What Did Tollund Man, One of Europe’s Famed Bog Bodies, Eat Before He Died?

Many questions about Tollund Man—arguably the most famous of Europe’s “bog bodies”—remain unanswered. Killed more than 2,000 years ago, the Iron Age man was buried in a peat bog that naturally preserved his body. The exact circumstances of his death remain unclear, but experts “tend to agree that [his] killing was some kind of ritual sacrifice to the gods,” wrote Joshua Levine for Smithsonian magazine in 2017.

What scientists do know for certain are the precise contents of Tollund Man’s last meal: porridge and fish. As Elizabeth Djinis reports for National Geographic, a team led by Nina Helt Nielsen, director of research at Denmark’s Silkeborg Museum, has analyzed the contents of the ancient man’s gut to determine what he ate before he died. The findings are newly published in the journal Antiquity.

Though his last meal was mostly standard fare, researchers did spot one intriguing ingredient in Tollund Man’s porridge: threshing waste, or a collection of wild seeds that were normally weeded out of grains during the threshing process. Early Iron Age people in Denmark may have added these castoffs to porridge to increase its nutritional value—or, the researchers speculate, they might have added the extra substance only for special occasions, such as ritual killings.