNA in almost 40% of the remains that they tested, which is a higher percentage than is found in some medieval urban cemeteries. An ongoing question has been whether ancient strains of plague were as deadly as the ones that caused massive pandemics later on. And it seems that this strain did cause serious disease based on the number of people infected and the fact that the burial sites included the remains of children and teenagers who presumably died of plague. It's theorized that this strain of plague passed directly from marmots to humans before it evolved the ability to be spread through flea bites. And lastly, archaeologists from the Copenhagen Museum have found a burial site that may have been associated with the city's hospital for people with leprosy during the medieval period. This research is being done at a building site, and so far they have found the remains of about 20 people. This hospital operated from 1254 until 1524, after which it was closed and the remaining patients were transferred. Although the hospital is known to have existed and its location was documented, there was no potential archaeological evidence of it until now. Future research may confirm whether these are patients from the hospital, and if so, the discovery may yield more information about leprosy in medieval Copenhagen. We will now move on to animals. Carthaginian General Hannibal famously crossed the Alps in 218 BCE with an army that included 37 war elephants. His exact route across the Alps has been the subject of debate, with researchers offering different lines of argument to support different possible routes. A leading contender has been a route through a pass called the Col du Clapierre, But research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July concludes that a different pass, called La Traversette, was more likely. The reasoning comes down to math and the amount of energy that it would have taken for the elephants and men and horses to make each crossing. The team used modeling methods based on the study of contemporary African elephants and how they move to estimate how much energy it would require for one of Hannibal's elephants to make each crossing. The Col de la Traversette was the shortest and most energetically efficient route. They estimated that the Col du Clapier route would have required 16% more energy than Col de la Traversette. They also studied two other potential routes, both of which were also less efficient than Col de la Traversette. This so-called easier passage was still demanding, though. The researchers also estimated that the men who made the crossing would have lost 19% of their body fat reserves on the Col de la Traversette route, even though that was the one that was ranked as the most efficient. War elephants, however, would have lost only 4% of their fat reserves, and the team suggested that this might explain why a lot of men died on the journey, but not nearly as many elephants did. Of course, Hannibal did not have mathematical models of energy costs when he was planning his route, so none of this could have been part of his decision-making process, although any information that he had about the route's terrain, length, and elevation changes certainly could have. Next, research published in the journal Antiquity has looked at the question of when humans started to domesticate pigeons, also known as rock doves, by studying 159 ancient pigeon bones, which dated back to the 13th to 14th centuries BCE. They extracted collagen from the animals' bones and looked at the ratios of carbon and nitrogen they contained, which is connected to the animals' diet. They found that these ratios were similar to those found in human bones from the same area and time periods. suggesting that humans and pigeons were eating similar foods. Either the humans were feeding the pigeons or the pigeons were eating the people's scraps. This might mean that these pigeons were being domesticated or were at least comfortable enough around humans to be eating their food. This is about a thousand years earlier than previous evidence of pigeon domestication. Next, another bit of research that was also published in the journal Antiquity has proposed an explanation for how brown trout got into mountain lakes in southern Norway. The fish are known to have lived there for thousands of years, but the area was covered in glaciers until about 10,000 years ago. And after that, waterfalls and other natural features would have kept trout from making their way into the lakes on their own. But now archaeologists have found fish traps dating back 7,000 years, and have concluded that hunter-gatherer peoples may have used them to catch and intentionally transport the fish from other bodies of water. In addition to proposing an explanation for how the fish got there, this suggests that these hunter-gatherers may have been exercising more control over their environments, ecosystems, and the food they had access to than was previously believed. This research was possible because water levels in one mountain lake were low enough in 2022 to reveal a number of fish traps that had previously been submerged. People didn't know they were there. Radiocarbon dating and tree ring analysis suggest that the oldest traps dated back to about 5000 BCE, while the youngest ones dated back to about 2650 BCE. There is not yet evidence of how this move could have actually happened if it did, but But researchers involved suggest that the fish might have been carried in leather bags similar to water skins, and this probably would have taken a really long time. Introducing the fish to bodies of water along this route in stages, since they probably wouldn't have survived the entire journey from where they originally lived to the mountain lakes all at once. Moving on, in the late 20th century, bone fragments were discovered at Ferreter's Cove on Ireland's Dingle Peninsula, which were identified as those of domestic cattle. They came to be known as the Kerry Cow and served as evidence of when agriculture was introduced into Ireland. The basic idea was that farmers were arriving from continental Europe and had introduced domestic cattle and methods for managing them in the late Mesolithic period, sometime between 8,000 and 4,000 BCE. However, new research using zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry has identified these bone fragments not as domestic cattle, but as coming from a bear and a wild boar, leaving no evidence for this idea of introduced cattle. It is possible, though, that further study of the bear bone fragments will lead to new information about about what types of bears were living in Ireland thousands of years ago. Yeah, there's a possibility that it was from a polar bear. But we don't really know yet. We will take another sponsor break and then get back to more finds. Now moving on to books and letters, one of my favorite categories on Unearthed. Research published in American Historical Review in July has examined a Chinese-language label that was previously believed to have had a connection to the Boston Tea Party. Thomas Wells was a blacksmith living in Boston in 1773, and some of his descendants had donated the label to the Old South Meeting House. They believed it had been removed from some of the tea that was dumped into Boston Harbor. Various authorities had examined the label since that happened, and none of them had conclusively determined that it was not connected to the Boston Tea Party, but nobody had been able to confirm that it was part of the Boston Tea Party either. MIT historian Tristan Brown looked at this label after American Historical Review issued a call for essays on 76 objects connected to 1776. Brown's focus as a historian is on Chinese history, not the American Revolution, but he had previously seen the label at the Meeting House and he was interested. Earlier study of the label had interpreted it as Mandarin, and in Mandarin, some of the characters couldn't be interpreted as Chinese prose in a way that made sense. But Brown realized that when the same characters were pronounced using Cantonese pronunciations, they represented an English-language name, Smith, Archer. That led him to New York-based import expert form Smith, Archer & Co., which had offices in East Asia in the 1860s and 70s. Another proper name on the label is that of a Cantonese merchant who was working in the 1860s. So this label is not from the Boston Tea Party. It is about a century too new for that. But it does still have relevance to U.S. history, including trade between the U.S. and China in the 19th century. Brown traced a likely route for the label to have taken through the Wells family, from their ancestor John Milton Wells, who was in the San Francisco Bay Area during the Gold Rush and later operated a business in Michigan called California Tea Store, which sold imported teas from Asia. A team led by archaeologist Franco D. Rossi has deciphered Maya glyphs from the Classic Period. which spanned from 250 to 900 CE. These glyphs were found in Guatemala in 2010 in a tunnel made by looters. The glyphs are an astronomical formula followed by, so says Sacton-Wox, that being the name of the astronomer who created the formula, which is translated as white-chested fox. This makes Sacton-Wox the earliest mathematician and astronomer to be known by name in the Americas, and the only Maya astronomer from the Classic Period to have been credited by name for their work. The formula relates to the movement of Venus and Mars in the sky. Other objects in the room where these glyphs were found include papermaking tools and other tools for making books. The space has been interpreted as a classroom and workshop for making codex books and for training people on how to do that. Next, a team of experts working at Guernsey's Island Archives have identified 17 medieval manuscript fragments which were repurposed in the bindings of other books. Until now, there's been no physical evidence of libraries, books, or literary culture on Guernsey during the medieval period. But these new identified fragments suggest that there were avid readers on medieval Guernsey and that when they were reading in the vernacular, they were more likely to be reading in French than in English. Yeah, there were also a lot of Latin fragments, but it seems the vernacular was more likely to be French. Most of these fragments are from works that have survived in other places, but one in particular is a fragment of a poem called L'Histoire de Griseldeus. Various versions of this story were very widely reprinted, but there are only a couple of known surviving copies of this specific one. There's the manuscript, and then there are two printed versions from the 16th century. This fragment has provided the first evidence that this version of the story was read outside of the French royal court. The story of Griselda, which is told in this poem, was first told in Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron in 1353. A collection of Latin fragments has been at the Penn Museum at the University of Pennsylvania since the museum acquired them from an antiquities dealer in Egypt in 1911. Some of the largest pieces have been reassembled and translated, and it appears to be a page from a sort of pocket guide, to Roman Empire laws that might have been used by tax officials or by landowners and their attorneys. The page is made from animal skin, and red ink on one side of the page suggests that someone marked something that was particularly important. These marks also helped the team figure out which side of the page was which. The text on these fragments has not been found in any other surviving work until this point, but the fragment traces back to Roman emperors Constantius II and Julian the Apostate, who ruled between 337 and 363. So these fragments have provided some new information about the law under these two emperors, and by extension, the kinds of things people were focused on and concerned about in their daily lives. Researchers from University College Dublin have traced about 3,500 years of history of the sheeppox virus by studying a range of materials from the archaeological record. Those include teeth, specimens from veterinary collections, and a lot of parchment. Parchment is made from animal skins, and researchers were able to extract sheeppox DNA not only from parchment made from sheepskin but but also from some parchment made from calfskin and goatskin. It's not clear whether these are examples of cross-species infections of sheeppox or if this DNA came from cross-contamination during the parchment-making process. Some of the parchments that were part of this study contain important historical texts, including the York Gospels, which are illuminated manuscripts that were written and illustrated in Canterbury in the late 10th or early 11th century. Another was the Corpus Glossary, which is one of the earliest English dictionaries. Sheeppox still exists today, and it is highly contagious. It can cause serious issues if it is introduced into a flock. This research has showed that the sheeppox virus genome has been very stable over centuries, and it may help researchers find new ways to treat or prevent the disease. In previous installments of Unearthed, we have talked about efforts to virtually unroll scrolls from Herculaneum, which were carbonized during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79 AD. These projects have relied on X-ray tomography, but it is hard to distinguish between the ink and the papyrus using X-rays, since both are made of carbon. An article published in PLOS One in September details another possible strategy for doing this. The pigment used to write on some Herculaneum scrolls contains lead. And x-rays can easily differentiate between lead and papyrus. So the idea is to scan the scrolls for lead and then focus on using x-rays on those specific scrolls. Rather than testing this idea on some actual Herculaneum scrolls, the team made some scrolls of their own, writing on papyrus with ink containing various concentrations of lead and then putting those scrolls in a furnace to carbonize them. They found that they could detect the lead using X-ray fluorescence and then use X-ray tomography and a specialized computer program to decipher some of what they had read. In addition to acting as a proof of concept for using a similar method on actual Herculaneum scrolls, these kinds of scroll mock-ups could also help refine the algorithms that are used to read text in virtual unrolling projects. I love this whole thing. It's so cool. We're going to make some scrolls. I like that there's craft time, right? We're going to bake them. Lastly, according to research published in the journal Notes and Queries in September, an English courtier named John Gage may have secretly protected a manuscript of Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ that he had been ordered to destroy. Gage was a prominent figure in the dissolution of the monasteries under King Henry VIII, even though he had previously left the king's court and expressed his intention to take Catholic holy orders. Before the start of the Protestant Reformation in England, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ had been approved by religious leaders in England and was a bestseller. This book was a translation of an earlier Latin text that was somewhat like an alternative to the Bible at a time when having an English language copy of the Bible was outlawed. This ban was connected to the Lollard movement, which was a reform movement that argued, among other things, that people should have access to the Bible in English. An anti-heresy act passed in 1401 targeted the Lollards and, by extension, English language versions of the Bible. but during the reign of Henry VIII, this book's references to things like Catholic sacraments and making confessions to a priest became very controversial. It's not clear exactly how or when Gage got this book, which has his signature in it, but it was probably during all of the chaos of the dissolution of the monasteries. The book remained in the Gage family until it was sold, minus six pages which had apparently fallen out at some point in 1976. Those pages wound up in the Keep archive, but due to various cataloging issues, they were effectively lost. After tracking down the six pages, UK researchers looked for and eventually found a copy of Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ in which those specific six pages were missing. That was in the collection of Beinecke Library at Yale University. Which is all very cool. Yeah. We're going to have more on Earth next time. In the meantime, do you have listener mail? I do have listener mail. This listener mail is from Ethan. And Ethan wrote to say, Hi, Holly and Tracy. I'm writing in as I'm finishing up your episode on Rebecca Smith Pollard. I'm an elementary school teacher and have lived that back and forth you talked about in the reading wars. I went through school during a whole era with some phonics, so I guess balanced literacy. But now teaching in the era of science of reading, it feels like we can't get enough phonics instruction into our day. The funny thing that made me connect more to this episode is the fact that I teach at a Horace Mann Elementary and the fact that he was such a champion for public education while also working against what research tells us. I apologize for being behind. I'm just finishing up my summer vacation and start with students on Monday. So I'm just now listening to you all on my commute. I always enjoy learning all the new things and have definitely referenced the show while teaching my elementary kiddos. Attached is my pet tax, my pup named Kix. He is a ball of energy while also always wanting cuddles. Thank you both for everything you do, Ethan. So thank you, Ethan. You do not need to apologize for being behind. I clearly am also behind. Your email is from August 21st, and I am reading it here on October the 8th. So time is a flat circle. It's funny. It's funny. Yeah. We have heard from a number of teachers after the episode on Rebecca Smith Pollard that have shared various experiences about the literacy wars and phonics and teaching reading instruction. So that's been really lovely. I can't remember if we have read any of them before this moment, but then we also have adorable, adorable dog pictures. So I need everyone to imagine a puppy dog who has a black spot over one eye. Black ears, mostly white. And in one picture, there is a significant amount of blep going on. So, so cute. So thank you so much again, Ethan, for this email. If you would like to send us a note, we're at historypodcasts at iheartradio.com. If you would like to see the show notes... For our episodes, including the ones for Unearthed episodes, which are extraordinarily long, they are at our website, which is MissedInHistory.com. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere 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.
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 Frey. It is time for our latest installment of Unearthed. If you are new to the show, this is when we talk about things that have been literally or figuratively unearthed over the last few months. Today, we have a number of medical finds, some things that are related to animals, lots and lots of books and letters. As we normally do, we are also going to start off with updates to things that we have talked about on the show before. So we talked about the Parthenon in Athens, Greece, in a two-part episode on Lord Elgin and the Parthenon sculptures that ran in January of 2020. And we talk generally about the Parthenon as an artistic and architectural marvel. But one of the details we didn't get into is that the Parthenon looks very rectangular as a structure, but it's really built with subtle curves. According to Roman writer Vitruvius, writing about 400 years after the Parthenon was built, this was intentional. The curves were used to trick the eye into seeing a regular straight structure rather than one that seems curved or sagging in the middle because of the viewer's perspective. And columns were curved with a slight bulge in the middle so that they would not appear pinched. That idea has persisted for thousands of years, but research published in Royal Society Open Science in September has called it into question. This work used modern data as well as measurements from 19th century surveys to mathematically analyze the monument's proportions and angles. And then it compared that information to what we know about how human vision and perception work. The conclusion was that it wasn't necessary to add curved elements to the Parthenon because human vision will interpret straight lines as straight when there is nothing else in our field of view to distort that interpretation. The upward curve that supposedly corrects a sagging appearance is also visible from some angles, not an invisible correction to a problem of perception. So these curves do exist, but there's no clear evidence that they were created as optical corrections. And while the columns are slightly thicker in the middle, they only bulge outward by 18 millimeters. That's less than three quarters of an inch, and that's too small of a variation to make a difference to something as huge as those columns. The paper's title sums all of this up as the illusion of illusions. There are no optical corrections in the Parthenon. Next, on New Year's Eve 2025, we did an episode about a New Year's Eve dinner that was held in a model of an Iguanodon. which was being built for London's Crystal Palace Park. In that episode, we talked about how the dinosaur sculptures that were built for the park had been scattered and they had fallen into disrepair, but that restorations were underway. As of July of this year, that project is complete. The dinosaurs have all been restored to their original 19th century appearance, or at least as close as possible to that 19th century appearance. Consequently, they have now been removed from Historic England's Heritage at Risk Register. Our episode on the ancient city of Mohenjo-daro in the Indus River Valley came out all the way back in April of 2018. We mentioned briefly that it seemed to be a city of egalitarian wealth. This idea is supported by recent research into the city and published in the journal Antiquity. According to this research, as Mohenjo-daro grew and matured, its wealth became even more evenly distributed, with houses for the richest getting smaller over time, while houses for poorer people actually got a bit larger. This is the opposite of how most known societies have worked as they transitioned from small farming communities to larger cities. Typically, wealth disparities got bigger, not smaller, during that shift to a bigger, more urban settlement. But according to this research, in its last years as a thriving urban center, wealth inequalities at Mohenjo-Daro were comparable to those found in very small farming settlements. Archaeologists also haven't discovered evidence of palaces or similar structures at Mohenjo-daro that would have been built and used only by super wealthy people. In the words of Dr. Adam Green from the University of York's Department of Archaeology and Department of Environment and Geography, as quoted in Science Daily, quote, While ancient Egyptians were building pyramids for god-kings and the Greeks were constructing massive palaces at Knossos, the people of the Indus were building something entirely different. Instead of gold-filled tombs and huge temples, Mohenjo-daro focused on sophisticated brick-lined drains and organized street layouts. Instead of allowing the perks of society to accumulate with a tiny elite, the city's amenities were widely distributed amongst the everyday households. Moving on, in March of this year, we did an episode on Hercules Posey, who was enslaved at George Washington's home of Mount Vernon and at the President's House in Philadelphia. In that episode, we talked about how the President's House site became part of the National Park System, including a slavery memorial, and the removal of interpretive panels and other materials from that site. We have talked about other legal developments and other back and forth since then, including an absolute last minute update to our last installment of Unearthed, which was in the middle of the night on July 14th and 15th of this year, where the exhibit was removed and replaced. While we have not seen the new panels ourselves, critics have described them as minimizing and whitewashing the issue of slavery and instead focusing on early U.S. history more broadly. There is apparently no longer a major focus on the nine people who were enslaved at the site. Recognizing and commemorating those nine people had been a central focus of the earlier exhibit. After that happened, the city of Philadelphia filed a petition for the Third Circuit Court to re-hear the case, and in early September, the court denied that request. On a similar note, we ended our last installment of Unearthed by talking about a federal report that was called Saving America's Story, How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage, which was released on the 4th of July. A couple of days after we recorded those episodes, the National Council on Public History issued a statement on that report, saying in part, quote, This unserious and distorted document violates the professional ethics and values that have guided history institutions, museums, and cultural organizations for generations. It also fails to reflect the basic and fundamental standards of scholarship, including an accurate interpretation of the full evidentiary record. The statement went on to say, quote, NCPH rejects authoritarian efforts to rewrite and and simplify our rich and complex history. We reject the Trump administration's attempt to control knowledge. We reject efforts to silence the voices of communities of color, immigrants, and LGBTQ plus individuals. We reject the dismissal of intellectual freedom, expertise, and collaboration. Neither of us is a member of the National Council on Public History, but I think of all the professional membership organizations for historians, that one is the most in line with what we do because the field of public history is all about Public Education on History Outreach to Public People. And so I would just like to say right on regarding that statement. For our last update, the Uffizi Galleries in Florence have announced a major two-year restoration and renovation project. expected to cost almost $ 58 million. Museum staff have called this effort unprecedented in scale and depth and something that will affect nearly every space in the museum. Plans include new cooling towers and climate control systems, which are increasingly important as average temperatures in Florence climb due to global warming. A few weeks after that announcement, staff at the Uffizi had to relocate Caravaggio's 1596 painting Bacchus, after sudden torrential rains caused a leak around a window in the gallery. That painting was in a glass case and it was not harmed, although a museum visitor's video of the leak does look quite alarming. The leak also did not affect any of the other artworks in the gallery. But boy, it sure made it clear that they need to renovate. Yeah. We talked about the Uffizi galleries on May 18th, 2026. And we're going to take a quick sponsor break before we talk about more Unearthed. Now we have some medical finds. First, there is research into the question of how smallpox was carried to the continent of Australia. There have been two primary hypotheses for this one. One, that smallpox was introduced to the northern part of the continent through fishers from Indonesia. And the other, that it was carried to Australia aboard the first fleet, which arrived from Britain in 1788. According to this research, with the available data, computer modeling didn't support the idea that smallpox was introduced by Indonesian fishers. But the first fleet idea had its own problems. The biggest was being that those ships traveled for months, and if someone on board had been carrying smallpox, an outbreak would have been long over by the time the ships arrived in Australia. There are also no records of a smallpox outbreak on board any of the first fleet ships. But it's possible, but definitely not confirmed, that one or more of the surgeons traveling with the fleet was carrying smallpox material to be used in variolation. While this does seem like a reasonable possibility, there is no direct evidence of it, and also no evidence of an intentional effort to introduce smallpox to the indigenous population. Yeah, the indigenous population of Australia specifically. That's the only indigenous population we're talking about here. Some of the same researchers have also published another paper suggesting that Australia had a much higher population before Europeans arrived than was previously believed. Earlier estimates have been between 200,000 and 800,000 people. But these researchers believe the population was more like 2 million to 3 million people. That means the estimated death toll for the Indigenous peoples of Australia was also much larger than was previously believed. These researchers estimated that a median of 2.4 million additional people may have died due to disease, violence, and broader social impacts. That is an estimated 93% of the Indigenous population in the first 80 years after the first fleet arrived. Next, researchers in the Netherlands have examined the skeletons of children who worked at dairy farms and industrial factories there between the 1600s and 1800s, and they found evidence of damage to their spines and other bones apparently caused by doing grueling work from a very young age. These people ranged in age from 4 to 25 when they died. And while the oldest of them could have been considered adults, they still had joint and bone issues that are typically associated with people who are much older than that. The children who worked on farms were particularly affected. Children as young as nine spent hours hauling heavy pails of milk and cheese molds. The children who worked in industrial factories also had problems, but they weren't as pronounced. They were doing work like spinning, sewing, and weaving, which was repetitive and fatiguing, but not as strenuous. Writing on this research noted that while the Netherlands eventually banned child labor, the United Nations Children's Fund estimates that 137.6 million children were forced into labor worldwide in 2024. Research published in the journal Nature suggests that that bubonic plague caused outbreaks among small groups of hunter-gatherers as long as 5,500 years ago. Historically, plague has more often been associated with densely populated communities where the disease could easily spread. But this research found evidence of early forms of plague in genetic material extracted from teeth found in four Siberian burial sites that were connected to hunter-gatherer communities. The team found Yersinia pestis DNA in almost 40% of the remains that they tested, which is a higher percentage than is found in some medieval urban cemeteries. An ongoing question has been whether ancient strains of plague were as deadly as the ones that caused massive pandemics later on. And it seems that this strain did cause serious disease based on the number of people infected and the fact that the burial sites included the remains of children and teenagers who presumably died of plague. It's theorized that this strain of plague passed directly from marmots to humans before it evolved the ability to be spread through flea bites. And lastly, archaeologists from the Copenhagen Museum have found a burial site that may have been associated with the city's hospital for people with leprosy during the medieval period. This research is being done at a building site, and so far they have found the remains of about 20 people. This hospital operated from 1254 until 1524, after which it was closed and the remaining patients were transferred. Although the hospital is known to have existed and its location was documented, there was no potential archaeological evidence of it until now. Future research may confirm whether these are patients from the hospital, and if so, the discovery may yield more information about leprosy in medieval Copenhagen. We will now move on to animals. Carthaginian General Hannibal famously crossed the Alps in 218 BCE with an army that included 37 war elephants. His exact route across the Alps has been the subject of debate, with researchers offering different lines of argument to support different possible routes. A leading contender has been a route through a pass called the Col du Clapierre, But research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July concludes that a different pass, called La Traversette, was more likely. The reasoning comes down to math and the amount of energy that it would have taken for the elephants and men and horses to make each crossing. The team used modeling methods based on the study of contemporary African elephants and how they move to estimate how much energy it would require for one of Hannibal's elephants to make each crossing. The Col de la Traversette was the shortest and most energetically efficient route. They estimated that the Col du Clapier route would have required 16% more energy than Col de la Traversette. They also studied two other potential routes, both of which were also less efficient than Col de la Traversette. This so-called easier passage was still demanding, though. The researchers also estimated that the men who made the crossing would have lost 19% of their body fat reserves on the Col de la Traversette route, even though that was the one that was ranked as the most efficient. War elephants, however, would have lost only 4% of their fat reserves, and the team suggested that this might explain why a lot of men died on the journey, but not nearly as many elephants did. Of course, Hannibal did not have mathematical models of energy costs when he was planning his route, so none of this could have been part of his decision-making process, although any information that he had about the route's terrain, length, and elevation changes certainly could have. Next, research published in the journal Antiquity has looked at the question of when humans started to domesticate pigeons, also known as rock doves, by studying 159 ancient pigeon bones, which dated back to the 13th to 14th centuries BCE. They extracted collagen from the animals' bones and looked at the ratios of carbon and nitrogen they contained, which is connected to the animals' diet. They found that these ratios were similar to those found in human bones from the same area and time periods. suggesting that humans and pigeons were eating similar foods. Either the humans were feeding the pigeons or the pigeons were eating the people's scraps. This might mean that these pigeons were being domesticated or were at least comfortable enough around humans to be eating their food. This is about a thousand years earlier than previous evidence of pigeon domestication. Next, another bit of research that was also published in the journal Antiquity has proposed an explanation for how brown trout got into mountain lakes in southern Norway. The fish are known to have lived there for thousands of years, but the area was covered in glaciers until about 10,000 years ago. And after that, waterfalls and other natural features would have kept trout from making their way into the lakes on their own. But now archaeologists have found fish traps dating back 7,000 years, and have concluded that hunter-gatherer peoples may have used them to catch and intentionally transport the fish from other bodies of water. In addition to proposing an explanation for how the fish got there, this suggests that these hunter-gatherers may have been exercising more control over their environments, ecosystems, and the food they had access to than was previously believed. This research was possible because water levels in one mountain lake were low enough in 2022 to reveal a number of fish traps that had previously been submerged. People didn't know they were there. Radiocarbon dating and tree ring analysis suggest that the oldest traps dated back to about 5000 BCE, while the youngest ones dated back to about 2650 BCE. There is not yet evidence of how this move could have actually happened if it did, but But researchers involved suggest that the fish might have been carried in leather bags similar to water skins, and this probably would have taken a really long time. Introducing the fish to bodies of water along this route in stages, since they probably wouldn't have survived the entire journey from where they originally lived to the mountain lakes all at once. Moving on, in the late 20th century, bone fragments were discovered at Ferreter's Cove on Ireland's Dingle Peninsula, which were identified as those of domestic cattle. They came to be known as the Kerry Cow and served as evidence of when agriculture was introduced into Ireland. The basic idea was that farmers were arriving from continental Europe and had introduced domestic cattle and methods for managing them in the late Mesolithic period, sometime between 8,000 and 4,000 BCE. However, new research using zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry has identified these bone fragments not as domestic cattle, but as coming from a bear and a wild boar, leaving no evidence for this idea of introduced cattle. It is possible, though, that further study of the bear bone fragments will lead to new information about about what types of bears were living in Ireland thousands of years ago. Yeah, there's a possibility that it was from a polar bear. But we don't really know yet. We will take another sponsor break and then get back to more finds. Now moving on to books and letters, one of my favorite categories on Unearthed. Research published in American Historical Review in July has examined a Chinese-language label that was previously believed to have had a connection to the Boston Tea Party. Thomas Wells was a blacksmith living in Boston in 1773, and some of his descendants had donated the label to the Old South Meeting House. They believed it had been removed from some of the tea that was dumped into Boston Harbor. Various authorities had examined the label since that happened, and none of them had conclusively determined that it was not connected to the Boston Tea Party, but nobody had been able to confirm that it was part of the Boston Tea Party either. MIT historian Tristan Brown looked at this label after American Historical Review issued a call for essays on 76 objects connected to 1776. Brown's focus as a historian is on Chinese history, not the American Revolution, but he had previously seen the label at the Meeting House and he was interested. Earlier study of the label had interpreted it as Mandarin, and in Mandarin, some of the characters couldn't be interpreted as Chinese prose in a way that made sense. But Brown realized that when the same characters were pronounced using Cantonese pronunciations, they represented an English-language name, Smith, Archer. That led him to New York-based import expert form Smith, Archer & Co., which had offices in East Asia in the 1860s and 70s. Another proper name on the label is that of a Cantonese merchant who was working in the 1860s. So this label is not from the Boston Tea Party. It is about a century too new for that. But it does still have relevance to U.S. history, including trade between the U.S. and China in the 19th century. Brown traced a likely route for the label to have taken through the Wells family, from their ancestor John Milton Wells, who was in the San Francisco Bay Area during the Gold Rush and later operated a business in Michigan called California Tea Store, which sold imported teas from Asia. A team led by archaeologist Franco D. Rossi has deciphered Maya glyphs from the Classic Period. which spanned from 250 to 900 CE. These glyphs were found in Guatemala in 2010 in a tunnel made by looters. The glyphs are an astronomical formula followed by, so says Sacton-Wox, that being the name of the astronomer who created the formula, which is translated as white-chested fox. This makes Sacton-Wox the earliest mathematician and astronomer to be known by name in the Americas, and the only Maya astronomer from the Classic Period to have been credited by name for their work. The formula relates to the movement of Venus and Mars in the sky. Other objects in the room where these glyphs were found include papermaking tools and other tools for making books. The space has been interpreted as a classroom and workshop for making codex books and for training people on how to do that. Next, a team of experts working at Guernsey's Island Archives have identified 17 medieval manuscript fragments which were repurposed in the bindings of other books. Until now, there's been no physical evidence of libraries, books, or literary culture on Guernsey during the medieval period. But these new identified fragments suggest that there were avid readers on medieval Guernsey and that when they were reading in the vernacular, they were more likely to be reading in French than in English. Yeah, there were also a lot of Latin fragments, but it seems the vernacular was more likely to be French. Most of these fragments are from works that have survived in other places, but one in particular is a fragment of a poem called L'Histoire de Griseldeus. Various versions of this story were very widely reprinted, but there are only a couple of known surviving copies of this specific one. There's the manuscript, and then there are two printed versions from the 16th century. This fragment has provided the first evidence that this version of the story was read outside of the French royal court. The story of Griselda, which is told in this poem, was first told in Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron in 1353. A collection of Latin fragments has been at the Penn Museum at the University of Pennsylvania since the museum acquired them from an antiquities dealer in Egypt in 1911. Some of the largest pieces have been reassembled and translated, and it appears to be a page from a sort of pocket guide, to Roman Empire laws that might have been used by tax officials or by landowners and their attorneys. The page is made from animal skin, and red ink on one side of the page suggests that someone marked something that was particularly important. These marks also helped the team figure out which side of the page was which. The text on these fragments has not been found in any other surviving work until this point, but the fragment traces back to Roman emperors Constantius II and Julian the Apostate, who ruled between 337 and 363. So these fragments have provided some new information about the law under these two emperors, and by extension, the kinds of things people were focused on and concerned about in their daily lives. Researchers from University College Dublin have traced about 3,500 years of history of the sheeppox virus by studying a range of materials from the archaeological record. Those include teeth, specimens from veterinary collections, and a lot of parchment. Parchment is made from animal skins, and researchers were able to extract sheeppox DNA not only from parchment made from sheepskin but but also from some parchment made from calfskin and goatskin. It's not clear whether these are examples of cross-species infections of sheeppox or if this DNA came from cross-contamination during the parchment-making process. Some of the parchments that were part of this study contain important historical texts, including the York Gospels, which are illuminated manuscripts that were written and illustrated in Canterbury in the late 10th or early 11th century. Another was the Corpus Glossary, which is one of the earliest English dictionaries. Sheeppox still exists today, and it is highly contagious. It can cause serious issues if it is introduced into a flock. This research has showed that the sheeppox virus genome has been very stable over centuries, and it may help researchers find new ways to treat or prevent the disease. In previous installments of Unearthed, we have talked about efforts to virtually unroll scrolls from Herculaneum, which were carbonized during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79 AD. These projects have relied on X-ray tomography, but it is hard to distinguish between the ink and the papyrus using X-rays, since both are made of carbon. An article published in PLOS One in September details another possible strategy for doing this. The pigment used to write on some Herculaneum scrolls contains lead. And x-rays can easily differentiate between lead and papyrus. So the idea is to scan the scrolls for lead and then focus on using x-rays on those specific scrolls. Rather than testing this idea on some actual Herculaneum scrolls, the team made some scrolls of their own, writing on papyrus with ink containing various concentrations of lead and then putting those scrolls in a furnace to carbonize them. They found that they could detect the lead using X-ray fluorescence and then use X-ray tomography and a specialized computer program to decipher some of what they had read. In addition to acting as a proof of concept for using a similar method on actual Herculaneum scrolls, these kinds of scroll mock-ups could also help refine the algorithms that are used to read text in virtual unrolling projects. I love this whole thing. It's so cool. We're going to make some scrolls. I like that there's craft time, right? We're going to bake them. Lastly, according to research published in the journal Notes and Queries in September, an English courtier named John Gage may have secretly protected a manuscript of Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ that he had been ordered to destroy. Gage was a prominent figure in the dissolution of the monasteries under King Henry VIII, even though he had previously left the king's court and expressed his intention to take Catholic holy orders. Before the start of the Protestant Reformation in England, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ had been approved by religious leaders in England and was a bestseller. This book was a translation of an earlier Latin text that was somewhat like an alternative to the Bible at a time when having an English language copy of the Bible was outlawed. This ban was connected to the Lollard movement, which was a reform movement that argued, among other things, that people should have access to the Bible in English. An anti-heresy act passed in 1401 targeted the Lollards and, by extension, English language versions of the Bible. but during the reign of Henry VIII, this book's references to things like Catholic sacraments and making confessions to a priest became very controversial. It's not clear exactly how or when Gage got this book, which has his signature in it, but it was probably during all of the chaos of the dissolution of the monasteries. The book remained in the Gage family until it was sold, minus six pages which had apparently fallen out at some point in 1976. Those pages wound up in the Keep archive, but due to various cataloging issues, they were effectively lost. After tracking down the six pages, UK researchers looked for and eventually found a copy of Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ in which those specific six pages were missing. That was in the collection of Beinecke Library at Yale University. Which is all very cool. Yeah. We're going to have more on Earth next time. In the meantime, do you have listener mail? I do have listener mail. This listener mail is from Ethan. And Ethan wrote to say, Hi, Holly and Tracy. I'm writing in as I'm finishing up your episode on Rebecca Smith Pollard. I'm an elementary school teacher and have lived that back and forth you talked about in the reading wars. I went through school during a whole era with some phonics, so I guess balanced literacy. But now teaching in the era of science of reading, it feels like we can't get enough phonics instruction into our day. The funny thing that made me connect more to this episode is the fact that I teach at a Horace Mann Elementary and the fact that he was such a champion for public education while also working against what research tells us. I apologize for being behind. I'm just finishing up my summer vacation and start with students on Monday. So I'm just now listening to you all on my commute. I always enjoy learning all the new things and have definitely referenced the show while teaching my elementary kiddos. Attached is my pet tax, my pup named Kix. He is a ball of energy while also always wanting cuddles. Thank you both for everything you do, Ethan. So thank you, Ethan. You do not need to apologize for being behind. I clearly am also behind. Your email is from August 21st, and I am reading it here on October the 8th. So time is a flat circle. It's funny. It's funny. Yeah. We have heard from a number of teachers after the episode on Rebecca Smith Pollard that have shared various experiences about the literacy wars and phonics and teaching reading instruction. So that's been really lovely. I can't remember if we have read any of them before this moment, but then we also have adorable, adorable dog pictures. So I need everyone to imagine a puppy dog who has a black spot over one eye. Black ears, mostly white. And in one picture, there is a significant amount of blep going on. So, so cute. So thank you so much again, Ethan, for this email. If you would like to send us a note, we're at historypodcasts at iheartradio.com. If you would like to see the show notes... For our episodes, including the ones for Unearthed episodes, which are extraordinarily long, they are at our website, which is MissedInHistory.com. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere 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.
