Connecting to our past through food

Healthy history: Looking to the food of the past reveals that living a balanced life has always involved being mindful of everything that goes into our bodies. – 123rf.com

THE Tollund Man is one of the best preserved corpses from the Iron Age that have been discovered to date. He is believed to have died some 2,400 years ago and his body was found in a peat bog – an environment whose lack of oxygen meant that it was perfectly preserved. Scientists studying his remains, which are housed in Denmark’s Silkeborg Museum – have discovered that he was about 40 years old when he died.

The circumstances of his death were grim; he was likely a human sacrifice. A leather rope was found tightly wound around his neck. So well had nature preserved him that he was thought by the people in the area to have been a recent victim of murder. Tollund Man is also interesting for another reason: Scientists have been able to study the contents of his stomach to discover what people then ate.