In 2003, a team of workers was operating a harvesting machine that chewed through the Irish moors to extract peat, the dense, earthy material left behind in bogs as plants decay. That day, along with the heavy peat they were gathering, the team found something else tangled in the moor’s churned soil. A corpse lay before them, cut in half by the machine’s workings but recognizably human, with face and hair intact.
It was far from the first body recovered from the bogs. The peat bogs of Ireland, Denmark, the U.K. and other European countries have yielded human remains for well over a century. These bog bodies, some thousands of years old, have been naturally preserved by the unique conditions of the bogs, which preserve skin and internal organs. Some have even been intact enough to have their fingerprints taken.
Researchers have suggested a range of explanations for why the ancient bodies were left to sink into the peat bogs. Some may have been purposely buried, or perhaps drowned. Others appear to be human sacrifices.
