Girl of the Uchter Moor

The Girl of the Uchter Moor, also known as Moora, is a female Iron Age bog body discovered in 2000 in marshland near Uchte, Germany. The remains include vertebrae, hair, and skull pieces. The studies of the body began in 2005. The radiocarbon dating performed at Kiel University showed that she had died between 764 and 515 BCE. Despite common Iron Age burial practices, the body was not cremated. All the body parts are estimated to have been found except for one scapula.

Before DNA analysis and radiocarbon dating, the body was initially believed to be that of a sixteen-year-old girl, Elke Kerll, who had disappeared in 1969 after going to a dance club.

Discovery

On 6 September 2000, peat cutters working in the Uchter Moor near Uchte, Lower Saxony, Germany, uncovered human skeletal remains while extracting peat. The discovery was reported to archaeologists, who found nearly her entire skeleton, together with fragments of her skull bearing scalp and hair, her naturally mummified right hand, pieces of skin, numerous teeth, and both fingernails and toenails. Only one scapula was not recovered.

Clothing and associated items

No garments or personal equipment were identified with the Girl of the Uchter Moor. During the archaeological excavation of her find site in 2005, researchers recovered additional fragments of her remains but found no associated items.

Researchers cautioned that preservation conditions in the bog may account for the absence of such material. It therefore cannot be determined what, if anything, she was wearing when she entered the bog.

Condition

During approximately 2,700 years in the bog, the Girl of the Uchter Moor's bones lost much of their original mineral content. They became dark brown, shrank and were partly deformed, although their underlying collagen structure remained well preserved.

Her surviving scalp retains hair up to approximately long. The hair is now reddish as a result of chemical changes during burial in the peat, and its original colour has not been established.

The naturally mummified right hand is particularly well preserved. Its skin, bones, tendons and joints survive, but the hand has shrunk to less than from the wrist to the fingertips and less than across. Researchers attributed the shrinkage partly to the chemical environment of the bog and partly to further drying after the hand was recovered.

Fine details of the skin also survived. Fingerprint ridges remain visible on all five fingers, allowing researchers to photograph and digitally enhance the prints. All five showed an ulnar-loop pattern, and the right thumb retained enough individual ridge characteristics for researchers to conclude that it could still have provided a reliable forensic identification more than 2,600 years after her death.

Initial analysis

Following the discovery of the remains on 6 September 2000, investigators initially believed they belonged to a recent death. Their first theory was that the remains might be those of the victim of a United States fighter-bomber crash that had occurred in the area at the end of the Second World War, approximately 55 years earlier. Anthropological and odontological examinations carried out at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf instead identified the remains as those of a young woman between 17 and 20 years of age.

Investigators then considered whether the remains belonged to Elke Kerll, a sixteen-year-old local girl who had disappeared after visiting a dance club in 1969. The site was treated as a crime scene while police and forensic specialists investigated the possibility. Mitochondrial DNA testing later excluded Kerll as a match, but without further evidence the case remained unresolved for the next three years.

The investigation resumed in 2005, when archaeologists recovered a naturally mummified hand from the same area. The renewed excavation uncovered additional bones, fragments of skin and fingernails, although no clothing or associated artefacts were found. Radiocarbon dating carried out at Kiel University subsequently showed that the remains dated to between 764 and 515 BCE, more than 2,500 years before Kerll disappeared, identifying them as those of an Iron Age bog body.

Scientific study

Chemical analysis

More than 2,500 years after Moora's death, researchers used chemical analysis to investigate both her remains and the effects of their long burial in peat. X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF) showed that the chemical composition of her bones and teeth had been substantially altered by the bog environment. Strontium measurements were consistent with the surrounding region and were interpreted as supporting a possible local origin, although they could not establish where she had lived.

Researchers also found that both burial conditions and conservation after discovery had changed the concentrations of elements in her remains. These changes make it difficult to distinguish chemical traces originating during Moora's life from those introduced or altered after her death.

Analysis of Moora's hair produced similar cautions. Researchers compared its trace elements with samples from other bog bodies, modern individuals and peat from her find site. They concluded that prolonged burial in peat can substantially alter the chemical composition of hair, limiting what its trace elements can reveal about Moora's health or diet during life. The reddish colour of her surviving hair was also attributed to chemical changes in the bog and does not establish her original hair colour.

Health and injuries

Although the Girl of the Uchter Moor was only about 17 to 19 years old when she died, her skeleton recorded several periods of physiological stress during childhood. Anthropologists Jan Nováček, Julia Gresky, Jeannine Mißbach-Güntner and Michael Schultz identified lines of arrested growth in her lower leg bones, which they attributed to possible infectious disease or malnutrition.

Examination of her spine by Nováček and his colleagues found slight sideways curvature of the lower back and a more pronounced forward curvature of the upper back. They considered abnormal posture or uneven physical strain among the possible causes, and the changes may also have affected the way she walked. An injury to the joint between her pelvis and spine had healed before her death and may have resulted from trauma.

She had also survived at least two injuries to her head. Gresky and her colleagues identified two healed oval depression fractures in the frontal bone of her skull, caused by blunt trauma. Both had healed substantially before her death.

The examination of her skull also revealed evidence of several health problems. Gresky's team found changes on its inner surface consistent with a chronic inflammatory process affecting the membranes surrounding the brain. Other lesions were considered possible evidence of tuberculous meningitis. The researchers also identified changes in the roof of the right eye socket that may have been associated with chronic frontal sinusitis, as well as evidence of inflammation in the nasal cavities and around the nose and upper jaw. Her teeth showed little evidence of disease apart from mild periodontitis.

A small fibro-osseous tumour was found at the base of her skull. Gresky and her colleagues interpreted it as a benign, slow-growing growth. Although there is no evidence that it caused serious symptoms during her lifetime, its position meant that continued growth might eventually have compressed nearby tissues.

Dating Radiocarbon dating carried out at Kiel University in Germany established that the Girl of the Uchter Moor died between 764 and 515 BCE, during the Early Iron Age. Researchers place her death at approximately 650 BCE, about 2,650 years before her remains were discovered in 2000.

The dating established that the remains were prehistoric, ruling out their identification with Elke Kerll, a local teenager who disappeared in 1969. Moora is the oldest known bog body discovered in Lower Saxony, the region of northern Germany where she was found, and among the oldest well-preserved human bodies discovered north of the Alps.

Cause of death For all that scientific examination has revealed about Moora's life, it has not established how she died. Her two skull fractures had healed before her death, and researchers identified no cause of death from the surviving skeleton. A later review similarly reported that no evidence of an injury associated with her death had been found and that the manner of her deposition could not be determined. The surviving evidence also cannot establish whether her deposition in the bog was accidental or deliberate. Her cause and circumstances of death remain unknown. Facial reconstructions

Moora's face has been reconstructed a number of times. The two that were created in the traditional way were built by moulding material over a plastic replica of the skull. The artist had to estimate the shape of the girl's lips, hair colour and skin tones, similar to the process of the Yde Girl.

Girl of the Uchter Moor

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