if you can, what are bog bodies??
WARNING THIS CAN BE CONSIDERED GROSS AND/OR UPSETTING, PLEASE TAKE CARE
(i am on mobile and afaik cannot insert a readmore)
okay so peat bogs are uniquely suited to preserving organic things like textiles, wood, butter -- seriously look up bog butter it's a trip -- and flesh and hair.
a combination of the cold anaerobic environment in the silty depths of bogs, acidic water, and a chemical called sphagnan (from sphagnum moss) basically makes the perfect tea to steep a corpse in that will preserve it for legiterally thousands of years. the bones are rubbery like science experiments in primary school where you put a chicken bone in vinegar for a week, and the skin ends up tanned like leather, and the flesh and even stomach contents all end up preserved.
for up to thousands of years.
the oldest one i know of is from the bronze age in ireland (cashel bog, county laois); he's about four thousand years old
and listen these bodies still have fingerprints, they have hair, they aren't just skeletons, we can tell how they died even if it was soft tissue damage or poison. they haven't been hollowed out or dried or frozen, some of them have faces that still look like faces
(there's a lot of debate over respect, over whether they should be re-buried, over the treatment by the academic community of preserved bodies that belonged to people who did not donate their bodies to science, but there has always been that kind of debate (witness early modern medicine, where medical students were literally graverobbing the freshly buried so they could dissect them and find out what was where)-- and most of these bodies, as with other bog deposits, are accidental finds due to peat milling machinery. it would be just as disrespectful to bury them with someone else's (our own) customs as it would be to get theirs wrong, and in large part the environment they were in has already been destroyed. (and i think museums have a lot more to answer for with younger bones.) the current compromise seems to be 'study and photograph but don't display' but i haven't checked that since 2018. )
either way there's so much we can learn about the lifeways of prehistoric people, and not just from skellingtons and stable isotopes; i wanna go on about the actual theories of human sacrifice in ireland based on evidence like the depositions at boundaries and the final meals and the triple death/overkill and specific ritual mutilation of apparent failed kings and tacitus's germania and the ulster cycle (see: eamonn p. kelly on academia.edu) and yde girl and lindow man and grauballe man and clonycavan man and his pine resin pompadour but it's 1:30 am and im thumb-typing this in the dark in bed on my tiny phone 🤣
edit: also most of my bog body focus is in the UK and Ireland but yoooooo there's a LOT MORE than that
