The Bad Dürrenberg burial contained the remains of an adult shaman.

The Bad Dürrenberg burial, discovered in 1934 near Bad Dürrenberg, Germany, dates to approximately 7000 to 6800 BCE. It held an adult woman aged 30 to 40 and an infant, and it ranks among the richest Mesolithic graves in Central Europe.

Workers found the grave on 4 May 1934 while digging a shaft in what is now the spa garden of Bad Dürrenberg, in the Saalekreis district of Saxony-Anhalt. The finds had to be lifted by the next day, so the original record was limited to sketches and a short report. Fresh excavations at the spot, carried out before the 2024 State Garden Exhibition, recovered many more pieces that clearly belong to the grave, including much of the infant’s skeleton.

A seated woman with a deer headdress

The woman was buried sitting upright. With her lay roe deer antlers still attached to part of the skull, and originally six boar tusks, some of them pierced. The excavators read these as ornaments for the head or body. The antlers bear cut marks that butchering alone does not explain, and they recall the Mesolithic antler frontlets from Star Carr in England. Both finds are usually compared with the antler headgear worn by shamans in Siberia, North America and northern Europe. Her grave goods, her posture and the oddities of her body are the reasons archaeologists interpret her as a shaman.

What her skeleton shows

She was slight and about 1.55 metres (5.09 feet) tall, and her legs lacked the strong muscle markings usual among hunter gatherers. The edge of the opening at the base of her skull is narrowed where an abnormal blood vessel ran. Her first neck vertebra never fully formed, and her second has an extra bony clasp. Together these could have pinched an artery to the brain when she held her head in certain positions. The researchers suggest that this could trigger nystagmus, an involuntary flicking of the eyes, without real danger to her health.

The museum suggests that her eye movements could have strengthened her standing as a shaman.

An earlier study by Porr and Alt (2006) also found unusual wear on the inner surfaces of her upper front teeth, from an activity that is still unknown.

Her genome and the infant

A full genome places her among the Western hunter gatherers, the population that lived across central and western Europe after the Ice Age. Her genetic variants point to fairly dark skin, dark straight hair and blue eyes, a look she shared with people of her time from Loschbour in Luxembourg, La Braña in Spain and Cheddar Man in Britain.

The infant was a boy, and he was not her son. In their 2023 genetic study, Orschiedt and colleagues ruled out a first or second degree relationship with standard tests. A newer method that measures stretches of shared DNA found that the two were related in the fourth or fifth degree. In a direct line she could have been his great great grandmother or one generation further back, which would mean the boy was laid in an older grave. The two also share a maternal lineage, so they may instead have been distant maternal kin who lived at the same time. These results were published by Jörg Orschiedt, Wolfgang Haak and colleagues in 2023.

The grave goods

The grave held several hundred objects, far more than the handful of flint pieces, or nothing at all, found in most Mesolithic burials in central Germany. Among them:

1. Flint artefacts and tools of solid rock.
2. Bone and antler tools, including awls, a needle over 20 centimetres long and a perforated red deer antler used as a hammer.
3. A lump of red ochre with a worn facet, and a spatula from a red deer foot bone with ochre on its tip.
4. A hollow crane wing bone used as a case for about 30 small flint blades.
5. The back shells of at least three European pond turtles, scraped clean inside, perhaps for use as bowls or rattles.
6. Pierced animal teeth, freshwater mussel shells and single bones of hedgehog and crane.

The turtle shells are unique among Mesolithic burials in central Germany. The ochre tools show red pigment being prepared and applied on purpose, a practice found among early peoples far beyond Europe, as at the Wilgie Mia ochre mine in Western Australia.