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[00:08] The shaman wasn't well. The face beneath the feathered, antlered headdress was flushed and twisted in pain. She always walked slowly, her head cocked to the side at an odd angle, but now she shuffled, the deer and boar teeth sewn to her clothing and dangling from her necklaces clacking against each other. Now she barely moved from her hut at all, complaining of intense pain in her teeth and face. The shaking limbs and blurred vision that regularly affected her worsened the sicker she became. She was coming closer to the spirit world, her people thought. The shaman had always been closer to the spirits than the rest of her band, but now the veil was thin. It wouldn't be long before she departed altogether, and her ghost joined them for good. Her people knew this was a dangerous time. Closeness to the supernatural was a gift. She could deal with unquiet ghosts and appease the spirits of the deer they relied on for food and hides. She could still make medicines, offer advice, and perform a thousand other essential tasks that inspired rightful fear and apprehension among the band. But that same closeness was also a curse. If not properly propitiated, her ghost might stick around and trouble the survivors. Their hunts could fail. Their nets come up empty. Their strolls through the shellfish beds, revealing a dearth of the sweetwater mussels they loved to eat. Several of the band's men had already begun digging a burial pit out in the forest, distant enough from the camp that the shaman's ghost wouldn't bother them, following her inevitable death. This wasn't just a hole in the ground. It had to be built and built right, with walls of wood and clay to hold in the spirit. Normally, the band would reuse the possessions of the dead. Every bit of hide, worked stone, and jewelry was precious. Not in this case. The tools of the shaman's trade, her charms and amulets, her clothing and paintbrush, all of it would go in with her. Nothing would be left behind that might attract a revenant. Their concerns never diminished the group's respect for their dying shaman. They had thrived during her years as their spiritual leader, benefiting from her visions and advice. Yet her efficacy was precisely the reason her spirit had to be treated with the respect it deserved. As in life, there were benefits to dealing with the spirits, but dangers, too. It paid to heed them. Hello, my friends, I'm Patrick Wyman. Thanks so much for joining me for another episode of Past Lives. Humanity's distant past is so expansive, it boggles the mind. When we think about the Ice Age in Eurasia with its roaming bands of mammoth and reindeer hunters, some of the most stunning pieces of evidence we have of their existence are the cave paintings they left behind. More than 20,000 years separate the earliest instances of cave painting by anatomically modern humans in Europe from the latest works. Similar art styles remained in use for longer than the span of time that separates us from the last glacial maximum, when the ice sheets reached their greatest extent. There are whole chunks of time, tens of thousands of years apiece, where we have almost no idea what was happening. Entire societies grew, flourished, and crumbled without leaving even the slightest trace. Countless other ages came and went, leaving only tiny fragments to tell us those people ever existed. Enigmatic eras, where chips of bone, stone, and genomes provide only the haziest evidence of countless lives. Of those many eras, the Mesolithic might be my favorite. It lies between two periods we know far better and tend to think about more often. The almost limitless expanse of the Paleolithic, or the Old Stone Age, with its megafauna and cave art, and the Neolithic, the New Stone Age, in which farming emerged and came to redefine life on this planet. The Mesolithic, as its name suggests, was the Middle Stone Age, coinciding with the end of the Pleistocene and beginning of the Holocene Epoch. The Mesolithic began around 13,000 years ago and lasted for at least 5,000 years in what is now Europe. People living a distinctively Mesolithic lifestyle persisted until around 4000 BC, well after the first farmers had put down generational roots. But despite its name, the Mesolithic wasn't just a transitional period, a bridge between the original pristine state of humankind and the transition to a world that provided the foundations for our own in the millennia that followed. Instead, it was a distinctive time in which forests and wetlands replaced the open steppe and tundra of the Ice Age, producing rich environments in which hundreds of generations of Mesolithic people hunted, fished, foraged, and lived full, complex lives. The thousands upon thousands of people who occupied forests of beech, oak, and elm, who paddled canoes along rivers and through marshes, didn't know that they were living in a transitional period. They had a world all their own, one that we can occasionally glimpse, even touch, in all of its rich detail and sophistication. On May 4, 1934, workers digging a trench in the spa gardens of the German town of Bad Dürrenberg discovered something unusual, a small grave pit containing two skeletons. One was well preserved and belonged to an adult woman. The other was the fragmentary remains of an infant. Working quickly with the aid of a local museum conservator, excavators recovered most of the remains and a wide assortment of grave goods, including more than 140 artifacts and animal bones, dozens of fragments of tortoise shells, and 120 fragments of sweetwater mussels. The style of the stone artifacts made it clear that the burial occurred during the Mesolithic period. Decades later, the invention of radiocarbon dating provided a more precise state, 7,000 to 6,800 BC, making the woman and the infant roughly 9,000 years old. Generally speaking, the Mesolithic offers little evidence of burials. A recent survey of Mesolithic archaeology in France found 150 individuals over 5,000 years. Only 27 burials have been found within the present-day borders of Germany, just five of them in the region of the middle Elbe where Bad Dürrenberg is located. Compare those numbers to just one regional slice of the Neolithic. Over 300 years in Lower Alsace, the region that lies along the Franco-German border, a single Neolithic society produced more than 300 individual burials. A nearly empty Mesolithic grave is an exceptional find. A grave that includes hundreds of artifacts is nearly unheard of. Moreover, those artifacts were themselves unusual. The antlers of a roebuck, a polished stone axe, dozens of perforated animal teeth and tusks the woman hung from her body is jewelry. The individual interred at Bad Dürrenberg was special. A healer, a ritual specialist, or perhaps a shaman. But what made this woman special in the context of the Mesolithic society in which she lived? Today, we'll apply the latest scientific tools and a healthy dose of comparative ethnography to try to understand why exactly she was buried in such an extraordinary fashion and what she can tell us about the world she inhabited. Before we dive in, I'm relying on a few excellent academic papers for today's episode. First, the 2006 article The Burial of Bad Dürrenberg, Central Germany, Osteopathology and Osteoarchaeology of a Late Mesolithic Shaman's Grave by M. Poore and KW. Alt. Second, the 2023 paper The Shaman and the Infant, The Mesolithic Double Burial from Bad Dürrenberg, Germany, led by Jörg Orschiet, and a 2021 paper by Christian Junes entitled Societies Without Ancestors, Why are So Few Graves Found in the European Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic? So let's start with what we know about that Mesolithic world and how the Shaman of Bad Dürrenberg and her people came to live in what's now Eastern Germany. As the Ice Age gave way to the Holocene around 12,000 years ago, with temperatures and sea levels rising, and the landscape changing around them, the residents of Europe had choices to make. Those who had thrived in the open spaces of the windswept steppe usually decided to follow their preferred game, mostly reindeer by this point, as they migrated to the north in search of their preferred environments. Small groups of foragers who had been living on the fringes of the Mediterranean, safe from the encroaching glaciers and their bitter cold fronts, began to expand north into the heart of a changing continent. From small beginnings, the isolated river valleys and small enclaves where trees had been able to survive the freezing temperatures of the last glacial maximum, vast forests now spread to cover the continent. Melting ice fed the rising seas, which slowly swallowed the exposed continental shelf beyond today's shorelines, and created a mosaic of marshes and sandy beaches. Gone were the herds of mammoth, rhinoceros, horses, and reindeer that had dominated the open steppes. Boar, wild cattle, and especially deer flourished in the forests, while migratory birds, fish, and shellfish abounded in the wetlands. The great rivers of Western Europe, the Seine, Thames, and Rhine, all drained into an enormous, low-lying plain that formed the heart of the Mesolithic world. The now-vanished region of Doggerland, a place long since covered by the rising tides of the North Sea. The people who made their homes in this world lived differently than their far-ranging predecessors did during the long millennia of the Paleolithic. Because food resources were so much more densely available in deciduous forests, river valleys, and gentle coastlines than they'd been during the Ice Age, Mesolithic groups didn't necessarily have to move as often or as far. Instead of following the herds as they migrated, as Paleolithic bands usually did, Mesolithic people occupied more restricted areas and utilized more intensively whatever they found there. They tended to rotate between seasonally occupied villages, often along rivers, lakes, or sandy hillsides overlooking the water, depending on what plants and game were available at any given time of year. Wetlands when the flocks of migratory birds passed through, river valleys when fish swam upstream to spawn, perhaps other places for gatherings, festivals, or spiritual rituals. This way of life can be characterized as broad spectrum foraging, and it's one of the characteristic global developments of the Holocene. A warmer, wetter world made for richer environments, which led to people settling down a bit more than they had. They weren't sedentary or bound to a single place year round, but they were more rooted than their predecessors. Their technological tool kit suited their way of life. Rather than using large pieces of stone shaped into blades or projectile points, Mesolithic people preferred microliths, tiny razor-sharp flakes of stone that were embedded several at a time into a wood or bone handle or shaft to suit the specific task at hand. The same sharp pieces could be placed in a curved handle to make a sickle for cutting grass, onto the shaft of an arrow, or into the projecting spines of a harpoon. Because of widespread forest growth, wood was plentiful, which meant that there was much more available to use as a medium for tool making. In the rare places where organic remains survive, such as the stunning lakeshore site of Starcar in Yorkshire, we can see extraordinary woodworking skills in abundance. Canoe paddles, digging sticks, spear shafts, barbed points, and complex structures, including platforms extending out onto the lake, all of them made with practiced quality. We can only wonder at what else these people might have made. The ephemeral nature of wood means most artifacts rotted away so long ago that no sign of them even exists today. The Shiger Idol is one of my favorite artifacts from any period of history, and it dates to precisely this time, though farther to the east in the Ural Mountains. The Idol is the world's oldest wooden sculpture, standing about 2.8 meters, or 9 feet high. It was taller originally, maybe as much as twice as tall, but the years whittled it down to its current size. A haunting wooden face looks out from the topmost portion of the sculpture while incised lines and a variety of geometric patterns cover the rest. It's a potent reminder of what we've lost through the decay of the ages. The people who made the Shiger Idol belonged to a different population in genetic terms than the woman buried at Bad Dürrenberg. The vast majority of the ancestry of the people living in Central and Western Europe, that of the shaman included, were descended from a group known as Western Hunter Gatherers, in contrast to the Eastern Hunter Gatherers of Eastern Europe. They shared much culturally and blended into one another in the middle, a bit to the east of Bad Dürrenberg. The two groups were simply descended from different source populations that had lived to the south of the ice sheets during the last glacial maximum. The Mesolithic contains many mysteries, the most salient of which is the generally light imprint its people left in the archaeological record. We see tiny scatters of stone flakes and worked microliths, occasional collections of butchered bones, and the rare burial, but the rich environments could have supported substantially larger populations. The unique, incredibly well-preserved sites like Starcar show us how much once existed by way of materials they typically don't survive thousands of years in the soil. The Bad Dürrenberg burial, the woman, the infant, and the collection of artifacts buried with them, is a strikingly precious glimpse into a lost world. Who was the buried woman? Why was she, whoever she was, buried in this specific fashion? Why was her grave filled with so many extraordinary artifacts? And why was the infant placed in the soil with her? Why, when so few people were buried, let alone in ways that are archaeologically detectable today, were they so prominently buried at all? We answer these questions with the information left behind in the human remains. The grave contained the bones of two different people, one, a woman aged between 25 and 35, and the other, a baby boy. In the past, it was often theorized that the two were mother and child, but DNA testing has disproven this idea. The woman and the baby were related, but only in the fourth or fifth degree. If he was her descendant, then he lived several generations after the woman, meaning the grave would have been reopened decades later to inter him with his great-great-grandmother. That's possible, but there's no obvious evidence for it, and it seems less likely than the two of them being second cousins who died around the same time. The infant's bones are too fragmentary to say much about his life or death, as is often the case with the remains of the very young, and only genetic testing even told us that he was male. The woman's remains, however, are almost complete. They tell a fascinating story. She stood around 155 centimeters tall, about five foot one, which is average for the period. Her skin was quite dark, and her straight, dark hair framed a face that featured prominent blue eyes. That combination of physical characteristics is rare today, but it was extremely common among the Western hunter-gatherer groups that populated Mesolithic Europe, thriving across the continent for thousands of years. Given the active foraging lifestyle her people practiced, hunting and fishing and gathering plants in forests and waterways, we would expect her remains to show evidence of that activity. Yet aside from some minor wear around the spine, her bones display practically no signs of repetitive occupational stresses or trauma. The muscle attachments are small and yearly non-existent. The incessant walking, running, and climbing that marked regular journeys around the Mesolithic landscape seemingly didn't apply to her, nor did tool manufacturing or food preparation. Unlike the Mesolithic woman buried at nearby Unseburg a thousand years earlier, she showed no sign of repetitive squatting motions. However, this woman spent her time, and it wasn't doing the kinds of intensely physical activities that we saw with the ancient one or with most other ancient people. The closer we look at this woman, the more unusual her story becomes. Her teeth show signs of extreme wear. That isn't unusual among hunter-gatherers, who often use their teeth as a third hand for a variety of tasks, but in her case, the two upper incisors are worn down all the way to the exposed dental pole. This led to infections severe enough to have left holes in the bones of her face. The resulting abscesses may well have been what killed her. At present, researchers have been unable to discern what specific activity caused this extreme condition. It doesn't stop there either. The base of her skull shows an anomaly at the edge of the foramen magna, the opening in the occipital bone where the spinal cord extends downward out of the cranial cavity. This anomaly is the imprint of an abnormally developed blood vessel, which gave her mild scoliosis of the spine. What's truly fascinating about this condition is that it often, not always, but often, causes noticeable neuropathological symptoms, severe temporary pains in the head, neck, and shoulder, sensations such as itching, burning, or numbness on the skin, and, if the condition is severe enough to compress the brain stem, involuntary eye and limb movement, double vision, and more. The woman buried at Bad Dürrenberg may have been able to control these episodes by positioning her head and neck in certain ways, but the condition itself was a major fact of her life. If her condition prevented her from engaging in the normal range of activities that vigorous foragers participated in, the activities that would have marked her bones, it means others handled those tasks on her behalf. In other words, they cared for her. Cases of hunter-gatherers caring for members of the group who couldn't provide for themselves are known as far back as the Neanderthals and appear regularly afterward. But there's another more compelling explanation for her physical attributes that also makes sense of the extraordinary burial and grave goods found with her. Far from being a disability, the woman's condition marked her as special in some profound way, worthy not just of care, but of respect and attention. Despite thousands of years of occupation and strong continuities and subsistence, life ways, ancestry, and cultural practices in the Mesolithic, cemeteries are almost unheard of, and even lone burials rarely occur. There are only five grave sites containing nine individuals from the Middle Elba region during the thousands of years of the Mesolithic. When we do find burials, that in itself is unusual. Richly furnished graves like that of the woman and infant are singular finds. To the extent that there's a basic pattern among these internments, Bad Dürrenberg follows it. The woman was seated, the infant in her lap, and covered in red ochre. A recent re-excavation of the site found that rather than a simple pit, the remains were placed in a purpose-built burial chamber constructed of wattle and daub walls and clay. Along with the dozens of artifacts interred with the deceased, this represented a substantial investment of time and resources. Whoever she was, she mattered to the people who buried her. Why was that? It's hard to peer into the minds of people who lived so long ago and left us no oral traditions or much less writing. But considering the nature of the artifacts found with her, it's not hard to see the woman as a ritual or spiritual specialist, what we might broadly call a shaman. The objects with which the woman was buried, which were presumably worn on her person, are, for lack of a better word, awesome. An antler headdress made from a roebuck and further decorated with goose feathers. More than 50 pierced teeth from wild cattle, steppe bison, roe and red deer, and wild boar, which may have been sewn to her clothing or worn as a necklace. Six split boar's tusks. The tongue bone of a wild boar, probably worn suspended from a cord on a necklace. The leg bone of a crane, which was used as a container to hold dozens of flint microliths. Three cleaned tortoise shells, and a deer metatarsus bone, which was probably used as the handle of a painting tool, one of the oldest paint brushes ever discovered. Various other more quotidian tools and more than a hundred sweetwater mussel shells rounded out the rich grave goods. Numerous scholars have noted the similarities between the reconstructed garb and that of shamans from northern Eurasian societies in the more recent ethnographic record. Calling the woman a shaman while recognizing that we have little idea what that might have meant to her Mesolithic community seems fair. In this interpretation, her group understood the physical and psychological manifestations of her unusual feature as a connection to the supernatural, her blurred vision and uncomfortable sensations as visitations from spirits or signals from beyond. We might call them visions or trances or simply an altered state of mind. What matters is that her people clearly believed she was a special person who held a particular place and had a specific function in their society and treated her in a way that accorded with that belief. In fact, a great many of the unusually rich burials from the distant past feature individuals with distinctive physical traits, including a teenager with dwarfism and others with bowed or asymmetrical legs. What might be classified as a disability in the 21st century may well have been a sign of closeness to another world in the Mesolithic. We can go a bit further still. The high proportion of these individuals, richly attired and equipped, disproportionately showing unusual physical characteristics, begs the question of why they received burials in a world where any archaeologically distinctive internment was rare. The scholar Christian Jeunesse, drawing on ethnography from around the world, argues that most ancient Eurasian foraging cultures could be classified as ghost societies. Ghost societies can be contrasted with ancestor societies. The fundamental difference between the two is whether the spirits of the dead are potentially dangerous ghosts, a threat to one's community, or ancestors who act as allies and offer status or rights or certain privileges to land and people. These two ideas, ancestors and ghosts, are in no way mutually exclusive, and most societies operate with a combination of these beliefs. Some of the dead might be dangerous while others ought to be celebrated. At the same time, those societies can also be placed somewhere on a spectrum between the two, either leaning more toward the ghost or ancestor pools. Neolithic societies that built up and up on the same plot of land for centuries and buried their dead beneath the floors of their houses are strong examples of ancestor societies. The native groups of the Great Plains, who exposed their dead on purpose-built burial platforms, far away from any campsite, would lean more toward the ghost pool. Now, there are certainly cases of ghost societies that buried their dead in archaeologically prominent ways, and cases of ancestor societies that left little trace of their valued ancestors for us to find, but by and large the patterns hold. If you are afraid of the dead, you tend to dispose of them as quickly as possible in ways that don't prominently mark the landscape. If you honor and revere the dead, the reverse is more often true. With these ideas in mind, we can classify the Mesolithic society that the Shaman of Bad Dürrenberg inhabited as a clear case of a ghost society, in which the dead were a potential threat to the living and had to be separated from them. We simply have no idea what they did with the remains of most of the deceased. More recent societies that we know through history and anthropology used a variety of practices. Zoroastrians exposed their dead, eventually building specialized towers to hold the remains. On the Tibetan Plateau and adjacent regions, some groups practiced and still practice sky burials, using a combination of de-flushing and scavenger birds to dispose of bodies. In parts of the Caucasus Mountains, the deceased were placed in a hollow tree trunk. And as I mentioned on the Great Plains, as in many other places, elevated platforms held the decomposing dead. Sometimes, the remaining parts of the body were simply left. Other times, the untouched bones were pounded into dust with hammers or heavy stones. Archaeological evidence of intentional de-flushing is widely attested throughout time and space. The most reasonable conclusion is that the Shaman of Bad Dürrenberg's people practiced a funerary rite of this kind, though what specific version is impossible to say. This leaves us with the question of why the woman and the infant were buried, and buried in such a specific fashion. We're well into the realm of interpretation here, but my guess is that the woman's role as a shaman or ritual specialist imbued her with spiritual power. That spiritual power didn't end with her death. It had to be honored or perhaps appeased and contained in the purpose-built burial chamber. Whether we see the extraordinary grave goods interred with her as her personal possessions or the tools of her trade, maybe they too had to be contained, taken out of circulation among the living. The inclusion of the infant is harder to explain, but it's notable that the very young are disproportionately represented in the few Mesolithic burials archaeologists have found. Maybe their spirits were thought to be particularly restive. For now, we simply don't know. Our portrait of life in the Mesolithic is patchy, made up of reams of interpretation extrapolated from the tiniest flakes of stone, pieces of charcoal, and animal bone fragments that make up the bulk of their archaeological signature. Yet, every once in a while, we catch glimpses of the rich, full, compelling world these people actually inhabited. An age of canoes slipping silently through shallow marsh waters, careful deer hunts under deciduous forest canopies, and shamans in feathered deer skull headdresses, festooned in charms and jewelry made from animal teeth, connecting with spirits through visions and trances. People lived this way for thousands of years, far longer than humanity has been living in cities, much less burning fossil fuels and working in factories and offices. So much of that past is gone beyond our sight and knowing, but it did exist. The Shaman of Bad Dürrenberg was a real person. Her beliefs were real to her and her people, no less so than ours are to us today. Through her, we can see, if only briefly and incompletely, a world that was, in profound ways, not our own. Next time on Past Lives, we'll stay where we are in Europe, but fast forward a few thousand years. Around 3300 BC, a man was climbing up and through an alpine pass when an arrow struck him in the shoulder. The wound killed him, and there, his body stayed for the next five millennia, frozen into a glacier. We know him as Ötzi the Iceman. Thanks so much for joining me today. Be sure to subscribe to our Patreon. It's linked in the description here. The Patreon is only seven bucks a month, and you get tons of great bonus content, like Q&As, interviews with scholars, and much more. It's thanks to subscribers like you that we can make this show. If you're already a subscriber, you rule, and thanks so much. You can follow me on Instagram at Wyman underscore Patrick, or on Blue Sky at Patrick Wyman. Past Lives is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. The producer is Morgan Jaffe. The music and sound design is by Gabriel Gould. The story editor is Rachel Cambori. This has been Past Lives.