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00:01Four thousand years ago, the dawn of European civilization, and the birth of a macabre and brutal ritual.
00:17Today, hundreds of prehistoric bodies unearthed from the boglands of Northern Europe.
00:24Their deaths intrigue historians. Were they all murdered? And why?
00:34Now a brand new find could hold the key. It's another ancient body, found preserved in an Irish peat bog.
00:44The skeleton is distorted, the muscle and skin badly torn.
00:49An international team of experts face a challenge as they seek to solve an ancient mystery.
00:57The horrific killing of hundreds of our ancestors in one of prehistory's darkest eras.
01:05Who were these victims? And why did they die?
01:09This is a four thousand year old cold case. The body in the bog.
01:18A bog in Ireland's midlands, where heavy machinery is used to industrially harvest peat.
01:26A fossil fuel used in Irish homes and power stations.
01:29In August 2011, a heavy equipment operator spotted something sticking from the bog in front of him.
01:39When he stopped his machinery, he realised it was the remains of a human body.
01:46Flattened and distorted.
01:48One thing was clear. This was not a modern corpse.
01:59Since the year 2003, peat harvesting in Ireland has uncovered six other bog bodies like this one.
02:07Bringing the total number of Irish finds to over a hundred.
02:10These mysterious corpses have captured the imagination of the Irish public, fascinating young and old alike.
02:18And today, peat workers are trained to recognise them and follow carefully developed protocol.
02:25So immediately, a call went out to archaeologists at the National Museum of Ireland.
02:32Within days, their excavations had revealed the body of a man.
02:36What secrets will his corpse reveal?
02:41The body is brought to a lab at the National Museum in Dublin for forensic investigation.
02:48Leading the team of archaeologists and scientists is Ned Kelly.
02:53He spent a lifetime studying ancient Irish history and archaeology,
02:58and has investigated the other Irish bog bodies.
03:00They are part of an ancient legacy.
03:04The 300 preserved corpses found in bog lands across Northwest Europe.
03:10To historians, these finds offer the chance to look our prehistoric ancestors in the face.
03:17Forensic science offers experts clues to diet, lifestyle and social status,
03:23and shines precious light on a dark era for which there are few records.
03:28This is a very, very, very important find.
03:34And it's a big responsibility to make sure that we get the maximum information from this body.
03:42We owe it to the man lying on the table to tell his story for him.
03:46Ned Kelly has named him Cashel Man after the townland where the body was found.
03:52Now he and the team must solve the mystery of Cashel Man and explain why he died.
03:58Their first task is to decipher the confusing mass of bone and soft tissue.
04:04The body was in a very unusual position and it took quite a while to work out what was what.
04:08The head is missing, destroyed by the peat harvester.
04:15The body is compressed and misshapen by millennia in the bog
04:19and badly damaged by the heavy machinery when it was discovered.
04:23I mean, I look at the front face of the vertebra.
04:27Despite the mangled condition, it could contain a wealth of clues about Irish prehistory
04:32that could also explain the mystery of the entire European bog body tradition,
04:38if the team can decipher the evidence.
04:41The first questions to answer are,
04:44how did this person end up in the bog?
04:47And what was the cause of death?
04:49Investigations into previous bog bodies revealed they were murdered.
04:54Could this also be true of Cashel Man?
04:57State pathologist Professor Marie Cassidy is joining the team to find out.
05:02There's a good bit of tissue, there's an organ there.
05:05It's either long or hard.
05:07That definitely has to be long.
05:09There's all the ribs there.
05:11And that looks as if that could well be the hard.
05:13Great.
05:17Professor Cassidy is on her way to investigate the scene where Cashel Man was found.
05:23She's more used to solving modern homicides.
05:26But the intensity of industrial peat harvesting in Ireland
05:29means bog body finds are a phenomenon Professor Cassidy has become familiar with.
05:38All of the bog bodies that we've had have been turned out to be ancient remains.
05:43The typical features would be the peaty discolouration of the skin.
05:48You can't miss that.
05:49Very often they're squashed or compacted because of the weight of the peat they're under.
05:52Now you don't see that with modern bodies.
05:55Even though the body is likely to be ancient, Professor Cassidy treats this like a modern investigation.
06:01As forensic pathologists, our training is to go one step at a time really.
06:07You start off with the body being found, what information is available.
06:10Her first step is to speak to the person who found the body.
06:15Jason Phelan, a milling machine operator who works on Cashel Bog.
06:19I turn at the right time and look on the left hand side and I saw this piece.
06:23It was probably maybe six inches triangular.
06:26And was it sticking up above the surface then?
06:28It was penetrating maybe this height just above the surface in triangular shape.
06:31I got out and I checked it and I just went over and kind of caught like this gently and gave a little bit of a tug.
06:37And when I gave it a tug, two legs came up gently out of the bog which were crossed.
06:43Professor Cassidy also examines the peat milling machine.
06:48Its sharp spinning blades were responsible for tearing into the body's chest.
06:53What it means is that there is a tearing motion.
06:56And that would account for the damage that you see on the body as it was photographed at the scene.
07:03Because the surface skin had gone and you're allowed looking into the guts, if you like, of the body.
07:09Professor Cassidy's investigations will help her assess which injuries were caused by a 21st century milling machine
07:17and which could have been caused in a prehistoric attack.
07:20Next, the team subject Cashelman's remains to a CT scan.
07:29It reveals details of the bone and soft tissue.
07:33And sheds light on who this man really was.
07:37They've got humour really so much.
07:40This is a young person's spine.
07:42How young do you think?
07:44Well, probably 20 to 25.
07:46The images from the CT scan allow the team to identify the orientation of Cashelman's skeleton.
07:54He is lying on his right side.
07:57His legs are drawn up to his chest and his hands are clasped around them.
08:02But his head and left arm are missing, destroyed by the peat harvester.
08:06The CT scan also reveals a further detail.
08:12Cashelman's right arm has been cleanly broken.
08:16For Mary Cassidy, it's the first clue to the cause of Cashelman's death.
08:22There's good evidence that this person was injured at and around the time of death.
08:28So we've got an injury, we've got one arm remaining that we can identify and we can see the bones very clearly.
08:36And this bone here, the bone that runs down towards your little finger, that's actually about midway.
08:41It's just been literally halved in two.
08:43And that's usually an indication of a direct blow, what we would call probably a defensive injury.
08:47So he's maybe been fighting with somebody, whatever weapon they've been using, and he's put up his arm to block a blow.
08:54And the impact's got him on the outer side of his arm and caused this fracture.
08:59So that indicates major trauma.
09:01So amazing.
09:02So we can actually even, we're starting to recreate an incident that he could have been involved in.
09:08The CT scan also revealed two dramatic fractures to Cashelman's spine,
09:14where the vertebrae have been left severely out of alignment.
09:18You can see there where the cord would be compromised there.
09:22This is so bad.
09:23I'm just thinking in terms of trauma.
09:25The vertebrae appear to have been torn out of alignment.
09:29Is this a clue to a frenzied beating, a horrific murder, or something else?
09:37At the National Museum, the team disagree.
09:40Ned Kelly is open to the idea of a violent attack.
09:44But Deputy Pathologist Dr Michael Curtis is not convinced.
09:48Now, is that the sort of thing that would result from being sort of hit on the spine with a pickaxe handle,
09:54or from somebody jumping up and down on the small yard back?
09:57I mean, they don't look to be fractured to me.
09:59No, they're just malaligned.
10:01Malaligned, disarticulated, but they do not appear to be fractured.
10:03I don't like that for a blow with an implement.
10:06No.
10:07No.
10:08It doesn't look as if it's a blow.
10:11So that would have been more localised?
10:13Yeah, and you'd probably have fracture as well.
10:16This is more dislocation.
10:18If Cashelman's spine was not broken when he died, then what killed him?
10:22While the forensics team continues to scour the body for clues, Ned Kelly turns his attention to his area of expertise, Ireland's unique literary record.
10:35It offers a key to the past that's found nowhere else in Europe.
10:39Unlike other countries in Europe where bog bodies are found, in Ireland we have a relatively huge volume of very early literary and analytical material that we can trawl through to see if it provides any information on the context of these bodies.
11:02As in most of prehistoric Europe, Ireland's ancient history was not written down.
11:07Instead, it was passed from generation to generation via the spoken word.
11:13But, uniquely, Ireland's oral history was finally recorded in a series of annals, written by early Christian monks working between 1000 and 1600 AD.
11:27This is real history, this isn't speculation, so it's a very good starting point to look back on what may have preceded it.
11:35Ned Kelly is hoping these sources will shed light on the mystery of Cashelman.
11:41Could he also belong to the grim roll call of men, women and children brutally murdered, then buried in the bog?
11:48Three hundred such bodies have been found across Northwest Europe.
11:59They date mainly from 500 BC to 200 AD, Europe's Iron Age.
12:04Professor Miranda Green is an expert in the culture of this period and its bog body legacy.
12:12The thing which links them all together is their bog deaths, but they were killed in different ways, some by trauma, some by garrotting, some by drowning.
12:21They have suffered extreme violence.
12:24These are adult people, one woman and one man, from Borremerza in Denmark.
12:30The woman particularly had had a very savage end.
12:33She'd been scalped and her face taken off.
12:36And the man had been hit hard on the head and then garrotted with a rope that is still visible around the neck here.
12:45This is the body of a young girl from Ida in the Northern Netherlands.
12:49She was put in the bog at the age of 12.
12:52Her hair was cut off and placed by her side and then she was garrotted.
13:00So this is the fate of this poor girl.
13:04The evidence is really quite special.
13:07We can see stomach contents.
13:08We know what people ate just before they were killed.
13:10We know how they met their deaths.
13:12We've even got looks of terror on people's faces.
13:15So you've really got a freeze-framing of people who clamour for our attention as individuals.
13:25Over 2,000 years later, the reasons for these deaths are a mystery.
13:33But one thing common to all of the bodies is the bog.
13:39Dr Ben Geary is a wetland archaeologist.
13:42He studies the history and formation of bogs.
13:47Bogs are incredible places.
13:48They have an enormously long history.
13:51They've been part of the landscape for millennia.
13:54Bogs are made up of dead plants.
13:57But their unique chemical composition, which is highly acidic,
14:02kills the bacteria that cause decomposition,
14:05meaning that organic matter is preserved in a form known as peat.
14:09By cutting into the bog, Dr Geary can expose the layers of preserved peat,
14:16going back millennia.
14:18We've got around about 2,500 years of peat accumulation in this section here.
14:23This is sphagnum moss.
14:25And you can see for a deposit that's maybe,
14:28perhaps 1,000, 1,500 years old, and the preservation is remarkable.
14:32Bogs are waterlogged.
14:33Rainfall is collected and stored in the peat.
14:37This oxygen-poor environment offers ideal conditions for the preservation of organic matter.
14:44And that essentially equates to the slowing down, almost the complete halting of the usual process of biological decay.
14:51As dead matter accumulates, the bog slowly expands, growing around one millimetre a year,
14:58meaning that today, a single metre of peat can contain a record of 1,000 years of history,
15:05preserving plant life, ancient artefacts and bodies.
15:09Within bogs, we essentially have, you know, we have this record, we have this memory of the past,
15:16the memory of past environments, past peoples and past landscapes.
15:20And we just don't have that in any of the environment on the earth.
15:24The unique properties of the bog have preserved hundreds of bodies across north-western Europe.
15:29In Denmark alone, around 200 have been dug from the country's bog lands.
15:36Paulina Singh is an archaeologist and the curator of Musgard Museum,
15:42home to one of the most famous Danish bog bodies.
15:46Graubelman was discovered in 1952.
15:52He is around 2,300 years old, but he's been remarkably preserved by the bog.
15:59You stand face to face with a dead man from a period so far, far away,
16:05and he looks like you.
16:07And his nails are very well preserved, his fingertips.
16:11You can still see the small lines in them.
16:14You could see his beard when he was found.
16:17You could see the pores in his skin.
16:20It's fantastic.
16:22Graubelman's preserved remains clearly reveal that he too was viciously murdered.
16:27He had a deep cut from one ear to another.
16:32It's a savage wound.
16:36But there's more.
16:38A broken leg and a fractured skull.
16:41More injuries than were necessary to kill him.
16:43It leaves historians asking why.
16:49Silkeborg.
16:51Less than 30 miles from where Graubelman was discovered.
16:55And where the museum holds another famous body.
16:57In 1950, Pete Cutter's working on a bog outside the town unearthed Tollandman.
17:07He too lived around 2,300 years ago.
17:11He too was murdered.
17:13During excavation, it became very clear very quickly that he was hanged.
17:20Because he still had a noose around his neck very, very, very tightly.
17:27And you can also see the furrows here groove around the neck at a very high position that indicates that he was hanged.
17:34Tollandman's head has been remarkably preserved by the bog.
17:39And his remains still tantalize archaeologists.
17:43Look here.
17:45If you see his face, it's so fantastic.
17:48And you see his wrinkles.
17:50You see his stubble chin.
17:52And so it's almost like a CV.
17:54But we can't read it.
17:58One thing scientists have been able to read is the contents of Tollandman's gut.
18:05It showed he had eaten a porridge of barley and linseed the day he died.
18:10Similar to Graubelman, whose stomach was also preserved.
18:15This is some of his last meal.
18:18Graubelman's last meal.
18:20And it has been eaten more than 2,000 years ago.
18:25They found out that there were seeds of 66 different herbs.
18:30It's not the best.
18:32It's animal food or poor man's food.
18:35And it's interesting because many of the other Danish bog budders
18:39have the same last meal inside when they found them.
18:45Could Cashelman's stomach reveal his final meal?
18:47The team in Ireland first need to locate the stomach.
18:51But identifying it in the jumble of soft tissue is not easy.
18:56They start by trying to locate his oesophagus.
19:00I think if he's got a trachea behind it,
19:03it would be his oesophagus behind it.
19:05In which case, you've got a portal of entry to his GI tract.
19:08I don't know if you could core out a bit, like a little core biopsy or something.
19:11The trouble is then you're actually going down into what you can't see underneath.
19:18Except it's minimally invasive.
19:21Oh yeah, but I think in some respects it's probably better to treat this as an archaeological excavation almost.
19:27Professor Cassidy decides the safest way to look for the stomach is with the fingertip search of Cashelman's internal organs.
19:36But her efforts are in vain.
19:38She finds the stomach has entirely decomposed.
19:40What's the stomach?
19:41No, because the stomach's going to be in this area here.
19:46So the stomach's well gone.
19:48There's nothing there. This is all very ratty looking.
19:51It's a disappointment.
19:54Without the stomach, the team will never know Cashelman's last meal.
19:58But carbon dating has revealed when he died.
20:03And the results are a shock to everyone on the team.
20:06The body is over 4,000 years old.
20:091,500 years older than the team expected.
20:12For Ned Kelly, it's a remarkable discovery.
20:16This body goes back to the early Bronze Age.
20:19It's much earlier than we anticipated.
20:22That's very, very exciting.
20:25It's probably the earliest fleshed bog body.
20:31Cashelman walked these bogs in Ireland centuries before Tutankhamun lived in Egypt.
20:37Making this the oldest fleshed bog body not just in Europe, but the world.
20:43It shows the bog body tradition stretches right back into our darkest prehistory.
20:49But it's not just the body that holds the clues to Cashelman's story.
20:52At the bog where the body was found, the layers of peat could also conceal ancient evidence.
21:00Archaeologist Dr Ellen O'Carroll has come here to look for it.
21:05She's taking a peat core sample and hoping the record of vegetation preserved within it will offer an insight into Cashelman's world.
21:12This is our peat core.
21:18You're 50 centimetres of peat, which represents about 700 years of environmental history.
21:25At the bottom of this core, we have evidence for a marginal forest where alder trees were growing.
21:31You can see the wood remains in here and you can see the reeds just poking out here.
21:39As you get up further, you can see your eriophrum or your bog cotton, which is the white kind of cotton you see growing on the bogs.
21:46So what you can't see with the naked eye, and what I analysed back in the lab as well, is your pollen.
21:53You can fit 30 pollen grains on the top of a pin.
21:57So they're so tiny you need the microscope to identify them.
22:00Dr O'Carroll hopes her analysis of the pollen grains will reveal what vegetation was most prominent around the time of Cashelman's death.
22:12Now that looks like ranunculus, I think, which is a buttercup.
22:21It's kind of got a globular grain surface.
22:25There's a hazel pollen grain.
22:27The variety of species she detects may indicate the scale of human activity in the area where Cashelman was buried.
22:36That looks like an ash pollen grain, Braximus.
22:42Ash and birch quickly grow after mature forest has been clear-felled.
22:47Pollen from these two species dominate the samples, indicating both ash and birch were widespread.
22:53It's a sign of intense human activity in the area where Cashelman was buried.
23:00The presence of ash indicates that humans were around the area, they were cutting down the forest.
23:07Ash is often used as an indicator of humans interacting with the woods and cutting them down.
23:11The rise in the ash and the birch curves and the exploitation of the woodland indicates that Cashelman died within the vicinity of a community that was quite vibrant.
23:19Further analysis of the peat core reveals more evidence of human activity.
23:26Microscopic traces of charcoal indicating fires were burnt in the area.
23:31Confirmation that Cashelman was buried close to a busy community.
23:36But what would this community have been like?
23:38Dr Billy McGlynn has studied Bronze Age archaeology.
23:44It's allowed him to recreate the technology of this vanished world.
23:48What I try to do is look at the originals and imagine how they would have been done using similar types of technology to what they had in the past.
23:57Dr McGlynn has recreated an ancient method of casting objects from bronze.
24:03It shows the skills and scientific knowledge Cashelman's tribe would have mastered to produce even an everyday object like an axe.
24:11What we're going to do is take these bits of scrap bronze and put them in the crucible here and heat up the whole thing.
24:17The idea is that the metal will melt and turn to liquid.
24:19To make a high quality casting, the bronze needs to be heated to at least 2,000 degrees.
24:26To achieve this, prehistoric bronze smiths figured out an ingenious system of bellows.
24:32You'd be starting the next stroke before the first one is finished, so there's a constant flow forward of air.
24:39It looks simple enough, but it needs a little bit of coordination.
24:43Once the bronze is molten, it is poured into a clay mould.
24:50This method of casting gave Cashelman's people the ability to mass produce essential items like weapons and tools.
25:03It'll clean up and polish very nicely and be able to hammer a sharp edge onto it.
25:10It is industrial production.
25:13What we saw here was the final step in a very long process where metal has to be produced.
25:18First you would have to prospect for the metal, find out where the ore is, then you would have to mine it.
25:22Then you would have to extract the metal from the ore in the process of smelting.
25:27But what really comes across is how refined they had their skills.
25:30And sure, their technology is at a more basic level than ours, but what they could do with what were essentially more limited conditions than what we have now was astonishing.
25:43But who were these ancient metal workers? And what was their civilisation like?
25:50They left no written records.
25:53The accounts we do have come from the Romans as they expanded their empire across Europe.
25:58The writer Tacitus described tribes living in villages, fashioned with no regard to pleasing the eye, and who ravage, slaughter and seize under false pretenses.
26:11To the Romans, there was one word for people like these, barbarians.
26:16It goes back to a classical term, sort of a barbaroi, meaning people who, in a sense, speak in languages which are incomprehensible to the classical world, bar, bar, bar.
26:28So that's the origin of it.
26:30But basically, it had come to mean people who are not like us, people who are different from us in the classical world,
26:37because they're not civilised, they don't write things down, they don't have organised laws, and they don't have organised structures.
26:44And so they're sort of almost not quite human.
26:47But historians now believe these Roman accounts are highly subjective, and don't reveal the true nature of Iron Age Europe.
26:57You have to look at the Romans as the imperialists that they were.
27:02And the Roman worldview was, of course, that the Roman way of doing things was the best way,
27:09and indeed the only worthwhile way of doing business.
27:14Nearly two centuries of archaeology has revealed the truth about a complex European society.
27:21The Gauls, the Celts, the Germanii, and the Goths.
27:25These were confederations of hundreds of diverse tribes, organised to protect their interests from the advance of Rome.
27:32The knowledge we have is of an immensely sophisticated group of people.
27:38We know of hierarchies of people, so political leaders, religious leaders, and other people.
27:45So in fact, a highly stratified society, but one without writing, and so it's largely silent and very difficult to get at.
27:50There would have been trading centres where you would have had, you know, something approaching an urban economy as well.
27:57So the idea of international trade and commerce and exchange were not foreign concepts.
28:04But the backbone of the economy was probably agricultural production.
28:07To these farming people, the land was sacred, and studies of ancient European iconography shows that, as with the Greeks and Romans, fertility deities were central to their belief systems, and may be the key to explaining the bog body phenomenon.
28:25Derryville, just 15 miles from Cashel Bog, and a huge excavation is revealing prehistoric craftsmanship on a massive scale.
28:36That may also unlock the ritual beliefs of the Iron Age.
28:40Archaeologists have uncovered a network of finely crafted trackways.
28:45They hint at the belief systems central to Cashelman's culture.
28:50Dr. Henry Chapman is an expert in interpreting wetland archaeology.
28:53Now this one is beautiful, it's a wicker work hurdle, so you can see it extending quite some way along here.
29:02Some Iron Age trackways in Europe may have been used as roads for taking cattle safely over bog land, but not all of them.
29:10At Derryville in Ireland, none of the trackways that have been found actually cross the entire bog.
29:16Instead, each ends right in the centre, where the topography indicates the marsh was at its wettest.
29:26Why? One clue could be the wealth of valuable objects found buried in boglands.
29:31The scale and locations of these hordes lead historians to believe they are not buried treasure, but votive offerings to ancient deities.
29:42A votive offering is simply a gift that is presented by people to a god or a goddess in return for some expected favour.
29:57It's an offering which has been made on behalf of the community.
30:02One such offering excavated from an Irish bog was a large pail of Iron Age butter, a valuable commodity 2,000 years ago.
30:11Ned Kelly believes it was an offering to the goddess of fertility.
30:15There's far too much of this butter for it to have been simply buried and overlooked.
30:21We're clearly dealing with material that has been deposited for a reason.
30:28And that reason, I believe, was the protection of the cattle herds and to ensure continued supply of milk by the herds and proper food resources.
30:40It may sound extraordinary, but evidence to support this theory can be found within living memory in modern Ireland.
30:50We know that butter continued to be deposited in a votive manner up into the middle of the 20th century at least.
31:00And we can trace that tradition back through the deposits in the bogs and in the lakes of Ireland.
31:05Other ancient artefacts associated with fertility have been excavated from Irish bogs.
31:12Cauldrons, feasting cups, millstones for grinding grain, and these are also thought to be offerings to the goddess.
31:20Sacrifices like these hint at the sacred nature of the bog lands of Iron Age Europe.
31:27And, to Dr Chapman, this evidence shows the trackways at Derryville were not about economics, but ritual.
31:37If it doesn't make sense in any sort of practical sort of world, then it's likely to be something which is a different sort of practical, you know, something about belief systems.
31:45It's allowing them to ask for things, to ask for help or to ask for thanks.
31:50Those sorts of events which happen, you know, either at times of conflict or at times when they require a good harvest.
31:55It's those sorts of events which are what these things are probably about.
32:01Trackways may have allowed Cashelman and his tribe to access the bogs to commune with their deities.
32:07But why deposit a body in the peat? Archaeology has shown that, typically, these people did not bury their dead.
32:16Normal people were burned, cremated, and put in an urn or a pot or just a shallow pit.
32:25So, this is highly unusual.
32:28Could the bog bodies themselves have been offerings?
32:31Were these men, women and children deliberately murdered, then buried in the bog to appease the gods?
32:39The way that he was put to rest in the bog, like lying in a sleeping position on the one side,
32:46somebody must have closed his eyes and his mouth because he don't look like this peaceful if you just hanged.
32:54So, I personally think that he was sacrificed to a god or a goddess.
32:59Could our ancestors have practiced ritual murder?
33:04Paulina Singh has studied Graubalman's diet, his injuries and the local archaeology.
33:10She has used this evidence to piece together his final moments.
33:15It's led her to believe Graubalman died as part of a sacrificial execution,
33:21a ritual in which the whole community was involved.
33:24When they walk through the old fields, and when they reach the bog there, then somebody hit him on his left shin bone.
33:41And then he fell on his knee.
33:44And when he's laying on his knees, somebody caught him from ear to ear, very deep.
33:54And the blood will flee from his neck here to the bottom.
34:01So, they give a life from this world, from our world, to the underworld.
34:08Could bog bodies really be evidence of the widespread practice of ritual murder?
34:16Could Cashelman also have been sacrificed?
34:20Ned Kelly believes clues to this theory might be found on one of Europe's most precious prehistoric artefacts,
34:26the Gundestrop cauldron.
34:31This is a rather elaborate cauldron made of silver,
34:35which was found in a bog at Gundestrop in Denmark.
34:40It dates to 200 BC, the same period as many of the bog bodies.
34:46The cauldron is decorated with panels depicting Iron Age deities.
34:50One image shows a ritual being performed in honour of the goddess of fertility.
34:57There is a figure who is holding a victim over a cauldron.
35:03This victim is either being drowned in the cauldron, or perhaps he's had his throat cut.
35:08It's an image of ritual killing.
35:11And there are other images relating to ritual killing on this object.
35:15We have one image of a male deity holding aloft two human victims,
35:22who in turn are holding aloft two pigs who are also to be sacrificed.
35:28And on an image before me here, which shows the goddess lying at her breast,
35:35are a human victim and a pig who have been sacrificed.
35:40So there are a number of references on this object to human sacrifice.
35:43For Ned Kelly, the Gundestrop cauldron offers an eyewitness account of human sacrifice,
35:52straight from the Iron Age.
35:54And for him, this crucial evidence helps explain the mystery of the bog body murders.
36:00This cauldron shows the context within which those killings may have taken place in ancient Ireland.
36:08Was Cattleman ritually killed by his own people as a sacrifice to the goddess of fertility?
36:17His extensive injuries may offer further evidence to support the idea,
36:22and the macabre practice known to historians as overkill.
36:26Very often that sacrifice is done with far more violence than is necessary actually to kill.
36:33As though the act itself conveys sacredness.
36:39The more violent, the more complex the killing, in a way the more valuable the gift is.
36:44It's far more than just sending somebody over to the next world.
36:48It is highly ritualised. It's spectacle, it's theatre, it's a collective act involving collective responsibility.
36:56The conservation lab at the National Museum of Ireland.
37:03The forensics team is considering whether Cattleman's injuries could be evidence of a ritual overkill.
37:09But there's still disagreement.
37:11Deputy State Pathologist Dr Michael Curtis believes a weapon such as an axe could not have been responsible.
37:17I find it hard to believe that it's displaced the vertebrae without fracturing them.
37:24If it's impacted them enough, it has to be the sharp edge.
37:29If the sharp edge has gone in sufficiently to displace the vertebrae, why are they not fractured?
37:35This trauma to the spine may not, in fact, be an injury at all.
37:38The theory of overkill was developed following the Danish bog body discoveries in the 1950s.
37:47But modern research by forensic anthropologist Dr Niels Lindrup is rewriting that theory.
37:54He's joining the team in Ireland and doesn't believe the injuries to Cattleman's spine were caused by a weapon at the time of death.
38:01If that was an injury that was physically induced, what sort of damage would you expect to see on those vertebrae?
38:11There is no sign of trauma. I mean, in terms of fracturing of the vertebral bodies, a fracturing of the posterior aspects of the...
38:19Right. Right. Okay.
38:21I can only recall seeing that. Massive trauma.
38:23Yeah. Traffic accidents.
38:24That's where a traffic accident falls from a height.
38:26Yeah. Even, for instance, by kicking somebody, you know, in the back wouldn't...
38:29No. Never. No.
38:32Dr. Lindrup has an entirely different explanation for the rupture to Cattleman's spine.
38:38Bog trauma. It all starts with the chemical composition of the bog.
38:43There are some substances in the bog which actually helps preserving the bog body.
38:49At the same time, however, there are also other substances, acidic substances, which start degrading some of the tissues.
38:54For instance, the bones. The acidity can be so strong that the bones come completely bendable. They get basically like wet cardboard.
39:04Dr. Lindrup's explanation is that the powerful acids in the bog where Cattleman was found softened the ligaments, holding his spine together.
39:12And that this effect was intensified by the increasing pressure on the body as the bog grew above it.
39:19The bog is undergoing a continuous development. It may actually grow in height. At some point in time, there might even be sort of, it may sink a bit.
39:27You get this active environment. And this environment can directly, indirectly, put a pressure on the bog body.
39:34Dr. Lindrup believes the weight of the bog is responsible for pushing the softened vertebrae in Cattleman's spine out of alignment over thousands of years.
39:45We've seen something like that in Danish bog bodies.
39:48I think it's because when the ligaments sort of degrade a bit or get a bit more soft, then they can start, depending on how the body is lying, sort of come out of alignment.
39:58To me, it seems post-mortem.
40:02Dr. Lindrup questions whether overkill was a real phenomenon.
40:06But Ned Kelly has led cutting-edge forensic investigations into two other mutilated bog bodies.
40:13And believes they offer compelling evidence to suggest that, in Ireland, overkill really did take place.
40:21The first was the body known as Clonique Haven Man.
40:24A blow in the face broke his nose and he was then set upon around the head with an axe.
40:32This is old Crocken Man.
40:34Modern forensics reveal that he too was the victim of a gruesome murder.
40:39He died as a result of a stab wound to his heart, probably with an iron-nade sword.
40:46He was decapitated and cut in half and the other parts of the body were disposed of elsewhere.
40:56There's far more done to this body than needed to be done to kill the man.
41:00Ned believes the extensive injuries to these bodies are evidence of overkill and that science backs him up.
41:10I would have to conclude, based on the evidence that I've been presented with by the pathologists in relation to the Irish bog bodies, is that these are bodies that have multiple injuries.
41:22So you have to interpret that. Now, whether you call it overkill, or what you call it, is just a matter of semantics.
41:32Further evidence on Cashelman's body may show he too suffered a violent death.
41:38The first clue is a long, thin cut to his back.
41:41That was revealed by excavation. It was down in the peak, so I don't see how that particular cut could possibly have been caused by the milling machine.
41:52Oh, I agree. I agree. It's more from it.
41:55No, it's definitely not the milling machine then. It's something else.
41:59The thin cut suggests a slash with a very sharp blade.
42:02Meanwhile, the clean break to the arm is a definite defensive injury, typical of someone deflecting a blow.
42:11For Mary Cassidy, the evidence suggests Cashelman's death was violent.
42:21I mean, your injury to your arm looks like a true injury.
42:23Yeah.
42:24And if that's a true injury, then you have to think of a mechanism.
42:28And the most likely mechanism I would have thought in those days is you're in the middle of a fight with somebody wielding something.
42:35Yeah.
42:36And therefore it's quite likely then the death is trauma.
42:42Forensic science has at last confirmed that Cashelman was murdered.
42:50And it can also reveal how these men lived.
42:53And when he анoniacic science...
42:56us were threatened by Venom Education.
42:58Dr. Andrew Wilson analyzed hair samples...
43:00... meat learned from Cyrus, Dr. Andrew Wilson...
43:03...analyzed hair samples taken from the bodies of Clonycavernman...
43:06...and Old Crockenmane.
43:08Hair is quite a unique resource.
43:10It locks both physical information and biochemical information.
43:12the chemical information that perhaps tells us about that person's diet by studying samples of
43:18hair dr. Wilson is able to unlock the dietary record hidden within the structure of each strand
43:25with hair you've got that incremental growth roughly a centimeter each month and if you've
43:30got long enough hair surviving therefore you can build a a complete timeline of the final months
43:36of the individual's life tests revealed both cloney cavern man and old crockin man enjoyed a diet rich
43:45in protein this indicates both men may have been of high status casual man's head was destroyed by
43:53machinery but the team did find his scalp flung several yards away by the peat harvester we've got
44:02samples from casual man's scalp roughly 18 to 20 millimeters in length which in itself is
44:10representing roughly two months of hair growth dr. Wilson places these prehistoric hair samples into
44:17a scanning electron microscope the intense magnification reveals the structure of the hair
44:23while isotope analysis deciphers the unique chemical signatures left in casual man's hair by his diet
44:30those signatures tell us that we're dealing with an individual who has most of the food groups
44:36dietary protein so in the form of meat and dairy as well as um as cereals and that's not dissimilar
44:43to the bulk bodies that we've looked at before so old crocker man cloney cavern man the evidence of a
44:48protein-rich diet suggests casual man may have been of high social status like the two other irish bog bodies
44:56so who were they ned kelly is at the national library of ireland where he's searching through
45:03some of the country's oldest literary records and he's found a clue the annals of the four masters was
45:12compiled by christian scribes in the 1600s but it records oral accounts of irish history dating from as
45:20early as 2200 bc one such account describes the excessive violence used to murder an ancient irish king
45:31okay you have a reference here to the death of the high king of ireland
45:37according to the annals the king was drowned in a vat of wine after being burned on the summit of
45:47the hill the king is killed in a number of ways he's drowned he's burnt and in other references he's
45:56stabbed as well this is referred to as the more as the the triple killing of kings references to the
46:02triple killing of kings occur throughout irish folklore could such a killing explain the extensive
46:09injuries to the irish bog bodies and show they were kings if so evidence from further annals may explain
46:17why they died an account of an inauguration ceremony describes how the new king was symbolically wedded to
46:24the land over which he was to rule in this case the western province of connacht
46:30and will fail mok a mok owen had married the province of connacht married the province of connacht
46:39in the manner remembered by the old men and recorded in the old books and this was the most splendid
46:47kingship marriage ever celebrated connacht down to that day this symbolic marriage of the king to the
46:55the land itself made him directly responsible for the success of the harvest and came with potentially fatal
47:02consequences
47:04if it fails he will be held accountable for failing to keep the goddess in a benevolent frame of mind
47:12and he will be replaced through uh his his ritual killing
47:20could these fragments of history show cashel man was a murdered king
47:25evidence from the body of old crocken man supports the idea
47:29and suggests to ned this man was certainly of high status
47:32his hands had been perfectly preserved he has no calluses whatever on his hands this is a man who did
47:42not engage in any manual labor he had an armlet i believe that that armlet signifies that he was a
47:50person of rank while ned searches the literary record for clues to explain cashel man
47:57science may be on the verge of a bold new theory to explain all 300 bog bodies and reveal the powerful
48:05larger force that spread across iron age europe the derryville dig just 30 miles from where cashel man was
48:14found and where ancient trackways led prehistoric tribes to the wet heart of the bog to practice their darkest rituals
48:26and scientists working here have long known that rainfall feeds the bogs causing them to grow
48:35now they're asking could rainfall also be the key to ritual murder
48:43the peat has preserved not just human remains but also microscopic fossilized amoeba
48:51and scientists believe these could throw light on the bog body murders they're known as testate amoeba
49:00testates live on the bog surface and we know from modern studies of of testate amoeba what
49:08moisture preferences different species have so we can use knowledge of um present as a key to the past
49:14modern science has revealed which testate species flourish when it's wet and which ones thrive in
49:21dry conditions environmental archaeologists like dr ben geary now believe this simple fact could open
49:28the door to thousands of years of climate history by analyzing samples of peat he is able to extract
49:35fossilized testates that lived thousands of years ago
49:39now as the bogs grow and change over time depending on how wet or dry they are of course this will be
49:47reflected by the composition of the communities of testates that are living in the peat under the
49:53microscope dr geary is able to identify the different types of testate amoeba
49:58so this is another species of testate it's called arkela discoides this is indicator of generally rather
50:09wet conditions this is hyalasthenia subflava this is indicator of a comparative dry conditions
50:16by analyzing peat samples dr geary is hoping to identify which species of testate wet or dry are the
50:23most dominant this work could reveal the weather patterns faced by ancient tribes thousands of years
50:30ago and offer an insight into the challenges posed by climate to these prehistoric farming communities
50:37meanwhile at the national library ned kelly has found another clue to help him explain casual man's death
50:45it's a medieval map like the annals it records information from thousands of years earlier
50:54in this case the boundaries of ireland's ancient kingdoms and the inauguration hills on which tribal
51:02kings were crowned the map shows casual man and old crock and man were buried in bogs at the foot of
51:10inauguration hills ned believes this is a sign both men were deposed kings each buried in the shadow of
51:19the hilltop on which they had once been crowned to find out more he's exploring the hill overlooking
51:27where casual man was found there's a wonderful view back here across the bog uh casual bog you can see
51:36that's the bog there in the middle of which casual man is
51:39the map shows that the hill and the bog mark the boundary of an ancient tribal kingdom
51:51part of modern-day county leash we're just here crook locker i think and the bog is over here
52:00on this boundary you can see there's a boundary running running around here the hill's wide flat
52:08summit overlooking the kingdom made it a place of assembly for ancient tribes performing kingship
52:15ceremonies ned believes they came here to crown their kings and to decommission them in murderous rituals
52:25and what i'm proposing is that the bog body down here in casual bog is also associated with kingship
52:34ritual he in my view is a king who was probably inaugurated here on this hilltop
52:40and when his kingship failed he was ritually killed and he's buried down there in the boundary
52:47surrounding this inauguration hill it just cannot be coincidental
52:56ned's theory is that casual man was a bronze age king faced with a failing harvest
53:04murdered by his tribe and sacrificed to appease the goddess of fertility
53:18this theory could at last explain the mystery of the prehistoric bodies buried in irish bogs
53:25but not those from the rest of europe it may work in a sense for places like ireland where you have
53:32this early medieval evidence but it doesn't work for the majority of bog bodies found for example
53:37in schleswig holstein in denmark and in the netherlands and and elsewhere in britain
53:43in europe archaeologists have found the bodies of men and women boys and girls clearly these can't
53:50all have been kings could a common theory ever explain them all experts have scrutinized archaeology
54:00ancient history and the bodies now the bog itself may provide an answer and reveal the powerful force
54:11that grew the bog lands but reigned chaos on ancient europe dr ben geary has spent years studying how
54:20bogs are formed and fed by rainfall and how the record of this rainfall is preserved in the form of
54:27microscopic fossilized testate amoeba so basically if we're identifying a large amount of the discoides
54:36in that sample that indicates that that that is a relatively wet environment represented and by that
54:41sample if we're seeing relatively great proportion of the dry indicators of course that shows the opposite
54:46shows that a relatively dry surface for 20 years scientists have been collecting data from sites like
54:54dairyville their goal to use testate amoeba to track changes in the wetness of these bog lands and
55:02reveal prehistory's changing climate there's been a huge amount of work done on different bogs different
55:09sites in ireland and indeed in northwest europe attempting to track changes in bog surface wetness over
55:15time and then to relate that to climatic shifts really over the last you know 5 000 years or so
55:20maybe even longer this work is at last unlocking the climate record preserved in europe's bog lands
55:29and the data has revealed an insight into the dramatic changes in climate faced by prehistoric tribes
55:35thousands of years ago we tend to see that there is increasing evidence for a climatic shift a shift
55:42probably to a wetter and a colder environment around about the bronze age iron age transition so very very
55:48broadly around the time that we do get increasing evidence you know of bog bodies appearing in in
55:53wetlands this research reveals a dramatic fluctuation in europe's climate around 750 bc when rainfall
56:01increased and temperatures dropped it lasted hundreds of years probably the most significant climatic event
56:10since the ice age now could this evidence of a climate shift to a wetter colder europe explain the bog bodies
56:20if you imagine in prehistory when people don't have the advantage of satellite based information those
56:26sorts of things um they don't have that record so when things change and they continue to get
56:31wester and colder they don't know why but it's affecting their economics european iron age tribes were
56:38dependent on farming for a society like this a colder climate with more rain could have meant disaster
56:46destroying their harvests and leaving them facing starvation those things are where people have to
56:53respond in some way and if the way you respond to that you feel impotent you have to do something
56:59and that's when belief systems ritual activities probably take place did the iron age tribes see their
57:07harvests devastated by climate chaos and interpret that as the work of angry deities and was their
57:15solution to march living sacrifices into the soaking bogs of europe to murder them and appease their gods
57:24in terms of the sort of ceremonial sort of prehistoric ones that we think of ritual killings
57:29um those ones it's entirely possible that they are related to changing environment people responding
57:36to the things which they can't control could this controversial theory answer prehistory's darkest mystery
57:44and explain the bog body phenomenon across europe we know it was the rain that grew the bogs
57:52but did the rain also drive our ancestors to commit murder in order to ensure their own survival
58:02thousands of years later are these bodies their unfortunate victims all murdered all sacrificed
58:12all buried in the bog
58:29kicking off a brand new season of american blues here on bbc4 with this week's music night
58:34we get stuck into blues america at nine tomorrow don't miss it
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