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Around 5,200 years ago, a man’s life ended violently in a peat bog in north-west Denmark. Now, researchers are using advanced genetic analyzes to tell the unexpected story of “Vittrup Man,” the oldest migrant in Danish history.
Researchers have long been interested in bog bodies, the uniquely preserved “accidental mummies” found in Northern Europe, but a new study says it’s the first time the deceased’s life history has been mapped so much by experts.
The man’s remains were found in a peat bog in Vittrup, Denmark, during turf cutting in 1915. His right ankle bone, lower left shin bone, jaw bone and fragmentary skull were found alongside a club wooden. Researchers estimate that he died after being hit over the head at least eight times with the wooden club sometime between 3100 BC and 3300 BC.
The remains of Vittrup Man were analyzed by scientists in a recent study published in the journal Nature about Danish genetic prehistory that sequenced the genomes of 317 ancient skeletons. Some of the same researchers decided to study Vittrup Man individually after his DNA revealed that he was genetically different from the rest of the Stone Age Danish population. A study detailing the new findings appeared Wednesday in the journal PLOS One.
“I wanted to make an anonymous skull (and) find the person behind the bone. The initial result(s) were ‘almost too good to be true’, leading me to implement additional and alternative methods. The result was this life history,” lead study author Anders Fischer, a project researcher in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and director of Sealand Archaeology, said in an email.
What the team discovered while piecing together the life of Vittrup Man sheds light on the movements and connections between the different cultures of the Stone Age.
Stone Age Migrants
The research team, keen to uncover as many clues as possible about Vittrup Man’s life, analyzed his tooth enamel, tartar and bone tissue using cutting-edge analytical methods.
The combined detection of specific chemical elements within his enamel, such as strontium, nitrogen, carbon and oxygen, as well as protein analysis of his teeth and bones, revealed how Vittrup Man’s diet went from being a hunter-gatherer to a farmer. before death between 30 and 40 years of age.
Vittrup Man was probably born and raised along the coast of the Scandinavian Peninsula, perhaps within the frigid barrens of Norway or Sweden. He was genetically closest to people from those regions and had darker skin than the Stone Age peoples in Denmark.
In Scandinavia, Vittrup Man probably belonged to a northern hunter-gatherer community that enjoyed a diet of fish, seals and even whales, suggesting that the hunters had vessels that enabled them to fish in the open sea.
And then, something changed his life dramatically, and by the age of 18 or 19, Vittrup Man was in Denmark subsisting on a farmer’s diet, eating sheep and goats.
His trip to a farming community in Denmark “shows that traveling by boat is a big deal,” the study’s authors said. Vittrup Man’s long-distance movements were unusual, “but they may say something about ongoing exchanges between Danish farmers and hunters from the north,” said study co-author Karl-Göran Sjögren, a researcher in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Gothenburg.
Why Vittrup Man made such a long journey is unknown, but researchers have a few theories. He may have been a captive or a slave who became part of the local society in Denmark. Or Vittrup Man was a trader who settled in Denmark.
Archaeologists have known that flint axes were traded from Denmark to the Arctic Circle in Norway, said study co-author Lasse Sørensen, head of research on ancient Danish and Mediterranean cultures at the National Museum in Copenhagen.
“The study adds a concrete person of flesh and blood to this decision,” said Sørensen.
Studying Vittrup Man has helped researchers gain insights into the genetics, lifestyles and ritual practices that can be traced back to Stone Age societies, Sjögren said.
“Vittrup Man is an immigrant – the indisputably earliest first-generation immigrant known from Denmark and the vicinity,” Fischer said. “As far as we know, it is (the) first time that scientists have managed to map the life of a person from northern Europe in such detail and for such a long time.”
Death in the swamp
Vittrup Man had “an amazing life course before he was killed and thrown into the swamp,” said Fischer, who has researched Stone Age cultures for more than 40 years. He is particularly interested in how Denmark transitioned from a hunter-gatherer culture to a farming one around 6,000 years ago.
Why did Vittrup Man end up with a broken skull in a peat bog? The exact answer will never be known, but researchers believe he was killed as a sacrifice, which was a common practice in the region at the time.
“It seems that bogs played a special role in the religious life of northern Europe in those days,” Fischer said. “Vitrup’s Man was killed in an unusually brutal manner. Others were killed with arrow shots or strangled with cords.”
“Perhaps we should understand him as a slave who was sacrificed to the gods when he was no longer fit for hard physical labor,” study co-author Kristian Kristiansen, professor of archeology at the University of Gothenburg, said in a statement.
But it is also possible that Vittrup Man was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Based on archaeological evidence alone this is difficult to tell other than e.g. someone killed in a conflict, or robbed and killed,” said Roy van Beek, associate professor of landscape archeology at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, via email. “I think it’s quite speculative that he was a ‘slave’ or that he was in captivity, but the authors show some concern there as well.”
Van Beek was not involved in this study but was a co-author of research published in the journal Antiquity about the wealth of information bog bodies provide about prehistoric life.
“I think this is a great study that shows the enormous contribution that innovative bioarchaeological methods can make to improving our knowledge of prehistoric societies, including important aspects such as population history, migration and ways of life ,” van Beek said after reading the new study.
“Our Antiquities study shows that thousands of prehistoric and early-historic humans ended their lives in bogs across Northern Europe, and studies like this show their incredible scientific potential. And this is just one person – we’re just scratching the surface!”
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