Unearthed: Ancient Murder Mysteries | Episode 6: The Tollund Man | FD Ancient History

For more than 2,000 years... There's no written records. It's like a Roman theater. ...a Danish bog hid a mummified body. Are there any injuries? No broken bones. Experts believe it was human sacrifice. This is not a long drop hanging. It's a slow strangulation. But was it really a case of cold-blooded murder? Murder is a crime as old as time. We've got the skeleton here. What can the bones tell us? In some cases... We've got a crime scene at 10,000 feet. That's interesting. Yeah. ...have been unsolved for centuries. It's a mystery. You have his knees sticking up like this. You have here his head. Now, archaeological geneticist Professor Turi King... It tells us something about our past. ...and top homicide cop Rod Demery. I've seen hundreds of murders, and it's all about putting that puzzle together with the evidence. ...are finally unearthing the truth... So this could be an axe? Sure. ...buried in these ancient mysteries. Whether it's now or 1,500 years ago, I still want to know what made this person do what they did. Beautiful. It feels really sparsely populated. Professor Turi King is in Denmark to re-examine a case that has intrigued scientists for over 70 years. Part of my role is to really scrutinize the evidence, and part of that is kind of really keeping everybody's feet on the ground, what we know and what we don't know. Former Louisiana homicide detective Rod Demery is convinced his modern-day experience will bring fresh eyes to this old case. We're going to find out that people killed each other, you know, 5,000, 10,000 years ago, or 1,000 years ago, the same reasons they do it today, and that doesn't change. Their incident room is in Denmark's oldest family-owned castle, Rosenholm, just an hour from where the body was discovered. This is an archaeological celebrity. This is Talland Mann. Oh, wow. Very little decant. Yeah. Discovered in a marshy wetland or bog near the village of Talland, the remains were so perfectly preserved that the police thought it was a recent case, until archaeologists found out otherwise. They've actually managed to do the radiocarbon dating, so they've got him to 380 to 405 BC, over 2,000 years old. Dating it to the early Iron Age. So do you know very much about the Iron Age? Not a lot. Okay, so it's a time when here there's no written records. Around this time, the Romans were starting to expand across Europe. The Danes were living in small tribal communities. They were prodigious craftspeople, with many of their artifacts surviving today. But nothing quite as extraordinary as the Talland Mann. He's really unusual in that he still has the murder weapon with him. Oh, yeah, it looks like a ligature. Probably hanged. Having an intact murder weapon after two and a half thousand years is a rarity. No, that's typically associated with a hanging, a lynching, some sort of asphyxiation, possibly a suicide. Since his discovery in 1950, most archaeologists have come to another conclusion. Of course, the killing of human beings was a familiar way of molting the fertility of crops and so on in ancient times, and he may have been sacrificed. Yeah, well, they call it sacrifice. I consider it a murder. When you take someone's life for whatever reason, just plain old murder. So maybe there are other ways to look at this. You know, I think it'd be interesting to explore that. After unearthing the body, archaeologists took it from the crime scene to the nearby town of Silkeborg. In a process taking six months, the bog water in his cells was replaced with beeswax. This preserved the head, which was then put on display. The treatment may have altered vital evidence, but Turi is determined to find out as much as she can. I absolutely love the detective work involved in my job. I love the taking all of the strands of evidence together to piece together a picture of what's happened in somebody's life and how they've died. Archaeologist Nina Helt Nielsen has access to some of the surviving remains, including the victim's ribcage, some shoulder and arm bones, and a foot. Nina, the really amazing thing about Talland Man is just how well preserved he is. It's really extraordinary. So what's causing that? Why is he so well preserved? Well, it's because Talland Man, he has been found in a raised bog. Raised peat bogs are formed by the buildup of layers of sphagnum moss fed by rainwater. The moss removes nitrogen and oxygen from the soil, increasing acidity. With few nutrients in the soil, the bacteria that are vital for decomposition starve and die, making peat bogs ideal for mummifying any organic matter that gets thrown in. After he had been excavated at the National Museum, he was taken to the hospital where they did an autopsy. So they could see, for instance, that he was 30 to 40 years old, about 161 centimetres high. They also took out the stomach and the intestines in one piece with the contents inside. Wow. Because that's, of course, the content would be the remains of the last meal. Are there any injuries on him? There's no evidence at all for him being injured. No broken bones. Does it look like he was restrained? No, no, we can't see that. With the forensics indicating the victim was killed without a struggle, experts have presumed Tallinn man went to his death willingly. And many ancient pre-Christian cultures did practice human sacrifice, believing they'd receive better crops or fertility, be victorious in battle or stay safe from natural disasters. But with hundreds of real-life murder investigations behind him, Rod suspects the experts are wrong. When it comes to ritualistic sacrifice and willing victims, I don't think that's true. To stand up and say, you know what, hey, kill me, so all of you can be better, is kind of a ridiculous notion to me. Pursuing the murder theory, Rod heads to the crime scene, Gjeldskupdal Bog, which still exists two and a half thousand years later. It reminds him of a similar landscape close to home. I immediately thought of a Louisiana swamp. It's the same exact thing. Rod believes that the Tallinn man case may be very similar to his modern-day cases. Those swamps and bogs probably tell a million stories or a million different murders, because people that kill people dump people in those sorts of environments. Dr. Ole Nielsen from the Silkeborg Museum takes Rod to where the body was found. This is a re-established, newly re-established bog that we see now, so there are a lot of trees that would not have been there in the Iron Age. The first witness you talk to on a homicide is the person who saw the person last. It may be difficult to find out who saw him last, but then the next witness would be someone that knows that community or that history. So this area back in the Iron Age, how different would it have been? I mean, now it's pretty accessible, there are trails, but back then, what would it have looked like? It would have been a big bog. This bog would have been filled with little holes that would be filled with water. So trying to cross it, you would really have to take care. Inhospitable and dangerous, the area where the victim was found would have been hard to reach, and almost 200 feet from solid ground. This post here marks the spot. The body was found by workers who were digging the peat out of the bog to be dried and sold as fuel. A practice that has been key to survival here since the Iron Age. This is from the finding, look here, you have here his head, and here one femur going up, and here down to, this is the foot. Once the remains were uncovered, they were transported to the museum for cleaning. One thing soon became clear. While the victim's hat and the noose survived, there was no other clothing. Was he naked for any particular reason, you think? I think it was a part of the ritual that he must have been undressed. More than likely. Ole's theory of what led to Tallinn Man's death is similar to other experts. I think it would have been a public display, so to speak. This is a ritual, and a ritual is communication. If you look here, it's almost like a Roman theater. Here and on this side, there could be a lot of people witnessing that it was being done. And here out in the middle, everybody were possible to witness, to see, yes, we are really giving this sacrifice to the god. Rod now has his first suspect, a priest-like figure conducting a human sacrifice. But for him, any sense of ritual hides the killer's true motive. Ritualistic murders, I don't necessarily subscribe to the fact that the person who commits the act of murder is doing it for anything other than to satisfy their need to commit the murder. People like it when they're sanctioned by a large group of people. But I think it's an individual choice to commit a murder. Rod is adamant Tallinn Man was murdered. What about others found in bogs? There are more than 500 other bog bodies that have been discovered across Denmark, and around 700 in all of Europe. Most of them are from the early Iron Age, just like the victim near Tallinn. Many of them have had their deaths explained as ritual sacrifice. And that's something that we really want to test to see if we can see whether or not we think that that's actually the case. In ancient Mayan sacrifices, some remains have been found with hallucinogenic drugs in them, which may have made them more willing to go to their deaths. Could the Tallinn Man, whose body showed no signs of struggle, have been drugged before he died? Tori's come to Copenhagen, where she's tracked down Dr. Peter Steen Henriksen. And the victim's stomach contents, nearly two and a half thousand years after his death. This brown sediment here, it's actually his last meal. And I've taken some of this and put it under the microscope. Will you try to see? Yeah, I would love to. Oh, that's so cool. Tori's been fascinated by science ever since she was a young child. My mom was a nurse and my dad was an engineer. So my mom did have all these nursing textbooks around and bought me a microscope very early on. I think I've just always been interested in science, medicine, history. And now I get to work in a field where I get to bring all of those things together. The ingredients of the victim's last meal are readily identifiable. Most of the particles are barley, with various small plant seeds, including flax, mixed in. You can see nearly entire seeds. That's extraordinary. He grinded it before making porridge. But within this ordinary-seeming porridge mix, there are stranger ingredients too. Small splinters of charcoal and numerous grains of sand. I would say for a normal meal, I would not put in, for example, sand. So this sort of waste material, are they adding it afterwards, or is it just they haven't been very tidy? We can't be totally sure. When they are threshing, they did it on the floor, which means when they pick it up, it's full of seeds and sand and whatever was lying on that floor. But Peter thinks there's too much waste material to be simply poor hygiene. I think they have been actually mixing it afterwards. So it sounds like it's deliberate. Is it to bulk it out because food is scarce? I don't think so. I think it's actually some kind of ritual meal. The meal is similar to that found in other bog bodies. To discover if the Talland victim is typical of other finds in Denmark, Turi is traveling to Vejle, just 40 miles south of the crime scene, where another well-preserved bog body has been found. She's meeting curator Charlotta Lindblom. This is a very interesting bog body. It was actually the first one found in Denmark in 1835. Found and kept complete, the female body dubbed Herald Scar Woman, after the place she was found, looks very like the Talland man. It's not so clear when you see her now, but you can see it on the back of her neck. She was hanged or garroted. And there's another similarity too. From the descriptions at the moment she was found, that she was naked. Why do you think that is? Well, I think there are two possible explanations. Some kind of a symbolic thing that maybe you come naked to the world, you go naked. Or if it was a murder, it could also be some kind of a humiliation thing. But despite the similarities, there is one crucial difference. Unlike the victim in Talland, Herald Scar Woman was surrounded by sacrificial objects. Her clothes, cap and a lock of hair were neatly placed beside her. Her body was also crisscrossed with branches holding her down. How do we know somebody's not just dropped something? Because it's very carefully put there. Hair, piece of hair. Like, I don't know the English word for when you just like... You braid your hair. That could be a woman asking for fertility. Herald Scar Woman's relics are convincing evidence of his sacrificial killing. Talland Man has nothing like that. For Turi, it's a turning point. Starting out on this case, I had always gone with the standard archaeological view, which was that Talland Man was a sacrifice. Now I'm not entirely sure about that. Rod's view is still that this is a murder case, and he's working it like he would any other. He's tracking down more witnesses who can tell him about Talland Man's life. He's come to Denmark's largest replica Iron Age village to meet curator and archaeologist Dr. Mads Ravn. How did people live back then? Well, you lived in a long house. You had the animals on one side of the house, and the people, a large family, maybe of 10 or 12, the parents, the grandparents, were living on the other side. And in that sense, they warm each other. These were farming communities. But between 600 and 300 BC, the climate here was wet and cold, making the land frozen or waterlogged for much of the year. A village where people could gather around a shared grain store was essential for their survival. It was probably a tough life. It was, you know, a struggle to get the food you needed. You could have illnesses and diseases coming. In a food-deprived small community, Rod is starting to see the possibility of a new suspect. How was law and order back then? How did it work? I think it's a community thing, because you were actually a very egalitarian society in some ways, so you had to have the backup of the whole group of people. Rod wants to explore the possibility that the victim did something that needed to be severely punished. Could he have even been a murderer himself? So, hanging. Was that a criminal punishment? Is that something that was common? Most likely it was. So it could have just been a criminal? Yeah, in the sense of breaking the community laws and the taboos, yes. When you think about it, the person who carried out this killing could be a representation of law. You know, sort of fixing a wrong. Punishing a violator. Rod has his second suspect. For him, a public display of law and order fits with this small community. If all of the people come together and they agree, more or less, that this person should be punished, hanged or whatever, then Tullaman's going to meet that fate. Rod and Turi regroup in the incident room. So what's your thinking at the moment? I think it's probably someone that was murdered for some sort of criminal act. That would be the first thought. But I don't believe it would be a sacrifice. Yeah. It's kind of overplayed. It can be something that I think when you're not quite sure what's going on, sometimes people start to use ritual as a way to go, well, maybe this is a way of explaining it. And that's actually the danger. You know, the fact that they start to romanticize or put a story together that when you really think about it, doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I think the basic beginning is to find out about the murder. Any deliberate constriction of the neck by ligature or noose is extremely dangerous and likely to result in death. But in this case, there's an important distinction to be made. Hanging requires a rope strong enough to support the victim's weight. But a strangling only needs a rope strong enough to constrict blood vessels or airways in the neck. To try to rule out one or the other method of attack, Turi and Rad have found Lauren Blom Kristansa, a traditional leather worker who is making a near replica of the rope found with Talland Mann. And we had to put the ladder in water because it's very stiff. Iron Age Danes were expert leather workers. Leather, jewelry, shoes and animal harnesses have all been found in bogs. I can think of a lot of uses for it, I would imagine. You know, if you want to keep an animal tied to a post or something like that. Or take your thing with you. Yeah. As a strap. Yeah. Rope making like this would have been an important part of everyday life. And you always have the animals outside. Right. To take the skin off. Looks like you got that down to a science show. Well, it's very simple. But the weaving presumably gives it extra strength. Yeah, it kind of doubles it. Yeah. This is incredibly strong. I think this would absolutely take the weight of a man. Easily. The rope could have been used to hang or garrot tall and man. But Rod has taken something else away from the demonstration. I think it's really significant that the ligature was still on the body. And more importantly, what the ligature was. It doesn't seem to be a hangman's noose. I don't think it was something that was designed to kill him. I think it was, that was its secondary purpose. Ropes like this were an everyday item for many Danes. I think the weapon used to kill someone tells a lot about the suspect, actually. So I think access to the weapon, obviously the skill needed to use that type of weapon, says a lot. If the noose was improvised, the idea of a formal execution for a crime now seems unlikely. Well, think telephone cord. Present day, it was used for a phone, right? But there were so many cases where people strangled with telephone cords. Because it's nearby and it's handy. It's nearby, it's handy and it works. Yeah, yeah. And this is not out of the ordinary. No, no. And it's part of the Iron Age toolkit. Many uses. Yeah. Unfortunately, in this case, this was used to kill him. Yeah. But Rod's experience tells him that an improvised noose can be used in another tragic way. I've worked several suicides where people have hanged themselves. Today, hanging is one of the most frequently used methods of suicide worldwide. And cops often recognize the typical forensics. I understand ligatures. I understand why people do it and how they do it and what actually kills them. So I've had a lot of experience. And those types of deaths. In the United States today, suicide exceeds motor vehicle accidents as a cause of death. To try and rule suicide in or out of this case, Tori and Rod need to see what evidence remains on the victim's neck. So they've come to Silkeborg Museum, where Ole is allowing them a close-up view of Talland Man's perfectly preserved head and noose. I see remains all the time, but this kind of preservation, it's amazing. To see something this old, this ancient, that's really fresh. It's incredible. Yeah. And it looks like he's just fallen asleep. It does, doesn't it? Yeah. Ole, what can you tell us about Talland Man? You can see him lying like in a sleeping position. But the body is a replica. It's a reconstruction based on the photos from the time when he was excavated. But the noose, the belt, and his wonderful face, this is original. In 1951, scientists replaced the bog water in the head with beeswax, creating probably the best preserved mummified face in any museum on the planet. This is what he's so famous for. A man here looks like a person asleep. The nose is slightly crooked because of the pressure of the peat. Look at his eyes, the eyelids. You can see that the eyeballs are still there because of the curvature of the eyelids. And his lips are preserved, which is very rare with the body. It's incredible. You don't have to be a corpse for a very long time before the lips are destroyed. So this is very, very exceptional to have a face preserved to this degree. Even his facial hair is present two and a half thousand years after his death. It's believed he was clean shaven, but death slackened his skin, revealing the hairs. A person that could wake up at any moment, I think. He does. He looks so peaceful. And it's so at odds with how he died. Yes. While the face and noose are original, the museum display has unfortunately hidden important evidence. I'm curious about the ligature. This is the exact position it was found in? Not quite. It was underneath the body. Today, Tallinn man lies on his left hand side. But when he was found, he was lying on his right hand side. The effects of thousands of years of gravity written on his bones and face. So when the museum made the replica of the body, they displayed it with the more preserved lifelike side up. We have turned him upside down. And added the noose back on the wrong side so that visitors could see it. Now it's loose in the very low down, but originally it was very tight and very, very high up. In the tail end of the ligature. Yeah, that was, it looks like it's been cut off. You can see it on the photos. Frustratingly, the original marks from the noose on the neck are now hidden. On the original body, you can still see the imprint. Right. From that. It still has an impression from. Yeah, that was my question. Could you see it on the skin? Yes. Yes. Moving or touching this unique artifact is out of the question. So hands-on forensic analysis is impossible. Tallinn man is extraordinary. I mean, he's incredibly well preserved. But what I want to do next is I want to find out about this injury. Was he hanged or was he strangled? Luckily, there is a way to answer one of this mystery's key questions. In the hope of seeing for herself the marks on Tallinn man's neck, Turi's back in Copenhagen. This time to meet professor Niels Linnerup, whose team has made a 3D scan of the victim's head. So Niels, what can you see about Tallinn man from this? Basically, CAT scanning is sort of an X-ray procedure, but we get a lot of slices. And this software here then allows us to build a 3D of that given structure. So, for instance, here you can see the. The face. It's incredible, isn't it? The marks Turi needs to see are on the back of the neck. The pathologist who was called to look at the Tallinn man when he was found, said he could still see what he calls sort of an inverted V. Yeah, it's the V. Yeah, which means that the noose, you know, has been strung up, which gives you sort of indentation in the skin. Yeah. And by rotating the model, those same marks are still clearly visible. And that means that he was hung. He wasn't like strangulated, otherwise you would have a completely circular. And it's lower down, isn't it? Usually lower down. The scan also reveals another hidden clue. The tongue, it would be consistent with hanging, because this sort of pushes the tongue more to the front, which points to a hanging subject. With hanging conclusively proven, Turi's wondering if the forensics can go one step further. There's two different types, really, of hanging. There's the long drop, sudden drop like that. In a sudden drop hanging, common in suicide, the hyoid bone, a horseshoe-shaped bone in the front of the neck, is often broken. And then there's the slightly slower, non-sudden asphyxiation. In these cases, where a victim is hauled up under their own weight, the hyoid bone usually remains intact. So were there any broken bones in his neck? No. No, that's something we quite specifically looked at. We didn't find any fractures there. Science is suggesting the victim died by being strung up on a rope. If so, it could have been a punishment killing, or maybe another scenario. Because of the weight of a fully grown man, Niels thinks there must have been more than one assailant to haul him up. Perhaps a group of people working against him in a mob. Lynchings, for instance, as we know, they happen, and we have unfortunate photographs from, you know, when that did happen. It was often a person strung up, you know, on, you know, whatever tree was near us. And no scaffolding, no drop. No, just people around pulling. Yeah. For Rod, the theory brings up a dark chapter in U.S. history. The thing that just immediately comes to mind is the KKK. I mean, they had ritualistic sacrificial deaths, but the victims were still murdered. From the 19th century onwards, the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan lynched and murdered as many as six and a half thousand black Americans. They had these rituals where they dress up, they light candles, burn crosses, recite Bible verses, but they were just murdering someone. In late medieval Europe, tens of thousands of people were ceremonially executed in the belief that they were witches. In an insular, tribal world, Rod wonders if the victim might have been considered different because he came from further afield. What I'm looking for is maybe somebody that can say, this group of people only existed in this part of the country, and this person was found here. You know, something that's out of the ordinary. Talon Man has been studied for 70 years, but Turi knows that scientists continue to investigate. I love it because I get to go and meet scientists who are working in areas that I don't normally get to work in. Archaeological scientists, professors Robert and Karen Margarita Frye have analyzed elements called isotopes from the victim's hair and bones. These might reveal whether he was a local or an outsider from another tribe. An isotope is one of two or more forms of the same chemical element, and strontium isotopes have proved useful in tracking movements of people. Strontium is stored in teeth, hair, and bones. It enters the food chain through plants that have absorbed it from the soil. Levels of strontium isotopes have been mapped all across Europe, including Denmark, so experts can estimate where long-dead people lived. The hair of the Talon Man was about three and a half to four centimeters long. The hair grows about one centimeter per month, so it tells us something about the last four months of his life. Karen and Robert analyzed the hair's strontium levels. So can you see this picture now? Yes. We saw that most probably the Talon Man in his last four months was residing in this local area. If Talon Man was local, Rod's hunch that he was lynched because he was an outsider is wrong. Does this mean that we can go no further back than four months on Talon Man? What we did is actually an analysis of the femur. The femur, or thigh bone, grows much more slowly than hair. And strontium found here tells the scientists about the last 10 years of the victim's life. So we can compare the femur signature with that of the hair, and what we could see is that they are different. The femur bone has a lower strontium isotopic signatures than the hair has, and there's not many areas which have so low strontium isotopic signatures. And if you focus on the Talon Man site here in a red dot, the femur bone has a strontium isotopic signatures which is lower. We would have to then go into the bluish colors, so that's most likely the Talon Man had come from that area to the north, about 50 kilometers away from the site. Well, that was pretty fascinating. It was. It was very interesting. Despite being local in the months leading up to his death, Talon Man actually spent the majority of his last decade alive outside of the area he was found in. Rod's hunch that the Talon Man could be an outsider from another tribe now has some evidence. Science is based on fact and things that you can prove. Homicide investigations are based on hunches and instinct and faith. You need the science to validate your hunch or your instinct or your faith. I think they kind of go hand in hand. Certainly a scientist doesn't have the passion for hunting killers, you know, they have the passion for doing science. Rod's instinct that the victim was an outsider means he can now add one more suspect to the list. There is evidence from the time of people being held as hostages by rival tribes and then executed. Maybe Talon Man strayed from his local area and was killed because of it. Hostages are described as being murdered really brutally. Rod and Turi head back to the incident room to take stock of the investigations so far. It sounds like we've got our four suspects. Pretty much so. And I suppose all those are very viable. I think our trick now is to kind of narrow it down and see which one fits best. I think that's our challenge. Rod wants to find out more about why and how people were killed back in the Iron Age. It was a violent time. In another bog over 20 miles away, a mass tribal battle grave of up to 380 individuals has been found. A tangle of crushed skulls, naked bodies with their intestines removed, and other horrific injuries shocked the archaeologists who discovered them. Maybe this brutality holds vital clues. In a lot of cases, there's that one little piece of evidence that you're looking for. Rod's meeting early Iron Age archaeologist Dr. Melanie Giles to see if she can help him crack the case. I'm curious, with the violence during that period, what was going on? We have some written sources by the Romans who encountered the tribes around Denmark, and they are trying to make sense of some of this frenzy of violence that we see very commonly in the Iron Age. The Romans expanded relentlessly across what we now call Europe between about 510 BC and 120 AD. And while they never colonized as far as Germania or Denmark, they did visit and trade. And the tribes they met were both feared and documented by several of their most important authors. One, of course, is Julius Caesar himself. Caesar writes about three centuries after Talon Man's death. Having once conquered the forces of the Gauls in battle, I don't know how to pronounce that. Ariovistus. Ariovistus is exercising a proud and cruel tyranny, demanding his hostages as children of the great nobles. I make no doubt that he will inflict the severest punishment on all the hostages in his keeping. So this is a passage that tells us that torture and the taking of high status hostages is part of the power play, part of the way in which those local tribes have authority over each other. Caesar's description of hostages from rival tribes backs up the idea of Talon Man being killed far from home. And even his living locally for the four months before his death. Those people who experience suffering and a violent death may actually be from the highest echelons of society and this may be about rivalries between tribes where honor and renown is earned from that taking of them, parading of them, keeping them alive for a bit and then finally deciding on the moment of their death. And it's about humiliation for him and it's about earning honor for yourself. Melanie also thinks the mode of hanging supports this theory. This is not a long drop hanging. It's a slow strangulation. And that might be a way of humiliating somebody further. But Caesar wasn't the only Roman writer documenting the Germanic tribes. Tacitus would be one of the other authors that we glean a rather different insight from. Okay, let's see what he says. Traitors and deserters are hanged on trees. The cowardly, the unwarlike and those who disgrace their bodies drown in swamps under the cover of wicker. It's an almost uncanny description with a direct link to both the victim's mode of murder and the disposal of his body. A deserting soldier might well lack injuries and be a possible victim. He talks about cowardly, he talks about unwarlike and he talks about disgracing their body and it kind of seems to me that he's talking about masculinity or the lack thereof. Yeah, these are a set of values that are about what it is to be a man in Iron Age society. But with Caesar and Tacitus offering different interpretations of tribal violence there's still lots to think about. We have to kind of figure out which one fits best. Yes, they're telling us that bulk bodies are not one thing. Every one of them has a story behind them and it's our job to try and unpick that and unfold it from the evidence that we have. Toland Mann is one of the most well-known archaeological figures on the planet. Since the day his body was discovered the majority of historians and scientists have interpreted his death as sacrifice. But Rod has a new take on this oldest of cases. I don't know what historians or archaeologists might think of a homicide detective especially an American homicide detective. They are from a world of science and academia and I've worked the gritty streets. I mean it's like how do those two things come together? Can Rod find a narrative that makes sense of all the evidence? I think Toland Mann was killed by an angry mob. I think there were some villagers that just didn't like the way he lived and I think that was punishable by death. It was a person who had a different history which most likely was deviant from the normalcy of the time. Rod believes the villagers saw him as an outsider. Who acted differently. I think there was probably some sort of group of people I think they posse'd up, found him and they strung him up. Lynchings for instance. As we know that happened on you know whatever tree was nearest. Didn't have to be a high distance just enough to create that unconsciousness. It's a slow strangulation and that might be a way of humiliating somebody further. The fact that he was disposed of in a bog says a lot about what they thought of him as a person. There's nothing nice about a bog. If you look here it's almost like a Roman theater. There could be a lot of people witnessing that he was being done. I think it was naked. It could be some kind of a humiliation thing. It feels like a hate crime. I think it's a community thing. You have to have the backup of the whole group of people. And when people are offended they do things like this. The cowardly, the unwarlike and those who disgrace their bodies who drown in swamps. I think Tacitus was on the money and I think the evidence matches it. Rod believes the Talon man was murdered by a lynch mob. Having come to a 2,400 year old case with fresh eyes. Rod thinks he's unearthed a story that fits the evidence. I think the scientists have a go-to. You know it's a sacrifice or it's some sort of religious ritual or something along those lines. No it's just pretty much hate. For Turi it's a reminder that even the oldest cases still have mysteries to unearth. There has been a consensus for a long time that this was a sacrifice. And I think it's one of these cases where it just shows that it's important to keep questioning, still keep gathering evidence to see if we can understand what happened in this case. However, Rod's new take on Talon man's death is bound to be met with skepticism by experts. I don't feel like I'm challenging beliefs. What I feel like is that I'm offering a new vision. Getting people to look at it in a different way. And it's only fair. I mean I looked at the ritualistic sacrificial side of it. So why don't you look at the homicide side of it?