Who Were the Ancient Bog Mummies? Surprising New Clues
Ongoing research suggests at least two 2,000-year-old corpses had traveled before their deaths.
Cast into northern European wetlands, bog bodies have long appeared as opaque to archaeologists as their dark and watery graves. But new clues are coming in the centuries-old mystery of their origins.
Over 500 Iron Age bog bodies and skeletons dating to between 800 B.C. and A.D. 200 have been discovered in Denmark alone, with more unearthed in Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. (Read "Tales From the Bog" in National Geographic magazine.)
Much of the bodies' skin, hair, clothes, and stomach contents have been remarkably well preserved, thanks to the acidic, oxygen-poor conditions of peat bogs, which are made up of accumulated layers of dead moss.
In Denmark, about 30 of these naturally mummified corpses are housed in
