Denmark. 11,000 years old elk bones shrouded in mystery

1/4. Here is a breastbone that is pierced by an arrow head of flint.

Someone put elk bones in a bog several thousand years ago -- but archaeologists have no clue who it was.

When archaeologists dig up ancient skeletons from humans and animals, they often find answers to questions about what our forefathers did and how they lived.

But sometimes they pose new questions.

That's what happened when the bones of several elks were excavated from Lundby bog in south Zealand in 1999, the archaeologists dated some of the animal remains back to sometime between 9,400 and 9,300 BC.

Recently, however, the archaeologists did a new carbon 14 dating on some of the bones which revealed that they dated back to between 9,873 and 9,676 BC.

These elk bones were clearly not buried in the bog over a short period, as originally thought, but were placed there over several centuries – and this surprised the archaeologists.

4/4.

 “People have been living here, that's quite certain,” says Kristoffer Buck Pedersen, an archaeologist and chief curator at Museum Southeast Denmark. “But so far we've not found settlements that are as old as the elk bones, so the identity of the people who put the bones in the bog is something of a mystery.”

He helped analyse the bone remains from the elks. Six deposits with bones from 13 elks were found in the bog.

Ritual positioning of the bones [...] sciencenordic.com/ / Link 2