Unearthed! In Spring 2026, Part 2 - podcast episode cover

Unearthed! In Spring 2026, Part 2

Apr 22, 202639 min
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Episode description

Part one of this quarter's edition of Unearthed! includes animals, artwork, edibles and potables, shipwrecks, potpourri.

Research:

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy be Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. This is part two of our latest installment of Unearthed, where we talk about things that have been literally and figuratively unearthed over the last few months. In this part two, we have animals, artwork, edibles and potables, shipwrecks, and then, as always kicking it off with some random stuff that I call popery because jeopardy.

Speaker 1

A six month long excavation in England, about ten miles south of Hadrian's Wall has unearthed at least eight hundred wet stones dating back about two thousand years to the Roman era. There are probably hundreds more still to be discovered at the site. Before this find, only about two hundred and fifty wetstones had been found in the entirety of Britain and Ireland.

Speaker 2

This was probably a whetstone factory in an industrial area, and the stone to make the whetstones may have been quarried from the northern bank of the river near where all of this was found. The surviving whetstones at this site all seem to have been broken or incorrectly cut, which means that these are the cast offs, and it's likely that many many more intact whetstones were transported out of this area to the coast and then from there

to other parts of the Roman Empire. Now I kind of want other research tracing the origins of the stone in other whetstones found elsewhere in what had been Roman territory. Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has looked at the genetic legacy of the Mongol Empire, especially rulingly from the group known as the Golden Horde in Central Eurasia. The Golden Horde was founded by Genghis

Khan's eldest son Joshi and his descendants. Local law in Kazakhstan has suggested that one of the four Golden Horde tombs that was analyzed in the study was that of Djoshi and his family. According to this research, these elites descended primarily from ancient Northeast Asians, with some ancestry from

ancient North Eurasian and Scythian populations. Genetic research on the remains from the four tombs suggests that the males had y chromosomes, from a particular ancestral branch that originated on the Mongolian Plateau. Many people living in Central Eurasia today have this cluster of DNA as part of their genome.

Speaker 1

However, this research also raises some questions about the popularly held ie idea that one out of every two hundred men is related to Ginghis Khan. Researchers also ran comparisons to modern DNA and didn't find this why chromosome cluster as frequently in modern populations as it is in the men buried in these tombs. Researchers also noted that we

don't have Ginghis Khan's DNA to go on. While Joshi and his father would certainly have had some similarities in their genomes, we don't know whether that would include this specific cluster. And Lastly, researchers in Hungary have been studying one hundred and twenty five skeletons from two Neolithic cemeteries, looking at patterns and how these people were buried and what that can tell us about gender roles and among

these people. These remains date back about seven thousand years, so they examined the bones themselves, looking for evidence of wear that could tell us about these peoples, maybe a little about what kind of work they might have done, and they also looked at the positions the people were buried in and what kinds of grave goods they were buried with. At one of the cemeteries, there wasn't a

lot of variation in how people were buried. In general, the people buried at this cemetery seemed to have done harder physical work, but those patterns didn't vary by sex either. At the other site, though, things seemed to be structured along clearer lines of gender roles. Most of the female skeletons were buried on their left side with shell beads, and then most of the male skeletons were buried on

their right side and they had stone tools. There were also two male skeletons and five female skeletons that departed from this pattern. In one case, there was a female skeleton buried with stone tools, and the wear on her towbone showed that she did a lot of kneeling. That was something that was more common among the male skeletons.

There was not anything to suggest that this person had some kind of unique social position, but these findings do suggest that there were people living in this community thousands of years ago who weren't aligned with the typical pattern of gender and gender roles in their area. This paper was titled Fixed and Fluid the Two Faces of Gender Roles, A combined study of activity patterns and burial practices in the European Neolithic.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

This small bone was compared to the bones of mammoths and modern elephants, and radiocarbon dating placed it in the fourth or third centuries BCE, which is when the Punic Wars took place. There were also several military related objects found at the site, like artillery projectiles, as well as coins and ceramics.

Speaker 2

Reading through this research, it does not seem like this identification is one hundred percent certain they did compare it to mammoths and elephant bones, but the bones condition is too poor for DNA to be extracted from it, and it's also possible that it was brought to the area as a trade good rather than in the body of a living war elephant moving on. A burial site in northern Norway has been found to contain the body of a Viking age woman who was buried along with her dog.

This discovery was made by a couple of people who were searching the area with metal detectors and contacted authorities about what they found. The woman and the dog were buried together in a boat, along with tools, a weaving sword, a wetstone, and a sickle. Next, there is a traditional Irish breed of goat that is known as the Old Irish goat, which just delights me such a simple, straightforward name.

This goat is bred for both meat and milk. According to research published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, today's Old Irish goats have a continuous lineage stretching back to at least the Late Bronze Age roughly eleven hundred to nine hundred BCE. This conclusion came from analysis of goat remains at an iron Age Hill Fort. These are the oldest goat remains found in Ireland.

Speaker 1

The old Irish goat is a rare breed today and there are small faral herds of them in parts of Ireland. Wild goats play a part in Irish folklore, so these goats have an ongoing connection to Irish culture and history and animal domestication and husbandry in Ireland.

Speaker 2

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

birds came from and where they were taken. In the words of doctor George Ollah from the Australian National University A and You, who is the paper's lead author, quote our ancient habitat modeling confirmed that the western side of the Andes was just as inhospitable to these species one thousand years ago as it is today. These parrots are strictly rainforest dwellers, with a natural home range of around

one hundred and fifty kilometers. The fact that they ended up more than five hundred kilometers away on the other side of South America's highest mountain range proves human intervention. They do not naturally fly over the Andes. Researchers from the University of Liverpool have published work on the development and spread of early domesticated dogs. This includes work from a rock shelter in Anatolia where people and dogs stayed

together roughly fifteen thousand, eight hundred years ago. These people buried their dead, and they also buried their dogs in a way that was very similar to human burials.

Speaker 1

Professor Doug Baird of the University of Liverpool was quoted as saying the archaeology makes clear that these dogs were close companions of humans. Isotope analysis showing the dogs ate fish, a major element of the human diet, and like humans, were carefully buried in the rock shelter near human burial,

thereby receiving ritualized treatment analogous to the humans. These people hunted animals like wild sheep and dangerous wild cattle, so it seems likely that these animals were hunting, but also possibly guard dogs, given the presence of large predators like wolves and leopards in Central Anatolia at that time. And lastly, we have a depiction of an animal. A hiker on the island of Majorca in Spain found a tiny bronze

bull's head. It is roughly three thousand years old. This is one of only four more such skull representations ever found on the island, and it is little. It's a little more than an inch long. This hiker delivered the fine two authorities and the plan is for it to be placed in a museum. It is time to take a little sponsor break and then we'll be back to talk about art.

Speaker 2

Okay, now for some art. A professor who specializes in rock art research has partnered with traditional owners in Australia to study fourteen newly documented images of the extinct Tasmanian tiger or thyloside. These images are from two different locations in Northern Territory. There are also pictures of Tasmanian devils. Today, Tasmanian devils live only on Tasmania, but they used to live on the Australian mainland as well.

Speaker 1

They look nothing like that cartoon.

Speaker 2

They really don't as and Tasmanian tigers don't look that much like tigers either. Some of these artworks are believed to be less than a thousand years old, and the Tasmanian devil is believed to have been extinct on the mainland three thousand years ago. This has raised some questions about whether the paintings were made by someone who had seen a living Tasmanian devil, meaning that they survived longer

on the mainland than was previously thought. The paper on this find, which was published in the journal Archaeology in Oceania, also includes information from Aboriginal oral histories about these animals and their cultural importance. In other rock art news, researchers in France have used carbon fourteen dating to directly estimate the age of several pieces of.

Speaker 1

Black line art.

Speaker 2

This is the first time carbon fourteen dating has been used directly off art in this region because it was believed that all of the pigments that were used were made of metals that didn't contain any carbon, so there would have been no carbon fourteen to test.

Speaker 1

This team used non invasive methods to test the composition of the pigments used in two figures. They found traces of charcoal, and the distribution of the charcoal was consistent enough that it seemed like part of the pigment and not like contamination from some of their point in history.

They extracted extremely small amounts of this pigment for testing and concluded that one of the figures dates to about thirteen thousand years before the present, while the other had pigment that seemed to come from two different time periods, the first about eighty five hundred years before the present and the other more likely fifteen thousand years before the present. It is possible that this was an older artwork that

was retouched or altered thousands of years later. A painting by Italian Renaissance artist sophonisba Anguisola was thought to have been lost, but has now resurfaced. It turns out it was bought by a private collector in nineteen seventy seven. The painting's current owners are relatives of the person who bought it, and they looked into the painting's history after seeing a lecture on the artist, which was presented by

the National Gallery of Art in twenty twenty four. This painting was publicly displayed for the first time since then this past February. This portrait is called Portrait of a canon Regular and it depicts a clergyman whose identity is unknown. Sophonisba Anguisola was one of the few women artists to become really recognized during the Renaissance, and fewer than twenty signed paintings of hers have survived until today.

Speaker 2

Speaking of resurfaced Renaissance art, a previously unknown postcard sized drawing by German Renaissance artist Hans Baldengrin has been found among the possessions of the descendants of Susannah Fefinger, who sat for this portrait back in fifteen seventeen. The portrait was done in silver point on paper that was treated with bone powder, and it was part of a collection of artwork that the family had taken in for valuation. This is the only known silver point work from this

artist that is still in a private collection. Back in nineteen eighty three, a mold was found at an archaeological site at a Slavic hillfort in Spandau, which is one of the burrows of Berlin today. This mold would have been used to cast a small devotional object in the shape of a wheel cross or a cross that's in

a circle. In January, a find was announced from a site in Javelan, Germany, roughly seventy kilometers away, which is a bronze wheel cross that was made with the mold, which was found by a volunteer using a metal detector. These date back to the tenth or eleventh century and they're two of the oldest Christian artifacts in the region, dating back to when it was first being Christianized. Archaeologists have found fragments of decorated ostrich egg shells at sites

in Namibia and South Africa. These shells were used as water vessels more than sixty thousand years ago, and people decorated them by engraving them. Researchers analyzed the engravings on one hundred and twelve fragments and found that eighty of them had what they described as coherent special regularities. That is, they had patterns of parallel lines or patterns of the same angle being used over and over. Some of them had repeating grids and diamond shaped motifs, which are the

most complex designs patterns are very consistent. They showed an ability not only to repeat an etching consistently, but also to plan it out so that these patterns and lines would cover the desired space in a regular way over the curved surface of an ostrich egg So this is basically more advanced thinking than might have been expected from

people who were living sixty thousand years ago. I don't think I could just plan out in my head a bunch of etchings on an ostrich eggshell and have it come out evenly.

Speaker 1

I don't know.

Speaker 2

I bet if you did it a bunch you could maybe eventually with a lot of practice.

Speaker 1

Right, it's mastery. We are going to wrap up our art talk with some art acquisitions that made headlines over the last few months. The Italian government paid almost thirty five million dollars for a Caravaggio portrait. The portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barbrini, who would later become Pope Urban the eighth had been on loan to the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. Now it is.

Speaker 2

Part of the permanent collection at the Palazzo. The National Gallery of Arts in Washington, d C. Has acquired Mary Magdalen in Ecstasy by past podcast subject Artemisia Gentileski. This is the first Gentileeskie painting in the museum's collection and.

Speaker 1

A museum I love desperately. The Dali Museum in Saint Petersburg, Florida acquired Salvador Dali's largest painting at auction for two hundred ninety three thousand, two hundred forty dollars. This painting was a strange landscape created as a stage set for Bacchanal, which was a surrealist ballet that premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in nineteen thirty nine. It is made of thirteen panels and four canvases and measures sixty

five by one hundred feet. Dali also wrote a libretto and designed costumes for this production.

Speaker 2

Now we will get into the edibles and potables, which are always one of my favorites. The four corners potato is a small, nutritionally very dense potato that people in southwestern North America have been growing for millennia.

Speaker 1

Today it is.

Speaker 2

Still eaten and used for spiritual and medicinal purposes. Research published in the journal plus one has looked at its history and early domestication by both examining more than four hundred stone tools and by interviewing indigenous elders.

Speaker 1

Those tools came from fourteen archaeological sites beyond the Four Corners Potatoes natural range. The team looked at large slabs and handheld stones used for grinding and found microscopic potato starch granules on tools from nine of the fourteen sites. Four of the site showed consistent use of the potato stretching as far back as ten t thousand years ago.

Speaker 2

Hope and Denay elders who were interviewed nearly all had knowledge of this potato and Denay women, in particular, new techniques on how to process and prepare them to make them less bitter. Denay doctoral candidate Cynthia Wilson, who's a co author of this study, was quoted as saying, quote the mobility of indigenous food ways was driven by kinship

based practices across the landscape. Indigenous knowledge holders, especially matrilineal women, held onto these seedlings and stories across generations to sustain ties to ancestral land and food ways. This research combines with other work to suggest the Indigenous people in the American Southwest domesticated the Four Corners potato. This contradicts earlier assumptions that the domesticated crops grown in the Southwest were not domesticated there, but were domesticated in America and then

introduced from there. This new information also augments other research and suggests that now perhaps agave, barley, and amaranths were all cultivated in North America. Researchers working at sites in what's now Ukraine have used the preserved proteins and dental calculus to confirm that Iron age Scythians consumed milk from horses as well as from cattle, sheep, and goats. There are historical accounts describing Scythians as consuming mayre's milk, but

this is the first physical evidence of that. Only one of the twenty eight individuals in the study showed evidence of consuming horse milk, so it doesn't seem like something that was common, at least among this particular group of people. It is possible that the proteins in horse milk did not survive as well in the dental calculus as proteins.

Speaker 1

From the milk of other animals. Since the Scythians are becoming understood as a culturally and ethnically diverse group rather than more of a homogeneous culture. It is possible that there were also cultural differences involved, or there could have been cultural factors involved, and who was caring for the horses and thus who was consuming horse milk.

Speaker 2

Someone at an estate sale in Minnesota found a silver pap boat and recognized it as the work of nineteenth century silversmith Peter Benson, who was born in Saint Croix and later moved to Philadelphia. He was one of the first known silversmiths of African descent in the United States. Fewer than thirty pieces made by Benson are known to have survived until today, and they are identifiable through a hallmark which he used to see their pee Benson or

as his initials. So a pap boat is a little like a gravy boat, but it was used to feed a thin porridge or pap to babies and too sick people.

Speaker 1

This pap boat was purchased at the estate sale for forty dollars and then it was sold at auction for twenty four thousand dollars. The buyer was reportedly a prominent American institution, but that institution has not been named.

Speaker 2

Research published in the journal plus one has used a combination of techniques to look at the residues left on pottery dating back to the third through the sixth millennium BCE. We talk about food residues on pottery fairly often on unearthed but often the focus is on fatty residues, and that largely limits the results to residues that came from animals.

This research used a combination of techniques, including microscopic examination and chemical analysis to try to instead look for plant residues. This involved fifty eight pieces of pottery from thirteen archaeological sites across northern and eastern US. The team found tissue samples from an assortment of plants, including grasses, berries, leaves, and seeds. Often there were animal remains as well, most

often fish or some other kind of seafood. The combination of ingredients seemed to vary, but suggested that people had already developed complex culinary traditions by this point.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 2

I think sometimes people imagine people from thousands and thousands of years ago just like spearing a fish on a stick and charring it over a fire. This was more nuanced than that.

Speaker 1

They were very picky about their plating.

Speaker 2

Grounds keeper working on a golf course in England noticed a sinkhole that had turned out to be a brick wine cellar that was abandoned more than one hundred years ago. This wine cellar probably belonged to a manner in the area that was torn down at the end of the nineteenth century. The cellar so was full of wine and port models which were now empty. I was unclear on whether they were empty when the wine cellar was abandoned, or whether their corks degraded at what was inside evaporated

or spilled, or what exactly. For now, though, the cellar has been sealed up while the staff at the golf course figure out what they should do about it make.

Speaker 1

It a gaming room. Speaking of wine, research published in the journal Nature has looked at four thousand years of viticulture in France. This has involved extracting DNA from forty nine grape seeds found at various archaeological sites. The oldest came from wild grape vines, but what is being described as essentially identical to pino noir grapes that are grown today. That one came from a toilet at a fifteenth century

hospital at Valenciennes in northern France. This suggests that people have been propagating grapes through cloning for more than five hundred years. Researchers have studied maize or corn samples in thirty five tombs from the Chincha Valley and they found that the samples had exceptionally high levels of nitrogen. There was a lot more nitrogen in them than could have

just come from the soil in the area. So this suggests that the Chincha Kingdom, which lived in what's now Peru before the development of the Inca Empire, fertilized its crops, probably with seabird guatto that was harvested from the Chincha Islands. Researchers believe this use of fertilizer was a factor in how this kingdom became one of the wealthiest and most powerful societies in their era. Basically, they had crops that had a lot better yield than some of their neighbors

as part of how they became wealthy. Hey, hey, it's almost time for everybody's favorite shipwrecks. The first going to pause and have a sponsor break.

Speaker 2

We will close out this installment of Unearthed with some shipwrecks. Divers have been exploring the site of a Roman shipwreck on the bottom of Lake Nukatel in Switzerland. This ship sank roughly two thousand years ago and the vessel itself has decayed, but the cargo it was carrying is mostly intact. This was a merchant vessel and it was carrying hundreds of pieces of ceramic tableware and m fora that were

carrying Spanish olive oil. There were also wheels, harnesses and swords that may have been connected to the vessel, possibly having guards or a military escort on board. This wreck is being described as unique among inland shipwrecks, and its cargo is expected to be exhibited in a museum once it's recovered.

Speaker 1

Maritime archaeologists from the Viking Ship Museum in Denmark have announced the discovery of the world's largest cog in the Strait between Denmark and Sweden. The cog was a type of cargo ship that was developed in the late twelfth century and it really revolutionized maritime trade, allowing small crews of sailors to handle ships that had an enormous carrying capacity relatively speaking. This one was probably built around fourteen ten, based on the tree rings in its timbers, and it

had a capacity of about three hundred tons. It was made from timber that came from what's now Poland and the Netherlands, with large timbers being shipped to the Netherlands where the vessel was built. This wreck has also provided direct evidence that some cogs had high castles at the bow and the stern. These had been documented through things like illustrations and written to descriptions of cogs, but this is the first time that these structures have survived in

an actual wreck. Often because of the conditions in this part of the world, all that remains of the vessel by the time it's discovered underwater is just the bottom. If that this wreck is also just very well preserved, with parts of its riggings still intact. Part of the galley has also survived, and items found on board include kitchen items like bronze pots, tablewear and bowls, as well as sailors personal items like shoes and combs, and even

rosary beads. But no cargo has been found with this wreck.

Speaker 2

It is possible that it was carrying goods in barrels and that those barrels may have floated away after the ship sank. Denmark's Viking Ship Museum has also announced the discovery of the wreck of the Danibroge, which was sunk by the British Navy during the Battle of Copenhagen in eighteen oh one. This this was the flagship of the Danish Norwegian fleet, and it caught fire and exploded after the British Navy struck it.

Speaker 1

This announcement was made on the two hundred and fifty fifth anniversary of the battle, which was April second, So technically this was a second quarter find, but just on the edge. But both this and the Cog were found and studied as part of advanced work ahead of construction of an artificial island that will both act as a new housing district and worked to mitigate the threat of sea level rise.

Speaker 2

The articles that I was reading about both of these were written in English, but they were obviously like published four people in Denmark and surrounding areas, and so they didn't really specify what was going on with this construction site. And I kept being like, okay, but these are shipwrecks. How are the shipwrecks a construction site? And the answer is building an island?

Speaker 1

Uh?

Speaker 2

Which sounds fascinating. Maritime archaeologists have published findings from the excavations of a shipwreck off the coast of Singapore. The excavations were carried out in sort of phases between twenty sixteen and twenty nineteen. They recovered three point five tons of broken ceramic and a few intact ceramic pieces. This wreck is being described as the first ancient shipwreck ever found in Singapore waters, and the cargo dates back to the fourteenth century Yon Dynasty.

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

The wreck of the Lac LaBelle has been found on the floor of Lake Michigan, almost exactly one hundred and fifty years after it disappeared in a storm that was in seventeen eighty two, and a shipwreck hunter spotted it in twenty twenty two. But the find of the wreck was not announced until earlier this year because its discoverer wanted to create a three D model of the wreckage. Four other people learned where it was.

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

Storms that struck the UK in late January may have exposed the timbers of a seventeenth century shipwreck. The ship sank off the coast of southern England and it made the Fame, which was a Dutch merchant vessel that sank in sixteen thirty one. Other parts of this wreck had already been discovered underwater in the Swash Channel, and there had been some research work at that wreck site. But these timbers that the storm exposed on the beach might be part of the hull that was missing people could

not find when they did that earlier work. The plan is to take these timbers to a conservation lab and take some samples from it to compare what they found on the beach with what they found underwater to see if it matches.

Speaker 1

And finally, we have talked about the Parthenon marbles on the show before. In March, it was announced that last year the Greek Ministry of Culture reclaimed a piece of the Parthenon that had been removed by Lord Elgin to be taken to the UK. There recovered pieces did not come straight from England, though it came from the wreck of elginship Mentor, which sank in eighteen oh two. This is a small piece of marble that is believed to have been part of a beam or a roof of

the Parthenon. Seventeen crates of marbles were recovered from the shipwreck by Elgin Secretary, So most of the Greek Ministry of Culture's discoveries of the site have been remnants of the ship itself and items like everyday pottery.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I appreciated how the recovery of this tiny piece of marble was hailed as like a giant success because of all that context around the Parthenon marbles and the shipwreck. That's it for this installment of Unearthed, with the exception of some listener mail, I have a listener mail from Whitney.

Whitney wrote, Hi, there, my family and I recently went to the Titanic exhibit at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland, and thanks to your wonderful podcast, I was able to impress one of the people working at the exhibit. While walking around looking at the artifacts, a museum employee came up to me with a replica of a life jacket that was have been on the Titanic and asked me if I wanted to wear it.

I of course said yes, and the employee mentioned how the life jacket was heavier than the ones we use nowadays. When he asked me what I thought the life jacket was made out of, without hesitation, I said cork. I don't remember the specific podcast episode or really much of the details, but I remember you guys covering a story

of a shipwreck that happened near the shore. There weren't enough lifejackets, so people on board fought each other to get one, but due to the life jackets being old and made of cork and I think having previously been used, the unfortunate individuals who had a lifejacket ended up sinking and drowning instead of floating and slafe fleet making it

to shore. When I correctly answered the question, the museum employee did a double take and told me I was the only person that day to have correctly answered the question. Although I must admit it was still pretty early in the day and I only knew the answer because of you two. It was a small thing but really made my day. I know that you guys love animals, so I've also included a picture of my mom's favorite child, little Bear. Little Bear was very upset about not getting

to go to the museum. Thanks so much for all you do. I love learning and I have been a big fan of your podcast for years. Sincerely, Whitney, we have a very cute little white, white scruffy dogs, little Bear. I went to refresh my memory about which episode that was about the life jackets made of cork. I have already forgotten which episode it was, and that was like two hours ago that I went and looked it up. But yeah, the issue was that some of the life jackets.

The cover on the life jacket had deteriorated and let water get in some of them, it was that the cork had deteriorated. Yeah, so when water permeated through the life jacket, like the material on the outside, it just soaked into the cork and became heavy, which is terrible. Yeah, it was not no longer buoyant cork, just porous cork. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. There was also a different shipwreck episode

where the life jackets had been standardized by weight. There was a weight requirement for how much cork, and so some unscrupulous life jacket manufacturers had supplemented the weight of their life jackets with iron bars, which're not buoyant. Uh, not even not even So thank you so much for the email. I love to feel smart.

Speaker 1

What's that like? I don't know.

Speaker 2

Lately, lately I feel more like I'm sort of struggling. I remember being at the Bookbinders Museum in San Francisco and the docent asked me what I thought the apprentices had used to clean the things that they were using, and I was like, I don't know, probably urine, and that was right, and I felt very smart. So I feel a kinship with Whitney with this email. If you would like to send us a note, we are at

History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. If you want to see our show notes, which include so many articles that went into Unearthed, they are at our website of Missed Inhistory dot com, and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and wherever else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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