Unearthed! Year-end 2024, Part 1

This first installment the end of year 2024 edition of Unearthed! starts with updates, so many shipwrecks, and so much art.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argentix. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  Whether you're calling the wise women in your life, video calling your girlfriends across the country, or checking in on someone who always knows how to make you smile, staying connected matters. Those small conversations, shared laughs, and quick hellos are what keep relationships strong even when life gets busy. Some of the most life-giving conversations start with just a phone call. That's why AT&T guarantees the network you can rely on, so you can focus on the moments and people that matter most. That's the AT&T Guarantee. AT&T: Connecting Changes Everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.

• 1:10Speaker 03

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• 1:41Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:52Holly Frey?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 1:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  And I'm Holly Frey.

• 1:57Holly Frey?

  It's time, once again, for our latest installment of Unearthed.

• 2:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  Uh, if you are new to the show, this is when a few times a year, we talk about things that have been literally and figuratively unearthed over the last few months. This is coming out in January of 2025, but it is our unearthed for the fourth quarter of 2024. We have so many updates to prior things that we have talked about either on unearthed or other episodes of the show, and then a lot of shipwrecks, a lot of art. There is part two, which will have a lot of other things that were unearthed that that will come out on Wednesday.

• 2:38Holly Frey?

  So let's start with an update to the top story in our spring 2024 installment of unearthed, and that is Amelia Earhart's plane. Private exploration company Deep Sea Vision made an announcement back in January that their sonar imaging had revealed a very plane shaped blob on the bottom of the ocean roughly between Hawaii and Papua New Guinea. The blob definitely bore a resemblance to a Lockheed Electra, which is what Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan were flying in. But as Deep Sea Vision CEO Tony Romeo acknowledged at the time, it could just be rocks.

• 3:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  It was just rocks.

• 3:19Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 3:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  That's that whole update. It was just rocks.

• 3:27Holly Frey?

  We also have another update on those ruby slippers that were used in the movie The Wizard of Oz, which we talked about twice on unearthed in 2024. Our last update about them was that they were going to be auctioned off, and they were for $28 million. According to a statement from the auction house, that means they are the most expensive piece of memorabilia ever to be sold at auction.

• 3:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  When we talked about this last time, it was hoped that the Judy Garland Museum of Grand Rapids, Minnesota would be able to buy the slippers. It's actually where the slippers were when they were stolen. One of the things that we've been talking about on on unearthed. The auctions winner has remained anonymous, at least as of when we are recording this, but it was not the museum. That $28 million winning bid was way beyond the amount that had been raised to help the museum buy the shoes. Also, way more than the estimated auction price from before the sale actually happened. The museum announced that it was not the winner.

• 4:35Holly Frey?

  Prior hosts of the show did an episode on the Terracotta Army back in 2009. Archaeologists started excavating one part of the tomb of Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huang in 2015. And in December, it was announced that they had found a Terracotta Warrior that seems to depict a high-ranking military officer. There are thousands of life-sized clay statues in the Terracotta Army, but this is only one of 10 high-ranking officers that have been found so far. Based on the figure's dress and where he was found, he may have been intended to represent the highest-ranking member of his unit.

• 5:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  Moving on, all the way back in 2013, which is so long ago, we did a two-part episode on the Lions of Savo, also called "The Ghost and the Darkness," who killed more than 30 workers on the Uganda Railroad in 1898. This kind of behavior was really not typical of lions. And in that episode, we talked about how they had signs of dental disease that might have affected how they were acting and what they were eating. This also came up in a 2017 installment of Unearthed, when we talked about some research into dental microware textures that suggested that they had only been eating their prey's meat.

• 5:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  They had not been chewing on or eating the bones, and that that may have been because of their dental pain.

• 6:05Holly Frey?

  Research published in the journal Current Biology in November has looked at what kinds of animals they were eating based on the hair that was impacted in those damaged areas of their teeth. And they found oryx, waterbuck, wildebeest and zebra hair, as well as hair from two different giraffe species and, of course, human hair. And there was also lion hair from the lions grooming themselves and one another. But there was almost no Cape buffalo hair, which is a staple for lions in the Savo region today. That may be connected to the decline in Cape buffalo in the late 19th century due to rinderpest. We have an episode on rinderpest as well from April 8, 2020.

• 6:49Holly Frey?

  DNA research that was part of this work also confirmed that the ghost and the darkness were siblings.

• 6:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  Next, previous hosts of the show did an episode on the Bayeux Tapestry on July 27, 2011. That is the medieval embroidery chronicling the Norman conquest of Britain. At least eight feet of this embroidery are missing. And in October, it was announced that French artist Elan Delprat has been tapped to create a depiction of the coronation of William the Conqueror to help fill in this missing portion. Delprat gave an interview saying that this is not a restoration or a reconstruction, but it will be something that evokes that moment from history.

• 7:35Holly Frey?

  Delprat works in painting, sculpture, film and other media. And the actual panel will be made at Paris's Gobelin's Menue Factory, which dates back to the 15th century. The exact timing is still to be worked out, but it's possible that this will be done in time for the millennium celebration of the birth of William the Conqueror in 2028.

• 7:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  We have two different discoveries for our latest Pompeii updates. First, archaeologists at Pompeii have found a very small house, one that headlines are pretty consistently describing as tiny, and the walls are covered in frescoes showing scenes from mythology. These frescoes are very well-preserved, and the house is being called the House of Phaedra, after the mythological queen of Athens, who's shown in one of these frescoes.

• 8:29Holly Frey?

  Older homes in Pompeii were often built around an atrium with a central pool for collecting rainwater and rooms around the edges. But eventually, trends shifted towards smaller, more compact homes like this one, but ones that were still luxurious in their construction and decor.

• 8:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  The other Pompeii find is about DNA research carried out by a team from the University of Florence, Harvard University, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. One of the most memorable features of Pompeii is the casts of bodies of people who died in the eruption and were buried in the volcanic ash. This left voids where their bodies had been, and some of those were filled with plaster in the 19th century. These plaster casts can be really evocative, and it's basically human nature to try to fill in the backstory and interpret who these people were based on the casts.

• 9:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  But of course, those backstories and interpretations are influenced by the worldviews, biases, and opinions of anybody that's doing that interpreting.

• 9:42Holly Frey?

  Recent DNA research on skeletal material from within some of the casts has really upended some of those interpretations. Like, one group of four people found together has largely been interpreted as being members of a family. But according to their DNA, three of them were not biologically related, and the tests on the fourth were inconclusive. Another pair of casts was believed to be a mother wearing a gold bracelet, holding her child on her lap. But these instead appear to be someone genetically male holding a child that they were not physically related to.

• 10:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  The team who did this work also recognized that these kinds of DNA studies have their limits, just like visual and archaeological interpretations of the casts. In a press release, Harvard Genetics Professor David Reich said, quote, "Instead of establishing new narratives that might also misrepresent these people's experiences, the genetic results encourage reflection on the dangers of making up stories about gender and family relationships in past societies based on present day expectations."

• 10:56Holly Frey?

  And one last thing, not about the city, but about the Vesuvius volcano. The Archaeological Park of Pompeii publishes data from the ongoing archaeological work in the site in its e-Journal, which launched last year. In December 2024, the journal published "The Date of the Construction of Pompeii: Premises for an Open Debate", which examines questions around when that eruption actually happened. And that paper and its title are in Italian. This is an English translation.

• 11:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, I do not read Italian, so I was not able to read this paper for myself. The commonly held date of the eruption is August 24th. That's the date that was mentioned by Pliny the Younger, although his original writings have been lost and what we have today are later copies and translations of that work. But in the late 18th century, researchers put forth a different date of October 24th. And in 2018, archaeologists at the park found an inscription that was dated October 17th. And that was something that seemed like it could back up that date. This was because the inscription was done in charcoal, which is very delicate. So the idea was that it must have been made

• 12:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  shortly before the eruption and was buried and preserved rather than much longer before that, where it would have weathered away before the eruption happens.

• 12:22Holly Frey?

  Archaeologists at the park conducted an experiment using charcoal to write on the same wall in October of 2023 to see if the note was still visible the following August, which it was. The paper also offers counterarguments to some of the other evidence that's been used to support a later date for the eruption, like what kinds of seasonal foods have been found at the site. Ultimately, the paper sort of cautiously supports the idea that Pliny the Younger was correct, but without conclusively saying that was the case.

• 12:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  Past host of the show, talked about Pompeii on October 19th, 2009. And of course, that has been on seemingly every installment of Unearthed.

• 13:07Holly Frey?

  We did an episode on the Paris catacombs on October 23rd, 2019, following our trip to Paris that same year. In the late 18th century, cemeteries around Paris were emptied out and the remains they had held were dumped into the catacombs. Our episode goes into the reasons why that happened and how it was carried out. Later on, walls were built along passages in the catacombs using the skulls and long bones. One of these collapsed in 2022, which gave researchers an opportunity to study the bones more closely.

• 13:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, the idea was that since the wall had already collapsed, they would be able to do that work without like further disturbing the remains. This is the first serious scientific study of the skeletal remains in that ossuary. This effort involves a team of archaeologists, anthropologists, biologists, and doctors, and they're studying the bones to try to get a sense of what public health was like in Paris over the centuries in which these people lived and died. So they're looking at physical damage to the bones, like evidence of past injuries or amputations, as well as evidence of illnesses, infections, and other conditions that can leave evidence on the bones. This will also give researchers enough

• 14:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  information to more accurately estimate just how many people's bones were placed in the catacombs.

• 14:34Holly Frey?

  We also did a two-part episode on Ernest Shackleton's expeditions to Antarctica in March of 2022, after the wreck of his ship was found. A new 3D digital scan of the wreck was released in October, showing that the ship is still very well preserved, with a number of everyday items still visible in the wreckage. The scan was released as part of the promotion for a documentary called Endurance, which is on Disney+

• 15:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  Prior host of the show talked about Ada Lovelace on November 11th, 2009. Researcher working at the Royal Society has found four letters from her to Sir John Herschel, which were written in 1848. These were letters that the Royal Society did know about, but they had been misfiled at some point in the past, so they didn't actually know where they were. They had been placed in a volume that was called miscellaneous 19. And apparently, they had been filed under the name Augusta Ada King, which was her name, but that left off the Countess of Lovelace that would have made it more obviously clear who these letters belonged to.

• 15:48Holly Frey?

  These letters offer an example of the steps Ada Lovelace had to take at a time in which women were not considered capable of things like complex mathematics and astronomy. She ostensibly writes on behalf of her husband and takes an extremely self-deprecating and apologetic tone, but then asks questions or offers insights that show that she definitely does understand the subject at hand.

• 16:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, it's almost like, hey, I'm really sorry to bother you, but my husband wanted me to ask you this question. And I really don't know anything about this, but then, and then just lays out an incredibly complex. We're going to take a quick sponsor break and then have a couple more updates.

• 16:32Speaker 04

  First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?

• 16:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hey, everybody, it's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, defining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.

• 16:59Speaker 04

  It was going to rival anything that was already built, and that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.

• 17:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game.

• 17:13Speaker 05

  Through what Alan's whole crew designed, we connected the event visitors to the world.

• 17:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.

• 17:22Speaker 05

  To actually see the whole stadium light up and data is flowing is a beautiful thing.

• 17:27Speaker 04

  What the fans experience is incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.

• 17:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  AT&T, connecting fans to what they love. Connecting changes everything. AT&T.

• 17:36Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?

• 18:21Holly Frey?

  Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 18:31Speaker 06

  This live check-in is brought to you by State Farm. Porque el bienestar de tu familia también merece protección. Okay, real talk. I'm about to become a dad again. And wow, it hits different the second time. Hi, I'm Wilmer Valderrama and I've done, you know, I've done the red carpets, the long days on set and all that, but nothing prepares you for that moment when you're building a crib and you realize you're building a future. Familia is everything to me. The laughs, the chaos, the unconditional love, but also the pressure, la responsabilidad. If you're stepping into something big right now, starting a family, getting engaged, moving cities, you're not alone. Take one step at a time. Why breathe?

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• 19:22Speaker 07

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers, producer, songwriter, guitarist, and co-founder of the group Sheik. A great song has a way of defining a moment, a moment of joy, heartbreak, or anything in between.

• 19:39Speaker 07

  This fall, I'll be driving across the country, dropping in on some of the coolest, most fascinating artists working today. We'll go deep into their lives and careers and hear what it was like before the moment that made them. From hitmakers like Miguel.

• 19:56Speaker 06

  That last year, finishing that record was the hardest experience of my life, regardless of how everyone else buys into this. I believe in this and I'm gonna push.

• 20:08Speaker 07

  To rising stars like Alex Warren.

• 20:11Speaker 06

  You know, a song is a story and the verse is setting the scene. And for me at least, it's allowing me to be personal and vulnerable with the audience, whether it's about my wife and I'm being vulnerable about her, or it's about, you know, my parents and I'm being vulnerable to them. And it's almost like a cinematic piece in a way where each song tells that beautiful story.

• 20:29Speaker 07

  It's gonna be one hell of a trip. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 20:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  Stonehenge has made a lot of appearances on Unearthed since we covered it back in 2014. That 2014 episode was because there had been research about it. This includes our most recent installment of Unearthed before this one. That time, that most recent prior episode, we talked about research suggesting that the central stone at the site, known as the altar stone, had come from northeastern Scotland. A subsequent paper actually called that into question to an extent, suggesting that while the stone did come from a formation in northeastern Scotland, known as the Orkney Basin, it wasn't specifically from Orkney,

• 21:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  which was the part of the basin that was pinpointed in that paper. Previous installments of Unearthed have also discussed research that concluded that other stones at the site came from whales.

• 21:44Holly Frey?

  Research published in Archaeology International in late December draws on all of this, suggesting that Stonehenge was built in an effort to unify farmers on the island of Great Britain. The stones used to make the circle weren't local to Salisbury Plain, and in some cases, they had to be moved hundreds of miles to get there. The paper's authors described this use of non-local stone as "unique among Britain's stone circles", and they suggest that in addition to religious or spiritual meanings surrounding the stones, there may have been a more social and political aspect of trying to bring people together. On a practical level, moving the stones from so far away would have required the immense

• 22:27Holly Frey?

  effort of people in these far-flung communities. And then, once the circle was built, the stones themselves may have symbolized those distant groups.

• 22:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  It's not clear whether this interpretation is correct, but it is interesting.

• 22:42Holly Frey?

  I love that interpretation.

• 22:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah. Lastly, for our updates, we have some updates related to the boarding schools for Indigenous children that we've talked about in several episodes of the show, including our two-parter on the Fort Shaw Indian School Girls Basketball Team and our three-parter on Jim Thorpe. Both of those episodes were about children who were athletes at the schools and were protected from some of the worst elements of going there. These schools were part of the United States' effort to eradicate Indigenous peoples, in this case, through cultural genocide. Much of the ongoing work involving the history of these schools is connected to the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, which we talked

• 23:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  about on Unearthed in July of 2022, after it released the first volume of its investigative report into the school's history. That report said that at least 1,000 children had died in these schools, according to federal records, but that the actual number was likely a lot higher. In late December, The Washington Post published the results of its own investigation, which concluded that the death toll was more than 3,000.

• 23:57Holly Frey?

  An oral history project started in March and is planned to continue through 2026 as a joint effort between the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition and the U.S. Department of the Interior. We cannot say, as we are recording this, whether the changing presidential administration is going to affect that timeline. This project has involved a team of historians visiting Indigenous communities in multiple states to record video interviews in a way that incorporates Indigenous practices with Indigenous psychologists on hand. And the intent is to take a holistic approach so that people's participation in these oral histories is healing rather than traumatizing.

• 24:40Holly Frey?

  The Department of the Interior and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History are working on ways to share these histories. But the survivors own the interviews they give, and they are the ones who decide whether their stories become public.

• 24:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  As we also noted in one of our other episodes this fall, President Joe Biden also formally apologized on behalf of the U.S. government earlier this year, saying in part, quote, "Quite frankly, there's no excuse this apology took 50 years to make." Biden also announced a new national monument being established at the site of Carlisle Indian Industrial School in December. Because that school was on the site of what's an active military installation, this new monument will be co-maintained by the Department of the Army and the Department of the Interior.

• 25:30Holly Frey?

  Moving on to some shipwrecks. A team in Wisconsin started a search for the wreck of the John Evanson earlier this year. The John Evanson was a wooden tugboat that sank on June 5, 1895, after crossing in front of the I.W. Stevenson, which was the ship it was preparing to tow. Four of the five crew survived the wreck, and the exact site of the wreckage had remained a mystery since that time.

• 25:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  Two maritime historians studied newspaper accounts of the wreck before starting side scan sonar surveys, and those revealed the wreck just minutes into the first day of what was planned as a three day search, which delights me. They followed up with photographs that were taken with a remote operated vehicle, and the Wisconsin Historical Society announced the find at the end of September, a little too late to wind up in our autumn installment of Unearthed.

• 26:28Holly Frey?

  A British submarine called the HMS Trooper vanished after a secret mission in 1943, which involved carrying three resistance agents to an island on the western coast of Greece. Afterward, it was supposed to go on patrol, but when it didn't arrive in Beirut, as expected, on October 17th of that year, its crew was presumed lost. Underwater recovery company Planet Blue had gone on 14 previous expeditions trying to find this wreck, based on the last place it had reportedly been seen just three days before it failed to arrive.

• 27:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  But it turned out that that sighting, which had happened on October 14th, was a case of mistaken identity. That was really a different British submarine of the same class. Eventually, the team decided to try looking in a different area where the submarine probably would have been earlier on in the month. They spotted the wreck on October 3rd of this year using shipboard sonar. Then they again followed up with a remote operated vehicle. This wreck is broken in two, suggesting that it ran into a German mine. And since its conning tower was open, it was probably traveling along the surface of the water when it happened. Since the submarine is a war grave, it is being left

• 27:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  undisturbed.

• 27:51Holly Frey?

  Researchers working with remains of sailors aboard the Mary Rose have found a possible connection between handedness and the chemical makeup of the clavicle. That's the collarbone. The Mary Rose sank in battle on July 19th, 1545, and the wreck is now housed at the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, England. This was covered in the 2011 episode Five Shipwreck Stories, and it's made several appearances on Unearthed.

• 28:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  This research examined the clavicles of 12 men from the ship who were between the ages of 13 and 40 using a non-destructive imaging technology called Raman spectroscopy. And they found that the chemical makeup of the clavicle varied according to people's ages. These age-related changes were more pronounced in the right clavicles than the left. Today, about 10% of the world's population is left-handed, but left-handedness was extremely stigmatized during the Tudor era, so it's likely that any left-handed people on the crew would have intentionally used their right hands instead. It really makes sense that the increased use of the right hand and arm would have

• 29:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  some kind of effect on the clavicle, and this research suggests that effect is there all the way at the chemical level.

• 29:14Holly Frey?

  Divers have documented a wreck off the coast of Sicily that was first spotted by fishers in 2022. The wreck itself is buried in sand, and what's visible is a collection of 40 ceramic vessels, many of them still neatly stacked as they were when the cargo was loaded. In the photos, they're mostly purple, and some of them have become home to various kinds of marine life.

• 29:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  It's hard to tell from the pictures whether they, like, how accurate the color is, because this is being taken underwater. But they're a really cool-looking color, in my opinion. A lot is still unknown about this ship and its cargo. The vessels, these ceramic vessels, they're believed to be a type known as Richborough 527, and that is named for where the vessels were first classified. Richborough is in England, but the ceramic vessels are believed to have been made on the Aeolian island of Lepari approximately 1900 to 2100 years ago. If this is really what they are, they might contain alum, which was commonly shipped

• 30:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  in vessels like these.

• 30:26Holly Frey?

  Conservators have finished their work on two bottles that were recovered from a wreck off the coast of Florida a couple of years ago. These are known as onion bottles, or glass onions because of their shape, which is sort of like half an onion with the stem still attached at the top. This is a style of wine bottle that was first developed in the mid 17th century.

• 30:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  It is not common for whole onion bottles to be found on shipwrecks because they're particularly delicate, even more delicate than a lot of other styles of glass bottle. These in particular were also covered in sand and marine life, and they were peeling apart because the glass itself was delaminating. So conservators spent just months cleaning and drying them before coating them in a resin to try to preserve them. The fact that they found two of them still intact with all this in mind is really incredible.

• 31:22Holly Frey?

  The exact ship these bottles came from is not known, but it was part of the Spanish Plate Fleet that sailed in 1715. Eleven ships from that fleet sank in a hurricane.

• 31:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  Research published in the Journal of Maritime Archaeology in November has concluded that a shipwreck that was found off the coast of Kenya in 2013 may have been part of the last voyage of Vasco da Gama. Twenty ships were part of this voyage, and one of them, the Sao Jorge, was captured and sank in 1524. They based this conclusion about the ship's identity on analysis of objects that were recovered from it during underwater archaeological work, including some pieces of the ship's hull.

• 32:09Holly Frey?

  A team working off the coast of Northern Ireland believes they have found the wreck of the HMS Stephen Furness, which was sunk by a German torpedo on December 13, 1917, while traveling to Liverpool for repairs. This effort was part of a project to find and identify multiple wrecks in the area. It combined multi-beam sonar scans of all the places where the various ships were reported to have been sighted, and historical records around the ships and their losses. The wreck believed to be the Stephen Furness was in an area where a German commander had reported firing a torpedo at a ship.

• 32:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  There's also another wreck that was connected to this discovery, which is a Swedish vessel called the Maya, which sank in the same general area after being torpedoed about a year later. The wreck now believed to be the Stephen Furness was originally identified as that other ship, which that ship is now believed to be a different wreck that's a few miles to the south.

• 33:13Holly Frey?

  And lastly, the deterioration of shipwrecks has come up on a couple of installments of unearthed. And this can happen to the ships themselves and to wooden artifacts onboard. Conservators' best efforts to preserve and protect them don't always work out after they've been waterlogged, sometimes for centuries. In addition to the effects of the water itself, the underwater conditions can also lead to the growth of bacteria and fungi that continue to damage the wood.

• 33:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  There are several techniques that conservators can use to try to deal with this. They have included freeze drying the wood, or using a pressurized process to force water out of the wood and replace it with something like carbon dioxide or a polymer. Another option is to paint the wood while it's still wet with a gel that neutralizes the compounds produced by bacteria and fungi that can damage the wood. All of these different techniques have their own downsides, including how long they take, how expensive they are, and in terms of that gel, possible damage to the wood when it's removed. But researchers have developed a new technique

• 34:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  that involves coating the wood in a hydrogel that first neutralizes acids and kills bacteria, and then just dissolves over time rather than needing to be manually removed. This is still kind of at the proof of concept stage, but tests on wood from an 800-year-old wreck that was found off the south coast of China seem pretty promising.

• 34:49Holly Frey?

  We are going to take a quick sponsor break here, and then we're going to talk about art.

• 34:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  So much art.

• 34:55Holly Frey?

  Woo.

• 34:59Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?

• 35:44Holly Frey?

  Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 35:54Speaker 03

  This mood check is brought to you by State Farm. Porque tu bienestar también merece protección. ¿Qué tal, mi gente? Honey German checking in contigo. Take a second. Literalmente, un momentico para ti. How's your corazón feeling today? If it's a little tired, a little oof, you're not alone. Have you eaten algo rico? Taken a deep breath? Maybe even turned off your phone for cinco minutitos? I promise, the memes will still be there. Sometimes self-care isn't candles and meditation. It's just saying no. It's drinking a little bit of agua. It's letting yourself rest sin pena. You don't have to prove anything today. Just be, breathe. Estás haciendo lo mejor que puedes. And yes, that's enough.

• 36:38Speaker 03

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• 36:41Speaker 07

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers, producer, songwriter, guitarist, and co-founder of the group Chic. A great song has a way of defining a moment, a moment of joy, heartbreak, or anything in between.

• 36:58Speaker 07

  This fall, I'll be driving across the country, dropping in on some of the coolest, most fascinating artists working today. We'll go deep into their lives and careers and hear what it was like before the moment that made them. From hitmakers like Miguel...

• 37:15Speaker 06

  That last year, finishing that record was the hardest experience of my life, regardless of how everyone else...

• 37:23Speaker 07

  Is into this. I believe in this and I'm gonna push. To rising stars like Alex Warren.

• 37:30Speaker 06

  You know, a song is a story and the verse is setting the scene. And for me, at least, it's allowing me to be personal and vulnerable with the audience, whether it's about my wife and I'm being vulnerable about her, or it's about, you know, my parents, I'm being vulnerable to them. And it's almost like a cinematic piece in a way where each song tells that beautiful story.

• 37:48Speaker 07

  It's gonna be one hell of a trip. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln Original Series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM.

• 38:05Speaker 03

  I spoke with IBM's Ana Paula Assis about what digital sovereignty actually means in the age of AI. AI now moves from somebody operating a system to the technology actually making decisions. So you have to have a much better visibility of what AI is touching, data it is accessing, and where. Hear the full conversation wherever you get your podcasts.

• 38:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  Now we get to talk about a whole bunch of art. Back in 1962, a junk dealer in Capri, Italy, found a painting in a basement while cleaning out a home, put that painting in an inexpensive frame and then hung it up on his own wall because he liked it. In October, it was announced that the scientific committee of the Arcadia Foundation has determined that this painting is an original Picasso, although that has not yet been confirmed by official Picasso authenticators, at least not as of when we're recording this. What's weirdly delightful

• 39:16Holly Frey?

  About the news reporting on this is that multiple articles make it sound like this was a huge and unexpected surprise. But the painting definitely looks like a Picasso. It shows a stylized figure facing out from the canvas in a blue top with long brown hair and a face that is surreally divided into two portions with one oversized eye forming the connection between one part where the mouth is and the other part, which has an ear, the nose, and the other eye. It's believed to be a portrait of surrealist artist Dora Marr, who was in a relationship with Picasso at the time that this was likely painted. And Capri, where it was found, is somewhere that Picasso often visited.

• 40:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  So aside from looking at this painting and going, hey, that like, it looks like a Picasso. The painting has Picasso's signature on it in the top left corner, and that signature also resembles ones on other works that were known to be by him. So sure, this could have been a forgery, but the idea that it might be a Picasso didn't just come out of nowhere for people to be totally flabbergasted when it turned out to be a Picasso.

• 40:30Holly Frey?

  My god, it's a Picasso. Apparently, the man who originally found this painting, Luigi La Rosso, wasn't very knowledgeable about art, and the painting became a source of strife between him and his wife, who thought it was horrible to look at. But their son started questioning whether it might be a Picasso after seeing similar work in an art history book, and that is what led them to try to have it authenticated.

• 40:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  I just love this whole story, honestly.

• 40:58Holly Frey?

  Like, I hate that ugly painting. Wait a minute.

• 41:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  Researchers working on an exhibition called Picturing Childhood at Chatsworth House in England have identified a black child showed in a family portrait that was painted by Jean Baptiste Vallou in 1739. It was common at this point for wealthy families in England to have either free or enslaved black children working in their households. And it was also fairly common for these children to appear in portraiture of the family, typically in the background or near the edge of the scene, often doing something related to what was going on in the portrait.

• 41:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  In this case, this child is carrying paintbrushes for Lady Dorothy Boyle, who was a painter herself and is holding an artist's palette in her hand. There's also an easel with a canvas on it in the background behind the family.

• 41:59Holly Frey?

  This child had previously been identified as James Cambridge, because that's how his name had appeared on a tailor's bill for household servants' livery in 1739. But his name was really James Cumberland, known to the family as Jem, and he was a paid servant. His father had been freed upon the death of his enslaver, that was a white man named Christopher Cumberland. And this research also revealed that James had a brother named Kit.

• 42:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  The uniqueness of that last name Cumberland has made it more possible for researchers to find out more about James Cumberland and his life than can be done for a lot of other Black people who were living in Britain in the 18th century. James and two other Black servants had lessons from a schoolmaster when they were children, and they learned to read and write. Cumberland continued to work for the family into his adulthood. And then after the death of the countess, he became a trumpeter for King George II. He eventually owned property, and he had a wife and child of his own. There is a whole article about his life with a lot more detail at the Chatsworth House website.

• 43:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  This one caught my eye because some of the headlines described this as research that could, quote, "rewrite Black history in Britain", which, in my opinion, is kind of overstated. This is definitely way more information that we previously had about this one person, and that is important. But this is not the first evidence of Black Britons in the 18th century, including Black Britons who were literate or served in the royal household or owned property. Like, we do know more about this one person, which I love, but...

• 43:49Holly Frey?

  It doesn't really rewrite Black history.

• 43:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  No.

• 43:51Holly Frey?

  Yeah. In October, Oxford University's Bodleian Libraries announced the discovery of what may be the earliest engraving work by William Blake, done when he was a 15-year-old apprentice working in the studio of James Besseir. Many of these aren't visible to the naked eye and were discovered using a non-contact, high-resolution recording system known as the Celine Photometric Stereo System. Some of these look like practice work and some like, nah, distracted doodling. Like, one is the platemaker's mark, but the "O" in London is filled in with crosshatching.

• 44:31Holly Frey?

  Another is an aro motif, and one shows a simple but evocative face looking out from the plate.

• 44:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  It's not conclusively known that this is William Blake's work. The plates do date from a time when he was known to be an apprentice there, but none of them really contain something concretely identifying, like, writing his name over and over, practicing his handwriting.

• 44:56Holly Frey?

  There are doodly demons everywhere. Paul Gauguin's 1888 painting, "The Little Cat," is on loan to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and the museum has done a technical investigation of it, including x-ray analysis. This x-ray analysis has revealed some distortion in the canvas caused by how it was attached to the stretcher frame, suggesting that Gauguin may have trimmed off the right side of the painting at one point. And they also found the remains of a beetle. It's not known exactly what kind because it is not intact. It seems likely that the beetle got into the paint while Gauguin was working on this canvas. Poor thing.

• 45:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  I know. And yet I love it that there's a little beetle on there. Archaeologists in Greece have unearthed a portrait of Constantine XI Palaiologos, the last Byzantine emperor, which may have been painted from life. This dates back to the mid 15th century and was found at a monastery in western Greece. If this was painted while he was still alive, this also would be the last known painting of a Byzantine emperor created during their reign and only known depiction of this emperor actually created during his lifetime.

• 46:18Holly Frey?

  Conservators at the Old North Church in Boston are working to undo renovation work from more than a century ago, including removing layers of paint to reveal murals of cherubic angels around the arches near the sanctuary's ceiling. Those angels were painted in the late 1720s and early 1730s. They resemble stone carvings, and each of the ones that has been uncovered so far has a subtly different expression and posture.

• 46:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  For reasons that aren't fully clear at this point, church officials painted over the angels in 1912. One possibility for why they did this was that in the early 20th century, there was a colonial revival movement going on, and that might have made people at the church want it to have sort of what they thought of as a more colonial work, which, I mean, you do see a lot of solid color or solid white walls and a lot of things that are supposed to be colonial, but like, these paintings of angels dated back to the colonial era. They were original to that time. When the angels were first painted, the Old North Church was an Anglican church, so it's

• 47:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  really not surprising that it might have had just somewhat different an interior aesthetic from the area's Puritan churches.

• 47:39Holly Frey?

  This restoration work was motivated in part by the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere's Ride. That's coming up this April. One of the historical moments connected to the church is the use of lanterns as signals for the invasion of the British troops, one if by land and two if by sea.

• 47:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  And we'll wrap up today's episode with a couple of finds that are related to rock art. First, research published in the journal Azania, Archaeological Research in Africa, has looked at the depiction of musical instruments in rock art in Zimbabwe. This has followed some earlier research into depictions of musical instruments in rock art in South Africa. The rock art in this region has been studied a lot, but a lot of that research has more involved documenting the sites themselves rather than analyzing or interpreting the art there.

• 48:35Holly Frey?

  This research looked at artwork made by the San people and categorized the artwork using an instrument classification system known as the horn bustle sax system. This system uses five categories based on where in an instrument musical vibrations are produced. So, for example, idiophones use the vibration of solid matter, like striking a key on a xylophone or shaking a shaker. This research used four of the five categories, since the fifth, electrophones, is for electronically amplified instruments.

• 49:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  So a team used the postures of the figures and the objects they appear to be holding to identify rattles, a drum, trumpets, flutes, and a bull roar. They also found regional differences in the types of instruments that are depicted, like rattles that could be held in the hand or attached to a person's arms or legs. And they found correlations between musical instruments and trance motifs, suggesting that the instruments were used in rituals and ceremonies. And in some cases, there are correlations between specific instruments and the genders of the people that are playing them.

• 49:48Holly Frey?

  And lastly, research into rock paintings in southeastern Finland, dating back to between 5,000 and 1,500 BCE, suggests that the surrounding acoustic environment was part of the artwork. This research involved taking audio measurements either from boats or from the ice surface when the water was frozen. They found that the cliffs on which the art was painted produced single echoes, which seemed to originate from behind the painted surface. So people could talk to the elks painted on the cliffside and then hear the elk responding in a voice that sounded like their own. Other nearby cliffs had a more jagged surface and produced much weaker echoes,

• 50:32Holly Frey?

  and the cliffs around dwelling sites didn't produce echoes at all. The University of Helsinki has a video on YouTube showing what the effect is like with a drum. A musical artist strikes a drum from a boat and the cliff seems to answer back.

• 50:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  This is, in my opinion, incredibly cool.

• 50:51Holly Frey?

  Oh, it's so cool.

• 50:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  It's one of those things that we don't know for sure that the people who made this artwork put it there on purpose for this reason or how they might have incorporated the echoes into the experience of the art if they did. But they are so distinctive that it does seem probable that this use of the echoes was intentional.

• 51:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  And that is it for part one of Unearthed. We will have more stuff on Wednesday.

• 51:19Holly Frey?

  Do you have listener mail for today?

• 51:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  I do have listener mail. It is also about art. It is from Deborah, who wrote, "Hello, Tracy and Holly. Really enjoyed the Hangover show, but a small knit regarding Suzanne Valladon. I was sorry to hear you describe her simply as a former circus performer who had a relationship with Lautrec. This happens so often to women, being reduced to a muse when she was a very accomplished artist in her own right. She will have major show at the Pompidou Centre in Paris starting later this month. Looking forward to more great episodes in 2025, Deborah." So thank you for this email, Deborah.

• 52:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  The description of that painting, the information in it came from the website of Harvard Art Museums, which is actually where that painting is in the collections. I have not personally seen it, but I should go down there.

• 52:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  And that description at the Harvard Art Museum website does describe her as a well-known artist later in her life, but that was a long time after this painting was actually done. So at the time of the painting, Suzanne Valladon had been a circus performer. She was injured in a fall from a trapeze. And so that sort of ended her circus career. And she started supporting herself as a model for a number of artists, including Toulouse D'Artre and Renoir. Probably the thing that people will be able to imagine the most beyond this Hangover painting is that she's the woman dancing in Renoir's The Dance at Bougival, which I don't, that's just, in my opinion,

• 52:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  like one of the most familiar Renoir paintings. Also, Berthe Marissot, who we have talked about on the show before, painted her walking on a tightrope. But Suzanne Valladon was not just modeling. She was also learning as much as she could from these artists while she was modeling because she couldn't afford regular art lessons. She'd been drawing and sketching since she was a little kid. Her first known paintings were from around 1892, which again is after The Hangover was painted. She met and became friends with Edgar Degas, who helped her with her art career. She had five drawings at the Salon of the Societe Nationale de Beaux-Arts in 1894.

• 53:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  And she was, I think, the first self-taught woman to have work at the Salon. But her peak as an artist in terms of her career was really in the 1920s. So that was like way after this painting was done. She also had a son, who we have mentioned on the show before, which is Maurice Cuccirlo, who we mentioned in our episode on the Domenico Guillaume art scandal. He was one of the people whose artwork Paul Guillaume was buying before he had really made a name for himself as his artist. I really don't think I had ever heard Suzanne Valladon's name before doing this episode. Definitely did not ring a bell to me.

• 54:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  And I, I don't, like, I didn't really know anything about her career beyond that. The description mentioned that later on, she became a well-known painter in her own life. I do want to stress that I was not mentally framing her in any way as a so-called muse when I wrote that couple of sentences. I, like, in my head, she was a whole, a whole person who had a whole life that was really not the point of the episode, which to me was more about trying to describe what this painting was like, so that people would get a sense of the visual element in an audio podcast. But I did want to take the opportunity to talk more about Suzanne Valladon as an artist,

• 55:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  since, since Deborah brought that up in this email. So, thank you again, Deborah, for your notes. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast, we are at [email protected]. You can subscribe to the show in the iHeartRadio app or anywhere else you like to get your podcasts.

• 55:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  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.

• 55:48Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 57:27Speaker 07

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.