The Dirt Podcast

If you thought we were experts, well, that's about to change. This week, Anna and Amber wade out into the great unknown-to-them of British history and discuss Richard III and the events that led to the excavation of his remains from a parking lot in Leicester, England. Plus, the secret to Richard III's perfectly aligned teeth, other rulers whose final resting places remain a mystery, and the curse of Tamerlane's tomb (but also, his great eyebrows). BONUS: The premiere of the "Amber Googles It" theme tune!

If you’d like to read more about what we discussed this week, check out the following links (and do yourself a favor and look at some baby rock badgers):

Richard III (William Shakespeare)

Richard III of England (Wikipedia)

English Car Park Where Remains Of Richard III Were Found Declared A Monument (NPR)

2012 Grey Friars excavation (University of Leicester)

What the bones can and can’t tell us (University of Leicester)

How Forks Gave Us Overbites and Pots Saved the Toothless (The Atlantic)

Using forks and knives has changed the human face (Business Insider)

The Richard III Society

New evidence: The bones of the ‘Princes in the Tower’ show no relationship to Richard III (Dr. John Ashdown-Hill Blog)

Now Richard III’s skull may prove he DIDN’T kill princes: Mystery of the missing teeth could clear king of murder in the Tower (Daily Mail)

Five missing kings and queens – and where we might find them (Independent)

Lost Tombs: In search of history's greatest rulers (Archaeology)

Digging up the past: famous exhumations throughout history (PRI)

This week, we fake it til we make it, tackling four archaeological hoaxes. Even when things aren't what they seem...they aren't what they seem. What's the deal with that stone giant in some guy's field? How can that mummified Persian princess be neither Persian nor a princess? Did someone stumble upon the final resting place of Jesus' little brother? Did Vikings inhabit Oklahoma in the 11th century? No. No, they did not.

If you want to read more about these hoaxes and maybe-hoaxes, check out:

Bogus! An Introduction to Dubious Discoveries (Archaeology)

The Cardiff Giant Was Just a Big Hoax (Smithsonian)

Ten Lost Tribes of Israel (Wikipedia)

The Cardiff Giant (Farmers’ Museum)

Special Report: Saga of the Persian Princess (Archaeology)

Princess of Persia: 17 Years Ago, a Woman’s Mummy Was Rescued from the Antiquities Black Market. 21 Years Ago She Actually Died. (Reddit)

A Mummy Hoax Might Be Wrapped up in a Modern Murder (Atlas Obscura)

Alleged Forger of Holy Land Antiquities Held (Haaretz)

Trial sheds light on shadowy antiquities world (Boston Globe)

The art of authentic forgery (Haaretz)

Jehoash Inscription (Wikipedia)

Photos: The Bone Boxes of the 'Jesus Family Tomb' (Live Science)

After 7-year saga, a surprising end to antiquities fraud case (Times of Israel)

Israeli Antiquities Collector Talks About His Trial – and His Acquittal (Haaretz)

Heavener Runestone (Atlas Obscura)

This week we're pushing our "um, actually" glasses up the bridge of our nose and busting some myths about archaeology. Was 30 the new 80 in the Paleolithic? Would someone from the Middle Ages be too short to ride a rollercoaster? Carbon dating is pretty precise, right? Can we tell if a skeleton is a lady? All this and more!

To learn more about this week's topic, check out:

The idea ancient people didn’t live until old age is a myth (Quartz)

Life Span of Early Man Same as Neanderthals’ (New York Times)

Life Expectancy by Age, 1850–2011 (Infoplease)

Global Health Observatory (GHO) data: Life expectancy (World Health Organization)

What Serena Williams’s scary childbirth story says about medical treatment of black women (Vox) 

Zollikofer, Christoph PE, et al. "Evidence for interpersonal violence in the St. Césaire Neanderthal." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99.9 (2002): 6444-6448.

Neanderthals Took Care of Deaf and Disabled Buddy Until Old Age (Ancient Origins)

7,000-Year-Old Head Surgery: One of the Oldest Trepanned Skulls Discovered in Sudan (Ancient Origins) 

Trepanation: The History of One of the World's Oldest Surgeries (Mental Floss) 

Potts, DT, Al Naboodah, H, Hellyer, P. (2003) Archaeology of the United Arab Emirates. Trident Press.

(And hey, don’t @ Amber: she knows there are indeed other Neolithic sites in the Oman Peninsula! Check out the work happening at sites like Al Ain and Qumayrah.)

Molto, J. E., and C. L. Kirkpatrick. "How Short Is Short, and Why? A Probable Case of Proportionate Dwarfism From Egypt's Third Intermediate Period in the Dakhleh Oasis, Egypt." International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 28.1 (2018): 3-17. 

What is radiocarbon dating? (EarthSky) 

Quick Tips: How to Estimate the Biological Sex of a Human Skeleton – Pelvic Dimorphism. (All Things AAFS!) 

Masculinities and Third Gender: Gendered Otherness in the Ancient Near East (Ancient Near East Today) 

Different Faces of Gender in the Marlik Cemetery (Northern Iran) (ASOR Blog)

Vacation season is here, and Anna and Amber are island-bound: To the site of Liang Bua, Indonesia! Join them as they get to know Homo floresiensis, our diminutive extinct cousins in Flores, and discuss their place on our complicated, ever evolving human family tree. Plus, local lore about small, hairy cave-dwellers said to steal food and/or children, and a brief moment of Hobbit (TM) Drama.

To learn more about this episode's topic, check out:

Bibliography and 3D tour of Liang Bua Cave

'Hobbits' on Flores, Indonesia (Smithsonian Institution)

Homo floresiensis (Australian Museum)

Van den Bergh, Gerrit D., et al. "Homofloresiensis-like fossils from the early Middle Pleistocene of Flores." Nature 534.7606 (2016): 245.

Ten Years On, the Flores “Hobbit” Remains an Evolutionary Puzzle (Smithsonian)

Where did we come from? A primer on early human evolution (Cosmos)

Origins of Indonesian Hobbits finally revealed (ScienceDaily)

Homo floresiensis (Smithsonian Institution)

Hobbit makers ban uni from using ‘hobbit’ (Newshub)

Sink your teeth into this nutrient-dense episode, in which we discuss the recent discovery of bread(-like substances) in the Eastern Mediterranean from more than 14,000 years ago, and learn more about what one might actually have eaten in the Paleolithic. Plus, Anna tells us what we can learn from stuff stuck in your teeth, and we speculate wildly about Iberian vegan Neanderthals.

For a deeper dive into this week's topic, check out:

Arranz-Otaegui, Amaia, et al. "Archaeobotanical evidence reveals the origins of bread 14,400 years ago in northeastern Jordan." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2018): 201801071. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/07/10/1801071115

Boyadjian, C.H.C., Eggers, S., Reinhard, K., 2007. Dental wash: a problematic method for extracting microfossils from teeth. Journal of Archaeological Science. 34, 1622–1628.

http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/natrespapers/68/

Weyrich, L.S., Duchene, S., Soubrier, J., Arriola, L., Llamas, B., Breen, J., Morris, A.G., Alt, K.W., Caramelli, D., Dresely, V., Farrell, M., Farrer, A.G., Francken, M., Gully, N., Haak, W., Hardy, K., Harvati, K., Held, P., Holmes, E.C., Kaidonis, J., Lalueza-Fox, C., de la Rasilla, M., Rosas, A., Semal, P., Soltysiak, A., Townsend, G., Usai, D., Wahl, J., Huson, D.H., Dobney, K., Cooper, A., 2017. Neanderthal behaviour, diet, and disease inferred from ancient DNA in dental calculus. Nature Letters. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature21674

Arlene M. Rosen and Isabel Rivera-Collazo, Climate change, adaptive cycles, and the persistence of foraging economies during the late Pleistocene/Holocene transition in the Levant. PNAS March 6, 2012. 109 (10) 3640-3645; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1113931109

We POKE AROUND the subject of tattoos. What are the oldest ones? What do they mean? How were they made? This one gets under our skin.

To learn more about tattoos and tattooing through the ages: 

Siberian Princess reveals her 2,500 year old tattoos (The Siberian Times)

Inside the World’s Only Surviving Tattoo Shop For Medieval Pilgrims (Atlas Obscura)

Algeria's Tattoos: Myths and Truths (Pulitzer Center)

Inked Heritage: Berber Women’s Tattoos In Algeria (HuffPo)

Vegetius' De re militari

Can Tattoos Be Medicinal? (Smithsonian.com)

Scientists Have Mapped All of Ötzi the Iceman’s 61 Tattoos (Discover)

Skin and Bone (Colin Dale, tattoo artist)

FYI: What Makes Tattoos Permanent? (Popular Science)

Deter-Wolf, Aaron; Robitaille, Benoît; Krutak, Lars; Galliot, Sébastien (February 2016). "The World's Oldest Tattoos". Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. 5: 19–24.

Gilbert, Steve (2000). Tattoo history: A source book (Paperback). New York, NY: Juno Books. ISBN 978-1-890451-06-6. Retrieved 10 July 2015.

Jones, C. P. (1987). "Stigma: Tattooing and branding in Graeco-Roman antiquity". Journal of Roman Studies. 77: 139–155.

Samadellia et al., (2016) Complete mapping of the tattoos of the 5300-year-old Tyrolean

Iceman. Journal of Cultural Heritage 16: 753-758

We're steppin' out to talk about some of the oldest human footprints ever found in North America, Europe, and Africa. We encounter a giant sloth hunt, and Amber and Anna have a series of existential crises as we dive deeper and deeper into the depths of time. Worry not, though: despite a strange audio glitch that suggests otherwise, Anna is not recording from beyond the grave. #notallsloths

To learn more about this week's topic, check out:

The oldest footprints in North America are right where native historians said they should be (Washington Post)

Oldest Human Footprints in North America Discovered (History Channel)

Oldest Human Footprints in North America Discovered: Here's What They Reveal (LiveScience)

Ancient Sloth Hunt Hinted at in 15,000-year-old Footprints (Science)

Earliest Known Human Footprints in North America Found on Canadian Island (New York Times)

850,000-year-old human footprints found in Norfolk (The Guardian)

Happisburgh footprints on Wikipedia

Laetoli footprints on Wikipedia

Bienvenue, and welcome to Le Dirt! This week, we discuss the discovery and translation of the Rosetta Stone. We brush off our best French accents, geek out over dead languages, and realize that we are very, very bad at pop culture references.

To learn more about the this week's episode, check out:

Digitized versions of Champollion’s work (in French)

Précis (1824) http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k117252f

Grammaire egyptienne (1836) https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1047536s

Robinson, Andrew. (2012) Cracking the Egyptian Code: The Revolutionary Life of Jean-Francois Champollion. Oxford University Press.

Review of Cracking the Egyptian Code from The Independent (Brian Morton, 2012): https://www.independent.co.uk/…/cracking-the-egyptian-code-…

It's...maybe the most infamous episode of The Dirt! Strap on the barf bags, folks, because today we're talking about bog butter, ancient beekeeping, and where Classical poets thought baby bees come from. Plus, Amber shares a cautionary tale about licking things on an excavation. And hey--never put archaeology in your mouth.

To learn more about this week's topic, check out:

Carson, Rachel D. (2015). The Honey Bee and Apian Imagery in Classical Literature

Poole, Federico. (2001). 'Cumin, Set Milk, Honey': An Ancient Egyptian Medicine Container (Naples 828). The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 87: 175-180.

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3822380

Honeybees Sweetened Life for Stone Age Humans (LiveScience)

Honey in the Pyramids (National Geographic)

Itinerant Etruscan Beekeepers (Archaeology Magazine)

And on a final note: Seriously, folks, don’t eat archaeological material. Even if it wouldn’t kill you.

After a curious coincidence in 1924, the world's weirdest paperweight was revealed to be the fossilized remains of one of our earliest ancestors.

To learn more about today's topic, check out:

Lee R. Berger, & Ronald J. Clarke. (1996). The load of the Taung child. Nature, 379(6568), 778-779.

Berger, L.R., Clarke, R.J., 1995. Eagle involvement of the Taung child fauna. Journal of Human Evolution 29, 275-299.

Dart, Raymond A. (1925), "Australopithecus africanus: The Man-Ape of South Africa", Nature, 115: 195–199, doi:10.1038/115195a0.

SA fossil murder mystery solved (BBC)

Taung Child (Smithsonian) 

Australopithecus africanus (Smithsonian)