Bronze Age Woman Had Surprisingly Modern Life
The stunningly well-preserved remains of the Egtved Girl from 3,500 years ago reveal her travels as a high-status woman of her day.
Though she died nearly 3,500 years ago, the Egtved Girl tells a surprisingly modern story.
A new analysis of the iconic Bronze Age woman, whose well-preserved remains were unearthed near Egtved, Denmark, in 1921, suggests she was born elsewhere and traveled widely during her lifetime.
Far from being the stay-at-home type, then, the Egtved Girl embodies a certain mobile cosmopolitanism.
"We have a perception of ourselves today as very developed people, like globalization is new," says Karin Frei, an archaeologist at the National Museum of Denmark and lead author of the new study, published Thursday in Scientific Reports. "But the more we look in prehistory, we can see we're already global."
Frei specializes in analyzing subtle variations in the molecular composition of
