Posted on 06/28/2005 10:10:18 AM PDT by blam
Bog Mummy Mistaken for Murder Victim
By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News
June 27, 2005— The body of a teenage girl thought to be the victim of foul play has turned out to be one of Germany's oldest and best-preserved mummies, German archaeologists announced at a press conference last week.
Bog Mummy's Hand
Found in September 2000 in a peat bog in the town of Uchte, in Lower Saxony, the corpse was first examined by the police homicide unit.
Though it had been fragmented by the peat machine, the body appeared to belong to a teenage girl. Investigators thought it could be a 16-year-old girl who had been missing since 1969.
The Mummy's Hair
"Forensic analysis showed that the body belonged to a young woman, between 16 and 20 years old, who died without any visible sign of force," the State Authority for Historic Preservation in Lower Saxony said in a statement.
The investigators even carried out DNA tests on the remains. However, comparison of the DNA of the mother of the missing girl with the corpse showed that the bog body was not the missing girl's.
The file was archived and the mummified remains forgotten.
When a worker in January dug a shriveled hand out of the moor, the police were called again, but this time they recognized it was an archaeological find rather than a murder victim.
The hand belonged to "The Girl of the Uchter Moor," as the bog body has been called. It emerged that the teenage girl was slightly older than thought. In fact, she was about 2,700 years old.
"Radio carbon dating showed the girl lived in the pre-Roman iron age, around 650 B.C.," Henning Haßmann, the state archaeologist of Lower Saxony, told reporters.
The Girl of the Uchter Moor is the only extensively preserved human body of that age to be found in Europe north of the Alps.
All parts of the body have been found, except for one shoulder blade. Even the hair on the head was intact, though archaeologists can't tell if the girl was blonde or black-haired: the peat turns all hair reddish.
Mummification occurs naturally in peat bogs thanks to a unique bog chemistry. Soon after the body ends up in the peat bogs, the ubiquitous peat-building Sphagnum moss begins growing over it, embedding it in cold, acid and oxygen-free conditions that immobilizes bacteria, tanning the body.
The best-known bog body in Europe, known as Tollund Man, is estimated to be around 2,100 years old and was found in Denmark in 1950.
Indeed, technology has made the discovery of intact bog bodies very rare. People do not dig peat by hand anymore, and the huge machines used to extract the peat in the dried-out moors make this kind of discovery highly unusual.
A bog body was last found in Lower Saxony 50 years ago, Haßmann said.
The Girl of the Uchter Moor will be on display until July 31 at the State Museum of Lower Saxony in Hanover. Then she will be moved to the Institute of Legal Medicine at the University of Hamburg-Eppendorf, where she will undergo further tests to find out about her lifestyle, diseases and cause of death.
"This finding will keep scientists busy for a long time," paleobiologist Andreas Bauerochse told reporters.
nyuk nyuk nyuk
Talk about a Cold Case file . . .
all bogged down.
I remember that guy from when I was a kid! In the Nat'l Geographic! Most memorable.
No, wait....
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