Scientists can tell us a lot about this young Egtved girl 3400 years AFTER her death. Great read, much more at the link.
In 1921, archaeologists exploring an ancient burial mound near Egtved, a village in Denmark, unearthed the grave of a girl estimated to have been 16 to 18 years old when she died.
Not much remained of her body — only some hair, teeth, nails, and bits of skin and brain — but scholars could tell a lot about her. Dressed in fine woolen clothing, with a bronze medallion on her belt that probably represented the sun, the Egtved Girl, as she came to be known, was believed to be a person of high status. She was buried with the cremated remains of a small child and a bark bucket that once contained beer. Analysis of the oak coffin in which she lay revealed that she died about 3,400 years ago.
This week, nearly a century after she was discovered, a team of researchers in Denmark filled in more detail of the Egtved Girl’s life story. By analyzing chemicals in her body and in the items in her coffin, they were able to surmise that she hadn’t been born in Denmark, that her diet lacked protein from time to time, and that she traveled widely in the final months of her life.
“Our study provides evidence for long-distance and periodically rapid mobility. Our findings compel us to rethink European Bronze Age mobility as highly dynamic, where individuals moved quickly, over long distances in relatively brief periods of time,” the researchers wrote, in a study published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.
More:
http://www.latimes.com/science/scien...521-story.html
More details here:
http://www.nature.com/srep/2015/1505...srep10431.html