Who is bog man

Beneath the cape he was naked. Whether he once wore linen clothes that have disappeared over time is unclear. He was anchored to the peat with two long wooden stakes, and around his neck was a band of willow rods likely used to strangle him. He was roughly 25 years old at the time. Meenybraddan Woman A. She was in her late 20s or early 30s when she died.

Given that she was interred in a peat bog, in what was likely an unconsecrated grave, she may have been a murder victim or a suicide. Oldcroghan Man B. He died a gruesome death, suffering repeated cuts and stabs before he was dismembered.

Experts debate whether he was a sacrifice to the gods, a criminal being punished, or perhaps both. His torso, the only part of him recovered, reveals that he was exceptionally tall for his time, standing roughly 6' 6". Lindow Man B. He was in his 20s and, unlike most bog bodies, wore a beard and moustache. Tollund Man also had several parasitic infections from whipworms and mawworms, as well as the first reported case of tapeworm ever found in an ancient body preserved in a bog, said the researchers, who made the finding by studying a piece of Tollund Man's colon.

Related: Photos of the best preserved bog people. The ancient man's remains were found in by a family from the nearby village of Tollund while they were digging for fuel in a peat bog.

His body — and the rope tied around his neck — were so well preserved, the family thought he was a recent murder victim, prompting them to call the police, according to Museum Silkeborg. But it soon became apparent that the Tollund Man had lived long ago and that the low- oxygen environment of the peat bog had preserved his remains.

Over the years, studies have found that he died between B. Tollund Man had been hanged and placed in a sleeping position in a peat pit — an "extraordinary treatment" given that most dead people from that time and place were cremated and buried on dry land, the researchers wrote in the study.

A study on Tollund Man's gut found that he chowed down on porridge for his last meal. Now, a new study published today in the journal Antiquity analyzes in detail the last meal of Tollund Man, a meal that is remarkable simply because it was, well, unremarkable. When Tollund Man was discovered 70 years ago, researchers examined his well-preserved stomach and intestinal tract and determined that the middle-aged man consumed his last meal 12 to 24 hours before his death.

In the most comprehensive gut analysis of a bog body ever conducted, researchers recovered plant macrofossils, pollen, and other indicators to reveal microscopic evidence of food and drink. Previous studies of another well-known bog victim, Lindow Man , who was sacrificed in northwest England around the first century A. But while that plant can be used for medicinal purposes, the amount found in Lindow Man was not substantial enough to be relevant, researchers say. Another earlier study looked at the presence of ergot in the remains of Grauballe Man , a Danish bog sacrifice from the time of Tollund Man.

The presence of the fungus, which attacks grain and can have severe psychoactive effects when consumed, was also too small to have had an effect on its victim and may have just been inadvertently consumed. Consistent with these earlier findings, no hallucinogens or other medicinal plants were found in the digested remains of Tollund Man.

Multiple bog bodies contain weed seeds and the threshing waste from weeds, most notably pale persicaria , commonly known as pale smartweed or curlytop knotweed. Henry Chapman , an archaeology professor at the University of Birmingham, thinks the landscape of European bogs may hold part of the key to understanding why people were sacrificed in them.

In the years before the death of Lindow Man in England, the bog he was ultimately laid to rest in was becoming much wetter, which may have signified a worsening climate and loss of agricultural land for the people who lived there. The next frontier for bog bodies lies in DNA analysis.

At this time, the acidic environment of bogs makes recovering genetic material from the victims almost impossible, but researchers think we may soon have the technology to obtain and analyze DNA from bog victims. Seamus Heaney felt it, and wrote a haunting and melancholy series of poems inspired by the bog bodies.

Before that, bodies found in bogs were often given a quick reburial in the local churchyard. To the extent that peat still gets cut at all—environmentalists oppose peat extraction in these fragile ecosystems—the job now falls to large machines that often grind up what might have emerged whole from the slow working of a hand spade.

The search for the origins of bog bodies and their secrets goes back a fairly long way, too. In , a peat-cutter found a skeleton and a plait of hair in a bog on Drumkeragh Mountain. The property belonged to the Earl of Moira, and it was his wife, Elizabeth Rawdon, Countess of Moira, who pursued what we believe to be the first serious investigation of such a find, publishing her results in the journal Archaeologia. As more bog bodies turned up, more questions got asked.

In the absence of clear answers, mythmaking and fancy rushed in to fill the void. She was clamped to the moss with small staves through her elbows and knees. Danish historian and linguist Niels Matthias Petersen identified her as Queen Gunhild of Norway, who, legend tells us, died around , and was notoriously cruel, clever, wanton and domineering.

According to the old stories, the Viking king Harald Bluetooth of Denmark enticed Gunhild over from Norway to be his bride. This explanation was not only accepted when Petersen first advanced it in , it was celebrated; Queen Gunhild became a reality star. Nicholas in Vejle.

Among the few dissident voices was that of a scrappy student, J. Worsaae, one of the principal founders of prehistoric archaeology. Worsaae believed the folklore-based identification was hooey. Moreover, a second postmortem in the year found a thin line around her neck that had gone undetected.

She had not been drowned but strangled. This changed everything, except perhaps for the victim. In the absence of hard evidence, the temptation to weave bog bodies into a national narrative proved hard to resist.

By this time, two views prevailed. It was largely accepted that the majority of bog bodies dated to the Bronze and Iron Ages, but their murder was ascribed either to ritual sacrifice or criminal punishment. This latter interpretation rested heavily on the writings of the Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus, whose Germania , written in A.

On the whole, Tacitus thought highly of the local inhabitants. He praised their forthrightness, bravery, simplicity, devotion to their chieftains and restrained sexual habits, which frowned on debauchery and favored monogamy and fidelity. To the researchers at the Ahnenerbe, bog bodies were the remains of degenerates who had betrayed the ancient code. Traitors and deserters are hanged on trees; the cowardly, the unwarlike and those who disgrace their bodies are drowned in miry swamps under a cover of wicker.

One of the few who dared was a historian of culture named Alfred Dieck, who perhaps felt himself protected by his own Nazi Party membership.

But the man who torpedoed the Aryan theory of bog bodies was prevented from working as an archaeologist after the war because of his Nazi past. Shortly after Tollund Man was discovered, the detective in charge of what was initially a missing persons investigation had the good sense to call in Peter Vilhelm Glob, who had recently been appointed professor of archaeology at the university in Aarhus, the nearest big city.

Glob, as everyone refers to him, has stamped his name more deeply than anyone else on the riddle of the bog bodies. His book, The Bog People —to the bighearted Glob, they were people, not bodies—was hailed as a modest masterpiece when it appeared in It is sharp, authoritative and moving all at once, and it remains intensely readable. Glob, who died in , succeeded not only in providing the scaffolding for our understanding of Tollund Man and his kin, but in restoring their humanity as well.

He conjured bog bodies back to life and made the world take notice of them. We can see the goddess paraded around, surrounded by fabulous animals, on the great silver Gundestrup cauldron, buried as a sacrifice in a Danish bog not far from where several Iron Age bodies were also found. And we know roughly the time of year when this occurred from the seasonal contents found in his stomach and that of other victims: barley, linseed and knotweed, among others, but no strawberries, blackberries, apples or hips from summer and autumn.