About 9,000 years ago, during the Mesolithic in Central Europe, a child died and was buried lying on the legs of an adult. The double burial was discovered in 1934 while construction work was being carried out in the gardens of the Bad Dürrenberg spa, in the state of Saxony-Anhalt (Germany).
What surprised the archaeologists was the equipment and position of the elderly person, who had several bodily anomalies. Hence it was interpreted that he was an ancient shaman. And genetic analyzes carried out in 2023 have revealed that both individuals were related. What no one expected is that she was his great-great-grandmother.
As explained by experts from the Max Planck Institute in an article published in the magazine Propylaeu, the woman was between 30 and 40 years old when she was buried and was a graceful person with a body height of about 1.55 centimeters (typical of the time). Her complexion was relatively dark, like her straight hair, and her eyes were blue.
This combination was quite common among Western European hunter-gatherers and the shaman lady shared appearance with contemporary Mesolithic individuals from other sites such as Loschbour (Mullerthal, Luxembourg), La Braña (Asturias, Spain), or Cheddar Man (Somerset, Great Britain). ).
The woman had missing muscles in her lower extremities and had an "abnormally developed blood vessel" in her skull. The first cervical vertebra is not fully formed due to a congenital growth defect and only reaches 40% of the arch.
The researchers point out that this anatomical anomaly can cause a pinch of the vertebral artery when the head is in a certain position, although they consider that it is "unlikely" that the consequences were serious or dangerous for this person's health.
Still, this type of condition, experts say, can cause nystagmus, that is, an involuntary movement of the eyeballs. This unusual characteristic could have been perceived as strange by the woman's contemporaries and could have reinforced or even justified her role as a shaman.
His grave goods also included flint artifacts and solid rock tools, but also pieces of bone and deer antlers, a piece of red ocher, several animal bones - including the shell of at least three water turtles - and six partially pierced boar tusks, finds that are probably head and body ornaments.
Although at first it was believed that the lady and the child were mother and son, a recent exhaustive genetic analysis has made it possible to detect that there really was a degree of kinship between them, but that this is equivalent to a fourth or fifth degree genetic relationship ( four or five generations apart) which would make the woman the potential great-great-grandmother of the child.
Archaeologists theorize that the woman may have been buried decades before the child. One of the possibilities that are being considered is that the little boy was added to the tomb of his ancestor (which could separate him between 60 and 80 years).
