Impaled Auroch Skull Puzzles German Archaeologists

Buried in a northern German moor for more than ten thousand years, an animal skull with a wooden stake driven through it is raising questions archaeologists can’t yet fully answer, starting with how it was even made.

A Find With No Match in Europe

The discovery comes from the Duvensee Moor, near Luchow in the Duchy of Lauenburg district of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. Archaeologists recovered the object during excavations in the summer of 2025: a 10,500-year-old aurochs skull with a wooden stake impaled through it. Harald Lubke, a researcher at the Leibniz Centre for Archaeology who leads the excavations, describes it as a unique archaeological discovery, with nothing comparable documented anywhere else in Europe.

A Few Meters From the Region’s Oldest Grave

The skull turned up just a few meters from what researchers believe is northern Germany’s oldest known grave, a burial first investigated during archaeological work in 2022 and 2023. Lubke doesn’t think that proximity is a coincidence. “The skull was probably meant to protect the buried person,” he said. Researchers believe hunter-gatherer communities in the region cremated their dead and buried the remains together with material from the funeral pyre. The newly found skull suggests the ceremony may have gone further still, potentially involving animal skulls mounted on wooden stakes positioned around or near the burial itself.

Remarkably Intact After Ten Millennia

Despite breaking into several fragments at some point, the aurochs skull survived almost completely intact after more than ten thousand years in the waterlogged conditions of the Duvensee Moor, the kind of oxygen-poor, consistently wet environment that can preserve organic material for millennia in ways dry soil simply can’t. More than 20 specialists have examined the individual fragments in recent months, including researchers based at the Schleswig branch of the Leibniz Centre for Archaeology.

The Question Nobody Can Answer Yet

One basic question about the skull remains completely open: exactly how the wooden stake was inserted into it in the first place. To find out, researchers now plan to carefully separate the animal’s jawbone from the rest of the skull. Only once that separation is complete, Lubke says, will the team be able to properly investigate how the peg actually entered the remains, and potentially work out how the entire object was originally constructed.

A Century of Discoveries, and Counting

Duvensee Moor has served as an important site for archaeological research for roughly a century, with more than 20 prehistoric sites now documented across the wider area. Together, these finds have given researchers an increasingly detailed picture of the hunter-gatherer communities that lived in this landscape after the end of the last Ice Age. Lubke believes people used this particular location thousands of years before permanent farming settlements ever appeared in northern Europe. The aurochs itself, now extinct, was an imposing wild ancestor of modern domestic cattle that once ranged across large parts of Europe, Asia, and North Africa.

Racing Against a Drying Moor

Lubke and his colleagues have carried out renewed investigations in the moor since 2022, and additional excavations are planned for summer 2026. But the team is increasingly working against time, since the wetland is gradually drying out, threatening the exceptional preservation conditions that have protected organic material like wood and bone for thousands of years. As those conditions deteriorate, archaeological remains that have survived for millennia could begin to decay. “So far, something new has turned up every year, and I’m curious to see what it will be this year,” Lubke said. This time, the team is hoping for something particularly ambitious: the remains of a prehistoric boat, which could offer rare direct evidence of how Mesolithic hunter-gatherers traveled across lakes and waterways more than 10,000 years ago.

Sources

This report draws on original reporting by NDR, as covered by HeritageDaily.