10: The Windeby Bog Bodies Near the town of Windeby in the north of Germany,
some locals were cutting peat from a bog for fuel.
They got quite the surprise when they discovered a body!!
They stopped working immediately and reported it to the authorities.
At the time, they believed the mummified body that they found in the bog was that of a teenage
girl and she was called the “Windeby Girl”.
More recently, the body has been reevaluated and experts now know that it's actually the
mummified remains of a teenage boy.
The story behind how this young man ended up buried in a bog is quite frankly horrifying.
Unfortunately, when the mummy was found the machine used to cut the peat had already done
some damage - in fact they had accidentally cut off one of its legs, a foot, and a hand.
But still, the rest of the body was able to be removed relatively intact.
There were no grave goods like what you would expect to find in such an ancient burial plot
from nearly 2000 years ago.
But there was a strange band of wool covering the dead person's eyes as well as a collar
around their throat.
He is now known more formally as the Windeby I bog body.
There were no signs of physical trauma so we have no idea what happened to him.
To make matters even more bizarre, a second body was later found nearby.
It was a middle-aged man who had been strangled by a hazel branch and then placed in the bog
on a stake.
Clearly, something bad had happened here.
At first everyone thought perhaps this was an adulterous couple that had been punished
and killed.
But since now we know both are male, and they died 300 years apart, historians have interpreted
the remains as belonging to Germanic tribes who punished people who committed crimes by
executing them and then staking their bodies in the bog.
Of course, all we know is how this man died, but we will probably never know the reason
why.
Now you can see these remains of the bog bodies in a museum in Germany.
9: Stone Age Murder Modern forensics and technology has just helped
solve a murder mystery from the Stone Age.
This is about as cold as a cold case can get, unsolved for 33,000 years!
The skull of the victim was first uncovered by miners working in Romania back in 1941.
It was clear by a huge crack in the top of the skull that the man had been hit very hard
with something in the head.
Researchers with the Eberhard Karls Universitat Tubingen in Germany wanted to know what exactly
caused the huge crack in his skull.
So, they recently did experimental trauma simulations.
What this means is that they tested different scenarios, such as falling off a cliff, being
hit with a stick, or being bludgeoned with a rock.
The researchers were able to pin down the most likely scenario.
They say that it was actually two injuries that caused the paleolithic man to die.
The first was a linear fracture at the base of his skull.
The second was a depressed fracture on the side of his cranial vault.
The injuries have proven to be from two consecutive blows with some kind of baseball bat-like
object.
Plus, researchers were able to determine by the positioning of the fractures that the
confrontation was face to face.
In other words, the killer was holding the weapon in their left hand and looking straight
in the eyes of the victim just before they beat them to death.
It definitely wasn't an accident, though of course it's impossible to come up with a motive
33,000 years after the fact.
8: Killed by Tomb Raiders Archaeologists recently discovered the body
of a Chinese man who had been stabbed to death and then dumped in a tunnel 1300 years ago.
The mystery came when archaeologists were excavating an ancient tomb in the northern
Ningxia region.
They found the body of a man who was probably around 25 years old at the time of his death.
His death was dated back to some time between the years 640 and 680.
Anthropologist Qian Wang from the Department of Biomedical Sciences at Texas A&M says the
skeleton belonged to a healthy person.
At least, healthy until he was stabbed 13 times in the head, arms, and rib cage.
Someone was really mad at this guy!
Archeologists found his remains slumped on the ground with his arm still covering his
face in a last desperate bid to protect himself.
Archaeologists were shocked, obviously dealing with an ancient murder.
But judging by other evidence in the area, they were able to put together a strong hypothesis
as to what happened.
Because the man was discovered in a vertical shaft dug from the surface into the tomb by
ancient tomb raiders, they believe he was the unintended witness to a crime.
He had likely stumbled upon the thieves as they were pillaging the tomb, and he surprised
them.
In the moment, the thieves killed him to ensure his silence.
After the thieves finished stealing what they could from the grave, they threw the victim’s
body into the tunnel and then filled it back up with soil.
If he hadn't died from the stabbing, he most certainly died from being buried alive.
7: Dead in a Cave Archaeologists in the Scottish Highlands got
another surprise when they discovered the skeleton of a man at the entrance of a cave
they were excavating.
He had been murdered about 1500 years previously in the year 600 AD.
And he had not died a quiet death...
The first clue that he had been murdered came from the position of his body.
He had just kind of been dumped into the cave with his legs crossed and heavy stones holding
down his arms and legs.
It was confusing because he had clearly been murdered but then he was laid to rest inside
the cave with a certain degree of consideration.
Because of this, archeaologists say his murder may have been the result of interpersonal
conflict or human sacrifice.
Whatever the case, his death was brutal.
According to Professor Dame Sue Black with Dundee University’s Centre for Anatomy and
Human Identification, it took at least five blows to kill this man.
Each blow resulted in an additional fracture to his skull.
The first three impacts broke apart his teeth, fractured his left jaw, and broke the back
of his skull.
He was not going to go down peacefully!
The fourth blow was probably meant to end his life.
A weapon was driven through his skull from one side to the other.
And finally, a fifth blow crushed the man's skull from the top.
This is one of those murder mysteries that has yet to be solved.
Nobody knows why he was killed, never mind in such a barbaric fashion.
6: Prehistoric Murder It's time for the oldest murder victim ever
discovered.
This individual died 430,000 years ago, give or take a few millennia.
We don't know if they were a man or a woman, why they were killed, or even that many details
surrounding the death.
We do know that they were killed by blunt force trauma to the head.
Archaeologists discovered this skull in a cave in Spain, in the Atapuerca Mountains.
They were immediately alarmed because it was visibly obvious that the victim had had their
skull bashed inward.
But that wasn't the only alarming aspect.
To get to the remains, the archaeologists had had to scramble down a skinny chimney
into an underground cavern to find this skull.
Inside the cavern was a pit of bones.
At least 28 people were dead inside the pit, including members of various Hominid species.
There were members of the ancient Homo heidelbergensis and another species of human ancestor that
scientists had never seen before.
Today, this is the one of the oldest burial pits ever found on the planet.
It's also one of the only burial pits where different species of humans have been found
in the same place.
Nobody knows why the bodies were dumped here, what the timeline looks like, or why the victim
of our ancient murder mystery had their head caved in.
It's truly one of the real archeological mysteries still waiting to be solved.
5: The New Mexico Massacre Seven skeletons have been found in a secluded
part of New Mexico deep inside a canyon indicating there had been some type of massacre.
The five adults, one child, and one infant were found to have been from the now extinct
native Gallina culture.
They occupied a small region of the southwestern state almost 1000 years ago.
But in the year 1275, they suddenly vanished and all trace of them was lost.
These skeletons, which were uncovered by the US Forest Service back in 2005, offer an explanation
for what happened to these ancient people.
According to Tony Largaespada, the main researcher involved with the discovery, every single
one of these people had been murdered, including the children.
The bones had been shattered and broken apart, left behind in the dirt.
Additionally, all the other skeletons that have been discovered in the area from the
time of the Gallina also appeared to have been murdered.
Archeologists are now starting to suspect that there was not only a massacre here, but
an ancient campaign of genocide in which every last member of the Gallina were wiped out
in just a few years – maybe as quickly as a few months.
Curiously enough, it appears that the Gallina disappeared around the same time as the Anasazi,
who built Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde.
Perhaps they were both wiped out by another culture who moved up from the South like the
Moche from Peru, whose gods were hungry for blood.
4: Murder by Hadrian’s Wall A young ancient victim was found at Hadrian’s
Wall in the U.K.
The child may very well have been killed some 1,800 years ago.
According to the experts, this young person was either a child slave or the offspring
of a soldier from mainland Europe serving at this farthest outpost in the Roman Empire.
Hadrian's Wall was built by the Romans when they occupied the United Kingdom.
It marked the boundary of the Roman Empire, or as far as they would ever conquer.
It was manned by Roman soldiers, with many of these soldiers coming from other parts
of the empire.
The body was found in a shallow pit at the corner of a backroom at the old Roman fortress.
Researchers immediately thought it was strange because most bodies were buried far away from
settlements so that ordinary folk wouldn't be contaminated by the dead.
Doctor Trudi Buck from Durham University was able to determine that the child was about
10, though no one knows if it was a boy or a girl.
Doctor Buck also says this was definitely a case of murder, since the body appears to
have been stashed rather than buried.
Also, the skull has a distinct fracture that means the child was hit over the head with
something heavy.
DNA tests showed that the child came from the Mediterranean.
That means they were either the child of a foreign soldier or a slave.
Seeing as child slavery was huge business in ancient Rome, it wouldn't be surprising.
It could be that the child’s Roman owner got angry, killed the child, then stashed
the body under the fort.
3: An Ancient Bullet Sometime around 2000 years ago, a man was
murdered in Greece.
The murderer killed this person by driving something very sharp into his chest.
Archaeologists investigating the body believe it was a unique type of spear, driven into
the man so hard that it left an almost perfect circle in his sternum.
Almost like an ancient bullet!
The ancient weapon used in the murder was called a styrax.
Anagnostis Agelarakis from Adelphi University says that in 40 years of studying archaeology,
they have never witnessed such a perfect wound on any remains.
They say that the spear was thrust at a close range with immaculate precision, stabbed straight
through the sternum.
Who was the individual who got killed?
He was tall for the day, standing 5’ 7”.
He was also about 50 years old and was extraordinarily muscular.
It remains a mystery why he was killed, though seeing as this was ancient Greece, it probably
had something to do with political upheaval.
The real fascinating part is the wound in his chest.
After doing experiments with the physics department, Anagnostis discovered that it would have taken
about 500 pounds of pure force to pierce the man’s sternum.
Even though the victim was quite buff, whoever killed him was an absolute beast.
2: Mass Cannibalism In the ancient village of Herxheim in modern-day
Germany, about 7000 years ago, hundreds of people were butchered.
They were likely ritually sacrificed, eaten by other humans, and then had their remains
thrown into a pit.
According to anthropologists from the University of Bordeaux in France, the sudden explosion
of cannibalism could have had something to do with ritual sacrifice.
But this wasn't a friendly ritual sacrifice.
The cannibals at the village may have brought slaves or prisoners of war back to their settlement,
before brutally murdering and eating them.
But these villagers weren't the only ones eating other people.
Cannibalism was fairly common in the early Neolithic period in Europe.
This was around the time that farming started to spread across the continent.
Villages would often fight against other villages for whatever reason, then take their bodies
back home to eat.
Archeologists know this because of markings on the skeletons indicating that they had
been butchered in the exact same way as animals.
However, it's impossible to say exactly what happened at Herxheim.
It was definitely cannibalism, but the motive is still up in the air.
Whatever happened was extreme, since archaeologists have never before found so many cannibalized
victims killed in the same brief span of time.
1: Death Pit 8000 years before today, a woman around the
age of 19, along with a man slightly older than her, fell into a well.
Either that, or they were pushed.
Archaeologists are calling it a Stone Age murder mystery.
Nobody can tell whether the couple fell by accident or if foul play was involved.
It does seem a little strange that two people would fall into a well purely by accident.
One would be understandable, but two really makes you wonder.
The couple lived during the Stone Age in what is today Israel.
The well is still around all these years later, near the ancient settlement of Enot Nisanit.
The well itself is 26 feet deep, made completely of stone sunken into the bedrock.
At its mouth, the well gapes 4 feet wide.
The two skeletons were not the only things that archeologists found inside the well.
They also uncovered tools, ancient garbage, and bones from animals.
It appears that after the people fell into the well or were pushed, the villagers stopped
using it to drink out of and turned it into a garbage dump.
Even 8000 years ago, people knew that dead bodies and fresh drinking water didn't mix.
But unfortunately, there really is no way to tell if these people were killed by some
evil villain.
It is possible that they were murdered, pushed into the well to contaminate the water on
purpose.
It could be that somebody was trying to make the entire village sick!
What’s your favorite murder mystery from ancient times?
Let me know in the comments and thanks for watching.
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