The mystery of Europe s most famous bog bodies BBC Global

75 years ago, a small family were out digging for Pete. By chance, they found him. One of the two brothers, he hid something. They realized that it was a body, and so they called the police. They could see that it may be a murder victim, but it is a cold case. They didn't need the police for this, they needed an archaeologist. This is a bark body. It is probably 2,000 years old. The preservation of the face and the head was so extraordinary that you've seen nothing like it. This is the best preserved head and face from prehistory in the whole world, even today. When you look at Toloman, it is as if 2,400 years of age is not between us. It is like meeting a person from today. He looks as if asleep, and he has this very, very calm expression on his face. Toloman was between 30 and 40 years of age. We don't know his role. We don't know whether he was a chieftain or a priest or maybe a slave or something like that. He was clearly prepared for this moment. He was shaven. He had his last meal. We see this horrible noose around his neck that shows that he had been hanged. Graupelman is what we call a bark body. It's a body from the Iron Age that has been lowered in the bark, and he has been laying there more than 2,000 years before he saw daylight again. And he is indeed very well preserved. His skin, his bones, his muscles, his tendons, even his hair is still there. It was the 26th of April, 1952. They were digging turf for heating the houses. Teb was his name, the man who found him. He saw his head, the head of an old man with this wild red hair. It was not until five days after he was found that they were turning him around and saw this big, terrible wound in his throat. It is actually the remains of Graupelman's last meal that he had during the last 12 to 24 hours. There's both dark brown seeds in here and then there are light brown grains. But the dark brown is a mixture of nut wheat seeds and cornsberry. We only have these very few cases where we find the bark bodies where you can actually see what people were eating. The early Iron Age is roughly from around 500 BC to around the Common Era. Throughout that period we actually find the bark bodies from Ireland in the northwest and through the northwestern European lowlands. It's an area which has a lot of communication and where ideas, also religious ideas, travel easily. It's men, it's women and a few children. I think we have preserved around 350 from a very big area in northwestern Europe. In many ways the bark bodies are a mystery. Why do we have this tradition of sacrifice? They stand out markedly from the normal burial tradition because in this period everybody were burned. Here we have something which is almost the opposite. We can see that at the beginning of the Iron Age changes happen in many aspects of people's lives. They start to move together into village communities and we can also see there's a change in religion. It is a period where we can see they have occasional challenges with both the climate, with different conflicts also. We see a varied range of different offerings. We have necklaces of metal being placed in the box. We have a horse being put down, a sword, the hair of a woman and sometimes also complete cauldrons. The bark and the wetlands were certainly one of the places that they believed this is a portal even where you can reach the gods. This is a mystery landscape. It's strange because it's a limbo. The water we see as a surface between our world and the other world. It was a sacred place. There has been found tree bark bodies in this little tiny part of the lake. It's clearly been a place where they have used it to give sacrifices to the god. The bark where he was buried is a special bark. This is actually the sphagnum moss. When it dies it releases a sort of sugary component that is able to tan the keratin and the collagen of the body so that it can keep for centuries, even thousands of years. We did a lot of preparation for scanning Tolunman. I see some details here at the bottom. Maybe you can find that. We scanned the entire head but we also focused on his teeth and the vertebrae in the neck. We were very curious to see what the newest technology in the CT scans what they could show us about Tolunman. We were very curious about the neck region. Can you see that he had been hanged? There had been other theories as well about asphyxiation that would make slightly different traces in the neck area. We're scanning at a 60 micron resolution so that's thinner than a human hair. That's up to a thousand times better than in a clinical scanner. Once we were finished we had a lot of data that is now being analysed. You see the parts of the middle ear here. In a normal CT scan it would be completely blurred. So here we have the actual section of the head. We see that there's an almost completely intact eye here. We could see the eyes and the nerves going from the eyes into the brain. We could clearly see the teeth. That really amazed us right away. Wow! What we saw was that his eyes are totally preserved. Especially one eye is completely round. What are the chances of preserving a human eye in a bulk 2,400 years? This is really amazing. We were excited to learn what they have found.