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The Bog Bodies of Europe
schwit1 writes: It's a regular occurrence in Europe for dead bodies to be found in peat bogs. The bogs preserve the bodies, providing scientists a window into the past. However, many of the bodies exhibit one mysterious tendency: violent death. "Since the 18th century, the peat bogs of Northern Europe have yielded hundreds of human corpses dating from as far back as 8,000 B.C. Like Tollund Man, many of these so-called bog bodies are exquisitely preserved-their skin, intestines, internal organs, nails, hair, and even the contents of their stomachs and some of their clothes left in remarkable condition. Despite their great diversity-they comprise men and women, adults and children, kings and commoners-a surprising number seem to have been violently dispatched and deliberately placed in bogs, leading some experts to conclude that the bogs served as mass graves for offed outcasts and religious sacrifices. Tollund Man, for example, had evidently been hanged." It's a fascinating combination of history, archeology, and forensics.
Funny, I do the same thing with my backup tapes. I store them in the bog.
I don't mean old ones, I mean I was expecting that this would be a story about the bogs becoming a popular dumping place for murderers.
Tollund Man who was hanged is only about 2000 years old.
Keep it simple stupid.
Violent deaths found in peat bogs. Guess what the easiest way to murder someone is to lure them to a swamp, bog, other dArk remote area and kill them there. It makes great dumping grounds.
It is a universal truth. Like prostituion, thievery, and taxes.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The murder rate in hunter-gatherer societies is known to be rather high. (They don't have police, after all.) In his book The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond states that the per-capita murder rate for the !Kung people is three times the rate in the United States, and 30 times the rate of countries such as Canada, the UK, and Germany.
So it was just a very violent time. The article asks the question but does not even begin to answer it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"Hey, did you hear they used to burn people at the stake due to fears of witchcraft because religious beliefs?"
"Yeah, WTF is up with that?!?"
(Meanwhile, on another continent...)
"Hey, did you hear they used to brutally murder people and throw them in a bog as sacrifice because religious beliefs?"
"Yeah, that's really interesting."
It's obviously a good place to hide a body, since they aren't being found for centuries, or even milennia.
It's still a little anachronistic. It's not as direct as a knife in the chest or an axe across the neck. With little in terms of civilization, hanging seems anachronistic. I'm not the GP, but I agree and would love to read some comments from anthropologists familiar with that time period.
Why did you feel you had to go there? Are you trying to say the people of the Fertile Crescent are the real master race? One could just as easily point to the disarray in the Middle East at the moment and draw the opposite conclusion. Neither perspective has value.
So much for the notion that Northern Europe was the birthplace of the Master Race. When these douchebags were crushing skulls and dumping people in peat bogs, down Mediterranean way, they were already engaged in seed and animal stocking (lentils, almonds) and obsidian trade with Melos.
In the Fertile Crescent, they had already devised incised "counting tokens" (the precursor to the modern day quantum computer).
True, but who other than Nazi wankers would ever claim that? Nordic civilization is specifically interresting because it is so young and we actually have outside historians documenting before the Scandinavians started writing anything down themselves.
If Jimmy Hoffa surfaces... then you'll have your answer. Bogs were a convenient body dump.
The Viking Age didn't begin until roughly 800AD. These "wankers" were not vikings in any sense of the word.
In 2,000 years historians and archaeologists will be scratching their head wondering why there were so many "Ritual Sacrifices" of cement shoe'd people at what is now the bottom of the Hudson..
Actually I'd find a bog museum or learning centre, with bodies on display, maybe a glass wall where you can watch researchers working on the remains would be fascinating. Sure, it's not the usual Eiffel tower, Big Ben, Windsor Castle etc tourist spots you think of when planning a trip to the EU. However; not having to deal with the usual swarms of tourists would also be part of the allure for me.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
Yes because Jesus was well known for referring to certain groups of dispossed people as human garbage
Be sure to read this NatGeo article which corrects some of the misconceptions and mistakes history passed on to the first linked article:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic....
Look up. See that little thing flying way above you? That's a joke.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The "White Culture" warriors are a surprisingly big movement in Northern Europe. You'll find educated, young, otherwise sophisticated Nords who believe that there is some worldwide conspiracy to deny the fact that the Northern Europeans were the first humans. There's a very popular podcast dedicated specifically to this, called "Red Ice".
I was in Finland and Sweden last year and was shocked at how much currency these beliefs have gained in Scandinavia. If you scratch the surface (and I did) you will also find generous helpings of racism and anti-Semitism among these folks, so maybe you're right, it's mostly Nazi wankers.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The problem these days is, that Islamic and Greek folks say such wacky things these days . . . and are serious about it . . . that it is hard to recognize it as a joke.
But build on your joke . . . Vikings were not wankers. They raped and pillaged so much, that they had no time for a wank, or a five-fingered shandy, or to polish the bishop's hat, or to relax in a gentlemanly manner, etc. . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It's still a little anachronistic. It's not as direct as a knife in the chest or an axe across the neck. With little in terms of civilization, hanging seems anachronistic.
First off, "little in terms of civilization" is a very relative thing. Northern European tribes during this period may not have been Rome, but they had complex metalworking and tools and a very developed culture.
Death in many societies is very ritualized, particularly if deliberate. Even so-called "primitive" societies often have very complex religious rituals in general. Assuming this death was deliberate (as most hangings are), why would anyone assume that it would have to be "as direct as a knife in the chest or an axe across the neck"? If they had metal tools to do those things, they had a society advanced enough to have all sorts of complex ritualistic behavior -- which, to put it another way, is behavior that's not strictly "necessary" or efficient, but serves important cultural purposes.
Is this why peaty scotch whiskey tastes so good?
It's probably because unlike open water, bodies don't resurface in bogs. The heavy vegetable matter, debris, muds and so on hold the bodies down so they don't get noticed later on.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
It's not as anachronistic as the Grauballe Man, who apparently ate corn porridge between 290B.C. and 310 A.D.. In Europe. Corn.
the word "corn" in that context could mean any cereal grain, probably oats or barley.
You're a moron ready to kick off a race war on the basis of bog mummies. People like you are the joke.
You really think I could kick off a race war? Now who's the joke?
You are welcome on my lawn.
“Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws”
~ Nietzsche
It's not as anachronistic as the Grauballe Man, who apparently ate corn porridge between 290B.C. and 310 A.D.. In Europe. Corn.
Europeans would refer to what Americans improperly call "corn" as maize (hint: it was "Indian corn" at first). Europeans use the term "corn" to mean almost any grain-based foodstuff, like barley, oats, rye, wheat, and suchlike.
Actually many Europeans would call it corn as well which is why the early American settlers called it corn because the pilgrams came from Europe...duh. the name corn really means small nugget or something like that such as peppercorns. But thanks for trying to act again like Europeans are so superior to Americans which of course is very far from being true. All people are stupid in their own way.
2K years ago = Jesus. I'm pretty sure they could tie knots by then.
A question occurs to me : while bog bodies are reasonably well known from Ireland, parts of Scotland and rarely in England ; common again on the North European plain (The Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Poland, Sweden), and this distribution is in large part a reflection of the distribution of peat accumulation and recent excavation, I am not aware of any reports of similar bog bodies from North America. Neither accidental bodies (travellers getting mired and dying) nor ones with complex, multiple injuries suggestive of "ritual" murder. As far as I know. And does anyone on Slashdot know differently?
I don't know much about the archaeology of Native Americans, but by analogy with other "stone age" societies, I'd be slightly surprised if there were no evidence of ritual human sacrifice, and I'd be more surprised at the absence of even accidental deaths (travellers). Given the presence of recent glaciation and a similarly temperate climate, I'd also be pretty surprised if there were no extraction of peat for both fuel and horticultural use (which is how most bog bodies are found in Europe). So I just find the absence of reports of bog bodies in North America to be surprising.
Any North Americans with a working knowledge of your archaeology that knows more on the subject?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
An explanation I've seen from linguistic sources is that "corn" or "korn" is the general term in the Germanic languages for "the most common grain hereabouts".
The term causes well-known problems for historians, because you can't know what grain it refers to without knowing what the people at that time and place were eating. People are always misinterpreting the term to mean whatever grain is most common in their own diet, and not asking about what the writer of a text might have thought it meant.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.