Die Schamanin von Bad Dürrenberg: Spurensuche am Skelett der Schamanin | Archäologie exklusiv

NEW RESEARCH INTO THE BAD SHAMAN OF DÜRRENBERG We are in one of the warehouses of the State Museum with thousands of finds. HARALD MELLER: STATE ARCHAEOLOGIST OF SAXONY-ANHALT In our anthropology examination room, Professor Orschiedt studies the skeleton of the Bad Dü

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shaman. The reason we are studying him is that we want to know about his life and his death. We want to know why he was a shaman, if there are any physical clues and we want to know if he was healthy, how tall he was, how he lived, what he ate, etc. One aspect is forensic anthropology, traditional anthropology coupled with genetics.

That's what we're investigating and we're very excited to see what Professor Orschiedt will find, if he can discover the cause of death, for example. IN SEARCH OF CLUES ABOUT THE SHAMAN'S SKELETON Hello Jörg, good to see you. - Hello. This is the famous burial or skeleton of Bad Dü

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. Looking at this from above, the only thing is the teeth, right? The skull has been surprisingly preserved. That's how it is. We have both front teeth, the front teeth with the two openings into the nerve chambers. JÖRG ORSCHIEDT: ANTHROPOLOGIST, LDA SAXONIA-ANHALT And here is the foramen magnum, two things that are very relevant to this piece.

The teeth really are of fantastic quality. They are perfectly preserved, they are not missing any teeth. Very healthy teeth, which is normal for a hunter-gatherer because he didn't eat sugar. We have bad teeth because of sugar. He had good teeth, but the strange thing is that these two teeth were filed down. How could that have happened? Was He using them for something or was it intentional? This could not have happened through natural use. Because when the teeth are worn down by natural wear or by using tools or by chewing leather, etc., adventitial dentin is formed. That means the nerve chamber closes automatically. - Good.

The tooth reacts. That's not the case here, so it must have happened so quickly that the tooth didn't have a chance to form adventitious dentin. Well. So when people chew on things like leather, as Eskimo women do, the tooth regenerates and doesn't wear down. - Good. It's a quick process. But I can see here that a small, narrow file has been used to file individual teeth without affecting the others. We suspect that the teeth have been tampered with. In other words, the material has been removed by any means. It must have been very fast... But the surface shows no traces of the process, no grooves or polishing marks.

It is completely smooth. But, like I said, the nerve chamber is exposed. And the blood came out so that the tooth would not turn black. - Yes. That's probably the reason why the teeth didn't turn black, because it was so fast that the blood could come out. That must have caused inflammation, right? He did it. There are signs of inflammation here in the upper jaw. There is slight porosity here which indicates an infection. Head infections are dangerous. Could the shaman have died because of it? It would be possible if the infection had reached the bloodstream through the sinuses.

It has not progressed to the point of being life-threatening here. It must have been extremely painful and extremely uncomfortable. So the cause of death was probably something else. It is possible, but unlikely. - That's how it is. But it must have caused agony. - Absolutely. When it was done? Was it recent or when she was a child? It must have been relatively early when she was a little girl. At some point then. It is very reminiscent of initiation rites, where pain is caused to remember something, to mark a special person. It's possible that it has something to do with that, but like I said, there aren't many parallels for that kind of thing in the Mesolithic.

But in modern Africa... - Yes. ...people file their teeth to have leopard teeth. That kind of things. You can't tell from the outside... - Exactly. ...whether it was an initiation or something that didn't need to be visible. It was important to the person. - Good. This permanent pain appears to have been deliberate. The interesting thing is that you can't see it from the outside. It has been made to make the tooth look intact. But if you look inside you can see that it has been filed diagonally downwards. This involved creating a fairly serious dental injury that caused permanent pain and recurring infection, and could be life-threatening.

There must have been a reason. It is a cultural phenomenon. This must be stated and it is exciting, and it makes this woman special. But when I look closer, I can see a bulge here in the foramen magnum from a blood vessel or similar. That's unusual, right? Sometimes irregularities like these appear in the foramen magnum. They are impressions of veins or blood vessels. Normally, it is not a problem in itself. But there are other features that show, for example, that the first cervical vertebra is incomplete. It is not fully formed. It's just... - It's a genetic defect.

Where there would be an

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shape, there is only a small peg. If I put it here, you can clearly see that when the head moves back, this little arm that is still there ends up right where this blood vessel enters. It would have squeezed the blood vessel. When she moved her head back, the blood vessel would have closed. This would have caused a reaction. Yes, it could have provoked a reaction. In addition to that, we have the second vertebra that appeared with the new finds when the tomb was re-excavated. These go together and this one also has an anomaly.

A hump has formed on this branch that would have pinched the blood vessel when it was turned to the side. Then when she looks back and to the sides... And to the sides. - ...the glass is pinched twice. Once directly in the foramen magnum and once through the second vertebra. He was pinched in two places which could cause physiological reactions. - That's how it is. What reactions could it provoke? We don't know exactly. We are doing clinical trials and collecting data. The cervical spine usually presents anomalies, especially the first vertebra. We are collecting data on that to get to the bottom of the matter.

A doctor told me that there is a possibility of the eyes moving up and down, which would be very strange. It is currently being tested, but it would be an unusual and disconcerting sight because the eyes do not blink like this deliberately. That is one option of what could happen. It is also theoretically possible that nothing happens. But this case would seem to combine a number of factors, and we're trying to figure out how, based on clinical data, this affects patients and what happens to them. How do neurological deficits manifest? We know various symptoms, from unpleasant tingling to actual signs of deficit because certain parts of the brain temporarily do not receive a full blood supply.

But when you have a nystagmus, an eye movement... - Right. ...when the eye blinks, you can see the whites of the eyes, it's amazing. We have some very unique remains here. So there could be a medical reason for this. Burial has been associated with shamanism. We could have a long discussion about what shamanism is. But Siberian shamans, for example, were often sick or special in some way. They could have epileptic seizures or similar. This was not seen as a disease but as a sign, and together with this deliberate manipulation of the teeth in childhood, it could indicate that this person's destiny was recognized from an early age.

And it could be related to this deterioration. - Exactly. At least, that is one hypothesis that could explain why this tomb is so special. You examined the grave. If I understand correctly, you established that this tomb has other unique characteristics. For example, Mesolithic people lived outdoors and were hunter-gatherers. They were fit and muscular, ate a natural diet and were very athletic by modern standards. But you told me that her muscles were quite weak, so she would have spent more time sitting and less time moving, a bit like us. She probably didn't need to go hunting. How does the skeleton tell you that?

Several things. First of all, the person's physique is quite delicate. There is not much mass in the bones. For example, the upper part of this arm is quite thin and there are not many muscle attachments. In hunter-gatherers, however, it is usually the lower limbs that are usually very strong. Look, for example, at the lower leg. They are people who walked a lot. They moved all the time. That is why we assume that the leg muscles must be very well developed. And there are examples where that is the case. A leg like this leads us to conclude that this person did not move much.

So she wasn't always walking. Another striking feature is that she is relatively young. She probably died when she was thirty years old. And you can already see signs of wear on the spine. For example, here where the lumbar vertebrae join the thoracic spine and here in the thoracic spine, some sections have slight formations on the sides. This means that the edges of the spine have changed, the intervertebral discs have worn out, and the vertebrae are touching each other. These are signs of degeneration. We can deduce that she probably did quite a bit with her upper body.

But her body was not under much physical strain. Can you determine the cause of death if it wasn't the teeth? Because otherwise her teeth look great and she looks healthy. The cause of death does not appear on her bones. That's how it is. And this person shows no signs of osteoarthritis or other changes in her joints. The joints look new, apart from the spine here, there are no signs to suggest that she could have been seriously ill in any way and that her body was under stress. Her physical condition is very healthy. There are no signs of inflammation on the bone surfaces, which are very well preserved.

We would see it differently. There is nothing. - Amazing. This person is 9000 years old. And her bones have been perfectly preserved. Very well preserved, yes. The damage we're seeing was probably caused when she was found. It was stored in calcareous sediments. -Yes. That's probably why she is so well preserved. She hasn't degraded herself at all. It really is a fantastic feature. In short, she died relatively young, when she was in her thirties. We don't know how she died. When she was a child she underwent a painful cultural procedure that involved opening her two front teeth. And in a way that allowed the blood to flow so that they would not become blackened and she could not be seen from the outside.

She had something to do with internal pain, which reappeared as she became inflamed. She was probably a notable person in her childhood because she had a casual defect in the foramen magnum in combination with the first and second vertebrae, which is probably quite rare. She probably developed visible symptoms like fluttering eyes or similar things, which is quite strange and not seen often. But she was not an active hunter. She didn't walk much but she spent a lot of time sitting and used her upper body a lot. She could walk but it wasn't necessary. Her community probably took care of her and she probably didn't contribute much to the hunt.

Something that I think is important is that the excavations did not find many bones but they did find important bones. This second vertebra is very important to interpret her defect and her special status as a shaman. It is malformed and the other vertebrae were also found. Good. We're not done with the

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aeological finds yet. Looking at the skeletal diagram you can clearly see that almost the entire cervical spine is missing along with the upper part of the thoracic spine. And here, when you look at the new finds, you can clearly see the missing parts, including this part of the first rib.

You can line it up exactly. There was some damage during the excavation when the skeleton was found, such as to the cervical spine and thoracic spine... In 1934? - In 1934. We are currently finding all the pieces that were broken or chipped. Or they were forgotten in the sand, because they fell or moved. - Yes. Those that were not found in 1934 during this unique excavation that Saturday. Those who didn't see, exactly. They were then returned to the grave or remained there the entire time. For us... - You can tell that leg is missing. But it is in the museum because in the 1970s they needed a lot of material to date the C 14 and they wanted to know how old the skeleton is.

There has always been some debate about the skeleton. At first, Bicker and Heberer, who worked on it, immediately detected Mesolithic aspects in the microliths, which means that it must be about 10,000 years old. But the stone ax was confusing because they are not from the Mesolithic. In the end they said that in the tomb, which actually dates back to 7000 BC. C., there was a Neolithic woman, or rather a Neolithic man, because they even got the gender wrong. - TRUE. And they dated it around 2500-3000 BC. In other words, they made the tomb 4000 years younger. This is remarkable.

And precisely because of this polished stone ax that they thought would only date from the Neolithic. But they did see the Mesolithic tradition with microliths. They were also wrong about sex. They thought he was a man. How could an eminent anthropologist like Heberer be so wrong about sex? He is definitely a woman and his figure is quite delicate.How could they think she was a man? We have genetic confirmation that she is female. No doubt about it. The key to this is probably that back then, in the 1930s, they were still very obsessed with skulls. They based their decision about sex on the skull.

And the skull has some features that are not typical for a woman. Overall yes. But there are some aspects, such as the shape of the eye sockets, that might initially mislead someone into thinking that she is a man. Furthermore, a direct reason why they thought she was a man was the stone axe. They must have concluded that it was... - A gun. ...a gun, so she couldn't be a woman. It is circular reasoning. - They couldn't imagine women with weapons or women with tools like this. This ax is transversal, so it is more of an adze for working wood, something they did not believe women did.

So the cultural interpretation influenced the anthropological interpretation. Presumably. They probably didn't even look at the pelvis. They didn't give it much importance. But the properties of the pelvis show that it is clearly a woman. And this has been confirmed genetically. That's very exciting. Are there any broken bones? Mesolithic people often suffered from them through contact with large animals such as aurochs. Is there a childhood injury, broken ribs or something else? We've seen all kinds of things from the Mesolithic, including violence and other things. None of that here. So apart from the points mentioned above, she is physically completely unharmed.

Then she died healthy. - Very healthy. Fascinating! - Yes, even in terms of food. We know which isotopes to analyze to reconstruct her diet. These allow us to determine that she was eating a diet very rich in protein. Generally...-her trophic level was high. Yes.-She ate mainly meat and fish. We can definitely say that when it comes to her protein intake. We don't know much about their plant consumption because it's not that easy to prove. But in general, we know that Mesolithic people lived in an environment where they had unlimited resources. We are at the end of the Boreal period in its transition to the Atlantic period.

There was very rich vegetation and fauna. These people had a very good diet. We can verify this in the first CT scans we perform. The bones are much denser than today. For this to happen, there needs to be an excellent nutritional foundation for that type of growth. I was in an ideal environment, I had very good nutrition and I was in very good shape. It is also worth mentioning that this is why they are so healthy and much larger than farming towns. 10-20 cm taller than farmers due to their incredible diet. We see that with meat-rich diets in the US or here in Germany after World War II, people grew much larger.

This is what happened here. It is also worth mentioning that these hunter-gatherers ate a completely natural diet, unlike the early farmers. They ate like people did when they lived in nature. This shaman here is the last of her kind. She is the last person in Central Germany or one of the last people who lived before the farmers, who had a completely different way of life. A productive economic system where they changed their diets: eating bread and eating cereals. They then developed a "civilization" diet in which their teeth were worn down by the small stones in the flour from the grinding stones.

They were smaller because they mainly ate plants. And, like you said, they were weaker because their bone density decreased. They didn't walk much so they weren't as athletic as hunters. Instead, they worked behind the plow 12 hours a day and broke their bones. So in a way, from a purely biological perspective, this was the era of the decline of a kind of paradise where humans lived as part of nature without cultural separation. Culture and nature were united. Interestingly, this is something we strive for now in the modern era. In Western philosophy, there is a separation between culture and nature.

There are more and more modern movements that seek to unite the two again, to the point of an irrationality that we really do not want. And then there is spirituality and we return to shamanism. This was attributed to women, I think rightly so. Here we have something quite different from what the farmers had. Here we have the idea of ​​a hunter-gatherer religion embedded in a tautegorical worldview. It covers everything. It's really exciting. I think it is a very moving story. We have this puzzle before us. This woman had an extremely rich burial. This woman raises even more questions than Nebra's celestial disk.

That is something extraordinary!