Genetic research into the 9.000 year old shaman burial from Bad Dürrenberg, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany

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The Bad Dürrenberg shaman in the State Museum of Prehistory Halle (Saale). | Quelle: Juraj Lipták | Copyright: State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt | Download

The burial
The double burial of an adult woman and an infant, dating to around 7000-6800 BCE, discovered in 1934 during construction works at the spa gardens of Bad Dürrenberg, Saalekreis district, is regarded as one of the outstanding burial finds of the Mesolithic in Central Europe. The unusual equipment of the woman, who was buried in a seated position, comprises flint artefacts and solid rock tools, but also bone and antler artefacts, a piece of red ochre, a number of animal bones including the shell of at least three terrapins and partly pierced animal teeth. Together with deer antlers and originally six partly pierced boar’s tusks these finds are probably head / body ornaments. Due to its grave goods and bodily anomalies of the woman, the burial is interpreted as that of a shaman.
Subsequent excavations at the site as part of the preparations for the State Garden Exhibition 2024 brought not only new revelations about the deposition and positioning of the body to light, but also revealed a multitude of new finds, which could be clearly attributed to the burial. Beside of pierced animal teeth, remains of fauna, lithic artefacts and a large amount of human skeletal remains could also be recovered. A recently published article by Jörg Orschiedt (State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt, LDA), Wolfgang Haak (Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology), Holger Dietl (LDA), Andreas Siegl (LDA), and Harald Meller (LDA) details the results of recent work on the find, which included aDNA-analysis.

The shaman
The study finds that the 30–40 year-old woman was a gracile person with a body height of about 1.55 m, typical for the period. Remarkable about her skeleton is the absence of distinct muscle attachments, especially on the lower extremities, which are commonly found in hunter-gatherers. At the base of the skull there is an anomaly at the edge of the great occipital hole, in the form of a small constriction. This area is the imprint of an abnormally developed blood vessel. The first cervical vertebra is incompletely formed due to a congenital growth defect and has only reached 40 % of the arch. The rounded end of the vertebral arch corresponds to the previously observed defect at the large occipital hole. In this context, the hypothesis was formulated that a pinching of the blood vessel with various sequelae appears possible with a corresponding head posture. The discovery of the 2nd cervical vertebra among the finds of the re-excavation confirmed this. This vertebra also shows an anomaly, which is limited to the vertebral process in the form of a protruding bone clasp. This makes a blockage of one of the blood vessels leading to the brain plausible. This can be caused intentionally by adopting a certain head posture. The consequences are unlikely to have been serious or hazardous to the person’s health. However, it is conceivable that a nystagmus, i. e., an involuntary movement of the eyeballs, could be caused by the blockage of a blood vessel. This unusual feature might have been perceived as uncanny and when initiated on purpose may have reinforced or even justified her role as a shaman.
Genetic research revealed that the genomic ancestry profile of the shaman falls squarely within several dozen other Mesolithic hunter-gatherer individuals from central and western Europe, a profile which is commonly coined »Western (European) Hunter-Gatherer ancestry«. The phenotypic variants analyzed in the Bad Dürrenberg genome inform us that the shaman had a relatively dark skin complexion, dark, straight hair and blue eyes. This combination was quite common among hunter-gatherer individuals from Western Europe and the shaman lady shared this appearance with contemporaneous Mesolithic individuals from sites such as Loschbour, Mullerthal (Luxembourg), La Braña, Asturias (Spain), or Cheddar Man in Somerset (Britain).

The child
During re-excavations of the Bad Dürrenberg site, the only partially preserved skeleton of an infant could be added on too. The discovery of the petrosal enabled a genetic analysis at this individual. Since high-quality data from both individuals, and especially from the female was available, researchers could also employ a newly developed method, which scans the genome data for the presence, amount, and length of tracts in the genome that are shared by two individuals, so-called identity-by-descent (IBD) tracts. This method, optimized to deal with missing data, as is common in fragmented ancient DNA, allows the detection of biological higher degree relatedness, and with reservations, up to the 10th degree. Concerning the two Bad Dürrenberg individuals, we found that the number and length distribution of identify-by-descent tracts that are shared between the pair is equivalent to genetic relatedness of the 4th or 5th degree. This degree of relatedness could be equivalent to 4 or 5 generations apart, assuming a direct line, which would make the adult female the potential great-great-(great)-grandmother of the boy.

Originalpublikation:
Jörg Orschiedt, Wolfgang Haak, Holger Dietl, Andreas Siegl, Harald Meller, The shaman and the Infant: The Mesolithic double burial from Bad Dürrenberg, Germany, in Harald Meller, Johannes Krause, Wolfgang Haak, Roberto Risch (ed.), Kinship, sex, and biological relatedness: The contribution of archaeogenetics to the understanding of social and biological relations (Halle 2023), p. 125–136.
https://doi.org/10.11588/propylaeum.1280.c18002