There are two things about a global flood deep enough to cover the highest mountains, just about 4,000 years ago, that would have been inevitable.
The first is that the whole surface of Earth would have been scoured and all trace of prior human and animal existence would have been destroyed along with any soil or alluvial deposits which would have been suspended in the water to fall out later or be left behind as silt. For example, no bog burial would have survived because no bogs would have survived.
The second is that the bare rocks would then have been left with a layer of silt which settled out, complete with the remains of all the animals and plants destroyed in the flood. Those remains, moreover would not just be from the local area, but would have had a world-wide distribution prior to the flood, so bodies of animal and plants from the Americas would have been jumbled up with those from Africa, Asia and Australia, etc. and they would all have been mixed with the remains of sea creature that would have inevitably been killed to. In fact, on that point, the Bible is quite specific that all living matter outside the Ark was destroyed.
But that's simply not what we see, ever!
Nowhere on the surface of the planet is there such a layer and yet its existence is a certain prediction of the legendary global genocidal flood.
Instead, we see the remains of cultures and civilisations from way back before this alleged flood which show no signs of ever being submerged under enough water to cover the highest mountains, as the tale in Genesis claims, and the cultures in those places have an unbroken cultural history, uninterrupted by mass drownings and repopulating by people with a recent Middle-Eastern ancestry.
And one of those cultural relics that apparently survived the genocidal flood was a man who lived about 1200 years before the alleged flood in 3200 BCE. His remains were discovered buried, apparently intentionally, in a bog in northern Denmark, having been ritually sacrificed and buried, presumably to appease or reward some long-forgotten god or spirit in some long-forgotten religions pantheon. His remains were discovered in 1915.
Vittrup Man met a brutal end.
Illustration: Niels Bach
We now know, for example that he was a foreigner in the local farming culture, having been born along the coast of Scandinavia, probably in modern Norway. In his youth, up to his late teens he was a hunter-gatherer living on food foraged from the seashore, then he migrated south and joined a settled community of farmers, changing his diet to agricultural produce of domestic animals and cultivated plants.
How we know these things is the subject of an open access paper in PLOS ONE by a team of Swedish and Danish archaeologists from the University of Gothenburg, who also explain their research in a University of Gothenburg news release:
Researchers have mapped the life of a Stone Age man in detail. New scientific methods have revolutionised archaeology and the Swedish-Danish team of researchers at the University of Gothenburg are now able to state that “Vittrup Man”, a Stone Age man found in a bog in Denmark, travelled across a wide geographical area during his lifetime.The abstract and introduction to the team's paper in PLOS ONE gives more technical detail and background information:
Vittrup Man was first discovered in 1915. His skull had been split by at least eight blows from a club and his body placed in a wetland in north Jutland. Until recently, this was all we knew about him. Researchers now know that he had travelled a long way before his death in about 3200 BCE. He must have led an interesting life.Ate a lot of fish as a childHe comes from the north, from a relatively cold area, and it must have been a coastal area because the food he ate as a child came from the sea.
Karl-Göran Sjögren, co-corresponding author
Department of Historical Studies
University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden.
The team thinks the man grew up in what is now northern Norway. But when he was about 18 or 19, he ended up in Denmark for some reason. There, his diet changed from fish from the sea to food produced by agriculture.The University of Gothenburg conducts world-leading archaeological research in which new scientific methods play a central role. DNA analysis, analysis of dental calculus and isotope analysis are enabling researchers to discover completely new information.He then spent ten to twenty years living in a farming community in Denmark before he died. Actually, he was brutally clubbed to death.
Karl-Göran Sjögren.
The researchers analysed tartar from the man to see, what he ate. They also measured different isotopes in his teeth and skull to map his travels and his changes in diet.
“This enabled us to follow this individual’s geographical and dietary development from birth to death. As far as we know, this is the first time researchers have been able to map a person’s life history in such great detail and from so long ago,” says archaeologist Anders Fischer, part of the Swedish-Danish team, who is linked to the University of Gothenburg.
Teeth and bone fragments provide clues
Vittrup man.Photo: Stephen Freiheit
The study has been published in PLOS ONE and is part of a larger study recently published in the journal Nature, in which researchers examined the genomes and DNA of the prehistoric Nordic population. The study in Nature was based on analysis of DNA and dietary markers from 100 teeth and bone remains found in Denmark. Vittrup Man is one of these 100 people.
Anders Fischer explains why the archaeologists chose to take a closer look at this particular man’s life.
The researchers analysed oxygen and strontium isotopes from the man’s teeth. Strontium is an element found in food and water which is absorbed by the teeth during childhood. Using this method, researchers were able to see that the strontium in the Vittrup Man does not come from the geographical area where he was found dead in a bog.His genome differed markedly from the rest of the Danish Stone Age population, and genetically, he was closely related to contemporary people living on the Scandinavian peninsula, in what is now northern Norway and Sweden. This is why we chose to study his origins and life history in detail.
Anders Fischer, co-corresponding author.
Department of Historical Studies
University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
And Sealand Archaeology, Kalundborg, Denmark, And Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen K, Denmark
But the questions of how he ended up in Denmark or why he was clubbed to death still remain unanswered. Here, the archaeologists can only speculate. In the Stone Age, travelling from what is now northern Norway to Denmark must have been a long and arduous journey. His subsequent brutal death might indicate that he was sacrificed, according to the researchers.
Stone Age man could have been sacrificed
Lasse Sørensen is an expert in the Neolithic period at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen and a member of the research team. He explains that there is already archaeological evidence of contacts between Denmark and northern Norway during the Stone Age. Archaeologists have long known that flint axes were transported in this period; from Denmark all the way up to the Arctic Circle in Norway.Vittrup Man is an example of a ritual practice that was common in this period. The murder weapon may be the wooden club found with him when peat cutters found his skeleton in Vittrup in northern Jutland more than a hundred years ago.
Professor Kristian Kristiansen, co-author
Head of the Rise II project.
Professor of Archaeology
Department of Historical Studies
University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
And Globe Institute
University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen K, Denmark
The study and the Swedish-Danish research team are headed by the University of Gothenburg and are part of the Rise II research project. The study Vittrup Man – the life-history of a genetic foreigner in Neolithic Denmark, has been published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.The study now adds a real flesh and blood human being to these finds.
Lasse Sørensen, co-author
Danish National Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark
Abstract
The lethally maltreated body of Vittrup Man was deposited in a Danish bog, probably as part of a ritualised sacrifice. It happened between c. 3300 and 3100 cal years BC, i.e., during the period of the local farming-based Funnel Beaker Culture. In terms of skull morphological features, he differs from the majority of the contemporaneous farmers found in Denmark, and associates with hunter-gatherers, who inhabited Scandinavia during the previous millennia. His skeletal remains were selected for transdisciplinary analysis to reveal his life-history in terms of a population historical perspective. We report the combined results of an integrated set of genetic, isotopic, physical anthropological and archaeological analytical approaches. Strontium signature suggests a foreign birthplace that could be in Norway or Sweden. In addition, enamel oxygen isotope values indicate that as a child he lived in a colder climate, i.e., to the north of the regions inhabited by farmers. Genomic data in fact demonstrates that he is closely related to Mesolithic humans known from Norway and Sweden. Moreover, dietary stable isotope analyses on enamel and bone collagen demonstrate a fisher-hunter way of life in his childhood and a diet typical of farmers later on. Such a variable life-history is also reflected by proteomic analysis of hardened organic deposits on his teeth, indicating the consumption of forager food (seal, whale and marine fish) as well as farmer food (sheep/goat). From a dietary isotopic transect of one of his teeth it is shown that his transfer between societies of foragers and farmers took place near to the end of his teenage years.
Introduction
Vittrup Man (Fig 1) is the popular archaeological name for the severely fragmented Neolithic skeleton of a 30–40 years old male, who was found in a peat bog in Northwest Denmark (Fig 2). His remains were recovered in 1915 during peat cutting together with a wooden club, a ceramic vessel and bovine bones (SI.1 in S1 File). In 2014 he was incorporated into a large genomic project investigating the Mesolithic and Neolithic gene pools of Eurasia [1]. The realisation that this individual had a genetic profile different from his local contemporaries led to the current study. We present and combine data on genetic ancestry, physical appearance, geographic origin, dietary history and cultural environment. New genetic evidence relating to the Vittrup individual is gained through merging and re-analysis of data that were published separately (Coutinho et al. 2020 [2]; Allentoft et al. 2022 [1]). By using a combination of bioarchaeological methods and traditional archaeological approaches we gain insight into a European Stone Age individual’s life-history at unprecedented resolution. The dramatic changes in geography and cultural environments revealed, adds decisive new dimensions to a generations-long discussion on population history, migration and interaction in Scandinavia during the local Middle Neolithic [3–14]. Our results involve further attention to a millennial-long relationship in European prehistory between farmers of southern origin and hunter-fisher-gatherers of northern genetic ancestry.
Fig 1. The cranial remains of Vittrup Man, who ended up in a bog after his skull had been crushed by at least eight heavy blows.
Photo: Stephen Freiheit.
Fig 3. Left lower leg bone and right ankle bone.
Like the cranial fragments and the lower jawbone these two bones are coloured brown from millennial deposition in the Vittrup mire. Arrows mark where material was taken for 14C analysis and dietary isotope measurements.Photo: Marie Louise Jørkov.
Fig 2. Southern Scandinavia with the location of humans and areas mentioned in the text.
Dots mark individuals with published genome-wide data and a 14C date referring to the epoch of the Funnel Beaker Culture, c. 3900–2800 cal. BC. Data from [1, 2].Map data from www.naturalearthdata.com.
Fig 4. The jawbone of Vittrup Man. Several of the teeth are corroded due to soil chemical processes. All are clearly worn as a result of chewing. The character of the root impressions (alveolar sockets) from the front teeth indicate that these were lost after death–possibly when the jaw was brought to the light of day by a peat digger’s spade.Photo: Arnold Mikkelsen.
Fischer A, Sjögren K-G, Jensen TZT, Jørkov ML, Lysdahl P, Vimala T, et al. (2024)
Vittrup Man–The life-history of a genetic foreigner in Neolithic Denmark.
PLoS ONE 19(2): e0297032. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0297032
Copyright: © 2024 The authors.
Published by PLoS. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
This work tells us a few things. It tells us of the life and movement of a person at an important period in European history when farmers from the south and east were replacing the hunter-gatherers that preceded them and that he lived his final 20 years in a culture in which there were ritual blood sacrifices and a religion about which we know nothing.
It tells us how forensic archaeologists can use modern technology to find some surprising things, like what a person ate at different periods of their life and where they lived, based on the ratio of isotopes of strontium in the soil in that area that ended up in their teeth.
It also tells us a great deal about the authors of the origin tales in the Bible and their low level of knowledge of the world outside their small part of it and the history of the planet they were creating myths about to fill the gaps in their knowledge. I doubt that they ever expected their imaginative tales to be written down by later generations and then bound up in a book declared to be the sacred word of an omniscient god.
Had they done so, and had they valued truth and had an iota of integrity, they would have said they were making up stories to satisfy the human need for a narrative to explain what, to them, looked like a small flat, magical world controlled by invisible spirits.
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