If you are looking for some wonder and whimsy from the animal kingdom to lift your spirits this week—some uplifting tale of a shrew that is so small that it sails on gusts of wind, or a fossil of an ancient crab that had an exquisitely defined buttcrack—you have not come to the right place. Instead, I have two tales about dead people and the bones they left behind. Is it the news we want? No. It is the news we have.
Skeleton No. 1
The first skeleton I would like to bring to your attention was excavated from a Roman-era cemetery in the town of Pommerœul, Belgium, which was the site of a large town near a river. Archaeologists uncovered 76 cremation burials and one grave, which held a skeleton lying curled up on its right side. Based on the details of the town and the cremations, which were the principle funerary practice at the time, archaeologists dated the site to the Roman period in the second and third centuries A.D. Barbara Veselka, an archaeologist at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium, and colleagues described the unusual nature of the Pommerœul grave in a paper recently published in Antiquity.
This grave was an anomaly. Bodies were not buried in a fetal position during the Roman period. Although the Romans would switch from cremations to burial in the third century, they buried their dead on their backs with their limbs extended, as we do today. By contrast, the fetal position of the Pommerœul body was consistent with burial practices from the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, which lasted from around 7000 B.C. to 3000 B.C. But archaeologists found a Roman bone pin near the skull of the buried individual, suggesting they were last interred in the Roman period.
Moreover, the skeleton looked suspicious. The bones did not seem to fit together. Some were more weathered than others. Some showed different stages of maturity. The vertebrae did not align. When researchers took samples from the skeleton for radiocarbon dating, they found the bones belonged to eight different people.
Seven of the people lived between around 3300 B.C. and 2700 B.C., while the cranium came from a woman living in the Roman period, around the third and fourth centuries.
The reassembled skeleton was also imperfectly assembled, containing five right big toes from different adults, as well as two foot phalanges from different children. Who would assemble a skeleton like this, and why? The researchers aren't exactly sure. It wouldn't be the first time someone back then did something funky with a body. Two sites from the Bronze Age, Cladh Hallan and Cnip Headland, hold skeletons that were assembled with bones from multiple individuals. And in the Roman cemetery of Ismant el-Kharab in Egypt, people constructed a "single" mummy from the remains of two adult females and two adolescents.
In one scenario, the researchers suggest that the Pommerœul skeleton may have been assembled during the Neolithic times and later disturbed during the Roman period, at which point someone added or replaced the cranium with a contemporary one and added a bone pin to "complete" the burial. Romans were known to disturb ancient tombs. In another scenario, the Romans themselves may have assembled the entire skeleton, combining Neolithic bones found nearby and the Roman cranium. The researchers hypothesize the first scenario is more likely; the curled-up position of the body would not have been unusual for a Neolithic burial, whereas such a position was unheard of in Roman times. Perhaps a group of Neolithic people assembled the skeleton with bones in the area, and 2,500 years later some Romans added their own flourish. It's a morbidly touching thought—a group project carried on throughout the ages.
In another strange detail of this grave, archaeologists found three badger bones beside the human skeleton. Fittingly, when the researchers analyzed these badger bones, they found the bones came from two different badgers: the skull dates to the Late Mesolithic and the humerus to the late Neolithic. Was this composite badger skeleton a kind of companion to the composite person nearby? The researchers suggest the badger bones may have served as grave goods, but they also do not rule out the possibility that the badgers, which are a burrowing species, simply dug into the grave and died there of their own accord.
Whatever the reason behind this burial, it's comforting to know there was a long lineage of people who, upon discovering the bones of someone who died before them, each independently decided to do a little bone prank; proof that there will always be someone, even centuries away, who will match your freak.
Skeleton No. 2
Were you frustrated by the lack of biographical and identifying details of the bones in the aforementioned skeleton? Well you're in luck, because this next skeleton is in the news precisely because scientists know who he is.
Our saga begins 800 years ago, in 12th-century Norway. The country has been plunged into a civil war lasting more than a century, a conflict ignited by contested claims to the throne. One of the contenders is Sverre Sigurdsson, who said he was a son of the King Sigurd Munn. Our source is a text called Sverris Saga, whose author, as you might guess from its name, is a big fan of our man Sverre. Historians believe the saga was written by one of the king's close companions, perhaps the Icelandic Abbot Karl Jónsson. (This raises, for me, the ultimate historical question: Were they boyfriends??) Jónsson, or whoever the author was, wrote 182 verses detailing Sverre's speeches, Sverre's military strategies, and Sverre's battles.
Sverre's armies were nicknamed "Birkebeiner," which translates to "birch legs," allegedly a reference to the birch-bark armor they wore on their legs and feet. One of the passages in Sverris Saga describes the winter of 1197, when one of Sverre's strongholds at the imaginatively named Sverresborg Castle is attacked by his enemies, nicknamed the "Baglers." The Baglers attacked as the Birkebeiners were enjoying dinner, managing to plunder and raid the castle and burn everything inside. Sverris Saga also mentions the Baglers threw a dead man into the castle's drinking well and buried him with boulders.
Cut to 1938. An excavation of the Sverresborg well revealed there was a body at the bottom of the well under a bunch of big rocks, but the archaeologists left it in place. About a decade ago, a group of researchers including Anna Petersen, an archaeologist with the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research, dug up the body from the well. Their genetic analysis of DNA from his teeth revealed the skeleton belonging to the person hereafter referred to as "Well Man" belonged to a 30- to 40-year-old man. He likely had blue eyes and blond or light-brown hair, and the researchers suggest he came from southern Norway.
The man's origin came as a surprise to the researchers. Sverre's Birkebeiners hailed from central Norway, and their enemies the Baglers came from southern Norway. Scholars of the past all assumed, quite logically, that the Baglers would have thrown a Birkebeiner man into the well. But not so! It appears Well Man was a Bagler in his own right, perhaps double-crossed and doomed by his own comrades. Sverris Saga does mention that Well Man was dead before he entered the well, so perhaps the Baglers threw an already slain member of their own army into the well. It's impossible to prove if Peterson's Well Man was the Well Man from Sverris Saga. But her team certainly has identified at least one Well Man from that era, which we can only hope was otherwise bereft of Well Men.
Why throw a man into a well? Well, man, that's easy to answer. If you were attempting to overthrow a castle, why not throw a man into their well? A Well Man can do many things a man outside of a well could not as easily do, such as poison the water supply or send a gruesome message. Perhaps Well Man did a bit of both. Peterson told NPR that the skeleton had a bad back, evidence of a life of heavy manual labor. Life was hard in 12th-century Norway, whether you were a Bagler or a Birkebeiner, whether you were a man thrown into a well or a man throwing boulders into the well. It's just as well that Well Man was a dead man when he became one with the well. And with that, my well of content for this blog has run dry.
