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Before he was bludgeoned to death and left in a Danish bog, an ancient individual now known as Vittrup Man was an emblem of past and future ways of living.<\/p>\n
He was born more than 5,000 years ago into a community of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who probably lived in northern Scandinavia as their ancestors had for millennia. But Vittrup Man spent his adult life across the sea in Denmark among farming communities, whose ancestors came from the Middle East.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s impossible to know the lives that Vittrup Man touched during his lifetime, but it was his death that caught people\u2019s imagination thousands of years later. His remains \u2014 ankle and shin bones, a jawbone and a skull fractured by at least eight heavy blows \u2014 were discovered in the early twentieth century in a peat bog near a town called Vittrup in northern Denmark, alongside a wooden club that was probably the murder weapon.<\/p>\n
If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing<\/a>. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.<\/p>\n His \u201cunusually violent\u201d death distinguished Vittrup Man from other similarly aged remains found in bogs, says Karl-G\u00f6ran Sj\u00f6gren, an archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who co-led a team that charted Vittrup Man\u2019s life in a study published last week.<\/p>\n But nothing else about Vittrup Man stood out until researchers examined his ancestry for a study that came out earlier this year. Vittrup Man, they learnt, was related to hunter-gatherers from what is now Norway and Sweden, and not to the farming communities with Middle Eastern roots that had arrived in Denmark hundreds of years before his death.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is an indication that his origin may be a bit further north,\u201d says Sj\u00f6gren, possibly near the Arctic Circle where people still lived by fishing, hunting and gathering. Carbon and nitrogen isotope levels in bones and teeth, which can reveal aspects of diet, suggest that Vittrup Man got his calories from the ocean as a child, before transitioning to freshwater fish and wild game as a teenager and a diet including cereals, dairy and meat typical of farming communities starting as a young adult. Incorporated into his teeth, the researchers found protein fragments from seals, whales and fish as well as sheep or goats.<\/p>\n A childhood among northern Scandinavian hunter-fisher-gatherers might have prepared Vittrup Man for a long open-sea voyage to Denmark. What\u2019s not clear is why he left the familiar to live among farmers. Some archaeologists, including some of Sj\u00f6gren\u2019s co-authors, surmise that Vittrup Man was taken captive and enslaved before being killed \u2014 a fate not uncommon in early Neolithic Scandinavia, when numerous social groups coexisted.<\/p>\n Sj\u00f6gren favours the idea that Vittrup Man lived like a foreign merchant, mediating the exchange of goods between farmers and hunter-gatherers. Flint axes made of high-quality Danish stone, which have been identified along the Norwegian coast, could have been traded for materials from northern Scandinavia such as basalt.<\/p>\n \u201cMaybe once he came of age, his role in society was to establish connections with farmer that lived across the sea,\u201d says Thomas Booth, a bioarchaeologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London. He lived with the farmers for the last decades of his life, but it\u2019s not inconceivable that he voyaged back and forth between homes old and new, adds Sj\u00f6gren.<\/p>\n What, then, of Vittrup\u2019s Man violent death, probably in his early thirties? Dozens of Neolithic human remains \u2014 many of them young males, like Vittrup Man \u2014 have been discovered in bogs, and archaeologists think ritual sacrifice explains many of these deaths. Many of these people had bone malformations that would have marked them out among their peers, but not Vittrup Man, says Sj\u00f6gren.<\/p>\n Genome analysis suggests that Vittrup Man was blue-eyed and his skin may have been darker than typical Neolithic farmers, but his dark hair colour and height wouldn\u2019t have stood out. \u201cWhy they chose to sacrifice some people, it\u2019s really hard to say,\u201d says Sj\u00f6gren.<\/p>\n Vittrup Man\u2019s hunter-gatherer ancestry more or less vanished from all of Scandinavian in the centuries after his death, and it\u2019s not clear if any close relatives survived him. Researchers sequencing ancient human genomes by the hundreds have begun to build genealogies of ancient families, and it\u2019s not inconceivable that a relative could one day be found.<\/p>\n The life \u2014 and death \u2014 of Vittrup Man goes to the heart of one Europe\u2019s biggest transitions, says Booth, when hunter-gathering communities like his sat on the edge of a new way of life. \u201cIt gives you a sense of the worlds that these people are inhabiting.\u201d<\/p>\n This article is reproduced with permission and was <\/i>first published<\/i><\/a> on February 21, 2024.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n