Vad 3 400 år gammalt hår + tänder + naglar + kläder berättar

Klicka på fotot så förstoras det. A new study of the 3400-year-old chemical isotopes, along with more conventional archaeological evidence. Conclusions of scientists who recently analyzed the teeth, fingernails, hair, and clothes of the Egtved Girl, so named for the Danish village where archaeologists first discovered her in 1921.The study is highly unusual, in the way that it brings together chemical tracers from a number of tissue types to reconstruct the life history of a single individual.

Strontium occurs naturally in soil and rocks and usually enters the body in water we drink. The ratio of two of its isotopes—strontium-87 and strontium-86—varies depending on soil and geology and can be used to make informed guesses about where people or animals originally came from. Researchers usually look at teeth, which absorb the element when an individual is very young and whose strontium ratios do not change after about 3 or 4 years of age.

In the case of the Egtved Girl, the team had not only her teeth, but also her hair, fingernails, clothes, and the ox hide on which her body was resting in the coffin, as well as the teeth and cremated bones of the child buried with her in a small box made of tree bark. (The girl’s uncremated bones did not survive the waterlogged, acidic environment in which the coffin was found.)

To figure out where the girl came from, the researchers first analyzed strontium in one of her molars and found a ratio noticeably higher than that typically found in Denmark; a small, dense bone from the rear of the child’s skull that had survived cremation produced a similar ratio. The team concluded that both the girl and her child had spent their earliest years outside of Denmark, likely in the Black Forest area. This fits earlier archaeological evidence—from Bronze Age settlements, burial mounds, and the exchange of artifacts such as swords—that the peoples of Denmark and Germany had formed alliances between chiefdoms that probably involved intermarriage. Här.