10,500-year-old auroch skull impaled on wooden stake at Duvensee moor, Germany

October 17, 2026GermanyArtifactNew ResearchShare

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Key facts

• Archaeologists in Schleswig-Holstein, northern Germany, recovered an auroch skull (the wild ancestor of domestic cattle), dated to about 10,500 years old, impaled on a wooden stake during summer 2025 excavations at Duvensee moor
• The skull lay only a few metres from what researchers identify as the oldest known grave in northern Germany, investigated in 2022 and 2023
• Excavation leader Harald Lüchmann of the Leibniz Centre for Archaeology believes the two finds are directly connected, and that the staked skull formed part of a burial ritual intended to protect the buried person
• The burial is attributed to a hunter-gatherer community living shortly after the last Ice Age; the report says such groups cremated their dead and buried remains together with grave goods
• Despite being broken into several fragments, the skull survived almost completely intact thanks to waterlogged peat conditions; more than 20 specialists examined the fragments at the Schleswig branch of the Leibniz Centre
• The team plans to carefully separate the jawbone from the rest of the skull to trace how the wooden peg entered and how the object was originally constructed
• More than 20 prehistoric sites are documented at Duvensee, an archaeological focus for almost a century; the moor is drying out, further excavations are planned for summer 2026, and researchers hope to find traces of a prehistoric boat

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