Vittrup Man was a Scandinavian traveler who was beaten to death in a swamp in Denmark. Following the discovery of his remains, new research has been carried out to find out about his life and the cause of his death.
Before he was beaten to death and left in the Danish bog, the ancient individual – now known as Vittrup Man – was born more than 5000 years ago, probably in a community of Mesolithic hunter gatherers living in northern Scandinavia, as his ancestors had lived for thousands of years. But Vittrup Man spent his adult life across the sea in Denmark, among farming communities whose ancestors came from the Middle East.
It is impossible to know the lives the Vittrup Man touched during his lifetime, but it was his death that stirred the imagination of people thousands of years later. His remains – ankle and tibia bones, jawbone and a skull broken by at least eight heavy blows – were discovered in the early twentieth century next to a wooden stick in a peat bog near a town called Vittrup in northern Denmark. The case was probably murder.
University of Gothenburg archaeologist Karl-Göran Sjögren, one of the team that recently mapped Vittrup Man’s life, says Vittrup Man’s “unusually violent” death is different from other remains of similar age found in bogs.
Researchers conducted a study earlier this year looking at his ancestry. They found that Vittrup Man was related to hunter-gatherers in what are now Norway and Sweden, not to farming communities of Middle Eastern origin that arrived in Denmark hundreds of years before his death.
Sjögren thinks his origins may have been a little further north. Carbon and nitrogen isotope levels in bones and teeth, which can reveal diet, show that Vittrup Man got his calories from the ocean as a child, then switched to a diet of freshwater fish, wild game, cereals, dairy and dairy products in his youth. Researchers found protein fragments from seals, whales and fish, as well as sheep and goats, embedded in his teeth.
A childhood among northern Scandinavian hunter-fisher-gatherers may have prepared Vittrup Man for a long offshore journey to Denmark. What is unknown is why he left his acquaintances to live among farmers. Some archaeologists speculate that the Vittrup Man was captured and enslaved before being killed, a fate not unusual in early Neolithic Scandinavia, where multiple social groups coexisted.
Sjögren supports the idea that Vittrup Man lived like a foreign trader, mediating the exchange of goods between farmers and hunter-gatherers. Flint axes made of high-quality Danish stone found off the coast of Norway may have been traded for materials such as basalt from northern Scandinavia.
“Perhaps his role in society when he came of age was to establish links with the farmer who lived across the sea,” says bioarchaeologist Thomas Booth of the Francis Crick Institute in London.