7,500-year-old deer skull headdress discovered in Germany indicates hunter-gatherers shared sacred items and ideas with region's first farmers

A deer skull headdress unearthed at an archaeological site in Germany reveals that Stone Age hunter-gatherers shared sacred items, tools and ideas with a farming community there roughly 7,500 years ago, a new study finds.

The ancient farming village near Eilsleben, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) east of Hannover in northern Germany, was "kind of an outpost" for some of the first farmers in Europe, study first author Laura Dietrich, an archaeologist at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in Germany, told Live Science.

The site was discovered in the 1970s, and it has been extensively excavated since. Recent geomagnetic analysis has revealed it covered almost 20 acres (8 hectares) and may have been the largest settlement in the region at this time.

Deitrich said the villagers belonged to the Neolithic, or New Stone Age LBK culture, which migrated into Central Europe up to 7,500 years ago from the Aegean region and Anatolia, now Turkey. (The culture was named for its unique ceramics; LBK, or "Linearbandkeramik" in German, translates to "Linear banded pottery.")

The earliest stages of the ancient village dated from the first generations of these Neolithic farmers, and the site still contains archaeological evidence of their distinctive houses, Dietrich said. But "it also has a lot of Mesolithic [Middle Stone Age] artifacts," indicating that the villagers interacted with the hunter-gatherers who already lived in the region.

Technology transfer

The headdress is made from the skull and antlers of an adult roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) and may be the most striking of the finds at the site; but it is distinctly Mesolithic and not Neolithic, the researchers reported in the study, which was published in the January issue of the journal Antiquity.

Similar deer skull headdresses have been found at Mesolithic archaeological sites dated to up to 11,000 years ago — including more than 30 unearthed at the Star Carr site in the north of England.

At Eilsleben, the headdress seems to have been part of a "technology transfer" between the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and the Neolithic villagers, Dietrich said.

The archaeologists also found tools made from antlers and antler flakes at the site — a material not generally used by the LBK people. However, it's likely that the Neolithic villagers made the antler tools after copying the practices of the hunter-gatherers.

Dietrich said that the remains of a rampart and ditch indicate the village was fortified against attacks — but it's not clear by whom.

"This was a paradoxical relationship," she said. "The Neolithic fortifications say 'we are living here' but there are a lot of Mesolithic hunter-gatherer elements in the settlement, which is amazing."

Ancient Europe

Genetic traces of the Neolithic people from the Aegean and Anatolia whose descendants formed the LBK culture can still be seen in the genomes of many modern Europeans.

The two other major genetic ancestries among modern Europeans are a wave of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers from about 14,000 years ago; and the later Yamnaya people ("Indo-Europeans") from the Pontic-Caspian steppe — Bronze Age nomads who wrangled herds of horses, cattle, sheep and goats.

Scientists think the Neolithic people were the first to introduce farming to Europe — a crucial technology wholeheartedly copied by the people living there already and the people who came later.

But how they interacted with the Mesolithic people who already lived there is not yet clear. "It may be that the relationships between the early farmers and the hunter-gatherers were very complex, and we are only beginning to understand them now," Dietrich said.

Previous genetic studies found very little evidence of interbreeding between the two ancient groups, she said. But the village near Eilsleben seems to have been a place of exchange, "not only of material artifacts, but also of symbolic meanings," Deitrich said.

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