What 9,000 year old remains in Germany tell us about human development

0:00Support for this podcast comes from Northwestern University's Online Master's in Public Policy and Administration, preparing graduates to drive meaningful change at the local, national, and international levels. Learn more at sps.northwestern.edu. Today on State of the World, what 9 ,000-year-old remains in Germany? Tell us about human development.

0:27You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. I'm Greg Dixon. On today's episode, ancient human remains are found in Germany. They're made famous by Nazis, but then science radically changes our understanding of what they mean. And they're the remains of a shaman. NPR's Rob Schmidt starts our story in the eastern German city of Halle, where a tram takes me to the steps of the State Museum of Prehistory. Above its massive wooden doors carved into the castle-like facade are the words, unsere Vorzeit, our distant past.

1:13Inside, I'm taken to museum archaeologist Oliver Dietrich, and he leads me to the subject of the museum's newest exhibition, the remains of a human from the Mesolithic period, the era of hunters and gatherers. Very few graves like this one have been discovered in Europe. Can I call you Oliver? Okay. So Oliver, one of the surprising things I'm finding when I look at this after reading about it is I'm surprised at how intact the skeleton is for being 9 ,000 years old. This looks like a complete skeleton to me. This is basically a complete skeleton. So we have had a lot of luck and it's not least due to a very impressive grave construction.

1:59An elaborate grave discovered in 1934 when a construction crew was digging to build pipes for a spa garden. The crew called this museum. It sent an archaeologist to the site, and they told him he had three hours to dig out what he could. Dietrich shows me a series of graphics chronicling the dig. He digs into the earth like this. He sees that the skull is here, and he just wants to get the skull out. Digs around here. This poor guy has like three hours to do all of this. Exactly. Starts excavating in the site, which we wouldn't do today, because it's very, very warm. After breaking nearly every excavation rule in the book, he brought the remains back to the museum, where even more archaeological rules were broken, thanks to who was in power.

2:48The National Socialists, otherwise known as the Nazis, were a year into their rule under Adolf Hitler, who delivered speeches like this one, which promoted the idea of a Germanic master race.

3:03Archaeologists were a big part of Hitler's nation-building propaganda program, and they were looking for evidence that Aryans came from Germany. And that's why the Nazis sent their archaeologists to this museum. They quickly declared these remains, which were likely those of a member of Europe's Indo-European ancestors to be, instead, those of an Aryan man from the Neolithic period. They were looking for Germanic ancestors, and they would have liked them to come from Scandinavia. So with Indo-Europeans, they come from India, probably. It's not so nice for national socialists. So then the archaeologists who then interpreted this find, who were under Nazi influence, basically said, okay, this is most likely a man.

3:50He was blonde hair, blue-eyed, Aryan, 100 % Aryan. Exactly. In the years after World War II, archaeologists reviewed the remains and corrected the Nazis. First, this was not a man. Then in the 1970s, they used radiocarbon dating that concluded the remains were 9 ,000 years old, dating back to the hunter and gatherer Mesolithic, not the agrarian Neolithic period. And then, most recently, they conducted a DNA test. And genetics can tell you exactly how she looks like. So she is not a white Aryan man. She's a dark-skinned-colored woman. So it's exactly the contrary from everything the National Socialists wanted her to be.

4:31The Nazis were wrong. They were wrong. And this dark-skinned, dark-haired, light-eyed woman, says Dietrich, was a woman with status. She was a shaman. Dietrich and I stand in front of a glass case. Surrounding her skeleton are various objects, which were part of her costume, starting with a skullcap made of deer antlers. So she wore a mask, an ornate, which was made up of different things. We have these boar tasks. They were worn, like, on the breast. And then we have all kinds of teeth. And they were also part of her shaman's costume. Part of this exhibit also has 200-year-old shaman costumes from Siberia that have the exact same elements, a shaman tradition spanning at least nine millennia of human history.

5:21But this shaman, says Dietrich, was a little different. There was a notch at the base of her skull, and the two vertebrae below were misformed, so they were not like they should be, like they are in our bodies. Dietrich and the museum's team of archaeologists say these two deformities suggest that when she tilted her head back, a key artery was pinched, cutting off blood to her brain, inducing a rapid eye movement called nystagmus and possibly inducing hallucinations. The shaman enters in the state of trance, of altered consciousness, and when he comes back, he can say, spirits talk to me, and this is the solution to our problem.

6:03So that's most probably what she did. All with a simple tilt of her head. It was like a superpower. Dietrich calls it a trick. And it suggests that it gave this shaman a lot of status. In fact, at the shaman's gravesite along the Zala River, Dietrich's team have found offerings of deer skullcaps and other elaborate arrangements of animal bones that date back to at least 600 years after her death. So she's almost like a figure that is revered to the point of almost being worshipped. Yeah, she is a venerated ancestor, I would say. And maybe we are at the brink of an ancestor cult here. That's really something that changes in this time, because hunter-gatherers, they have their shamans, and they are remembered, but they are not remembered that long.

6:51Dietrich says at the time the last offerings were left for her, the world was changing. Humans were roaming less and settling near reliable food sources. The first signs of agriculture and then written language emerged soon after this period. But what's clear from his team's discoveries, he says, is that stories of this shaman were passed from generation to generation over several centuries. An oral tradition that was lost and then piece by piece rediscovered, interpreted for political gain, and reinterpreted using science. An oral tradition that continues with this very story.

7:37That's the State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening. ICE has ramped up immigration operations across the country, but American citizens and legal residents have increasingly found themselves targeted. Their message was not subtle, right? They were saying, we see you, we can get to you whenever we want to. And it did scare me. How Americans pushing back on ICE are getting caught up in a web of surveillance. The Sunday story from the Up First podcast. Listen now on the NPR app.