transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:01] Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeartRadio.

Speaker 2:
[00:12] Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson.

Speaker 1:
[00:15] And I'm Holly Frey.

Speaker 2:
[00:17] This is part two of our latest installment of Unearthed, where we talk about things that have been literally and figuratively unearthed over the last few months. In this part two, we have animals, artwork, edibles and potables, shipwrecks, and then, as always, kicking it off with some random stuff that I call potpourri, because Jeopardy!

Speaker 1:
[00:43] A six-month-long excavation in England, about ten miles south of Hadrian's Wall, has unearthed at least 800 wet stones dating back about 2,000 years to the Roman era. There are probably hundreds more still to be discovered at the site. Before this find, only about 250 wet stones had been found in the entirety of Britain and Ireland.

Speaker 2:
[01:08] This was probably a whetstone factory in an industrial area, and the stone to make the wet stones may have been quarried from the northern bank of the river near where all of this was found. The surviving wet stones at this site all seem to have been broken or incorrectly cut, which means that these are the cast-offs, and it's likely that many, many more intact wet stones were transported out of this area to the coast, and then from there to other parts of the Roman Empire. Now I kind of want other research tracing the origins of the stone and other wet stones found elsewhere in what had been Roman territory.

Speaker 1:
[01:51] Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has looked at the genetic legacy of the Mongol Empire, especially ruling elites from the group known as the Golden Horde in Central Eurasia. The Golden Horde was founded by Genghis Khan's eldest son Joshi and his descendants. Local lore in Kazakhstan has suggested that one of the four Golden Horde tombs that was analyzed in the study was that of Joshi and his family.

Speaker 2:
[02:20] According to this research, these elites descended primarily from ancient Northeast Asians, with some ancestry from ancient North Eurasian and Scythian populations. Genetic research on the remains from the four tombs suggests that the males had Y chromosomes from a particular ancestral branch that originated on the Mongolian Plateau. Many people living in Central Eurasia today have this cluster of DNA as part of their genome.

Speaker 1:
[02:53] However, this research also raises some questions about the popularly held idea that one out of every 200 men is related to Genghis Khan. Researchers also ran comparisons to modern DNA and didn't find this Y chromosome cluster as frequently in modern populations as it is in the men buried in these tombs. Researchers also noted that we don't have Genghis Khan's DNA to go on. While Joshi and his father would certainly have had some similarities in their genomes, we don't know whether that would include this specific cluster.

Speaker 2:
[03:32] And lastly, researchers in Hungary have been studying 125 skeletons from two Neolithic cemeteries, looking at patterns in how these people were buried and what that could tell us about gender roles. And among these people, these remains date back about 7,000 years. So, they examined the bones themselves, looking for evidence of wear that could tell us about these people's lives, maybe a little about what kind of work they might have done. And they also looked at the positions the people were buried in and what kinds of grave goods they were buried with.

Speaker 1:
[04:11] At one of the cemeteries, there wasn't a lot of variation in how people were buried. In general, the people buried at this cemetery seemed to have done harder physical work, but those patterns didn't vary by sex either.

Speaker 2:
[04:26] At the other site, though, things seemed to be structured along clearer lines of gender roles. Most of the female skeletons were buried on their left side with shell beads, and then most of the male skeletons were buried on their right side, and they had stone tools. There were also two male skeletons and five female skeletons departed from this pattern. In one case, there was a female skeleton buried with stone tools, and the wear on her toe bones showed that she did a lot of kneeling. That was something that was more common among the male skeletons. There was not anything to suggest that this person had some kind of unique social position, but these findings do suggest that there were people living in this community thousands of years ago who weren't aligned with the typical pattern of gender and gender roles in their area.

Speaker 1:
[05:26] This paper was titled Fixed and Fluid, The Two Faces of Gender Roles, A Combined Study of Activity Patterns and Burial Practices in the European Neolithic.

Speaker 2:
[05:38] Now we are going to move on to some animal finds. A bone found at a site in Cordoba, Spain in 2020 may be the first direct evidence of war elephants from the Punic War period. There are historical depictions of elephants being used in the Punic Wars, and there are depictions on things like coins. They have most often been associated with Carthaginian General Hannibal. But until this point, there has not been physical evidence of actual war elephants.

Speaker 1:
[06:15] This small bone was compared to the bones of mammoths and modern elephants, and radiocarbon dating placed it in the 4th or 3rd centuries BCE, which is when the Punic Wars took place. There were also several military-related objects found at the site, like artillery projectiles, as well as coins and ceramics.

Speaker 2:
[06:36] Reading through this research, it does not seem like this identification is 100% certain. They did compare it to mammoths and elephant bones, but the bones condition is too poor for DNA to be extracted from it. And it's also possible that it was brought to the area as a trade good, rather than in the body of a living war elephant.

Speaker 1:
[07:00] Moving on, a burial site in northern Norway has been found to contain the body of a Viking Age woman who was buried along with her dog. This discovery was made by a couple of people who were searching the area with metal detectors and contacted authorities about what they found. The woman and the dog were buried together in a boat, along with tools, a weaving sword, a whetstone, and a sickle.

Speaker 2:
[07:25] Next, there is a traditional Irish breed of goat that is known as the Old Irish Goat, which just delights me. Such a simple straightforward name. This goat is bred for both meat and milk. According to research published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, today's Old Irish goats have a continuous lineage stretching back to at least the Late Bronze Age, roughly 1100 to 900 BCE. This conclusion came from analysis of goat remains at an Iron Age hill fort. These are the oldest goat remains found in Ireland.

Speaker 1:
[08:05] The Old Irish goat is a rare breed today, and there are small feral herds of them in parts of Ireland. Wild goats play a part in Irish folklore, so these goats have an ongoing connection to Irish culture and history and animal domestication and husbandry in Ireland.

Speaker 2:
[08:24] According to research published in the Journal Nature Communications, there was a sophisticated long-distance trading network for parrots in the Andes Mountains and coastal Peru that predated the establishment of the Inca Empire. This conclusion came from analysis on parrot feathers from Pachacomic, which was a religious center that was well outside the bird's native range. Researchers used DNA sequencing, isotope chemistry, and computational landscape modeling to determine where the birds came from and where they were taken.

Speaker 1:
[09:00] In the words of Dr. George Olaf from the Australian National University, ANU, who was the paper's lead author, Our ancient habitat modeling confirmed that the western side of the Andes was just as inhospitable to these species 1,000 years ago as it is today. These parrots are strictly rainforest dwellers with a natural home range of around 150 kilometers. The fact that they ended up more than 500 kilometers away on the other side of South America's highest mountain range proves human intervention. They do not naturally fly over the Andes.

Speaker 2:
[09:39] Researchers from the University of Liverpool have published work on the development and spread of early domesticated dogs. This includes work from a rock shelter in Anatolia where people and dogs stayed together roughly 15,800 years ago. These people buried their dead, and they also buried their dogs in a way that was very similar to human burials.

Speaker 1:
[10:05] Professor Doug Baird of the University of Liverpool was quoted as saying, The archaeology makes clear that these dogs were close companions of humans. Isotope analysis showing the dogs ate fish, a major element of the human diet, and, like humans, were carefully buried in the rock shelter near human burial, thereby receiving ritualized treatment analogous to the humans. These people hunted animals like wild sheep and dangerous wild cattle, so it seems likely that these animals were hunting, but also possibly guard dogs given the presence of large predators like wolves and leopards in Central Anatolia at that time.

Speaker 2:
[10:45] And lastly, we have a depiction of an animal. A hiker on the island of Mallorca in Spain found a tiny bronze bull's head. It is roughly 3,000 years old. This is one of only four such skull representations ever found on the island, and it is little. It's a little more than an inch long. This hiker delivered the find to authorities, and the plan is for it to be placed in a museum.

Speaker 1:
[11:13] It is time to take a little sponsor break, and then we'll be back to talk about art.

Speaker 2:
[11:27] Okay, now for some art. A professor who specializes in rock art research has partnered with traditional owners in Australia to study 14 newly documented images of the extinct Tasmanian tiger or thylacine. These images are from two different locations in northern territory. There are also pictures of Tasmanian devils. Today Tasmanian devils live only on Tasmania, but they used to live on the Australian mainland as well.

Speaker 1:
[12:02] They look nothing like that cartoon.

Speaker 2:
[12:05] They really don't. And Tasmanian tigers don't look that much like tigers either.

Speaker 1:
[12:10] Some of these artworks are believed to be less than a thousand years old. And the Tasmanian devil is believed to have been extinct on the mainland 3,000 years ago. This has raised some questions about whether the paintings were made by someone who had seen a living Tasmanian devil, meaning that they survived longer on the mainland than was previously thought. The paper on this find, which was published in the journal Archaeology in Oceania, also includes information from Aboriginal oral histories about these animals and their cultural importance.

Speaker 2:
[12:44] In other rock art news, researchers in France have used carbon-14 dating to directly estimate the age of several pieces of black line art. This is the first time carbon-14 dating has been used directly on art in this region because it was believed that all of the pigments that were used were made of metals that didn't contain any carbon, so there would have been no carbon-14 to test.

Speaker 1:
[13:12] This team used non-invasive methods to test the composition of the pigments used in two figures. They found traces of charcoal and the distribution of the charcoal was consistent enough that it seemed like part of the pigment and not like contamination from some of their point in history. They extracted extremely small amounts of this pigment for testing and concluded that one of the figures dates to about 13,000 years before the present, while the other had pigment that seemed to come from two different time periods. The first about 8,500 years before the present and the other more likely 15,000 years before the present. It is possible that this was an older artwork that was retouched or altered thousands of years later.

Speaker 2:
[14:00] A painting by Italian Renaissance artist Sophanisba Anguissola was thought to have been lost but has now resurfaced. It turns out it was bought by a private collector in 1977. The painting's current owners are relatives of the person who bought it. And they looked into the painting's history after seeing a lecture on the artist, which was presented by the National Gallery of Art in 2024. This painting was publicly displayed for the first time since then, this past February.

Speaker 1:
[14:33] This portrait is called Portrait of a Canon Regular, and it depicts a clergyman whose identity is unknown. Sophanisba Anguissola was one of the few women artists to become really recognized during the Renaissance, and fewer than 20 signed paintings of hers have survived until today.

Speaker 2:
[14:53] Speaking of resurfaced Renaissance art, a previously unknown postcard-sized drawing by German Renaissance artist Hans Baldungrion has been found among the possessions of the descendants of Susanna Feffinger, who sat for this portrait back in 1517. The portrait was done in Silverpoint on paper that was treated with bone powder, and it was part of a collection of artwork that the family had taken in for valuation. This is the only known Silverpoint work from this artist that is still in a private collection.

Speaker 1:
[15:31] Back in 1983, a mold was found at an archaeological site at a Slavic hill floor in Spandau, which is one of the boroughs of Berlin today. This mold would have been used to cast a small devotional object in the shape of a wheel cross, or a cross that's in a circle. In January, a find was announced from a site in Havilland, Germany, roughly 70 kilometers away, which is a bronze wheel cross that was made with that mold, which was found by a volunteer using a metal detector. These date back to the 10th or 11th century, and they're two of the oldest Christian artifacts in the region dating back to when it was first being Christianized.

Speaker 2:
[16:14] Archaeologists have found fragments of decorated ostrich egg shells at sites in Namibia and South Africa. These shells were used as water vessels more than 60,000 years ago, and people decorated them by engraving them. Researchers analyzed the engravings on 112 fragments and found that 80 of them had what they described as coherent special regularities. That is, they had patterns of parallel lines or patterns of the same angle being used over and over. Some of them had repeating grids and diamond-shaped motifs, which were the most complex designs. Patterns were very consistent. They showed an ability not only to repeat an etching consistently but also to plan it out so that these patterns and lines would cover the desired space in a regular way over the curved surface of an ostrich egg. So this is basically more advanced thinking than might have been expected from people who were living 60,000 years ago. I don't think I could just plan out in my head a bunch of etchings on an ostrich egg shell and have it come out evenly.

Speaker 1:
[17:37] I don't know. I bet if you did it a bunch, you could.

Speaker 2:
[17:40] Maybe eventually with a lot of practice.

Speaker 1:
[17:43] Right? It's a mastery. We are going to wrap up our art talk with some art acquisitions that made headlines over the last few months. The Italian government paid almost $35 million for a Caravaggio portrait. The portrait of Monsignor Maffei Barberini, who would later become Pope Urban VIII, had been on loan to the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. Now, it is part of the permanent collection at the Palazzo.

Speaker 2:
[18:10] The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC has acquired Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy by past podcast subject Artemisia Gentileschi. This is the first Gentileschi painting in the museum's collection.

Speaker 1:
[18:26] And a museum I love desperately, the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, acquired Salvador Dalí's largest painting at auction for $293,240. This painting was a strange landscape created as a stage set for Bacchanal, which was a surrealist ballet that premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1939. It is made of 13 panels and four canvases and measures 65 by 100 feet. Dalí also wrote a libretto and designed costumes for this production.

Speaker 2:
[19:02] Now we will get into the edibles and potables, which are always one of my favorites. The Four Corners potato is a small, nutritionally very dense potato that people in Southwestern North America have been growing for millennia. Today, it is still eaten and used for spiritual and medicinal purposes. Research published in the Journal Plus One has looked at its history and early domestication by both examining more than 400 stone tools and by interviewing indigenous elders.

Speaker 1:
[19:36] Those tools came from 14 archaeological sites beyond the Four Corners potato's natural range. The team looked at large slabs and handheld stones used for grinding and found microscopic potato starch granules on tools from 9 of the 14 sites. Four of the sites showed consistent use of the potato, stretching as far back as 10,000 years ago.

Speaker 2:
[20:02] Hopi and Denae elders who were interviewed nearly all had knowledge of this potato. And Denae women in particular knew techniques on how to process and prepare them to make them less bitter. Denae doctoral candidate Cynthia Wilson, who's a co-author of this study, was quoted as saying, quote, the mobility of indigenous foodways was driven by kinship-based practices across the landscape. Indigenous knowledge holders, especially matrilineal women, held on to these seedlings and stories across generations to sustain ties to ancestral land and foodways.

Speaker 1:
[20:41] This research combines with other work to suggest that indigenous people in the American Southwest domesticated the Four Corners potato. This contradicts earlier assumptions that the domesticated crops grown in the Southwest were not domesticated there, but were domesticated in Mesoamerica and then introduced from there. This new information also augments other research and suggests that now, perhaps, agave, barley, and amaranth were all cultivated in North America.

Speaker 2:
[21:14] Researchers working at sites in what's now Ukraine have used the preserved proteins and dental calculus to confirm that iron-age Scythians consumed milk from horses as well as from cattle, sheep, and goats. There are historical accounts describing Scythians as consuming mare's milk, but this is the first physical evidence of that.

Speaker 1:
[21:38] Only one of the 28 individuals in the study showed evidence of consuming horse milk, so it doesn't seem like something that was common, at least among this particular group of people. It is possible that the proteins in horse milk did not survive as well in the dental calculus as proteins from the milk of other animals. Since the Scythians are becoming understood as a culturally and ethnically diverse group rather than more of a homogenous culture, it is possible that there were also cultural differences involved. Or there could have been cultural factors involved in who was caring for the horses and thus who was consuming horse milk.

Speaker 2:
[22:18] Someone at an estate sale in Minnesota found a silver pap boat and recognized it as the work of 19th century silversmith Peter Benson, who was born in St. Croix and later moved to Philadelphia. He was one of the first known silversmiths of African descent in the United States. Fewer than 30 pieces made by Benson are known to have survived until today, and they are identifiable through a hallmark, which he used to see as either P. Benson or as his initials. So a pap boat is a little like a gravy boat, but it was used to feed a thin porridge or pap to babies and to sick people.

Speaker 1:
[22:59] This pap boat was purchased at the estate sale for $40, and then it was sold at auction for $24,000. The buyer was reportedly a prominent American institution, but that institution has not been named.

Speaker 2:
[23:15] RESEARCH published in the journal PLOS One has used a combination of techniques to look at the residues left on pottery dating back to the 3rd through the 6th millennium BCE. We talk about food residues on pottery fairly often on Unearthed, but often the focus is on fatty residues, and that largely limits the results to residues that came from animals. This research used a combination of techniques, including microscopic examination and chemical analysis, to try to instead look for plant residues.

Speaker 1:
[23:52] This involved 58 pieces of pottery from 13 archaeological sites across northern and eastern Europe. The team found tissue samples from an assortment of plants, including grasses, berries, leaves, and seeds. Often there were animal remains as well, most often fish or some other kind of seafood. The combination of ingredients seemed to vary, but suggested that people had already developed complex culinary traditions by this point.

Speaker 2:
[24:22] Yeah, I think sometimes people imagine people from thousands and thousands of years ago, just like spearing a fish on a stick and charring it over a fire. This was more nuanced than that.

Speaker 1:
[24:35] They were very picky about their plating.

Speaker 2:
[24:36] They were just really... A groundskeeper working on a golf course in England noticed a sinkhole that had turned out to be a brick wine cellar that was abandoned more than a hundred years ago. This wine cellar probably belonged to a manor in the area that was torn down at the end of the 19th century. The cellar was full of wine and port bottles which were now empty. I was unclear on whether they were empty when the wine cellar was abandoned or whether their corks degraded and what was inside evaporated or spilled or what. Exactly. For now though, the cellar has been sealed up while the staff at the golf course figure out what they should do about it.

Speaker 1:
[25:25] Make it a gaming room. Speaking of wine, research published in the journal Nature has looked at 4,000 years of viticulture in France. This has involved extracting DNA from 49 grape seeds found at various archaeological sites. The oldest came from wild grapevines, but what is being described as essentially identical to Pinot Noir grapes that are grown today. That one came from a toilet at a 15th century hospital at Valenciennes in northern France. This suggests that people have been propagating grapes through cloning for more than 500 years.

Speaker 2:
[26:04] Researchers have studied maize or corn samples in 35 tombs from the Chincha Valley, and they found that the samples had exceptionally high levels of nitrogen. There was a lot more nitrogen in them than could have just come from the soil in the area. So this suggests that the Chincha Kingdom, which lived in what's now Peru before the development of the Inca Empire, fertilized its crops, probably with seabird guano that was harvested from the Chincha Islands. Researchers believe this use of fertilizer was a factor in how this kingdom became one of the wealthiest and most powerful societies in their era. Basically, they had crops that had a lot better yield than some of their neighbors as part of how they became wealthy.

Speaker 1:
[26:56] Hey, hey, it's almost time for everybody's favorite, shipwrecks. But first, we're going to pause and have a sponsor break.

Speaker 2:
[27:11] We will close out this installment of Unearthed with some shipwrecks. Divers have been exploring the site of a Roman shipwreck on the bottom of Lake Nuketel in Switzerland. This ship sank roughly 2,000 years ago, and the vessel itself has decayed, but the cargo it was carrying is mostly intact. This was a merchant vessel, and it was carrying hundreds of pieces of ceramic tableware, and M4A that were carrying Spanish olive oil. There were also wheels, harnesses, and swords that may have been connected to the vessel possibly having guards or a military escort on board. This wreck is being described as unique among inland shipwrecks, and its cargo is expected to be exhibited in a museum once it's recovered.

Speaker 1:
[28:06] Maritime archaeologists from the Viking Ship Museum in Denmark have announced the discovery of the world's largest cog in the strait between Denmark and Sweden. The cog was a type of cargo ship that was developed in the late 12th century, and it really revolutionized maritime trade, allowing small crews of sailors to handle ships that had an enormous carrying capacity, relatively speaking. This one was probably built around 1410 based on the tree rings in its timbers, and it had a capacity of about 300 tons. It was made from timber that came from what's now Poland and the Netherlands, with large timbers being shipped to the Netherlands where the vessel was built.

Speaker 2:
[28:48] This wreck has also provided direct evidence that some cogs had high castles at the bow and the stern. These had been documented through things like illustrations and written descriptions of cogs, but this is the first time that these structures have survived in an actual wreck. Often, because of the conditions in this part of the world, all that remains of the vessel by the time it's discovered underwater is just the bottom, if that.

Speaker 1:
[29:17] This wreck is also just very well preserved, with parts of its rigging still intact. Part of the galley has also survived, and items found on board include kitchen items like bronze pots, tableware and bowls, as well as sailors' personal items like shoes and combs and even rosary beads. But no cargo has been found with this wreck. It is possible that it was carrying goods in barrels and that those barrels may have floated away after the ship sank.

Speaker 2:
[29:47] Denmark's Viking Ship Museum has also announced the discovery of the wreck of the Dannebrog, which was sunk by the British Navy during the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801. This was the flagship of the Danish-Norwegian fleet, and it caught fire and exploded after the British Navy struck it.

Speaker 1:
[30:08] This announcement was made on the 255th anniversary of the battle, which was April 2nd, so technically this was a second-quarter find, but just on the edge. But both this and the cog were found and studied as part of advanced work ahead of construction of an artificial island that will both act as a new housing district and work to mitigate the threat of sea level rise.

Speaker 2:
[30:33] The articles that I was reading about both of these were written in English, but they were obviously like published for people in Denmark and surrounding areas. And so they didn't really specify what was going on with this construction site. And I kept being like, okay, but these are shipwrecks. How are the shipwrecks a construction site? And the answer is building an island. Which sounds fascinating. Maritime archaeologists have published findings from the excavations of a shipwreck off the coast of Singapore. The excavations were carried out in sort of phases between 2016 and 2019. They recovered 3.5 tons of broken ceramic and a few intact ceramic pieces. This wreck is being described as the first ancient shipwreck ever found in Singapore waters. And the cargo dates back to the 14th century Yuan dynasty.

Speaker 1:
[31:34] Much of this cargo was blue and white ceramic. There was more of this style of ceramic that has been found in any other shipwreck in the world. There were also a number of other styles of ceramic represented. The ship's hull has not survived, but it's believed to have been a Chinese junk that was bound for Temasek, which was the port that preceded the establishment of modern Singapore.

Speaker 2:
[31:57] The wreck of the Lock Labelle has been found on the floor of Lake Michigan almost exactly 150 years after it disappeared in a storm. That was in 1782, and a shipwreck hunter spotted it in 2022. But the find of the wreck was not announced until earlier this year because its discoverer wanted to create a 3D model of the wreckage before other people learned where it was.

Speaker 1:
[32:24] The Lock Labelle was sailing from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Grand Haven, Michigan carrying both passengers and cargo, and it started to leak about two hours into the trip across the lake. The ship turned back to Milwaukee but foundered in the stormy weather. The passengers were moved to lifeboats before the ship sank, although eight people drowned when one of the lifeboats capsized.

Speaker 2:
[32:49] Storms that struck the UK in late January may have exposed to the timbers of a 17th century shipwreck. The ship sank off the coast of southern England, and it may be the Fame, which was a Dutch merchant vessel that sank in 1631. Other parts of this wreck had already been discovered underwater in the Swash Channel, and there had been some research work at that wreck site. But these timbers that the storm exposed on the beach might be part of the hull that was missing. People could not find when they did that earlier work. The plan is to take these timbers to a conservation lab and take some samples from it to compare what they found on the beach with what they found underwater to see if it matches.

Speaker 1:
[33:35] And finally, we have talked about the Parthenon marbles on the show before. In March, it was announced that last year, the Greek Ministry of Culture reclaimed a piece of the Parthenon that had been removed by Lord Elgin to be taken to the UK. The recovered piece did not come straight from England, though. It came from the wreck of Elgin's ship, Mentor, which sank in 1802. This is a small piece of marble that is believed to have been part of a beam or a roof of the Parthenon. 17 crates of marbles were recovered from the shipwreck by Elgin's secretary, so most of the Greek Ministry of Culture's discoveries of the site have been remnants of the ship itself and items like everyday pottery.

Speaker 2:
[34:19] Yeah, I appreciated how the recovery of this tiny piece of marble was hailed as like a giant success because of all that context around the Parthenon marbles and the shipwreck. That's it for this installment of Unearthed, with the exception of some listener mail. I have a listener mail from Whitney. Whitney wrote, Hi there, my family and I recently went to the Titanic exhibit at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland. And thanks to your wonderful podcast, I was able to impress one of the people working at the exhibit. While walking around looking at the artifacts, the museum employee came up to me with a replica of a life jacket that would have been on the Titanic and asked me if I wanted to wear it. I, of course, said yes. And the employee mentioned how the life jacket was heavier than the ones we use nowadays. When he asked me what I thought the life jacket was made out of, without hesitation, I said cork. I don't remember the specific podcast episode or really much of the details, but I remember you guys covering a story of a shipwreck that happened near the shore. There weren't enough life jackets, so people on board fought each other to get one. But due to the life jackets being old and made of cork, and I think having previously been used, the unfortunate individuals who had a life jacket ended up sinking and drowning instead of floating and safely making it to shore. When I correctly answered the question, the museum employee did a double-take and told me I was the only person that day to have correctly answered the question. Although I must admit it was still pretty early in the day, and I only knew the answer because of you two. It was a small thing, but really made my day. I know that you guys love animals, but I've also included a picture of my mom's favorite child, Little Bear. Little Bear was very upset about not getting to go to the museum. Thanks so much for all you do. I love learning and have been a big fan of your podcast for years. Sincerely, Whitney. We have a very cute little white scruffy dog.

Speaker 1:
[36:18] Little Bear.

Speaker 2:
[36:19] I went to refresh my memory about which episode that was about the life jackets made of cork. I have already forgotten which episode it was, and that was like two hours ago that I went and looked it up. But yeah, the issue was that some of the life jackets, the cover on the life jacket had deteriorated and it let water get in. Some of them, it was that the cork had deteriorated. So when water permeated through the life jacket, like the material on the outside, it just soaked into the cork and became heavy, which is terrible.

Speaker 1:
[36:57] Yeah, it was no longer buoyant cork, just porous cork.

Speaker 2:
[37:02] Yeah, I'm pretty sure there was also a different shipwreck episode where the life jackets had been standardized by weight. There was a weight requirement for how much cork, and so some unscrupulous life jacket manufacturers had supplemented the weight of their life jackets with iron bars, which are not buoyant. Uh, not even, not even. So thank you so much for the email. I love to feel smart.

Speaker 1:
[37:35] What's that like?

Speaker 2:
[37:36] I don't know. Lately, lately, I feel more like I'm sort of struggling. I remember being at the Bookbinders Museum in San Francisco, um, and the, the docent asked me what I thought the apprentices had used to clean the things that they were using. And I was like, I don't know, probably urine. And that was right. And I felt very smart. So I feel a kinship with Whitney with this email. If you would like to send us a note, we are at historypodcasts at iheartradio.com. If you want to see our show notes, which includes so many articles that went into Unearthed, they are at our website of missedinhistory.com. And you can subscribe to our show on the IHeartRadio app and wherever else you 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.