Back to Life
"Moora"
stares across millennia, thanks to a digital reconstruction based on
the Iron Age girl's fragmented skull—one of several interpretations
released January 20.
Along with the nearly
complete corpse of the teenager, peat bog workers found her
2,600-year-old skull bones—mangled by peat-harvesting machinery—in Germany's Lower Saxony state (map) in 2000.
At
first, "the police thought it was a criminal case"—perhaps the remains
of Elke Kerll, a young woman who disappeared in 1969—said Andreas
Bauerochse, a paleoecologist with the Lower Saxony State Office for
Cultural Heritage.
But the DNA of the corpse and
Kerll's living mother didn't match, and the identity of Moora—nicknamed
after Uchter Moor, where the remains had been found—remained a mystery
until 2005.
That year, peat workers found a hand at
the same spot where the bog body had been found and scientists including
Bauerochse were called in.
The hand was physically a
good fit for the body, they found. What's more, by radiocarbon-dating
the peat on the hand, the pair determined that Moora died about 650
B.C.
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