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Ivory Baton, Pliny the Elder and Amelia Earhart - Ep 253
3k Plays9 months ago
This week we have 3 fascinating archaeology news stories. First, experimental research has helped researchers determine the function of an ivory baton. Then, we take a look at a newly discovered Roman villa that may have belonged to Pliny the Elder. Finally, Amelia Earhart is back in the news with some new and potentially controversial findings!
Links
- Experiments suggest ancient four-holed ivory baton was used to make rope (Phys.org)
- Rope making in the Aurignacian of Central Europe more than 35,000 years ago (Science Advances)
- 1st-century villa discovered near Mount Vesuvius may be where Pliny the Elder watched catastrophic eruption
- Amelia Earhart's plane may have crashed in the heart of the Pacific Ocean, explorer claims (Live Science)
- The Earhart Project in a Nutshell
- Scientists discover new possible clue in Amelia Earhart mystery
Contact
- Chris Webster [email protected]
- Rachel Roden [email protected] RachelUnraveled (Instagram)
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Preview
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to The Archaeology Show. TAS goes behind the headlines to bring you the real stories about archaeology and the history around us. Welcome to the podcast. Hello and welcome to The Archaeology Show, episode 253.
00:00:19
Speaker
On today's show, we talk about an irie baton, a Roman villa that may have belonged to Pliny the Elder, and possible sonar images of Amelia Earhart's plane. Let's dig a little deeper, 16,000 feet deeper.
Podcast Schedule Discussion
00:00:38
Speaker
Welcome to the archaeology show Monday edition. Monday edition. Yeah, so we decided that given our work schedules lately, that we would move our release date to Mondays instead of Sundays. So hopefully nobody gets mad about that. We're just hoping that it will fit our schedules better to have a whole weekend.
00:01:04
Speaker
to get things done because sometimes we fall behind and with work during the week and everything, it's just a lot to release it on Sunday sometimes. So I know we're a couple of weeks ahead right now because of some interviews and such. And we're going to try to keep that going. But it still is better to just have this time weekend with.
00:01:22
Speaker
with things to do because as we're full-time RVers, we often obviously work during the week and sometimes our weekends are taken up by driving and sometimes they're taken up by just experiencing a place that we're at. So having an extra day to get the podcast on will help us keep it going. Yeah, definitely. So that's what we're doing with this episode going forward. Yeah.
00:01:46
Speaker
until we move it to Tuesday. No, we're not going to do that. Monday is good. We don't have any other shows on the network that release on Mondays either. So it's like a nice balance to have this be on Monday with the rest of the shows. So later in the week. All right.
Exploring the Ancient Ivory Baton
00:02:01
Speaker
Well, this first article.
00:02:03
Speaker
has been in the news a little bit. And it's kind of cool because it's something that was found, but a new analysis is showing that it might be for a different use. I know. And it's experimental archaeology, which I always get very excited about that because it's really fun to try to recreate something and recreate the thing that it makes. So they do that in this article. Yeah.
00:02:24
Speaker
So we found this on fizz.org and the name of the article is, experiments suggest ancient forehold ivory baton was used to make rope. And then we also linked to the open access paper that it was originally published in, which was in science advances. So I actually like this, the fizz.org article was kind of like short and sweet, you know, it was a good, like, like quick overview of the topic. It has some great photos in it, so it's certainly worth checking out.
00:02:49
Speaker
But then I wanted more. So then I started reading the actual paper and it's it's really cool and really in depth. So yeah. Well, a recent analysis of this ivory baton suggests that it dates between thirty five thousand and forty thousand years ago.
00:03:05
Speaker
And this was originally found in 2015 with 15 pieces of ivory. It was all in a cave in Holy Fells in the Ak Valley of Southwestern Germany. None of that is pronounced right. It's fine. It's good enough. So the ivory is from mammoth tusks and these 15 pieces were reconstructed into one artifact that appears to be carved or worked by modern humans.
00:03:30
Speaker
And you can really see in the photos the way they reconstructed it. There's a lot of different fragments that they had to put back together. But it is really cool that they found that many pieces of this same artifact and were able to do that. The only reason they're able to do this analysis is because they have almost the entire thing once they put all these pieces back together. So that's really cool.
00:03:51
Speaker
The artifact itself, they tried to date it, but were unsuccessful in getting an exact date with any sort of certainty. And I'm not even sure. I mean, Ivory is like, it's not teeth, but you know, it's interesting. I don't think you can even get DNA out of Ivory. I'm not sure. They didn't really go into why they weren't able to get a date with a high degree of certainty. It sounds like they tried and they just basically didn't trust whatever came out of the process.
00:04:18
Speaker
But it was found in a stratigraphic layer that is solidly radiocarbon dated between 35 and 40,000 years ago. So it's a large date range, unfortunately. But I mean, still, you know, that's not bad to say that it fits into that 5,000 year chunk of time.
00:04:34
Speaker
And this is another example of relative dating coming to the history, coming to the rescue.
Experimental Archaeology: Ivory Baton
00:04:40
Speaker
I mean, there's so many things in archaeology that just can't be reliably dated, but there's so many other things that can. And that's where you just put it within that window. You know, you can't really pin it down, but you can put it within that window and that works out.
00:04:52
Speaker
Yeah, and you don't even necessarily need an artifact itself to be carbon dated. As long as there is carbon in the layer intermixed with the artifacts and you can date that carbon, then you can say that those artifacts are contemporaneous and that they date to that timeframe. So, yeah.
00:05:09
Speaker
Of course, the researchers who initially found this thought that it was a piece of art. Any time we don't recognize something, it just goes down as art or ritual, which is art and ritual pretty much the same thing. Right. And it's ivory, which is like a special material, right? It's got holes in it. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I don't know how many mammoths they were taking down. It probably was kind of a special thing to get that done. Right.
00:05:29
Speaker
I'm just not sure. Well, sure, but I think it was also more common than you would think. Yeah, maybe. Because it's a mammoth, and we think that's a huge thing to do. And of course, they did too. It was probably really dangerous, but also just kind of part of life. And you've got tusks. And even if you didn't take the mammoth down, they'd die. Yeah, that's true. You can find it on the landscape. That's true, for sure.
00:05:51
Speaker
So it's baton shaped, like we said, approximately 21 centimeters long, and it has four holes in a row carved into it. They describe it as looking like a modern cricket bat, which I don't really know what those look like, but okay, if that helps somebody visualize what that looks like.
00:06:07
Speaker
Actually, I think you can more accurately visualize it as like one of those movies where some Catholic nun is smacking some kid on the butt with a paddle. Right. That's kind of what a quick paddle looks like. Kind of like that. But I think it's a little smaller than that. It is. It's smaller. It's like smaller scale, but shaped like that.
00:06:25
Speaker
The holes have spiral grooves carved along the edges. And the two researchers from the University of Tübingen, Tübingen? I think it's Tübingen. Tübingen. Yeah. Nicholas Conard and Virl Ruts had a hunch that it was more than just a piece of art. So they started doing some analysis. Yeah. And if you look at the pictures, you can really see the grooves that they're talking about. And they're in this almost like spiral shape. It's it's really obvious and really purposely dug out on those edges there. So yeah.
00:06:54
Speaker
And these two researchers, they thought the holes looked like they had some kind of use wear from something being repeatedly pulled through them, maybe. So that was where they were starting from. They're like, it just doesn't seem like art. I think there's something else going on here. So their best guess that they were going to test was that it maybe was used for making rope.
00:07:15
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Yeah, so as they were testing this theory, they performed micro and macroscopic analysis of the use wear on the whole edges. And the images do appear to support the rope theory. And there are images of this in the original article, not the original article. Well, yes, the original article, but also the phys.org article. Yeah. So go check that out. It's pretty neat.
00:07:35
Speaker
Yeah, they're very cool. And in addition to that, they also did residue analysis on the walls of the holes. And that analysis suggested that there was some sort of plant material in or on these holes at some point, which isn't perfect evidence, but it is pretty good.
00:07:53
Speaker
It's also crazy that after 35 to 40,000 years, there would still be a residue of plant material. They show it in the little images of the residue of these fibers or whatever that they found on the holes. It's like microscopic stuff in the little pores of this ivory. Definitely.
00:08:10
Speaker
So they did that scientific analysis, it's kind of supporting their theory, right? So they're like, let's go forward and make a replica and see if we can make the thing that we're saying this tool might have made, which would be rope. So they created a baton out of similar material and similar shape and all that stuff.
00:08:29
Speaker
And then they performed experiments to test the functionality of the holes individually and of the four holes in combination. And they tested that with sinew from deer, flax, hemp, cattail, linden, willow, and nettles. So they tried a variety of different, both animal products and vegetable matter, I guess.
00:08:52
Speaker
pretty much. They had varying degrees of success using each of these fibers to make a rope. The most successful, they said, was using cattail to make a thick, strong rope. By feeding it through the holes, it maintained regular thickness and it helped control tension. The grooves that were carved along the edges, those spiral grooves,
00:09:15
Speaker
What that did is it broke down any leaves that were attached to the cattail sill and took all those fibers and sort of oriented them in the right direction for creating the rope. So that was part of what those grooves were doing and what they hypothesized that they would do, which it turns out that it did.
00:09:32
Speaker
It was a pretty labor intensive process. It requires a whole bunch of people. There'd be one person per hole feeding the material in. So up to four people feeding material through the holes if they're using all four of them. And then on the other side, you had to have at least one person who was twisting those strands together into a rope. So you're talking three to five people, basically,
00:09:58
Speaker
as a requirement to manage this whole thing while they were creating the rope. When you have that many people, it apparently went fast and these are people trying this that really don't have a lot of experience with this sort of method. And even so, they were able to make about five meters of really strong supple rope in about 10 minutes, which is incredibly impressive.
00:10:17
Speaker
Yeah, it is. And you can see how valuable that would have been to an ancient group of people who needed, I mean, rope would have been essential for a lot of different things. So to be able to make it that quickly, I'm sure this would have been a very, very useful tool to have.
00:10:32
Speaker
The one thing that leads me to think, why did they ever think this was art, is that these types of perforated batons are referred to, well they're referred to in German as Luchstab, but they're well known in upper Paleolithic periods. Yeah, they found a lot of them. It's like if you find a lot of them, I mean it's not people just replicating the same art over and over again.
00:10:51
Speaker
Now, I mean, the four-hole version, like the one they found here, has only been found in a couple areas, but they all date to about the early Arganischian age in the Paleolithic time period, which is about the time that we mentioned earlier. Yeah, I don't know why it took this long for somebody to think that maybe there was a function to these rather than art. And like, don't get me wrong, they could be both artistic and functional.
00:11:13
Speaker
because there's no reason why a tool can't also be beautiful. But, you know, to assume that it's art and didn't have some kind of function is, you know, probably, well, you know, without any other better ideas or options, it takes two people to look at things with different eyes to come up with, you know, this whole rope idea and then to test it and see how well it worked. And I'm guessing that's going to prompt some reanalysis of some of these other batons that have been found that dates this time period to see if
00:11:42
Speaker
You can find the residue like they did on this one and also that use wear analysis to see if maybe it was used for making rope because I mean, it seems like it's a pretty good use case for this this tool. Yeah.
Discovery of the Roman Villa
00:11:55
Speaker
All right. Well, we're going to go from making rope to finding out why you shouldn't sail your boat without a motor towards an actively erupting volcano back in a minute.
00:12:07
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 253 of The Long Paws Archaeology Show. I want to get a t-shirt that says The and actually have a long set of paws from some animal in the middle there and then Archaeology Show. See, only a few people that'll get it. I just don't support this at all.
00:12:29
Speaker
Oh man. All right. Well, now we're over in Italy, Naples to be exact. And as I've said many times in that part of the world, even like England and all over the place there, you can't drop a spoon in the ground without finding something Roman or something at all, really, but generally something Roman. And that happened here when they were excavating for a, actually they removed a swimming pool, I think, and they were trying to make a park or something like that. And of course found a luxurious, possibly famous Roman villa. Yeah, totally. Why not?
00:12:58
Speaker
Yeah, I was wondering if maybe it was Italian CRM that discovered this. I'm sure it would. Well, CRM would imply that they're required to do some sort of pre-excavation analysis, but it seemed like the article implied that they just found it almost accidentally while they were doing construction. It did, yeah. And then somebody had the budget and wherewithal to get this excavation done. So we're lucky for that, I guess. Yeah.
00:13:20
Speaker
But anyway, the article back to the article. So so it's called First Century Villa discovered near Mount Vesuvius, maybe where Pliny the Elder watched catastrophic eruption. Yeah. And this is in live science.
00:13:34
Speaker
Yeah, and they think this luxurious villa apparently. I don't know if they've ever found a non luxurious villa. There's a lot of luxurious villas. Yeah, like villas by nature are luxurious, right? So I'm a villa. I always say Pliny the Elder. Oh do you? I don't know what's right though. Pliny or Pliny? I don't really know. I'm not sure.
00:13:52
Speaker
Oh well. I'm going to say Pliny. Do you say Pliny? Well, I'm going to say Pliny. So there. Well, Pliny the Elder, they think this is maybe where he first witnessed the, again, as I mentioned before, the massive volcanic eruption that would later claim his life. Not much later. Not a lot later. Yeah. Maybe weeks potentially, but yeah. So his real name was Gaius Plinyus Secondis.
00:14:14
Speaker
Thanks, Romans. And he basically, the short story is, and we'll tell a little bit more about this at the end, but he famously sailed from his home towards the eruption in an attempt to rescue some people that were affected by it. Yeah. Because from this vantage point, he could see Mount Vesuvius pretty clearly. Yeah. Yeah. And the whole bay.
00:14:32
Speaker
And they know for sure what happened to him because his nephew and adopted son, Pliny the Younger, wrote in a letter that he witnessed the elder's death a few hours later and when he was overcome by toxic gas from the volcano. So they have like a first-hand accounting of what happened and there's no reason to think he would have lied about it. So yeah. True. But I think they said it was like Mount Suey's is 20 miles away first off. Yeah. And it wasn't right up next to the shore. So I guess
00:14:56
Speaker
if he was sailing across, that's fine. But if his son could see him die without aid of a telescope or anything, cause he didn't have that, wasn't invented yet, some sort of vision thing. How did he know he died from the gases? And his son didn't also succumb to the gases. I assumed he was with him on the ship.
00:15:13
Speaker
Oh no, I think he was on the shore. And didn't die. Like, you know, but maybe not, or maybe, Hmm. Yeah, I don't know. Or maybe, maybe he was overcome by the gas when he got back from, from, you know, wherever he landed over there. So yeah, I don't know. That's, that wasn't clear. I didn't really deep dive into that to find out the full details, but yeah.
00:15:34
Speaker
Well, either way, this excavated villa at a place called Punta Sarparella is northwest of Naples in the town of Bacoli and would have been the port city of Mycenum in plenty of the elders' time. In fact, he commanded the Roman naval fleet in that city. And I think I read in the article that he was like the Roman name for what he was, was commander, blah, blah, blah, Mycenum or something like that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, something like that. Yeah. And the villa, it clearly belonged to a wealthy Roman.
00:16:03
Speaker
They don't know for sure yet who but it has a clear view of Mount Vesuvius approximately 20 miles away across the bay and we know that he, Pliny the Elder, would have watched the eruption from his villa. We know that from the records so it's a good guess that it might have been his.
00:16:21
Speaker
Yep. Some of the remaining walls that were found were built from diamond shaped blocks of soft limestone called tufa. And they were decoratively arranged like a net that extended onto the beach and into the water, which is kind of neat. Yeah. I was kind of struggling to visualize that, but I think it's kind of like a, like a trellising pattern almost. Is that kind of what they were getting at? I don't know. Yeah.
00:16:43
Speaker
And then that created the wall, so a very open, holy kind of wall that went off into the water from the villa. That was, I don't know how you envisioned that, but that's kind of how I took that to mean. If this villa was indeed Pliny's, I haven't, and now I don't even know how I'm pronouncing it. How do you do it? Pliny. That's how I say it. All right.
00:17:02
Speaker
If this villa was indeed plenty, he would have entertained many of the Roman elite at Benquitz in the villa's courtyard, obviously, like you do when you're Roman elite. I think it's required if you have a villa. And just a little bit more about the man in question, he was born into a wealthy Roman family and he rose to prominence in the Roman army.
00:17:25
Speaker
Yeah, he was also a very prolific writer, which is probably how most people have heard the name. Yeah. And he wrote a book called Natural History, which is probably his most famous. And in that book, he attempted to record literally everything about the world. There are 37 volumes with contemporary knowledge of zoology, botany, geology, mineralogy, astronomy, technology and more. And somebody was quoted in the article as saying it may have been the world's first encyclopedia. Yeah.
00:17:50
Speaker
I know I love that and he also wrote like a lot more stuff than just that but a lot of it has been lost to time apparently so this is the most complete and the most I guess like spectacular of his writings that we have left so yeah
00:18:05
Speaker
Yeah, keeping in mind that he was a naval commander, when I was first envisioning them saying that he died sailing across the bay to try to save his friends, I was thinking of like a small sailboat. Yeah, like hopping to his boat, yeah. Yeah, but I'm guessing it was more like a warship, probably. Probably. And a whole bunch of other people probably died too. Yeah, it's possible. Again, yeah. If he went to save people, he had to have a big enough boat to bring them back. Yeah. Well, he certainly had the power to command
00:18:30
Speaker
people, many people, and also larger vessels to do his bidding. Whether or not he would have done that just to save his friends, we don't know, but it's definitely possible. And I love this that he was warned that it would be dangerous to go over there. I mean, can you imagine it? Like all of Naples is basically watching this happen, right?
00:18:49
Speaker
Yeah, erupted for like three days. Yeah. And I think there was like, it was even longer than that, I think, because there was like some pre eruptions and stuff that people ignored and all that. So yeah, they're just like watching this happen. And they're like, Oh, you don't want to go over there. Like what's going on is what's going on. You can't help now. But I love this quote from him. He didn't create this quote, but he quoted the famous proverb fortune favors the bold. Yeah.
00:19:15
Speaker
when he was told that this would be a dangerous mission. And I thought that was funny because he wasn't so fortunate since he died a few hours later on the shore at Stabier. So that was what happened to him.
00:19:28
Speaker
I mean, you know, I'm sure his friends appreciated the rescue attempt or rescue if it did actually happen. But yeah, Vesuvius was, you know, unstoppable at that point. And anybody in the vicinity was just various terrible ways of death happened to those people. So, yeah. Well, some people think Amelia Earhart died on the shore. And some don't. And some don't. We'll find out what they think on the other side of the break.
Amelia Earhart Sonar Images
00:19:56
Speaker
Welcome back to The Archaeology Show, Episode 253. This is our third article, and it's called Amelia Earhart's plane may have crashed in the heart of the Pacific Ocean. Explorer claims. And this has been all over the internet. Yeah. All over it. It's Amelia Earhart. Well, yeah, I guess every time, right? But this article is from Life Science, but there are many, many, many of them. Choose your favorite new source and you can go read about this and check out the images. So yeah.
00:20:23
Speaker
Yeah. So the current team called Deepsea Vision that's been doing this whole exploration and the guy who kind of funded this whole thing spent $11 million making this thing come true. So much money. Yeah, which is crazy. But they were actually taking sonar images of a whole bunch of area. And I did read somewhere in here that it was like 90 days after they actually took these images that they found it because they weren't really analyzing them in real time. So they couldn't just go back and take more. They're going to later, but either way,
00:20:49
Speaker
they found what looks like sonar images of a plane 16,000 feet below the surface. Yeah. And these images were captured about a hundred miles off the coast of Howland Island. And that's an uninhabited coral atoll that was supposed to be a refueling stop in Amelia Earhart's flight around the world in 1937. And you might've heard of that island because this is the island she never made it to. We don't think she ever made it to. She definitely didn't make it there for her.
00:21:16
Speaker
She didn't make it there for her refilling stop, but we don't know where things went wrong between that and her last stop. So yeah. Yeah. She was flying a Lockheed Electra, may have heard of that too. She made that plane pretty much famous. It's a Lockheed Electra 10E and that is a twin engine plane. This plane is unique because it had distinctive twin vertical stabilizers on the tail. So when you have a, imagine the flat tail that looks like
00:21:40
Speaker
smaller than the front wing, but it looks like a little wing. Two little stabilizers right on the ends of each of the tail. And that's a Lockheed Electra. And again, that is unique to that plane. And back in that time, there weren't too many planes that looked like that, especially once we were crossing the ocean. So according to Tony Romeo, or Romeo, I don't know what it is. He's a former pilot, but he's the CEO of Deep Sea Vision. He says that this sonar image clearly shows what appears to be these two stabilizers.
00:22:07
Speaker
I mean, I see what he's talking about when you look at that image, right? Just two little smears, really. Yeah. Smear is a very good way to describe it. It's a very smeary image. We'll talk about that in a second. Yeah, for sure. But his team used an underwater Hugin drone, which is a torpedo-shaped device that autonomously maneuvers through the water and scans the seabed and creates these images. Yeah.
00:22:30
Speaker
Now, of course, the reason that this article is out there is, you know, there's going to be a debate about whether or not this image is what they're claiming. And to be totally honest, they're not fully claiming anything. They're just saying, hey, this is what this looks like. You know, let's do more research. So that's kind of like where they're at at this moment. But I'm sure they're also super excited. Like maybe this is it. But yeah, maybe.
00:22:55
Speaker
But there are people who disagree or not disagree, but just are skeptical. And one of those groups is the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, and that's TIGAR, T-I-G-H-A-R. And they have always said for a very long time that it's much more likely that Earhart landed on an island and survived as a castaway before she finally died. So the plane crashing into the ocean
00:23:19
Speaker
is not part of their narrative at all. So they're immediately skeptical of this image for sure. But they have some good reason to be skeptical. Yes. Representatives from TIGR say that the shape of the wings in the image is completely wrong for the Electra. And I'll let you explain why it's wrong because it's getting like into technical piloty stuff. And I feel like you'll know that better than me.
00:23:42
Speaker
Yeah, they say that the Electra had a very unique design in that there was this massive beam going wingtip to wingtip, really engine to engine, where the engine's kind of hung off this beam and went straight through the middle of the airplane. And they say that it's relatively impossible for the wings to sweep back like that. And I'm like, even if it hit the water at a high rate of speed...
00:24:03
Speaker
If it hit the water at a high rate of speed, which could have possibly folded the wings on a plane like that, they probably wouldn't be sitting with the plane 16,000 feet below the surface. Yeah, thinking about the Titanic, for example, and how many pieces it broke into because of the weight of the ocean crushing down on it, you would think a little airplane like this would have broken into pieces. It could have gone to the bottom of the ocean intact, for sure.
00:24:28
Speaker
As it hit the water, depending on how it hits, I mean, like I said, if it had swept the wings back and ripped them off, they wouldn't still be sitting with the plane. They'd be somewhere else and they wouldn't know what they were looking at. And you really have to go look at the photos to visualize this. They do this great comparison where they show the image, the sonar image and then next to it, like a diagram of what
00:24:47
Speaker
her airplane look like and you can see that the wings are they're angled of course because wings always are but they're straight across they don't they don't face backwards at all and the sonar image the wings are definitely like angled back yeah like they weren't swept yeah
00:25:02
Speaker
And so Tony Romeo, he's like, well, there's probably a reason for that. He's because when you have sonar looking at something at an angle and moving at the same time, it creates these sort of stretching of images. He says, you can even see that in the tail. He's like, when you correct for all the stretching, it looks like a Lockheed Electra. It looks like the plane.
00:25:23
Speaker
which totally sounds legit to me too. So I'm like, cool, I believe both these guys. I don't really know what to believe at this point. And obviously there needs to be a lot more research. So yeah, I mean, people are right to be skeptical because Tigar has found, you know, quite a bit evidence, which we'll talk about in a second, but these deep sea vision or whatever they're called, they're heading back later this year to obviously take some more pointed images of it and just really see what they're looking at.
00:25:47
Speaker
And oh, they also didn't have a functioning camera on it when they passed over this, so they didn't get any actual camera images. So they want to go back and get actual camera images that might show pieces of a wing or a number or something where they can actually match it to the airplane. Or if not her airplane, then somebody's, right? It does look like an airplane, right?
00:26:09
Speaker
And then the guy, Tony Romeo, he specifically says it could be a different plane entirely, like a World War II plane. Yeah, totally. Something like that. So it was all right around in that time period. Yeah, I mean, it's still really cool to find it from an image like this, though, and yeah. Yeah, I mean, he gained a lot of press by just uttering the words Amelia Earhart. Amelia, yeah, totally. Might even get some more funding. People are just obsessed with Amelia Earhart.
00:26:32
Speaker
I have to imagine that they were in that area to look for Emilia Harker. Why else would you be in that part of the ocean, right? Yeah, they were definitely there looking for me. Yeah, and they covered a huge area in this search grid that they were doing. Right.
00:26:47
Speaker
So there's a reason Tigard doesn't feel like this is her plane, and the only reason they think that is because, well, they think they're in the wrong spot. So their version of events is that Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan veered off the planned route that would have taken them to Howland Island to refuel. They ended up landing in the reef around the uninhabited Gardiner Island, otherwise known as Nicomero, right now.
00:27:11
Speaker
And I thought this was really cool and I felt like this is very good evidence for them. But, and maybe you can explain this better because I don't quite understand how it works, but I guess they were sending distress calls for several nights from the plane itself until finally the rising tides swept the plane away and off the reef edge because they didn't see it from the air when they were searching for them so they know the plane was gone at that point. But I guess radio bearings taken on the signals
00:27:38
Speaker
that they were sending sort of match up with the Gardner Island area. And that's why they think they landed there. But I'm like, how did they get bearings on those radio signals? Like, how does that work? How could they, how do they, well, it's, it's signal strength. Oh, okay. So if you've got a,
00:27:54
Speaker
If you've got something sweeping back and forth and your needle pegs because you're receiving a transmission in a certain direction, that tells you that the signal came from that direction. And early radio stuff like that was incredibly powerful. In fact, there's an instrument inside of, I don't think some modern aircraft really have this anymore, but there's an instrument inside an aircraft that I learned how to fly on that's used for something completely different. But if you're like lost, you can tune into an AM radio station if you know where it's at, and it will basically point you in the right direction of that AM radio station.
00:28:22
Speaker
That's so fascinating. Because they're so powerful. It just picks it up, so. Yeah. OK. But yeah. So that is some pretty solid evidence that they were in the vicinity of this island. Like, again, we have a link in the show notes to Tiger's website where you can go look and where they've got these signals, like crisscrossed, and they're right along the edge of Nicomero Island. So yeah. That's what the native people call it, I think, which is why they've switched to referring to it as that. Yeah.
00:28:49
Speaker
A US Navy search plane flew over the island while searching, and they saw signs of habitation, but no plane. And they assumed it was just local inhabitants on the island. But according to the time frame, the island actually had not been occupied since 1892. But the Navy didn't know that, I guess. Yeah, I guess they didn't realize that at the time. That wasn't put together till later. So the theory came from that. It was Earhart and possibly Noonan that lived as castaways on the atoll before they eventually died as castaways.
00:29:17
Speaker
And in 1991, a metal plate washed ashore on the island and apparently has like riveted punctures that are not a precise match to the plane, but could have come from what they said is a repair during the flight that isn't documented. I'm like, no, I'm sure you got to fix the plane. But there's some like, there's definitely some
00:29:34
Speaker
I'm reaching with this bit of story. And this is from yet another article that I found. And I just thought it was interesting because again, using technology, modern technology to do some really cool things, like we might eventually get an answer to this mystery as technology keeps advancing. But in this case, they more recently took that metal plate that was found in 1991 and they did neutron radiography, which is a non damaging imaging technique. And it brought out some letters and numbers.
00:30:02
Speaker
They are meaningless right now, D24XRO, and then either 335 or 385, depending on your preference, because it's hard to tell in the picture. They have not been able to connect any of that to her plane yet. And this metal plate, if you look at the pictures, it's pretty small, so it's not like it was a tail number or something. This is some kind of random number letter thing that's just on that piece of metal, and who knows what it belongs to.
00:30:30
Speaker
But, you know, technology is always moving forward and they brought this out with this new technique. So that I mean, you know, just got to keep adding to the to the pile of evidence before we get an answer. Right.
00:30:43
Speaker
Finally, in 1940, bones were discovered on Nicomero Island, but apparently those reins have since been lost. I know. I know how you just lose human reins. It happens all the time. It happens all the time. It does. It happens so often. Where did they go? There's forensic analysis done on those bones in 1941, I think, so that time period. They determined that it belonged to a man.
00:31:07
Speaker
No, look, I took a lot of forensic analysis classes in college. And what I can tell you is that the techniques used in 1941 were way behind the techniques that we have today. So I think maybe, maybe those bones were from a man. And if they were, they could be from, from Fred, from Fred Noonan.
00:31:30
Speaker
But the techniques were not great back then, so they could be from a woman. I'm pretty sure Amelia Earhart was fairly tall, and a lot of the way that they sex-boned, sexed them back in the day was just by size. A smaller meant woman, larger meant man, but that's just not accurate because there are smaller men and there are larger women.
00:31:51
Speaker
So you need more than just that to say and it depends on what kind of bones they had. Like some parts of the body are more obviously man or woman. So without knowing what bones they were analyzing, I wouldn't say for sure. I don't know. I have a lot of skepticism about say in 1941 saying that it was a man.
00:32:09
Speaker
And then also the fact that those bones disappeared and I don't know, I'm just like, okay, well without those, without knowing the context, people were on that Island back in the 1800s. It could have been from any one of those people that were there. So I just, the human remains a bit of it is sketchy at best for me personally. So yeah. I'd also heard just kind of as an aside on why this all went so horribly wrong. There's a lot of articles out there that
00:32:34
Speaker
You can find that Fred Noonan was a well-known, pretty good navigator. That's why he was on this flight. But I did see something recently, and I can't find the source that I found, but I did see something recently that came out, because this article came out, talking about how he may have
00:32:51
Speaker
made a calculation error that he wasn't even aware of. And it had something to do with the route that they took and the distance of it. And it was just incorrectly determined. And they just ran out of fuel prior to where they thought they would. Because he had miscalculated that. But there's no real evidence of that. It's just one of those things that kind of fits the narrative if it's true. But there's a lot of things that could fit that narrative, a lot of circumstances. You just got to look at which ones most likely.
00:33:18
Speaker
Well, we've talked a lot about all of this, this whole mystery here. And I think the takeaway for me from this is that Tiger has one one theory about what happened. They have created this narrative that does seem to have a lot of evidence supporting it. It is an interesting, you know, it does seem like it could be true. Right. This whole island crashing castaway thing. Right. But if this sonar image, after they do more research, if they get more
00:33:45
Speaker
images, better images. If it is her aircraft, then that blows that theory out of the water completely because Howland Island was like way over like north, I think. And then Gardner Island was south. So like, it's just, they couldn't have happened together. These two stories. So it would, yeah, it would definitely change everything if this is her airplane.
00:34:06
Speaker
Well, it would solve the mystery if it is her airplane. If her airplane's in the ocean in the middle of nowhere, then they would down with it. I don't think it would necessarily change anything. I mean, Tigar has been pushing the narrative that the evidence they've found supports, but that doesn't mean anybody believes that. It's just the current theory that is being pushed pretty hard by that organization. It is. That's true. But if you look at the story anywhere, they're still going to say, we don't know what happened. Yeah, basically. The radio signals, though, that is the most convincing thing for me, right? But was it from them?
00:34:36
Speaker
Oh, right. Yeah. So, but why else? Who else would be out in that area? It's like mostly uninhabited islands in the middle of the ocean. I mean, yeah, I don't know. So anyway, yeah, it's a mystery. It's a fun one to talk about, though, and like debate back and forth. So I enjoy when stuff like this comes up and you can kind of go through it all again and
00:34:57
Speaker
I think I fall on the on the Gardiner Island side of things still, but I am very interested to see where this sonar image goes for sure. Yeah, I'm sure there are lots of planes in the ocean. Yeah, yes, exactly. I'm not saying it's not a plane. I just definitely a plane. Yeah, it looks like a plane. It must be a plane. Yeah, so it's cool. All right. Well, with that, I guess we'll see you next week. Bye.
00:35:27
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Archaeology Show. Feel free to comment and view the show notes on the website at www.arcpodnet.com. Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at arcpodnet. Music for this show is called, I Wish You Would Look, from the band C Hero. Again, thanks for listening and have an awesome day.
00:35:50
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.