Is pizza even older than we think?!

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to By Amara. This is a weekly news show where we'll discuss some of the weird, strange, and just downright odd things that have happened in the art and history fields.

I'm your host and personal curator, Amara Andrew. This week, we're going to talk about a donated artwork that's so graphic, I can't even show it. You've heard of the Stone Age, but there may have been a Bamboo Age.

And is pizza even older than we think? We have all that and more coming up on this episode of By Amara. Let's get to it.

Went the wrong way there. My headphones are reading that this is very loud. Okay, there we go.

I literally just went deaf in that intro, but I was like just grin and bear it, it'll be fine. Anyway, hello. Welcome back to By Amara.

If this is your first time listening, yes, it is more than likely going to be a shit show of an episode, but thank you for listening.

Right now, we are actually renovating our bathroom and our bedroom, so if you see weird things around, we kind of have our like bedroom stuff tucked on the sides. It was everywhere. But anyway, it's very exciting because we've been wanting to paint the bedroom for a while and blah.

And we got a new bathroom thing and I don't know.

It's not like a crazy renovation project. I'm making it sound like it's much grander than it is, but it's just a lot of work and especially because it's literally just my boyfriend, Jeff, and I doing it. So, he's very skilled.

I am not. I'm an unskilled laborer, so he has to deal with me, so I'm sorry. But it's really exciting.

It's nice to get some new things just because like our house is a little bit older and he has already renovated like all of it, which is really cool, but I don't know. We just

There are just a few stylistic things that I was like, "I want this instead." Speaking of, we had a whole saga for our bathroom. We got a new vanity, which is like where you put your shit and have your sink on top of it. And we went to, and this is no shade at Home Depot.

Maybe a little bit of shade at Kohler, but we'll talk about that in a second. But we had a whole vanity fiasco. I'm trying to figure out if I make it into like a little mini vlog or not.

But basically, we went to Home Depot and we were only going there for paint supplies. But then we walked down the bathroom vanity aisle and we saw this really nice vanity that was totally our style. It had like cross, I don't know.

It looks really nice, I promise. So, we're just like, "Fuck yeah. Let's just get that." We like found the box that's in the size that we need for our bathroom.

And we got it. We got all the rest of our paint supplies and stuff like that.

We get home. I'm like, " let's just eat food because it's like already late. It's like 7:00 or 8:00 or something at night." Oh, mind you, I forgot this little tidbit.

We get the vanity out to our car, and we're like, "Okay, cool. Well, let's put it in the trunk, because I think it'll fit back there." We lift it. We're holding it.

We're trying to fit it in. It doesn't fit. We're like, "How about the passenger seat?" It doesn't fit.

It like it could just barely fit in the car. It was just an inch too big, which is so infuriating.

So, then Jeff had to run back into Home Depot, rent a truck, and thankfully we lived very close to this one. So, we could just rent the truck and get it back because also, that location was closing very soon, cause we went there later in the evening. So, then it was like, "Okay, well fuck.

We only have like an hour until they close, so we got to make this quick and like make this work."

So, we rent the truck, we put it in there, and it was so funny because I didn't think he'd actually get it. So, then he just comes driving up, and he's like, "Beep." It was really funny. So, then we get it in there.

We drive home, we unload it, and then we drive back. And then we get back in our car, and we come home. And then, now I'm catching up to myself.

Then, we're going to have dinner, cause I'm like, "Oh, we should eat food, because we've we're already painting in the day and blah, blah, blah."

So, let's just eat dinner. We eat dinner and then I'm like, " let's just put it together now, because I'm impatient." And I was like, "Let's just see how it is." And I was excited. We dismantled our old vanity.

We get all of the plumbing out, turn off the water, all that fun stuff, which took like over an hour. It took a very long time. And we're like getting it out and cleaning the tubes and blah, blah, blah, and getting it all nice and pretty for our new vanity.

And we open the box and we pour it out and we're taking all the packaging off, and I'm like, "This is it."

And then we look and it's the fucking wrong vanity in the box. The outside was correct. It was the 24-inch whatever we got, blah, blah, blah.

But the inside was an entirely different one that was farmhouse chic. I mean, I don't know if you can tell. We're not farmhouse chic people.

We're We like a little bit more modern of a vibe. So, I was like, "God damn it." And by this point, it was like 10:00 at night, 10:30, 11:00, whatever. It was very late.

And we were both so upset. And I know like first world problem, whatever, but when you are doing all this and you're excited for it and then this fucking happens, it was just like, "Argh." I was so pissed off. And then, we're both nonconfrontational people, so then it's like, "Well fuck.

Now we have to take this back, and then figure it out, and then talk to the Home Depot people and be like, 'How do we get this back?'" So, anyway, we like the rest of the evening we were not happy.

We wake up. We're both a little on edge cause we get nervous with that. And then, we're just like, "All right." And I try to call into Home Depot, and I tried three different times and I went three different places, and it went absolutely nowhere.

I got hung up twice. Hung up on twice, which is fine, I guess. Whatever.

And like I said, no shade to Home Depot. It's fine, whatever. But then, we get the So, then we're just like, "All right.

Fuck it. Let's just go do this in person, because then we can at least explain it a lot better and then actually like talk to somebody versus me just sitting there like, 'Hello, I can't like Hello.'"

So, we go to Home Depot, and then we wait in line. We explain the situation, and then they're like very nice. And they're like, "Yeah, here's the truck for free." And then, they didn't actually have the one that we wanted in stock, but another store did, so we went there that was nearby, and then got it.

We checked in store, like, "Is this the correct one in the box?" And it was. So, we were very elated, as you could imagine. So, then we get it and then we put it back on the truck.

And I have this all documented, too, because it was just insane.

But then, we bring it back home. We get the one that we're returning, and bring it back to the previous location, and everything was fine. And now, it's installed and it was great.

Now, we have a little bit of a water leak, good figuring that out, but TLDR, we got it. It was a little bit of a saga. So, anyway, those are just my life updates, I guess.

I don't have any other updates for the stories. So, you're probably like, "Can you just shut the hell up already?" Which I can. So,

Without further delay, hopefully by next week all of this will be not chaotic. It'll be put away. We'll have nice new painted stuff and it'll all be great.

And it just I don't know, it feels nice and fresh. It feels just like nice, I don't know, because Jeff lived here before. So, me moving into his space, it's always felt more like his space than mine, which is fine, obviously, because like it's his.

But now that I'm getting to make some creative choices and change a few things, it does feel more like, I don't know, it feels like our home. So, anyway, blah, blah, blah, sappy, sappy, sappy. So, let's just get straight into our show.

Shield your eyes. Beeple is donating a very graphic artwork to an Italian museum, and like I teased at the beginning of the episode, I literally cannot show this to you, otherwise YouTube will ban me and I cannot do it. So, you can Google it on your own.

For now, I will be showing you a censored image up here so you can see the censored version, but go look if you're curious because it is quite tastefully done, but I will describe it to you in excruciating detail. Here we go.

The Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Turin, Italy is getting a painting or a painting an artwork by Beeple, so it's a digital artwork, first and foremost, but then there also will be a physical oil painting that will be given to the institution. But they're getting "FTX Board Meeting Day Number 5-7-6 5-6-7-6".

Okay, so they're getting "FTX Board Meeting Day Number 5676 11 13 22", which is November 13th, 2002. I'm going to break down the context for this, also, because this is a very loaded piece.

The image shows various depictions, and I'm going to look at it here on my computer so I can do justice, but it shows various depictions of FTX's co founder and who was the CEO at the time of all of this, in various arrays of fornication with himself. And it's various different bodies, male and female, in various different ways engaging in sexual acts with each other.

I'm trying not to get banned by YouTube, so just bear with me. I'm trying to keep it very chill. I can't really describe it anymore.

I mean, he's just he's literally having sex with himself, but there's another way you can put that. I just don't want to get banned. I'm doing my best, but you can see the censored image if you're watching this.

And there's a whiteboard in the background that says, "Altruism stuff, help kids, help animals, buy stuff for poor people, Joe Biden 2H." And then there's a little sticky note that says, "maybe customer wallets", which we will talk about in a second what all this sort of means.

Yeah, it is quite a piece. And this is going to be in a museum, which is really cool. So, let me tell you a little bit about FTX in case you are unfamiliar with NFTs or crypto.

So, like I said, this shows the FTX co-founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, which I'm just going to call him SBF from now on, because I keep switching Bankman and Fried, so it's Friedman-Bank. So, SBF. FTX was one of the largest cryptocurrency exchange firms, and it was also a crypto hedge fund that was founded in 2019, like I said, by SBF and another person, I forget their name.

You could trade FTT, which was their own coin, as well as kind of like the main players in cryptocurrency, so like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and then like Ripple and Tether, and all those various different things, and like a bunch of other coins. At one time, like at the peak of their popularity, they were valued at $40,000,000,000.

All that came to a screeching halt November 11th, 2002, when they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and SBF resigned as the CEO of FTX. Sorry, there are a lot of acronyms. SBF is the person.

FTX is the company.

By November 17th, FTX had officially collapsed. And this crash caused an entire ripple in the cryptocurrency and NFT community. Like, everything in crypto kind of crashed, everything was like chaotic.

The people that were left over from the big boom in NFTs and crypto, a lot of coins plummeted. I had my cryptocurrency just plummet as well. And Bankman-Fried was then arrested on December 12th, 2002, for money laundering and wire fraud in addition to other charges.

And there's a whole lot more to this story for FTX. Like, you could go any which way, but for now, that's kind of like all you need to know. So, back to the piece.

I'm going to talk about that more. So, basically SBF fucked a lot of people over, including himself, it seems, in the in the image. And it makes sense that Beeple would create this social commentary about FTX because he himself is a digital artist, and he actually set a record at Christie's back in 2021, I don't know why I said it so formally, for his piece "Everydays: the First 5000 Days", which is basically just a mosaic of images that Beeple had created and posted on the web, one a day since May 1st, 2007, which is really fucking cool.

So, why then did Beeple depict Sam or SBF, rather, why did Beeple depict SBF having intercourse with himself in many different formats and arrays and body types? He is specifically referencing a rumor that there were orgies in the FTX offices between SBF, his girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, and a bunch of other people. And sorry, not in the FTX offices, but in the his currency company of Alameda Research, that they would host these orgies and they would partner swap.

And that's totally fine. Like, you do whatever you want, but don't do it in a workspace that other people are in. Like, that is so fucking creepy.

So, this is a very graphic image of that, and it's showing like it's a very layered piece. And like I said, if you want to know more about this, you can find so much more symbolism within this, but I don't have all day for this podcast. So, I love you, but I just I don't.

So, anyway, so instead of showing multiple different people though, it's literally just SBF's face, and actually, you can't really even see the eyes on most of them, too. So, it kind of looks like this really creepy non person It just looks creepy. Like, it's a very off-putting image, I will say.

But, you know, Beeple is very well known for mocking the tech industry. So, obviously, this fits in with his other oeuvre of things. Like, I think there's a piece about Elon Musk, and like one of Zuckerberg, and a bunch of other people.

So, it makes sense. It fits with his MO, I will say.

In the statement about the donation, the Castello di Rivoli, sorry, Rivoli, included a censored version of the image, which that is what you're seeing right now if you're watching this. And it said that this is a reference to the censorship that takes on social media. It says quote, "In order to conform to online regulations by digital companies, the museum has covered part of the image," end quote.

And this is really important, actually, because it's funny, because now the institution is iterating on another artwork by making a different artwork in that now they're opening up the dialogue about all the different censorship on social media, like on I mean, on YouTube right now, I cannot show you this actual image because I will get banned, or my account will get flagged, or whatever can happen.

Like, I will not be able to show it to you. This episode won't make it out. I mean, it might not, honestly.

I have no idea. But same with TikTok, they're very stringent on certain things. Instagram is super stringent, as well.

But like Twitter and Tumblr, Tumblr, you could you literally there are porn accounts on there, so you can go see whatever you'd like on Tumblr if it's even still exists, I actually have no idea.

Both platforms are very like you can almost post anything as long as it's within like guidelines, of course. This now is yet another type of artwork, in that there is this extra piece to it. Again, just to wrap the story up, this is one of very few Beeple artworks that are going to be in a museum collection.

Also, very few NFTs, because there's still not widely It's not ubiquitous in all institutions and things like that. So, in addition to the digital version, like I said, there will also be a physical oil painting. So, maybe when you're strolling through the gallery one day at the I forget the name, at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Turin, Italy, maybe you'll round the corner and you'll see a lot of people having an orgy.

On to the next story.

If you're a history buff, you may have heard of the Stone Age, the Iron Age, the Bronze Age, all the ages, but now, archaeologists are saying there may have been a Bamboo Age. This is really interesting. Researchers, I say that all the time, but genuinely it is.

Researchers found microscopic plant bits that were stuck to three stone tools recently uncovered in the Philippines. And this is pretty spectacular, mostly because in warm, humid climates, green matter, like plant matter, cannot survive. So, if somebody used bamboo way back when, like thousands and thousands of years, it would not survive to this day, because it'll decompose so much faster, unlike stone and bone fragments, which is a lot easier to find because they hold up a lot better.

These stone tools were found in the Tabon Caves located in the Palawan province in the Western Philippines, which is dubbed kind of like the cradle of civilization for the Philippines. These may be the earliest known tools made for working with the region's tough vegetation. They were radiocarbon dated, and it was found that these were 39,000 years old.

Before that, the oldest known evidence of plant matter was 8,000 years old, and it was in southern China, and it was like from a like a series of mats that were found, like plant-based mats.

Unlike the stone tools that are found in Africa and Europe, Southeast Asian stone tools weren't standardized, so they could be a myriad of shapes and sizes. It's also believed that the people here in this part of the Philippines, they relied more heavily on bamboo tools, which obviously, like I said before, they would not exist right now, so there would be no way to be able to find them.

But like I said, since these don't preserve well, scientists are trying to find like any type of microtrace that they can find to prove, yes, these existed, and to prove another thing.

If they can prove this and find these microtraces on these tools, it can help show that people were able to harness fiber technology, which means that they could create ropes, baskets, build complex houses and structures, make string bows to hunt, rig sails to boats, and also build boats, like meaning that they were able to take palm and bamboo, strip them, and turn their stems into fibers for weaving or tying.

And this provides way more context to many different things, not only the history of the area, but also researchers are now considering if the traditions that are currently used today to process plant fibers, if this actually is a longer tradition, so if this would be 39,000 years old of traditions that essentially it would be the exact same from then to now, or if there would be a new, you know, kind of just like variation.

So, like maybe the 39,000-year-old one died out after 2,000 years or something like that, and then this is a totally different tradition that's used today, or if it's the same one. Either way, it's really fascinating. So, like I said, more study is being done.

So, hopefully in the future, we can know.

Is pizza even older than we think it is? A frescoed wall in Pompeii that was uncovered shows what looks to be a personal pan pizza from Pizza Kiss Hut-a-Kiss. But is it actually pizza?

So, there is this flattened dough that's bubbled up at the edges, and it's topped with what appear to be spices, pesto, pomegranates, and maybe like a date. It rests on a big silver tray, like a big silver serving tray, and it's next to a huge ass wine goblet filled with wine and a bunch of different dried fruits and things like that and various other food stuffs.

This is actually an ancient Roman take on the ancient Greek idea of xenia, which is like the idea of hospitality where you respect the shit out of each other whether you're the host or the guest and you like give each other gifts and blah. Well, the host gives the guest gifts and doesn't ask them questions. It's a whole big thing.

It's a whole It's a really interesting idea, but it's interesting, too, that it's seen here. But that is not the topic today. We are talking about pizza.

This fresco was found in the atrium of a wall that was attached to a bakery. In another room of the home, three skeletons were found at like at an oven, meaning that they were working when Mount Vesuvius erupted. So, they were just like, you know, I know that this is exploding, and like it took a long fucking time, too.

I think it took like hours, I think I remember reading. Yeah. 18 hours.

It took 18 hours. I found it. It took 18 hours, allegedly.

But either way, they were just like, "Hey, I'm going to work and I'm going to get this shit done." And then they died working, which sounds so bleak to me.

But anyway, back to my original question. Is this actually pizza in the fresco? Is this a pizza?

The press statement from the Archaeological Park of Pompeii says no. Quote, "Though it looks like a pizza, this image from a Pompeian painting," try saying that five times fast. "Though it looks like a pizza, this image from a Pompeian painting from 2,000 years ago obviously cannot be so, since some of the most characteristic ingredients are missing, namely tomatoes and mozzarella."

Well, I feel like now we could get into a philosophical discussion about what a pizza is. What is a pizza? You know?

Like, does it actually have to have tomato sauce? Does it have to have cheese? And this could be a whole contentious debate.

I'm not even going to step into that territory. But then like, would you say that a pizza that's olive oil and cheese, is that still a pizza? Is it not?

Does it have to have both of those qualities? I have no idea. I don't have strong opinions on pizza.

I can't even eat actually all of the ingredients that are a pizza, so I digress. I should not involve myself, because I cannot partake in the traditional pizza age.

So, anyway, we're going to leave that philosophical discussion, or you can let me know in the comments below if you would like if you're watching this on YouTube, or come on over to YouTube and let me know. Anyway, the archaeological park are instead calling this a focaccia flatbread, which does also make sense. Ancient Romans did actually eat cheese, but they didn't have mozzarella available at that time, so that is like out of the question.

Plus, the first documented instances of tomatoes being brought over to Italy from the Americas by European colonizers was in 1548. But, the first tomato recipe, tomato sauce recipe rather, doesn't appear to surface until 1694. That is 2 years post Salem witch trials, just in case you want a frame of reference.

As of now, also, the first pizza is said to have emerged from Naples in the 1800s. So, between 79 AD to the 1800s, that's a very big time span. So, I don't know, personally, this looks like a pizza to me.

If you're listening to this, you need to Google Pompeii fresco pizza or I'll have it linked below, so you can just click on the link, but to me, this really looks like a pizza, which again, focaccia, it could totally be like that instead. But, I don't know. I like thinking it's an early pizza.

So, let me know in the comments below, do you think it's a pizza or do you not think it's a pizza, or do you not give a shit, and let me know in the comments below. So, anyway, that will do it for this episode of By Amara. Be sure to like and subscribe.

I really appreciate those of you who do, so thank you so much. And if you find anything interesting throughout the week that you want to hear me divulge about, I don't know why you would, but if you find any interesting stories that you think I would enjoy, definitely send them my way. I'll give you a little shout out, too, just because like why would I take credit for you, when like you found them, I mean.

So, yeah, if you find any interesting ones, send them to me either Instagram, TikTok, here, whatever, find my email, I don't know, YouTube. You can comment them if you want. Anyway, thank you so much for listening.

Please like and subscribe. It means the world to me, and it means the world to any other creators out there, so make sure you're doing that for them. And I'm Amara Andrew.

Never stop creating.

You cannot tell me that is not a pizza. That's a motherfucking pizza.