Cooked cereals and fish: a frugal meal shortly before being hanged and thrown into a swamp: it happened 2400 years ago to the one known as the "Tollund man" (if you don't know who he is take a look here).
The Tollund man was in his 40s when he died in what is now Denmark. It was probably offered as a human sacrifice. The peat bog in which he was buried mummified his body in extraordinary detail. Dozens of other Iron Age Europeans were similarly sacrificed and are collectively referred to as “bog bodies.”
Tollund Man: one of the first archaeological “cold cases”.
Danish scientists they analyzed for the first time the intestinal contents of the Tollund man shortly after the discovery of his body in 1950. The analysis revealed 20 species of plants and one species of parasite.
But now Nina Helt Nielsen at Museum Silkeborg in Denmark and his colleagues performed new analyzes of the contents of the Tollund Man's large intestine, studying plant fossils, pollen and (for the first time in a bog body) a full range of non-pollen microfossils, steroids and proteins.
The analysis of his “Last Supper”
The research revealed the presence of proteins and eggs of intestinal worms belonging to whipworms (trichuris), tapeworm (taenia) and worm (roundworm), as well as the man's partially digested dinner. In his last supper the Tollund man ate a sort of "porridge" consisting of approx 85% barley, 5% flax and 9% seeds of a plant called persicaria pallida. The crust of the food indicated that the porridge was slightly burnt and had been cooked in a clay pot.
The Tollund man also ate a fatty-boned fish, it may have been an eel. He probably got the parasites from eating undercooked meat and drinking impure water well before his death.
However, the Tollund man's last meal was mostly ordinary for the time. “I'm pretty sure we would see something similar if we analyzed the gut contents of other bog bodies,” Nielsen says, although the persicaria seeds may have been a special addition as part of a sacrificial ritual. At around 1350 kilocalories, Tollund Man's last meal would have provided half of his daily nutritional needs. It has been preserved in such detail that we could almost reproduce the recipe.
