He was born in the Scandinavian Peninsula and later moved to Denmark. He was a hunter-gatherer who experienced firsthand the transition to agriculture around 5,000 years ago before dying violently. His skull was completely shattered by up to eight club blows in what archaeologists believe was a ritual sacrifice.
The remains of Vittrup Man were discovered in 1915 in a swamp located north of Jutland. Until recently, this was all the information we had about him. That’s why researchers at the University of Gothenburg decided to analyze his bones to try to discover the secrets he was hiding.
“He came from the north, from a relatively cold area, and it must have been a coastal area because the food he ate as a child came from the sea. During his life he traveled across a wide geographical area,” explains archaeologist Karl-Göran Sjögren, one of the authors of the article published in the journal PLOS ONE.
A right ankle bone, a lower left shin bone, a fragmented skull and a jaw with 16 teeth are all that remains of this person. His bones further suggest that he died around the age of 30 or 40, the scientists write in their study of him.
The team of experts believe the man grew up in what is now northern Norway but, when he was 18 or 19, ended up in Denmark for some unknown reason. There, his diet went from being based on fish and marine mammals (cod, sea bream, whale or dolphin meat) to agricultural foods (including sheep and goats).
“He spent ten to twenty years living in a farming community before he died. In reality, they brutally clubbed him to death,” says Sjögren. DNA analysis, dental calculus analysis and isotope analysis have made it possible to obtain completely new information about this Stone Age individual.
They discovered what it ate through the tartar on its teeth and also measured isotopes of carbon, oxygen and strontium to map its journeys and changes in diet. “This allowed us to follow the geographical and dietary development of this man from birth to death in great detail,” says archaeologist Anders Fischer. Until recently this was an impossible task.
The study of the Vittrup man is part of a broader analysis in which specialists from different disciplines examined the genomes and DNA of the prehistoric Nordic population, based on 100 teeth and bone remains found in Denmark.
“This person’s genome caught our attention because it differed markedly from the rest of the Neolithic Danish population and, genetically, was closely related to contemporary peoples who lived in the Scandinavian Peninsula, in what is now northern Norway and Sweden. . That’s why we decided to study their origins and life history in detail,” adds Fischer.
Between 3300 and 3100 BC, traveling from Norway to Denmark must have been a long and hard journey. But there is already other archaeological evidence that shows contacts between these areas. In the Stone Age, for example, flint axes were transported from Jutland to the Arctic Circle.
And investigators believe his brutal death could indicate he was euthanized. “It is the example of a common ritual practice in that period,” says Professor Kristian Kristiansen. “The murder weapon may be the wooden club that the peat cutters found next to him when they discovered his skeleton at the bottom of a ditch in Vittrup more than a hundred years ago,” he says.
