New analysis by a workforce of archeologists in Scandinavia is shedding gentle on a person who died a brutal demise within the space of Northwest Denmark greater than 5,000 years in the past.
“Vittrup Man” was first found in a peat bathroom in northern Denmark in 1915. It was evident that he’d died a brutal death, having acquired at the very least eight blows from a membership over his physique.
For greater than a century, this was all that was identified in regards to the ancient man.
Now, researchers have mapped out essential particulars of his life, figuring out that he lined a large geographical space earlier than his demise, someday round 3,200 BCE.
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“Vittrup Man” was first found in northern Denmark in 1915. (College of Gothenburg)
The person seemingly grew up in northern Norway however, for some cause, traveled to Denmark in his late teenagers. It was there that his weight-reduction plan modified from fish to meals produced by agriculture.
“He comes from the north, from a relatively cold area, and it must have been a coastal area because the food he ate as a child came from the sea,” mentioned archaeologist Karl-Göran Sjögren, who was a member of the analysis workforce.
The researchers decided the “Vittrup Man” seemingly spent 10 to twenty years in a farming group in Denmark earlier than he was “brutally clubbed to death.”
The revolutionary strategies in DNA evaluation, evaluation of dental calculus, and isotope evaluation, are opening new home windows into the lives of historic peoples.
Anders Fischer, who’s a part of the Swedish-Danish workforce that’s linked to the College of Gothenburg, mentioned such strategies allow researchers to “follow this individual’s geographical and dietary development from birth to death.”
“As far as we know, this is the first time researchers have been able to map a person’s life history in such great detail and from so long ago,” Fischer mentioned.
A cartoon depiction of an historic man assembly a brutal demise. (Niels Bach through College of Gothenberg)
The examine, printed in Nature, is a component of a bigger examine analyzing the genomes and DNA of the prehistoric Nordic inhabitants. “Vittrup Man” is a part of an evaluation of 100 enamel and bone stays present in Denmark.
Researchers have been notably drawn to “Vittrup Man” as a result of his genome “differed markedly from the rest of the Danish Stone Age population,” mentioned Fischer.
“[H]e was closely related to contemporary people living on the Scandinavian peninsula, in what is now northern Norway and Sweden,” Fisher mentioned. “This is why we chose to study his origins and life history in detail.”
It stays unclear how “Vittrup Man” ended up in Denmark or why he was clubbed to demise and archaeologists can solely speculate. Researchers have speculated he might have been sacrificed.
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“The study now adds a real flesh and blood human being to these finds,” mentioned Lasse Sørensen, an knowledgeable within the Neolithic interval on the Nationwide Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen and a member of the analysis workforce.
