It's been 30 years since the first episode of Beverly Hills, Nido 2.0, 30 years since we walk the halls of West Beverly High and since we all hung out at the Peach Pit. Relive it all with Jennie Garth and Tori Spelling on their new podcast, Niono, two a.m.. We get to tell the fans all of the behind the scenes stories that actually happened. Join them as they watch every episode of the beloved 90s TV show. From the very beginning, listen to Nine and OMD on the IHA radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

We have elected scoundrels in America because because the people have said, well, at least there are scoundrel, but it comes back in the end. I think so.

I think so. In 1987, David Frost sat down with then Senator Joe Biden for an over two hour interview at age 44. Biden was making his first bid for the presidency just as the Reagan years were coming to an end.

This president, the thing that I disagree with him most about is the way he has divided this nation.

Biden would end his campaign just weeks after the interview was recorded and the tapes were never made public until now. But the harder test, it's not the one. Can I do it better than my opponent? The harder test. Everyone who goes to bed is sitting in this library by yourself. And you ask yourself, how can I be the kind of president that I think America should have? Can I be the kind of president that Abraham Lincoln was? Can I be the kind of president Franklin Roosevelt was?

Can I can I be a great president? Listen to this, never before at Joe Biden interview, only on the Frost Tapes podcast. Well, I'm not sure I'd like to talk about that. Welcome to stuff you missed in History Class, A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast, I'm Tracy Wilson, and I'm Holly Fry. It is time for Unearthed if you're new to the show. This is when we talk about things that were figuratively or literally unearthed.

This one covers basically the last quarter of twenty twenty.

Normally when we record our year end unearthed episodes, it's one of the last things that we do before we take a break. Hmm. But in twenty twenty we started our break early. Because we were tired and that was the only reason I was tired, so I finished up these episodes of the very first thing on my to do list in 2021. So I'm like normal. There's not just a gap of a couple of weeks where we just are never going to talk about those things.

So today we have a lot of updates to previous episodes and some books and letters, some stuff about Vikings and mummies and some other things, too. And then part two has some of the other listener favorites and favorites of ours, also, including the edibles and potables and the exhumations. So stuff to look forward next time also. So we're going to start out with something that is not entirely typical for our unearthed episodes, but it was really big news at the end of 2020 and so big that it would seem like if we don't talk about it right out of the gate, some folks are going to spend the whole episode wondering if we will ever get to it.

That's that monolith. Yeah, I wrote the stuff about the monolith before I went on break. And when I got back, I was like, does anybody even remember that monolith? At this point, it seems like it's been eons ago. It was not eons ago. It was in November. In November, the Utah Department of Public Safety and Utah Division of Wildlife Resources were conducting a sheep count by helicopter. And as they were doing that, somebody noticed something strange upon closer investigation.

It was a triangular prism that was 10 or 12 feet high, made of metal, held together with rivets and securely anchored into the rock. And since this thing kind of resembled the monolith from the film 2001, A Space Odyssey, a lot of people sort of talking about aliens. And although authorities tried to keep the location of this monolith secret, it didn't take very long for people to figure out exactly where it was. And they found it on Google Earth satellite imagery.

And soon it became clear that it was a lot newer than the things that we would usually cover on an unearthed episodes, not an ancient historical thing. It wasn't there in August of 2015, but it was as of October of twenty sixteen. And one hypothesis was that it was a work of art, possibly by sculptor John MacCracken, whose son said he liked to install his artwork in remote in unexpected places.

But that doesn't really add up because MacCracken died in 2011. A representative for McCracken's estate later said that it was not his work. So this announcement that this monolith had been spotted came on November twenty third. And then on the 28th, the Bureau of Land Management reported that this, quote, illegally installed structure had been removed. The day before, photographer Ross Bernhard's of Colorado reported that he had gone to the site with some friends to check out this monument and that while they were there for other people arrived, they knocked the monolith down and took the pieces away in a wheelbarrow.

One of those four people reportedly said, this is why you don't leave trash in the desert. And then on their way out, another one of them said, leave no trace. Michael James Newlands took photos of this whole removal on his phone.

People who have taken credit for this removal include Andy Lewis and Sylvan Christensen.

Christensen sent a statement to The New York Times that they had removed the monolith to protect the area from the sightseers who had started flocking to the site pretty much as soon as people figured out where it was then a similar monolith appeared in Romania on November 28th, only to vanish on December 1st and then on.

The second one appeared in Southern California and disappeared again the next day. Four men took credit for that, one on the fifth. And that was also the day that another one appeared in Joshua Tree National Park in California. Still, more monoliths came and went around California. There was also one on the Isle of Wight and one outside of El Paso, Texas, and one in Finland. Moe, who's the founder of the collective known as the most famous artist, gave some pretty cagey interviews in which he didn't exactly take credit for the monoliths but did not deny being involved with them either.

And the most famous artist website started listing monoliths for sale for the price of forty five thousand dollars. As of when we are recording this, that listing says that it is sold out. I mean, who doesn't want to?

Forty five thousand dollar monolith. I have that DIY thing where I'm like, if I wanted it, I just make it myself. Honestly, this whole thing has become increasingly silly since then. A gingerbread model is my personal favorite. Appeared in San Francisco on Christmas Day, among other things. Yeah, we may not know the true nature of that. First one that was cited and who was responsible for it, but I like the people, took the idea and ran with it in cookie form.

Yeah.

When it initially showed up, before people figured out how recently it had appeared, I was thinking it might turn out to be like some piece of a movie set from some classical film. We will get to talk about that.

And no, it was not that. And when I got back to my desk on January 4th and was like, any updates on that monolith in the time that I was not at work? Well, there was a gingerbread one, the whole thing. And this is not the only disappearing and reappearing objects that happened at the end of last year. And other news of disappearing and reappearing things a few years ago, someone put a two meter or seven foot tall wooden sculpture on the ridge of Gretton Mountain in southern Bavaria.

The sculpture was of a phallus. There's no real documentation of how it came to be there, but the local story is that somebody got this gigantic statue of a phallus as a gag gift and did not want it. So they hold it up the mountain and just left it there.

Then in late November, without explanation, someone chopped it down and took it away, as was the case with the Utah monolith, it is not clear who this sculpture actually belonged to. So that means it's also not clear whether an actual crime was committed. But authorities were investigating. Yeah, earlier I said this was a disappearing and reappearing thing, but really it's just appearing and then disappearing. There was no reappearance of it yet.

Yeah, see, I see. Moving on to things that are a little more typical of of unearthed. We have lots of finds that are related to past episodes of the show. So we've had some previous updates on Unearthed about efforts to find mass graves that are connected to the 1921 massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We covered that massacre on the show in 2014. We also replayed it as a holiday classic more recently, I think, in October. Oklahoma State archaeologist Kari Stickleback announced that a team had found a human remains at Oak Lawn Cemetery.

It was one of the sites they were investigating at that time. They found the remains of one or possibly two people at a site where it's believed that 18 victims of the massacre had been buried. In October, Peru's Culture Ministry announced the discovery and conservation of a 37 metre that's about hundred and twenty foot long geoglyph in the Nazca desert. It's about 2000 years old and in the shape of a cat. It was discovered during planning for a new path that would lead up to an observation tower.

So Peru's chief archaeologist for the Nazca lines told reporters that this glyph actually predates the Nazca culture that is credited with creating the other glyphs in the area. This cat glyph dates back to the late Perakis era, which is between 500 BCE and 200 C, while the Nazca culture that is associated with the other lines spans from 200 to 700 C because of its age and its position on the slope, this cat glyph had eroded to the point there was just barely visible.

And if you look at pictures of this glyph, it seems stylistically much different from many of the other Nazca lines.

I will confess that when I first saw pictures, I said that's 100 percent a hoax. Someone went through kiddie picture. It is not clear whether that difference in style is because of its origins in an earlier era or because of that recent cleaning and restoration. Our episode on the Nazca lines, so you can get more context for all of this came out in 2013. Moving on, according to research that was published in December, analysis of mummified baboons that were found in ancient Egyptian temples might help pinpoint the location of the kingdom of put.

A team from Dartmouth College analyzed isotope composition of these mummies, and that analysis suggested that their origins were from a region that includes parts of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia and Yemen.

So kind of a narrowing down into that general region, we talked about Hatshepsut and the expeditions to put on the show in July of twenty nineteen. Next up, three metal detectorists have found a shipment of arms that was meant for the Jacobite uprising of 1745, which we covered on the show in 2016. This find was on the shores of Lochaber Lokke, near a ruined craft house that had belonged to Bonnie Prince Charles's tutor. It included at least 200 musket balls, and it's believed that they are part of a shipment that arrived not long after the Battle of Calladine.

These metal detectorists had the permission of the landowner to be there, and they reported their find to treasure trove in Scotland. And that's the official organization for handling fines that might have some kind of archaeological or historical importance in Scotland.

Next up, divers in the Baltic Sea have found a German enigma machine from World War Two. Divers on assignment from environmental group WWF founded while looking for abandoned fishing nets. The person who spotted it actually first thought it was an old typewriter. The Enigma machine is expected to undergo a year long restoration process before being put on display in a museum. Prior hosts did a series of episodes on cryptography during World War Two in September of 2012.

We have a couple of updates to previous unearthed episodes in our fall unearthed last year, we talked about the discovery of 13 unopened coffins that were found in a burial. Well, in Sacar, Egypt, these were estimated to be 2500 years old. Their wooden coffins found in very good condition with much of the original painting on the exterior still very clearly visible.

Work on these is, of course, still ongoing. And in October, Greg Lewis, New Zealand's ambassador to Egypt, shared a video of one of them being open for the first time. This was part of an unveiling of that earlier find, which is actually much larger than that was originally reported as 13 coffins as of October. Fifty nine coffins had been discovered, which were believed to belong to priests and senior officials.

By November, that number of discovered coffins had risen to 100, and they had also found funerary masks and 40 gilded statues. Officials had also started x raying the mummies to try to visualize their structures and figure out how they had been preserved. Some of the openings of these coffins and the x raying processes that have gone along along the way have been carried out publicly to try to help offset the pandemic's impact on the Egyptian tourism industry. In Unearthed in March twenty twenty, we talked about some Glassey matter that was found at the site of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79, and that Glassey matter was believed to be part of a person's brain.

Further research into this find has actually uncovered the fact that there are intact neurons preserved in that glassy material. According to a paper published in October, the rapid cooling of the volcanic material allowed those neurons to be preserved in this way. So cool.

Yeah, when I was looking at this, I was like, is this the same brain? Yes. We will move on to the books and letters after we take a quick sponsor break. Who was David Bowie? Well, that depends on who you ask or which records you play. To some, he's Ziggy Stardust, to others that then why do or Major Star. But who is David Bowie? You to answer that question will have to go off the record.

My name is Jordan Ron Talk and I'm the host of Off the Record, a new music biography podcast from my heart. Radio Off the record goes beyond the songs and into the hearts and minds of rock's greatest legends. Every season profiles one classic artist taking listeners on a wild ride through their extraordinary career.

The first season examines the life or rather lives of David Bowie. Every episode of the 11 part audio event tells the story of one of his iconic personas. Together, these faces form an intimate portrait of one of the 20th century's most influential figures. So who was David Bowie?

Tune in to Off the Record to find out. The series premieres on January 18th. Listen and follow on the I Heart Radio Apple podcast wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

It's been 30 years since the first episode of Beverly Hills, 1981.

OK, 30 years since we walk the halls of West Beverly High and since we all hung out at the Peach Pit, relive it all with Jenny Garth and Tori Spelling on their new podcast two. OMG, we get to tell the fans all of the behind the scenes stories actually happened. Join them as they watch every episode of the beloved 90s TV show. From the very beginning, listen to Nyarota and OMD on the I Heart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Next up, we have the category of books and letters. And first up, in November of 2020, the correspondence between authors J.M. Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson was published in a book titled A Friendship and Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson and Jamboree. Most of Stevenson's letters in this correspondence had already been published. They were not really new, but Barry's side of the conversation had not been published.

A lot of the chatter about this described Barry's letters as having been lost. But as is so often the case in these episodes, that is not really the right way to describe this situation. The letters were in the Vinicky Library at Yale University and they were catalogued there. But somehow people didn't make the connection between that catalog box of letters and Barry's unpublished correspondence. Dr Michael Shaw, who realized what they were after being unable to buy a copy, was quoted by The Guardian as saying, When I first saw them, I didn't realize that these were lost letters.

I just assumed they had been published and I didn't know about them.

Yeah, the letters were there the whole time. Folks just didn't quite realize that they were not ones that were widely publicly available.

Of course they were published. I just never stumbled across them. So these letters chronicled not only the T writers intense affection and even love for each other, but also Stevenson's influence on Barry's work with phrases and images making their way into Barry's stories and his novel, Peter Pan.

Next up, in December, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation released a statement that the 340 character cipher attributed to the Zodiac Killer, which was sent to the San Francisco Chronicle in November of 1969, has been cracked. This cipher is one of four attributed to the killer, and it was the first one to be submitted to the FBI. Before this point, only one of the other ciphers had been solved. Five murders from the late 1960s are attributed to the Zodiac Killer, whose identity is still not known.

So this solution to the cipher was the work of three private citizens software developer David Orange, Jack Applied mathematician Sam Blake and warehouse operator and computer programmer Yahel von Ikki, who used a code breaking program to test more than six hundred and fifty thousand possible solutions. They're decoding found some of the same themes as the killers. Other communications, including this idea that these murders were about collecting slaves to take to the afterlife. The decoded cipher also misspelled the word paradise, and it had some rather convoluted phrasing.

I feel like this would have been way bigger news if there were less going on in the world, you would think, right? Yeah, it was one of those things that I saw a brief headline of, say, I saw nothing further about. I forgot totally about it. Then I heard somebody mention it on a podcast while I was out on break and I emailed myself Zodiac Killer Cipher, so I would remember to put it in here in September to move on to another subject.

Thieves stole a scroll of poetry that had been written by Mao Zedong. They stole this from the Hong Kong apartment of art collector Fusun Show. This was part of a really enormous heist with an estimated value in the Hong Kong press as being worth four billion Hong Kong dollars. The U.S. press estimated the value of the stolen items of 500 million U.S. dollars at the time fashion show was away from Hong Kong because of the pandemic.

The scroll was sold for just five hundred dollars in Hong Kong currency, with the buyer believing that it was a forgery. It was recovered in October, by which point it had been cut in half. It originally measured about nine feet. That's about 2.8 metres long. And the buyer who was arrested for handling stolen property reportedly found it too long to display the way they wanted.

And in our last find, under books and letters, research at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility has looked at the composition of inks that were used to write on Egyptian papyrus. These papyri date back to the years 100 to 200, and most of the writing on them is in black. But red ink is used for things like beheading or words that require some kind of special emphasis. They discovered that the inks contained lead, but not as a pigment. Instead, lead seems to have acted as a drying agent, encircling particles of ochre and adhering them to the papyrus.

This predates a similar technique used to dry oil paints during the Renaissance in Europe. Hundreds of years moving on and this installment of Unearthed, we once again have a few finds related to Vikings. The first is that DNA testing has solved the mysteries about a Viking era burial site known as the Godric Grave near Roskilde, Denmark. This burial site was discovered about 40 years ago and it was not clear whose remains they were or why they were buried together. The remains seems to belong to a man and a woman, and for a time it was believed that the man was enslaved and had been killed as a sacrifice because he seems to have been hanged and bound.

The woman's remains had been covered in large stones based on that DNA analysis. They are mother and son, and while a lot about their deaths and their burials is still unclear. One hypothesis is that they are figures described in the Icelandic sagas, the Sorcerous, Cottler and her son Khaled. In the sagas, Cotlar was stoned to death and Khaled was hanged. To be clear, the female remains in this grave were covered in heavy stones. But the remains themselves do not show evidence of being stoned or pressed to death.

Yet the sagas are sort of like epic accounts of the settlement of Iceland, which are both. They're both literary and historical. So there are elements of them that are rooted in factual accuracy than parts of them that are more mythologized. And this burial site also includes a weapon which was a lance. And this was one of the first examples of a weapon being included in a grave that was identified as belonging to a set of female remains. But based on this idea that the bodies may belong to Katla and odd, there's another idea that has arisen, which is that maybe is it a it is a sorceress is staff.

Next up, the remains of a twelve hundred year old temple known as a guardhouse have been found in Norway. This was a temple that would have been dedicated to Old Norse gods. And while other examples had previously been unearthed in Sweden and Denmark, this is the first such find in Norway.

This fine includes the temples, foundations, and it seems to have been a later addition to a settlement that included at least two long houses that were first built between 2000 and 2500 years ago. Other finds that the site that were related to the God house include remains of animal sacrifices and cooking pits that would have been used for religious feasts.

Ground penetrating radar studies and yellow starred in southeastern Norway have discovered that there is a lot of other stuff surrounding a Viking burial ship there. Viking burial ships have, if you listen, come up on on Earth before this one was discovered in twenty eighteen.

In addition to the ship, there are a buried feast hall and a cult temple, along with at least 13 burial mounds. These are close to yell mound, which is a burial mound that had already been excavated and studied. So it is possible that this whole area was an important ritual and burial site and that the ship was placed there because of its established use for burial mounds.

Yeah, I tried to figure out whether we had talked about this specific ship before.

I'm not actually sure. I'm not either. I can't remember if it came up in our Yelling Stones episode. Yeah, yeah. We've definitely talked about burial ships before. But whether whether this specific one has come up, it's not as clear. Over the summer, there was also a team of archaeologists who were really racing to excavate this ship because it was being destroyed by a fungus.

And in our last bit of Viking news, a team in central Norway has excavated the grave of a woman dating back to the Viking era. This find was unexpected because there aren't any other graves nearby. Some of the items buried with the woman include a three lobed Brutsch and hundreds of tiny beads so small that the team had to buy mosquito netting to have something find enough to sift them out from the soil. Although the beads were mostly found around the bodies right shoulder, it isn't clear if they were part of a necklace or a piece of clothing or something else entirely, just like the idea of like needing to go get some mosquito netting to get these tiny, tiny, tiny beads.

I love it. We're going to shift gears now and talk about some mummies.

According to research that was reported in the journal Analytical Chemistry, researchers have found a new nondestructive technique that uses electron pair of magnetic resonance to analyse bitumen in ancient Egyptian mummies. Before this point, most methods that were used to study bitumen required researchers to collect a small sample of it. And then that sample was destroyed over the course of the tests. This process doesn't destroy anything. And rather than. Damaging the bitumen itself as a whole, this technique analyzes some of its components, which are byproducts of the decomposition of plant matter.

Bitumen is the compound that gives mummies their dark color and it can be found in natural deposits or it can be made from substances like beeswax, fat and resin. And this analysis can help determine exactly where the bitumen came from and how old it is because of the specific byproducts used in the tests. It can also confirm whether they came from a Marine source like the Dead Sea or a land source like a tar pit. It can also help researchers confirm whether a mummy has been restored at some point during its history.

In other news, during the Roman era in Egypt, which spanned from about the first century BCE to the third century CE, it was common for members of the upper class to have a mummy portrait. That was the portrait of the person on a wooden board that would be attached to their mummy. Many of these have been found in the Fiume basin and are described as the fire mummy portraits. This find isn't a mummy portrait, though. It's an earring found in the Roman city of diatom in southeast Bulgaria.

Archaeologists found the earring while excavating the remains of the city's public baths. Wedged between two tiles in the earring is identical, or at least extremely similar to one depicted on fire mummy portraits of at least two women. I loved this.

I loved the lost earring and the fact that it's in these two different portraits and just sort of the wondering, like, is this the exact same earring?

Is it just a really similar earring or was this just a really popular earring line that everyone. Yeah. Was it the hot earring of the season? In other Fayoum portrait news, researchers at the University of Utah have analyzed a tiny, tiny, tiny speck of pigments on the portrait known as Portrait of a bearded man in this portrait. The pigment was used for the claverie or the purple stripes that indicated a person's high status, this particle. I said tiny so many times it's because it was only 50 microns in diameter and it was sent to the team at the College of Mines and Earth Sciences at the University of Utah between two glass slides.

In transit, this particle shifted by about a millimeter, so it took a while for them to actually find it in the slides to analyze it because it was so small, it shifted this tiny amount o after analysis using energy dispersive x ray fluorescence analysis, electron microscopy diffraction and atom probe tomography, they concluded that the pigment was made with dye mixed with clay or silica, known as a lake pigment.

They also found evidence of beeswax binder, and there's still some uncertainty about how the dye was made, although they did conclude that the purple pigment had been synthesized in a lead container and it was not made from the purple dye that came from Murex snails. It's not clear whether chromium in the sample was intentionally included there or if it was a byproduct of some other ingredients. Now, we're just going to take a quick break before we move on to some other other things.

We have elected scoundrels in America because because the people have said, well, at least there are scoundrel, but it comes back in the end to correct. I think so.

I think so. In 1987, David Frost sat down with then Senator Joe Biden for an over two hour interview at age 44. Biden was making his first bid for the presidency just as the Reagan years were coming to an end.

This president, the thing that I disagree with him most about is the way he has divided this nation.

Biden would end his campaign just weeks after the interview was recorded and the tapes were never made public until now.

But the harder test is it's not the one. Can I do it better than my opponent? The harder test, when everyone goes to bed and you're sitting in this library by yourself and you ask yourself, how can I be the kind of president that I think America should have? Can I be the kind of president that Abraham Lincoln was? Can I be the kind of president Franklin Roosevelt was? Can I can I be a great president?

Listen to this. Never before had Joe Biden interview only on the Frost Tapes podcast.

Well, I'm not sure I'd like to talk about that. Next up, we have a few finds that I have loosely grouped together as prehistory, they are not all from the exact same time period, but they're from before the start of the written record in the areas where they were found.

First up, a local resident named Roman Novak was out picking mushrooms in northern Moravia when he stumbled upon a Bronze Age sword along with an axe. Both of these have been dated to about thirteen hundred BCE. And even though the region where they were found was really sparsely populated at that time, they do appear to be local rather than something that was brought in by, say, an army that was just passing through the area. In other news, according to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in October, the first human arrival in the Bahamas may have led to the extinction of several species of birds through the newly arrived humans, hunting them directly because of habitat loss related to that human arrival, or in the case of a giant barn owl and a giant eagle because their prey species disappeared or became harder to find.

These conclusions came from a 10 year study of more than 7000 fossils and many cases there was about a 100 year overlap between the arrival of the humans and the disappearance of the birds. Disappearance is not really explained by any other changes to the environment that the researchers could find. In some cases, the birds did survive, but only on some of the islands. For example, the Abaco parrot lives only on two islands in the Bahamas, and there are islands in between them that also would have supported similar habitats.

The team were able to find fossils of those parrots on islands where that species currently does not live. In other news, according to research published in the Journal of Human Evolution, Homo sapiens did not, as was previously believed, invent the first barbed bone point that Inventure was probably really Homo erectus about 800000 years ago. This came from a study of a set of 52 different animal bones from East Africa's Olduvai Gorge. One of these was carved with three barbs and a curved tip.

And it doesn't seem to have been made to attach to any kind of a handle or a shaft.

So it's unclear how this point would have been used before this. The oldest known barbed bone points were much younger only about 90000 years ago. These points were attached to shafts and probably used to fish or to hunt.

Other prey is one of those parts that I wrote before going How to Break. And when I came back to my desk, I was like, is this right? Are these numbers right that I put an extra zero somewhere? Because that's a huge difference. No, that is correct.

We have recaps this next thing we're going to talk about a little bit before, but it's been a while. So to touch on it again, any time archaeologists are trying to draw conclusions about human remains based on the things that were buried with them, there are layers of assumptions that work like how sex and gender worked in that particular society and why that society chose to bury specific items with specific people. As one example, it's pretty easy to conclude that a person who was buried with a sword was a warrior.

But it's also possible that a sword had a ceremonial or a symbolic purpose that didn't have anything to do with combat. So no matter how careful and thoughtful we are, when we try to think about these things, our own experiences and our own societies and our own perspectives influence how we interpret these kinds of finds.

Sometimes there is other information that we can use to back up these assumptions and conclusions, for example, written records or artwork, or in the case of that sword where patterns in the person's remains, that suggests that they saw a lot of combat while they were alive. But sometimes it's just a lot more nebulous. All of that said, research published in the journal Science Advances suggests that gender roles and hunter gatherer societies in the Americas might not have been strictly delineated along the lines of men hunted and women gathered, which I know is a thing that I learned and many other people learn in school.

The research started with the discovery of what appeared to be the burial site of a female hunter, which dated back about 9000 years. This find was unearthed in Peru and researchers started trying to figure out whether this was a relatively unique situation or whether there were other similar burial sites. They looked at four hundred twenty nine skeletons from 107 late Pleistocene and early Holocene burial sites across the Americas. Twenty seven of those 107 skeletons were buried with tools that would have been used to hunt big game of those, 11 were female and 16 were male.

The 11 female skeletons came from 10 different burial sites and the 16 males came from 15 sites. So this pattern wasn't confined to one particular time and place. The sex of the skeletons was determined by both the morphology of the bones and analysis of dental enamel proteins.

So this is adding to an increasing body of work that suggests that the whole men hunted, women gathered. Binary doesn't exactly hold up. And a lot of that binary idea really came from the assumptions of 18th and 19th century archaeologists and anthropologists who didn't have very robust methods of figuring out the sex of skeletons, but could draw conclusions about what sex the skeletons were based on what was buried with them.

I love when science evolves. Me too.

There's a whole podcast about this whole idea from the podcast seen on radio. They did a series. One of their seasons was called Men, and it was basically about where patriarchy came from. And this idea that it's really reductive to imagine that men hunted and when women gathered like they talk about that being. Way more reductive than could really have worked in prehistoric societies. A team from the National Museum of Natural History in France, the University of the Basque Country in Spain and other institutions, has published a study in the journal Scientific Reports that concludes that Neanderthals intentionally buried their dead.

That's a conclusion that has been suggested in earlier work, but it wasn't considered a conclusive conclusion. So this research involves 47 bones, all belonging to the same Neanderthal child who was approximately two years old when they died and who lived about forty one thousand years ago. And there are several pieces of evidence at this burial site that added up to the conclusion that this child had been intentionally buried very soon after their death. The stratification layers in the soil in the area are inclined to the northeast, but the child's remains were oriented to the west.

So it's not a matter of like the child's body being covered in sediment gradually with other material in the area. The bones themselves are also all together, still in about the same position that they would have been at the time of burial, while animal bones in the same area from the same time are just a lot more scattered. They confirmed that the bones were Neanderthal using mitochondrial DNA analysis and they dated them using Carbon 14 dating. While their published findings described this as conclusive proof that Neanderthals buried their dead.

The team does also note that, quote, Further discoveries will be necessary to understand the chronology and geographical extension of Neanderthal burial practices.

And that's where we are going to leave things for part one of our unearthed. We have lots more stuff to talk about in our next episode.

Yeah. Do you want to talk about listener mail? I do. I also want to say we're recording this on January 5th. We have many days of not looking at email.

So if you sent us an email during, like the last three weeks of December, there's just a lot of email to go through. So we're not trying to ignore anyone. There's just there's just a lot of it to catch up on having come back from the holidays. So this one is from Laura and it is about our episode on Jim Thorpe. And Laura says, Holly and Tracey. I'm a little behind on all my podcasts at the moment, but I was elated to see a three part series on Jim Thorpe when I went looking through my yet to be downloaded list.

I wrote to you guys years ago requesting one on him right after you covered the 4chan Indian School. I immediately downloaded them this morning and listened to while I worked, which is something I don't often do. Laura then goes on to talk about growing up pretty near Jim Thorpe and says, quote, I managed one of the major tourist operations in town from 2007 to 2014. Growing up in the 80s and 90s, the town of Jim Thorpe was a bit of a mess.

Buildings were being neglected, tourism was minimal. And yes, even the Jim Thorpe Memorial, which is unfortunately a bit of a trek outside the historic tourist part of town, was greatly neglected at the time I graduated college, moved back to the area and started working in town. However, most of these neglected buildings were fixed up and filled with unique little art galleries, restaurants, gift shops. The sidewalks were fixed and the building facades were well on their way to being restored to their late 19th century glory.

The Jim Thorpe tomb and Memorial were restored and added on to as well, partly due to projects by students at Jim Thorpe School District known as the Olympians. Having grown up in the area, everyone knew the story of Jim Thorpe and why he was buried in a town he never stepped foot in, or at least most knew the story.

Through my interactions with tourists, though, who were coming to town for a variety of reasons, I was shocked to have to continuously answer questions like Who was Jim Thorpe and why does your town have a man's name? How could so many people not even recognize the name of the greatest athlete in the world? Everyone in the area closely followed all the legal battles of the past decade with the people of the town torn between the two sides. Some felt the town deserved to keep his body.

Others felt he should be sent back to his family. Back when the area buried Jim Thorpe and changed his name, they were expecting at least a hospital in the National Football Hall of Fame to come out of the deal. They also hoped that having the athlete would bring back tourism to an area that had been at one point one of the most popular tourist destinations in the United States, second only to Niagara Falls. But none of these things happened. Then Laura goes on to give some topic suggestions for the podcast and says, Anyway, I love listening to you guys.

A student I hated history class, but I've always loved learning about local histories of locations I visited. And I'm a sucker for any museum. I've learned so much for your podcast over the past several years that I'm looking. Forward to several more years to come, Laura.

Thank you, Laura, that that description of sort of how the the tourism industry of Jim Thorpe evolved over the years really matches up to what I had read previously from other folks who did not live in the area, but knew about it and had visited it, having seen pictures of the town like it looks like a super cute little kind of touristy place to visit when the weather's good and traveling is safe.

So thank you so much, Laura, for sending that email.

If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast or history podcast and I heart radio dot com and we are all over social media, at least in history. That is where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show.

And I hurt radio app and Apple podcasts and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in history class is the production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts from My Heart radio visit by her radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. We have elected scoundrels in America because because the people have said, well, at least there are scoundrel, but it comes back in the end to correct. I think so.

I think so. In 1987, David Frost sat down with then Senator Joe Biden for an over two hour interview at age 44. Biden was making his first bid for the presidency just as the Reagan years were coming to an end.

This president, the thing that I disagree with him most about is the way he has divided this nation.

Biden would end his campaign just weeks after the interview was recorded and the tapes were never made public until now. But the harder test is not the one. Can I do it better than my opponent? The harder test, when everyone goes to bed and you're sitting in this library by yourself and you ask yourself, how can I be the kind of president that I think America should have? Can I be the kind of president that Abraham Lincoln was? Can I be the kind of president Franklin Roosevelt was?

Can I can I be a great president?

Listen to this. Never before had Joe Biden interview only on the Frost Tapes podcast.

Well, I'm not sure I'd like to talk about that.