Thousands of bones from boys and men likely killed in a ferocious battle 2,000 years ago have been unearthed from a bog in Denmark, researchers said Monday.
Credit: Mads Dalegaard/Moesgaard Museum
Without local written records to explain, or a battlefield to scour for evidence, experts are nevertheless piecing together a story of the Germanic people, often described by the Romans as "barbarians" for their violent nature.
Four pelvic bones strung on a stick were among the remains of at least 82 people found during archaeological excavations at Alken Enge, on Denmark's Jutland peninsula, indicating an organized and ritual clearing of a battlefield, said the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Credit: Mads Dalegaard/Moesgaard Museum
The site, which has been studied since 2009, has yielded the earliest discovery of "a large contingent of fighters from a defeated army from the early first century AD," said the PNAS report.
"The bones are extremely well preserved," co-author Mette Løvschal, of the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies at Aarhus University, told AFP.
Credit: Mads Dalegaard/Moesgaard Museum
"And you can see stuff that you can normally not see in them, like the gnaw marks of animals and you can see the cut marks from sharp weapons. That is highly unusual," she said.
The more than 2,300 human bones were contained in peat and lake sediments over 185 acres (75 hectares) of wetland meadows. Radiocarbon-dating put them between 2 BC and 54 AD.
Credit: Mads Dalegaard/Moesgaard Museum
In this era, Roman soldiers were pressing an expansion northward, and around 7 AD, the Romans suffered a massive loss in which tens of thousands of warriors were killed by the Germanic people.
"What they do in the succeeding decades is have these military raids in Germania, basically to punish the barbarians for this huge defeat," said Løvschal. "What we actually think we are seeing here could be the remains of one of those punitive campaigns."
Credit: Ejvind Hertz, Museum Skanderborg
Løvschal said the bones appear to be from a "fairly heterogeneous population," with some as young as 13 to 14, and others as old as 40-60.
The bog is estimated to hold the remains of around 380 men who died from combat injuries.
Credit: Ejvind Hertz, Museum Skanderborg
"They do not seem to have a lot of healed trauma, from experience with previous battles," she said. "They could have had previously very little experience with battle."
The bones show weapon strikes predominantly on the right side, with few injuries around the midsection where the fighters may have been holding shields with their left arms.
Credit: Ejvind Hertz, Museum Skanderborg
Experts think the bodies may have been lying on the battlefield for quite some time, possibly six months to a year, because many bones show signs of being gnawed by dogs or wolves.
They were stripped of their personal belongings before being deposited into the bog.
Credit: Ejvind Hertz, Museum Skanderborg
Many questions remain. Who was involved in the battle? Was it tribe-against-tribe? Or Germanic fighters against Roman warriors?
And what is the meaning of stringing pelvic bones on a stick?
Credit: Ejvind Hertz, Museum Skanderborg
"Those four pelvises on a stick could almost point to having connotations to sexual humiliation," said Løvschal. "It seems to have aggressive undertones to it as well. So it has been difficult to say who did it."
Archaeologists could also see another telling change in the landscape after the battle.
Credit: Ejvind Hertz, Museum Skanderborg
Once a pastoral area including cropland, forest and grassland, it changed dramatically into a densely forested landscape for the next 800 years, said Løvschal.
"It suggests that this event had a huge impact on the people who lived there," she added. "There was a large-scale trauma to the community."
Eleven thousand years ago at the end of the last ice age, Norway was buried under a thick layer of ice. But it didn’t take long for folks to wander their way north as the ice sheet melted away. The first traces of human habitation in Norway date from roughly 9500 BC.
An excavation of a Stone Age settlement where there was a hut-like structure, dated to roughly 7000 BC [Credit: Museum of Cultural History]
Steinar Solheim is an archaeologist at the University of Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History who has worked on numerous excavations of different Stone Age settlements around Oslo Fjord. Now he and colleague Per Perrson have investigated longer-term population trends in the Oslo Fjord region, based on 157 different Stone Age settlements. All were inhabited between 8000 and 2000 BC.
The two researchers tried to determine whether the population during this time was stable, or if living conditions were better or worse for people who lived here during different periods.
A newly forested landscape
Solheim says that forests began to grow in this region after 9000 BC.
"The climate was also quite different, and it was probably a bit warmer than it is today,” he said. “We see a lot of hazel, alder, elm, and later oak, all of which are tree species that prefer warmer environments.”
This area of Norway was also much lower in elevation than it is today, since the weight of the glacial ice was enough to depress the land itself. That means the coastline at the time was also higher than it is today. Stone Age settlements were usually down by the water.
The map shows Stone Age settlements in the Oslo fjord region [Credit: Solheim & Persson, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 2018]
The people who lived here used wood to keep their fires going, and their cooking pits and fireplaces are among the few things that archaeologists can still find after many thousands of years.
But archaeological digs of the settlements also yield stone tools, residues from tool production and remainders from cooking fires. The charcoal from the fires can be used to date the site using radiocarbon dating.
In a new study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, the researchers used all available dates —512 in total— from the settlements to draw conclusions about population trends for the region between 8000 and 2000 BC.
A stable life
The researchers used a method that relies on radiocarbon dates as an indication of the amount of human activity in an area.
Excavation of the same hut-like structure as in the photograph at the top of the article [Credit: Museum of Cultural History]
The idea is to look at the temporal distribution of radiocarbon dates, to see whether the population has been stable or whether there have been major fluctuations in human activity. The researchers also used a simulation-based model to account for oversampling and for comparison.
The researchers use the simulation-based model to see whether dates from the archaeological sites show a stable population over time, or if the dates are actually more randomly distributed.
Using this approach, the researchers found that there was a stable, cohesive population in the Oslo Fjord area between 8000-2000 BC.
A little conundrum
There is also evidence of settlements that are older than this, but researchers have not found any charcoal, which makes it impossible to accurately date the settlements. This presents a bit of a conundrum, Solheim says.
"It is possible that they used something other than wood to cook with, such as blubber, but we just don’t know,” he said.
Solheim says that people may have been more mobile at the beginning of this period, but they eventually settled in more permanent locations.
“Eventually, you get a network of settlements, where some places are more specialized for hunting or fishing or for other resource use,” he said.
Solheim says that they also find traces of more permanent hut-like structures that are surrounded by berms or embankments.
A good life by the sea
If there was indeed a stable population over the millennia in the region, it means that the people living here lived well, Solheim said.
"It appears that they have managed to live quite well on the resources they found along the sea," says Solheim.
These populations also managed to survive through known climate anomalies that posed problems for other settlements during the same period.
One prominent example is the Finse event, also known as the 8.2 ka event, where there was a sudden and extreme drop in global temperatures starting around 6000 BC that persisted for two to four centuries.
This could have been catastrophic for people who lived here, but Solheim’s analysis shows that the population in the region remained stable in spite of the sudden deep freeze.
Archaeologists from the Museum of Copenhagen have made a rather sensational discovery: evidence of a settlement estimated to be around 7,000 years old.
Traces of Copenhagen’s Stone Age past were found under the resistance museum just opposite the Anglican church [Credit: Henrik Lundbak, Nationalmuseet]
During the building work for the new museum of Danish resistance at Kastellet, flint arrowheads, animal bones and even a couple of human bones have come to light, a municipal press release reveals.
“Finding a Stone Age settlement is special because it reveals the history of the area long before it became Copenhagen,” said the deputy mayor for culture and leisure, Niko Grünfeld.
Enormous historical value
“The settlement sheds light on what is under our feet and also tells us about how people lived, settled and moved around many thousands of years ago. That is of enormous historical value,” added Grünfeld.
Archaeologist think the settlement dates back to 6,400-5,400 BC and the people who lived there came from the so-called Kongemosekulturen. They were hunters in the forests and along the coasts and lived in southern Scandinavia.
At that time, the landscape of Denmark was changing markedly. The seas were rising fast so coastlines and the landscape were also changing.
Over the last 100 years there have been four to five other Stone Age settlements found in Copenhagen.
Some of the earliest animals on Earth were soft-bodied ocean-dwellers that ranged from a few inches to several feet and were shaped like circular discs, tubes, or cushion-like bags.
A Dickinsonia fossil animal of the Ediacaran era [Credit: Verisimilus (CC BY 3.0)]
While fossil impressions from the Ediacaran Era--635 to 541 million years ago--reveal their existence, little is known about this fascinating group of animal-like creatures, which preceded more complex animals with skeletons.
In a paper published in Nature Communications, researchers at the University of California, Riverside, used biomarkers in ancient rocks to learn more about the environmental conditions and food sources that sustained this group of animals, called the Ediacara Biota. Led by Gordon Love, a professor of biogeochemistry at UCR, the team studied molecular fossils, known as lipid biomarkers, made by the ancient biological communities and preserved within sedimentary rocks that contain early animal fossils. The communities they studied lived off the coast of the ancient continent Baltica--encompassing modern day Russia, Ukraine and the Baltic States--between 560 to 540 million years ago.
Love said the Ediacara Biota lived in nutrient-poor regions of the sea on the continental shelf, an extension of land under the ocean that results in relatively shallow water. Despite this oligotrophic environment, the researchers found there were sufficient nutrients and organic debris for feeding sustained by bacterial primary production and dissolved organic matter.
The team also observed a dearth of sponge biomarkers, suggesting possible niche competition between the Ediacara Biota and sponges in different marine settings.
"Different environmental conditions and nutritional resources could have selected for very different community structures in different regions of the Ediacaran oceans," Love said.
