interesting reading - his last meal was porridge and fish. he was hanged in a religious ritual.
https://gizmodo.com/body-preserved-in-a-bog-since-the-iron-age-still-contai-1847343217
They are very common in northwest Europe and Ireland.
shareSome have also been found in Florida. Nowhere near as well preserved.
shareI did not know that. The wiki page makes it sound like the Florida bodies were staked down in relatively shallow waters within a regular burial ground. I think the European ones were occasional bodies thrown in to deeper, colder and more peaty waters - hence the better preservation but much fewer remains?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windover_Archeological_Site
A lot of the European bodies are believed to be murder victims or sacrifices rather than traditional burials. Probably why there are fewer of them.
sharethe things about the past which are certainly lost are the rituals & myths of these ancient peoples.
we will never know how or why this individual was selected, mandated, volunteered or sentenced to be the principle in this event.
he is incredibly well-preserved. we know -exactly- what he looked like. i would put him in his 40s. he was not a kid.
the preservation is incredible.
shareBog bodies are among some of the most interesting preservation of remains. Right up there with mummies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog_body
FYI archeologists will say "... probably religious" to explain anything they just don't understand.
My favorite story about that is that a group was being shown through a history museum by a staff member, and they came to some primitive artifacts, which included a piece of carved bone labeled "ritual object". A woman in the group piped up and said "That's not a religious object, that's a bone spindle! I'm a weaver, and we've been using them to spin wool into thread forever, and some craft hand-weavers still use them!". So the object was re-labeled, and some archeologists are using the internet to ask the public what the human-shaped items they dig up are.