Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Unearthed Year-end 2025, Part 1 About this episode The show's coverage of things literally or figuratively unearthed in the last quarter of 2025 begins with updates, books and letters, animals, and just one exhumation.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:32 Holly 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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2:07 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
2:21 Holly Frey? And I'm Holly Frey.
2:23 Tracy V. Wilson? It is time for our most recent installment of Unearthed, which is when we talk about things that were literally and figuratively unearthed over, in this case, the last quarter of 2025. So this is once again, a two-part episode, as is pretty much always the case anymore. We've got a ton of updates, some things about books and letters and animals and an exhumation. And then we'll have other stuff that was unearthed on Wednesday.
2:53 Holly Frey? So, starting off with the updates, in last fall's installment of Unearthed, we spent quite a bit of time talking about the executive branch's focus on the Smithsonian museums, including a request for the Smithsonian to send a wealth of information about the museums and their exhibits to a committee at the executive branch for review. The Smithsonian submitted materials on September 18th. And three months later, on December 18th, a letter that had been sent to Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III was posted on the White House website. The letter characterized the museum's submission as a partial production of materials that was woefully incomplete
3:35 Holly Frey? and suggested that the Smithsonian's federal funding could be withheld if it does not comply. This letter also reiterated that federal funding is available to the Smithsonian only for use, quote, "in a manner consistent with Executive Order 14253, restoring truth and sanity to American history", which is an executive order we have also discussed on the show before.
3:58 Tracy V. Wilson? I really don't have much to add to this. We have already talked about this executive order. We've already talked about how the Smithsonian is not an executive branch agency. So this is like just more of what we talked about repeatedly over the course of 2025. Also,
4:18 Tracy V. Wilson? We've talked previously about just how important and valuable the work of public media has been to our show. And just yesterday, as of when we are recording this, the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting voted to dissolve itself. That is, the corporation that has sent the money to public broadcasting for almost 60 years. President and CEO Patricia Harrison said of this, quote, "For more than half a century, CPB existed to ensure that all Americans, regardless of geography, income, or background, had access to trusted news, educational programming, and local storytelling." When the administration and Congress rescinded federal funding,
5:00 Tracy V. Wilson? our board faced a profound responsibility. CPB's final act would be to protect the integrity of the public media system and the democratic values by dissolving, rather than allowing the organization to remain defunded and vulnerable to additional attack. I don't have a lot to add to this again either. Again, this just happened yesterday. As of when we are recording, I found out about it after the end of business hours, which is why I did not even send Holly a brand new third update to this episode before we recorded it.
5:35 Holly Frey? I'm glad you said that because I was like, I know you.
5:38 Tracy V. Wilson? I could tell you were looking at me like, why does Tracy's?
5:41 Holly Frey? Well, I was more worried that I had, I was like, I know I went to the right email, but.
5:45 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, it would have been three changes to the outline sent in the span of about two hours.
5:52 Holly Frey? Fine by me. Uh, moving on, in April of 2022, we did a two-part episode on Ernest Shackleton, who led an expedition to Antarctica that went very wrong after his ship, the Endurance, got trapped in the ice. The Endurance was supposedly one of the strongest ships of its time, and this disaster has been blamed on an apparently weak rudder, which the ice was able to tear away. With no rudder, of course, the ship could not steer, so it couldn't get out of the ice, and it was ultimately crushed. But a paper published in Polar Record, a journal of Arctic and Antarctic research, which came out in October, has come to a different conclusion that the ship wasn't really all that strong to begin with.
6:36 Tracy V. Wilson? According to this paper, the Endurance was really designed to go at most to the edges of the Antarctic, not deep into the pack ice farther south. That pack ice can put huge amounts of pressure on a ship as it moves. The weakest part of the Endurance's hull was around the engine room area, and the engine room also was large and not reinforced by beams. So all of that would have made it a lot easier for the ice to crush the ship.
7:07 Holly Frey? And on top of that, Shackleton may have known this before setting out on the expedition. His 1920 book, "South," which chronicled the expedition, said that the shipwrights who had built the Endurance, quote, "had never done sounder and better work." And he framed its destruction as the inevitable outcome for any ship that was trapped in pack ice. But in a letter to his wife Emily, he framed the Endurance as not as strong as the Nimrod, which he had taken on an earlier expedition in 1907.
7:38 Tracy V. Wilson? Part of the research that went into this paper came from underwater imaging that was conducted after the wreck of the Endurance was found back in 2022. We talked about that finding on previous installments of unearthed, and the research also examined a lot of diaries and correspondence for coming to this conclusion.
7:57 Holly Frey? In our Spring 2023 Unearthed, we talked about a gold pendant that had been discovered by a metal detectorist in 2019, which had just been unveiled at the British Museum. That pendant was decorated with the letters H and K, a Tudor rose, and a pomegranate bush, which was a symbol of Catherine of Aragon. It was made of high-quality materials, but without the same level of craftsmanship. So there was speculation that this had been made in a hurry, perhaps as a tournament prize, or as something someone was going to wear at a tournament.
8:32 Tracy V. Wilson? Now, this pendant is believed to have been a commission for a tournament that was held in October of 1518 to celebrate the betrothal of Mary, daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, to Francis Dauphin of France. At this time, Mary was a toddler and the Dauphin was a baby. It is possible that Henry VIII was the person who commissioned this piece. He was known to have jewelry like this made for members of his court to wear at similar events.
9:02 Holly Frey? Because of its age and condition and its connection to the 24-year marriage of Henry and Catherine, this pendant is being described as one of the most important 16th century pieces ever discovered in Britain. It is currently on display at the British Museum and the museum is raising funds to try to permanently acquire it. They've set a goal of 3.5 million pounds, or about 4.6 million dollars, with a deadline of April of 2026.
9:31 Tracy V. Wilson? Next, prior hosts of the show did an episode on Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, and they also did an update to that episode, which came out in 2012. And of course, Rapa Nui has made a ton of appearances on Unearthed. Several articles and papers about Rapa Nui and the Moai statues there came out toward the end of last year. And one of those papers was about how large statues were moved from where they were made to the roads where they are today. And the conclusion in this paper was that they were walked there. And when I saw all the headlines about this, my first thought was, did we not know that already?
10:12 Holly Frey? The idea that Moai walked to their destinations goes back to the 18th century, when the island's inhabitants told Dutch explorer Jakob Roggevinh that was how they moved. Back in 2012, a team of US anthropologists and archaeologists used a replica to demonstrate that three teams of people could use ropes tied to the Moai to rock it back and forth so that it would move. They moved that replica more than 300 feet in under an hour.
10:42 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, and in a way that you could describe as walking. But while a YouTube video of this experiment got millions of views, the academic paper that the team published the following year got a lot of skepticism. Among other things, when it was published, the prevailing narrative about the island was that its residents had committed ecocide by cutting down the trees to make the rollers to move the statues.
11:10 Tracy V. Wilson? We have talked about a lot of research that contradicts and undermines this whole ecocide theory on past installments of an Earth as well, but the idea that they walked the statues just went against the idea that they cut down big rollers and deforested the whole island to do it.
11:27 Holly Frey? The new paper that yielded this latest round of headlines was written to address that skepticism. It was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science and titled "The Walking Moai Hypothesis: Archaeological Evidence, Experimental Validation, and Response to Critics." According to the authors, walking the statues to their destinations is the explanation that best fits the available evidence. The paper systematically addresses the various critiques of the one that was published in 2013. The paper's acknowledgements credit several Rapanui people for their involvement, insight, and commitment to community-based archaeology on the island.
12:07 Tracy V. Wilson? This still is not completely settled, though. Archaeologist and professor Sue Hamilton, who was not involved in this research, was quoted in Live Science as saying, quote, "The current work by the authors further demonstrates the technical possibility of upright movement of the statues, Moai, but does not prove that it happened." Hamilton also noted that there are other possible explanations for what went on.
12:35 Holly Frey? This paper was written by Carla Lipo and Terry L. Hunt, and they published another paper on Rapanui in December. This one was also in the Journal of Archaeological Science, and it examined the role of rats in the deforestation of Rapanui using faunal evidence and ecological modeling. Polynesian rats arrived on the island with people in the 12th century, either as stowaways on their canoes or as an intentionally introduced food source. At that point, the island was covered with slow-growing palm trees, and while people did cut some of them down for various reasons, it's likely that the bigger factor was the rats eating the palm nuts that the trees used to reproduce.
13:17 Holly Frey? And since the rats had no other predators on the island other than people, they proliferated. So while Rapanui was largely deforested by the time Europeans first arrived on the island, according to this paper, it wasn't a case of humans just cutting down all the trees.
13:34 Tracy V. Wilson? And there was also yet another paper. Lipo, Hunt and other co-authors also published an article in Plus One about Rapanui Society at the time that the Moai were created. Prior to contact with Europeans, Rapanui Society was made up of small groups of independent families rather than having one centralized leadership or government. So this research looked at whether the quarry where most of the Moai were created was similarly decentralized. They created a comprehensive 3D model of the quarry and found that there were 30 distinct centers of quarrying and carving activity.
14:16 Tracy V. Wilson? They also found evidence suggesting that once they were made, the Moai were transported out of the quarry in all different directions. So their conclusion based on this is that Moai creation was decentralized, similarly to how Rapanui Society was decentralized overall. And the 3D model that they made for this is viewable online.
14:38 Holly Frey? Our episode on the Jacobite Rising of 1745 ran as a Saturday classic in May of 2021, and archaeological finds related to it have come up on Earth since then. In October, archaeologists from the University of Glasgow and the National Trust for Scotland announced the discovery of more than 100 projectiles at Kaladan Battlefield, site of the last major battle of the Rising. These projectiles were found in an area that had been investigated previously without producing any archaeological material, possibly because the area was forested during that earlier investigation.
15:17 Tracy V. Wilson? These projectiles included lead musket balls and cannon shot. This includes a three-pound cannonball believed to have been fired by Jacobite artillery. And it's believed that some of these are from the very last actions in the battle as the Jacobites were being defeated by government troops. The musket balls may have been fired by Irish troops who were in French service, known as the Irish Piquet, who were fighting alongside the Jacobites and continued to fight against British government troops while many of the Jacobites retreated. I don't actually know if at the time, if they said that "Piquet" as a French term, or if it was said more like "pickets," which is where that word comes from.
16:02 Holly Frey? This likely saved the lives of the Jacobites who escaped. The Jacobites were trying to restore the House of Stuart to the British throne, so from the Hanoverian perspective, they were rebels who would have been executed if they were captured. But since they were serving in the regular French army, captured Irish Piquets would have been treated as prisoners of war.
16:24 Tracy V. Wilson? We're going to take a quick break and then talk about some more updates.
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17:25 Speaker 05 It was could have rivalled anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.
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19:09 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you Can take with you. All sass, zero filter,
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20:14 Tracy V. Wilson? It has been a while since we have talked about the Maya Train on Unearthed. That is the train that was built to carry tourists from the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula to less visited sites farther inland, including Maya historic sites. This train was controversial since its construction had the potential to unearth and possibly damage other archaeological sites along the way, and there were concerns that there might not be just enough time or money to study and protect all of these sites in advance of the construction. So simultaneously making historical and archaeological sites farther inland more accessible, also potentially
20:57 Tracy V. Wilson? causing damage on the way to get there.
21:00 Holly Frey? Last November, crews working on the Maya Train accidentally discovered an inscribed stone slab in the ruins of the city of Cabah dated back to the 7th century. It has been dubbed the Foundation Stone. Conservators have restored the stone's hieroglyphs and a translation is in the works. One of the things translators have substantiated is the name of a female ruler, Ixchacchin, who came to power in the year 569.
21:29 Tracy V. Wilson? These hieroglyphs connect Ixchacchin to various deities and suggest that she was involved in the construction of some nearby sporting facilities. A lot of the work with this is still very preliminary, but it suggests that she helped guide the city of Cabah into becoming an important regional power.
21:49 Holly Frey? Next, work is still ongoing to find and identify victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, which we originally covered on the show in 2014 and then ran as a Saturday classic in 2019. In November, officials working at Oaklawn Cemetery in Tulsa announced that they had documented the remains of 80 more people who had been buried in unmarked graves, with nine of them meeting the criteria to be exhumed and studied further. Those criteria are based on historical records and eyewitness accounts describing where and how victims were buried.
22:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Yet, not every unmarked grave is believed to have been connected to this massacre. This most recent season of fieldwork in Tulsa has concluded now, but the lab work from that fieldwork is ongoing. The hope with this continues to be that they will be able to identify the victims and connect them to surviving family members wherever possible.
22:50 Holly Frey? On November 16th, 2022, we did an episode on Boston's Coconut Grove Fire, which took place in 1942 and continues to be the deadliest nightclub fire in history. On June 25th, Bob Shumway, last known survivor of the fire, died in a senior living community in Naples, Florida at the age of 101. His death was covered in the Boston Globe in November, and the Coconut Grove Memorial Committee paid tribute to him during its annual anniversary vigil on November 29th. Shumway was 18 the night of the fire and had gone to Coconut Grove with a friend after Boston College lost to Holy Cross in that night's football game.
23:31 Holly Frey? Both of them were uninjured and stayed at the club to help with the rescue and recovery.
23:36 Tracy V. Wilson? Our next update is that on January 19th of 2022, we did an episode on Britain's 1897 punitive expedition into the Kingdom of Benin and the removal of artworks and artifacts from that kingdom that are known today as the Benin Bronzes. Much of Benin City was destroyed by fire during this raid, and it is not fully clear whether that fire was unintentional, or if the British forces set it on purpose, but then it spread a lot farther and faster than they had expected. It really, I mean, the raid itself... Horrifying and bad, obviously, but it does not seem like the intent was to burn the whole city down.
24:20 Holly Frey? Right. Archaeological work has been undertaken in Benin City ahead of the construction of the Museum of West African Art, and some of it has been focused on the site of the Obas Palace, which was one of the buildings that was destroyed. Archaeologists have found parts of the palace that predate the colonial era and archaeological layers that predate the establishment of the Kingdom of Benin. In addition to evidence of the palace and the post-colonial structures that were built there afterward, researchers found evidence of metalworking workshops, more than 100,000 pieces of ceramics, glass bottles, smoking pipes, and other objects. Analysis of all of this material is ongoing and should lead to a better understanding
25:04 Holly Frey? of the pre-colonial Kingdom of Benin and the site's post-colonial development.
25:10 Tracy V. Wilson? Next, there's always work going on at Pompeii, and Pompeii has made an appearance in multiple episodes of the show and is a frequent flyer on Unearthed. Some of the most recently published research about Pompeii is what some of the victims of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79 were wearing. In particular, researchers have raised questions about why some of the victims were wearing wool.
25:39 Holly Frey? Today, a lot of people probably associate wool with warm garments and cold weather, but it really is a versatile material that can also help keep people cool when it is hot out. Wool is breathable, and it's moisture-wicking, and as sweat evaporates out of it, it helps cool the person wearing it. Wool was also a widely-used and affordable fabric in the area 2,000 years ago. So by itself, evidence of wool clothing on some of the victims of the eruption doesn't mean anything unusual. But for a long time, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius was believed to have happened in the month of August, based on the writing of Pliny the Younger. Some of these people weren't wearing summerweight garments, but instead, multiple heavy layers
26:24 Holly Frey? of wool.
26:25 Tracy V. Wilson? So these garments could back up the competing hypothesis that this eruption really took place later in the year, more like October in the autumn, when temperatures would have been cooler. That's sort of one possibility. Another is that people might have put on multiple layers of heavy clothes while trying to escape Pompeii because they thought that those layers would help protect them from volcanic debris. Either way, some questions suggested by the fact that people had heavy wool on.
27:00 Holly Frey? And for our last update, prior hosts of the show did an episode on the Bayeux Tapestry in 2011, and it has been featured on several installments of unearthed since then. There are a number of questions about the tapestry, one of them being where it was hung before it wound up at Bayeux Cathedral in France, where it was listed on an inventory from 1476. One of the proposed locations has been the dining hall of the Dover Priory, but a paper published in the journal Historical Research suggests a different location, the refectory at St. Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury.
27:37 Tracy V. Wilson? And this paper also suggests a purpose for what we commonly call a tapestry, but it's really an embroidery. The Benedictine monks who lived at this abbey were required to eat in silence while listening to a reader. If the Bayeux Tapestry were hanging from the walls of their refectory, it could have served as kind of a visual accompaniment to the religious or moral or historical texts that were being read from during meals. Refectories of this era typically had very long uninterrupted walls, which would have provided enough space for the embroidery to hang as one piece. That's actually one
28:18 Tracy V. Wilson? of the arguments against the idea that it was designed to be hung in Bayeux Cathedral, which did not have that kind of continuous uninterrupted wall space.
28:28 Holly Frey? This is, of course, all speculative, and the paper does not try to present it as a final answer. This paper also has origins in a class at the University of Bristol in which students studied the tapestry and the current research around it, and were asked to come up with possible alternative explanations for the Bayeux Tapestry.
28:47 Tracy V. Wilson? The Bayeux Tapestry Museum in France is being renovated right now, which is part of why this embroidery is being loaned to the UK. For the first time, it will be on exhibit in the British Museum from September of 2026 until June of 2027. This loan has involved the British government insuring the embroidery for about 800 million pounds, or roughly a billion dollars.
29:17 Holly Frey? Yeah, some of the headlines that I saw regarding this is like, "At last, the Bayeux Tapestry returns to Britain where it belongs."
29:26 Tracy V. Wilson? There's a whole, I mean, that's
29:28 Holly Frey? There's a lot of stuff.
29:29 Tracy V. Wilson? Right, it's discussed in that episode. Also, I mean, a billion dollars is a lot of money, but the tapestry is irreplaceable, so.
29:37 Holly Frey? Yeah.
29:39 Tracy V. Wilson? Anyway.
29:40 Holly Frey? Moving on to books and letters. According to research published in Current Anthropology, signs used in murals and on decorated pottery in the ancient city of Teotihuacan in central Mexico may constitute a written language. It's possible that they're a very early form of Udo Aztecan, which later developed into multiple other languages, including Quora, Quichol, and Noual. If this is true, it could also shed some light on who lived in Teotihuacan and when the Noual-speaking Aztecs arrived in the area. Researchers involved with this work have described it as difficult because the logograms that are used sometimes seem to have a clear representative meaning, like pictures of birds and animals.
30:23 Holly Frey? But together, they can seem almost like they're meant to be read as a Rubus puzzle with different elements meant to be sounded out to form a word.
30:32 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, a lot of this sounds very preliminary to me, but also really interesting of like, how it might be interpreted and what those interpretations might mean. Next, a small book containing religious songs that was passed down through a family before being given to the National Library of Norway may actually be Norway's oldest book. This book currently has eight remaining pages. Those pages are written in Latin and it is bound in sealskin. According to this family, it came from a monastery in western Norway. It is believed to date back to the 13th century or older, and this sealskin binding is being
31:14 Tracy V. Wilson? described as unique. There are only two other known books of a somewhat comparable age in Norway, and one of those is missing its binding.
31:26 Holly Frey? Next, a family picking up trash on Wharton Beach in Western Australia found a Schweppes bottle containing messages from two World War I soldiers, Malcolm Alexander Neville and William Kirk Harley, who were traveling on the same troop transport. Neville wrote a letter to his mother, while Harley's letter said that his mother had died, so anyone who found the letter should keep it. They corked this bottle and threw it overboard. Once it washed up on shore, it got covered in sand, which helped protect the contents, until it was uncovered by storms earlier last year.
32:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Deborah Brown, who found this bottle, went on a quest to try to find the families of these soldiers and return their letters to them. Neville was killed in action in April of 1917, and she was able to track down his great nephew. Harley did return home from the war, and Brown was able to reach his granddaughter. There's been a lot of very heartwarming coverage of this in the Australian press. If you want to just go read some feel-good stories about family members being reconnected to this message from an ancestor, go Google that.
32:39 Holly Frey? And lastly, linguists are trying to compile the first-ever complete dictionary of ancient Celtic, scouring all kinds of surviving sources to bring together a collection of what will probably be about 1,000 words. Ancient Celtic contained many more words than that, but there is very little written documentation of it remaining today. Sources include everything from accounts of Julius Caesar's conquest of Northern Europe to memorial stones that date back roughly 2,000 years. This is a work in progress, but the plan is for it to be publicly available when it is complete.
33:15 Tracy V. Wilson? We're going to take another quick sponsor break and then talk about some animals.
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33:54 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy
34:39 Tracy V. Wilson? only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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37:05 Tracy V. Wilson? Now, we will talk about some research involving animals, starting with domestic dogs. Research published in the journal Science in November has looked at the physical characteristics of domesticated dogs and how those characteristics have changed over time. So this research analyzed 643 modern and archaeological skulls, including ones from recognized dog breeds and street dogs and wolves. The oldest skulls that they analyzed were from about 50,000 years ago, which is before dogs are known to have been domesticated.
37:46 Holly Frey? The team created 3D models of each skull and used a method called geometric morphometrics to compare them. And they found that during the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods, there was already a lot of diversity in dogs. The oldest skull that could really be distinguished as a domestic dog rather than a wolf was from about 11,000 years ago, which wasn't that long after dogs were first domesticated, relatively speaking. The team found a lot of variety in the shapes of dog skulls by about 8,000 years ago.
38:19 Tracy V. Wilson? So this variety was probably connected to how dogs and people were living and working together and how quickly different groups of people started using dogs for specific roles, as well as what kinds of tasks those dogs were doing, like if the dogs were helping humans to hunt or if they were herding livestock or controlling pests. Basically, breeds were developing really early on in the development of dogs as a domesticated animal. At the same time, though, the researchers noted that while these domestic dogs' skull shapes really quickly started showing a lot of variation, this variation was not nearly as extreme as you can see in some of today's dog breeds.
39:05 Tracy V. Wilson? They did not have the equivalent of like a pug.
39:08 Holly Frey? There were no Sharpe's.
39:10 Tracy V. Wilson? No.
39:12 Tracy V. Wilson? There was variety, but the spectrum was smaller.
39:16 Holly Frey? Right. Uh, moving on to cat domestication, research from a team at Peking University, published in December, has looked at the timeline of when domesticated cats were introduced to China. We have talked about a couple of other studies looking at this same question on Unearthed before. And this research involved 22 small bones from 14 archaeological sites around China, the oldest dating back about 5,000 years. According to this research, leopard cats were living around human settlements more than 5,000 years ago, and they continued to do so until about the year 150 CE. Then, there was a gap in felines around settlements,
39:59 Holly Frey? with the first definitive example of a domestic cat in China dating back to about the year 730. While leopard cats still live in much of Asia today, they never became domesticated in the way that cats did.
40:13 Tracy V. Wilson? They are very cute. Researchers also looked at the DNA of modern and ancient cats in China to try to pinpoint the geographic origins of domesticated cats when they were introduced to China. And their research suggests that domesticated cats were introduced along the Silk Road. Not very surprising as a way for that to happen. This research puts the introduction of domesticated cats into China even later than research we have talked about on the show before.
40:44 Holly Frey? Researchers have found the oldest mule in Western Europe. This animal's remains were found during an archaeological dig in Catalonia back in 1986, and they date back to sometime between the 8th and 6th centuries BCE, three to four centuries before it was believed that mules were present in Western Europe.
41:05 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, this is one of those, uh, re-explorations of an older find with new technology and techniques that are available today. Mules are, of course, a hybrid of a donkey and a mare, so this suggests that people in this part of Europe learned about hybridizing equine species a lot earlier than was previously thought. It is possible that this mule was bred on the Iberian Peninsula after the Phoenicians introduced donkeys into the area. But future research using genetic and isotopic analysis will be needed to actually confirm that. They will use those isotopes to figure out things like what the mule ate when it was alive.
41:45 Holly Frey? Speaking of donkeys, there are written records of colonists bringing horses to what is now Virginia in the early 17th century, and no written records of donkeys on things like ship manifests. But archaeological research at the site of the Jamestown Settlement has revealed that colonists brought donkeys with them as well. This isn't really surprising since donkeys were already known for being working animals on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. These were likely brought from the Iberian Peninsula or from Western Africa. These donkeys and the horses that had been brought with them became food sources for the colonists during the winter of 1609 to 1610, which is known as the starving time.
42:29 Tracy V. Wilson? Researchers have found the remains of two wolves on the Swedish island of Stora Karloso, which is a small island that does not have any native land mammals. This suggests that seal hunters and fishers who used this island between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago brought wolves there for some reason. The wolves also have some traits that suggest that they may have been living alongside humans, including some isotope analysis that suggests they were eating a lot of seal meat and fish, which would not be the typical diet for a wolf unless someone were feeding it to them. One of these wolves had some kind of a leg condition that probably would have affected
43:12 Tracy V. Wilson? its mobility, meaning that it might have only been able to survive with the help of people.
43:19 Holly Frey? These remains are somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 years old. And according to DNA research, they are definitely wolves and not domesticated dogs. They are also somewhat smaller than a typical wolf of the time. And one of the two seems to have a reduced amount of genetic diversity.
43:38 Tracy V. Wilson? So it seems like these wolves were living alongside people for some reason, but there's a lot that is unclear about that. Like, had people managed to tame some wolves? Were the wolves being kept caged? Or were they otherwise restrained? Was there some other method of managing the wolves' behavior and keeping them around the settlement with people? We don't really know the answers to any of that.
44:04 Holly Frey? Researchers in Sweden have found the burial site of a dog dating back about 5,000 years. The area where it was found is now a bog, but at the time, it was a lake. This dog was clearly buried intentionally. It was likely placed in a bag or a container made of skins along with stones to weigh it down. The dog also had a polished bone dagger between its paws.
44:30 Tracy V. Wilson? Research into this burial is ongoing, including some isotope and DNA analysis that might reveal more about the dog and where it came from. But it is possible that this burial was part of a ritual rather than the simple burial of a pet or a working dog that had died.
44:48 Holly Frey? And our last animal find. According to research published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology, Roman officers stationed in the Egyptian port of Baranike may have kept Indian macaques as a mark of status. This comes from the analysis of 35 monkey burials at an ancient animal cemetery in Baranike. In addition to providing a glimpse of what wealthy officers might have spent their money on, this also provides some of the earliest evidence of an animal trade between India and Roman Egypt.
45:20 Tracy V. Wilson? Almost 800 burials have been examined at this animal cemetery, and the monkeys have some notable differences from the other burials. About 40% of the monkey burials included grave goods, so objects buried along with the monkeys. And that was true of only about 3% of the cat and dog burials. The grave goods that were buried with the monkeys included things like food, shells, and collars that were made of luxury materials. Some of these monkeys also seem to have been buried with other small animals that seem like they were meant to be the monkey's own pets.
45:59 Holly Frey? We are going to finish off today's episode with one historically relevant exhumation. Eliza Monroe Hay, oldest daughter of US President James Monroe, was exhumed from her burial site in Paris and returned to the United States, where she was reburied with others in the Monroe family at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia in October.
46:21 Tracy V. Wilson? So Eliza Monroe Hay had died in Paris in 1840, and the burial plot where she had been laid to rest had been paid for by an American diplomat named Daniel Brent. After hearing that this plot was going to be cleared and resold, Barbara Vornick, who is the author of Eliza's True Story, the first biography of President Monroe's eldest daughter, started a two-year process to have Hay's body returned to the US. That obviously was successful. We just said she was returned to the US and laid to rest here, and that biography came out just last year.
46:58 Holly Frey? We're going to have more unearthed on Wednesday, but in the meantime, do you have listener mail, Tracy?
47:04 Tracy V. Wilson? I do. I have listener mail that is from Mary. It's from October, and I don't think I've read it before. Mary wrote, "Hello, Tracy and Holly. I've been listening to the podcast for several years. I've gone pretty deep into the archives, though I have not completed my SYMHC PhD in parentheses yet. I love history and learning and appreciate the variety of topics you cover. I also appreciate your willingness to stand for justice, ethics, and all the good things decent humans should be doing during challenging times. Standing firm and what's right has never been more important. I was really excited to see the history of soap episode recently.
47:46 Tracy V. Wilson? A few years ago, I had some allergy testing and learned I am allergic to coconut. Coconut oil is in very nearly all soaps, including Cindat cleaners, which use coconut-derived ingredients. I decided to learn how to make my own soap and other skincare products out of necessity." Apart from learning in my 50s that showers and baths are in fact not supposed to be an inherently itchy experience, I discovered that I love making soap. I get to tap into my creativity by using different colorants, fragrances, and butters and oils to make each batch unique and end up with a useful product. Soap making has become my happy place and a great source of stress relief.
48:28 Tracy V. Wilson? Since January alone, I have made so much soap. If you still had a physical address, I would share the wealth if you wanted to give me an address I could use to ship soap to. I would love to share it as a thank you for all of the enjoyment and learning I've had from your podcast over the years. For picture tax, I have attached a picture of a small sample of the soap I've been making recently. I also added pictures of both my daughter's cats. The two black cats will be moving in with us in a few weeks while my daughter and her wife return to the nest in order to work toward grad school. Orange kitty. It's very sweet and sociable and very chatty. Um, and then there's like a PS that says, "Part two. I wrote this message and forgot to hit send." And that's not all bad.
49:10 Tracy V. Wilson? I just finished the eponymous diseases episode and there's another topic that's right up my alley. I work as a public health professional. Years ago, I used to do communicable disease investigation, including vector-borne diseases. This brought back memories. Your listener mail response at the end about researching and verifying sources can't be understated, especially with the degradation of public health systems and available resources. Thank you for being a source of education and support. Mary. Thank you, Mary, so much for this email. These are some incredibly cute cat pictures. We have an orange tabby kitty cat wearing what looks like a little shirt, standing with
49:52 Tracy V. Wilson? two front paws on an open book and the biggest of big eyes with huge pupils. Uh, a black kitty cat curled up on a chair who does not look happy to be having a picture taken. Um, and then a black kitty cat on top of, uh, like a dresser cabinet kind of thing, looking into the middle distance, I feel.
50:19 Tracy V. Wilson? Which is a thing that cats do. And then, oh, man, these soaps are beautiful.
50:24 Tracy V. Wilson? These are, it's a picture of a lot of different soaps. They have kind of a marbled appearance of different swirls of color. Really lovely. Those are very beautiful soaps. Thank you so much for the offer of sending us things. I am touched anytime anyone wants to send us things. I will say when we did have a physical address, the amount of things received became overwhelming. And again, deeply appreciated and I'm grateful for anyone's attention in that way, but it was more stuff than we could deal with. Some of it from listeners, a lot of it from book publicists who sent us unsolicited review copies of
51:06 Tracy V. Wilson? things. And it was just more than we could really handle. And then now, we have a dispersed working environment, and we don't have a centralized place for things. But again, thank you for even the suggestion. And for these beautiful, amazing pictures. I love this whole email. Except for the part that you had to spend many years being itchy anytime you bathed or showered. That's not good at all. When I was little, I had a lot of trouble with itching. And it took getting rid of anything that involved fragrance in our household. But anyway, thank you again. If you would like to send us a note about this
51:49 Tracy V. Wilson? or any other podcast, we are at [email protected] . And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you like to get your podcasts.
52:04 Tracy 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.
52:18 Holly 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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Previous SYMHC Classics: P.A.R.C. and Mills Next Unearthed Year-end 2025, Part 2 Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated