On 26 April 1952, a team of peat diggers was working a bog near the village of Grauballe in Jutland when Tage Busk Sørensen pushed his spade into something that was not peat. They cleared enough to see a head coming out of the ground. The local postman happened to be passing and raised the alarm; the village doctor came, and so did an amateur archaeologist named Ulrik Balslev.

What followed was the messy reality of a find that outruns the professionals. The body stayed in the bog overnight while word went round, and the next day locals came out to look. One of them accidentally stepped on its head. The following morning Professor Peter Glob arrived from the Prehistoric Museum in Aarhus and arranged to lift the whole thing — man and matrix together — as a single block of peat.

He was found naked, with no clothing and no objects of any kind. Whether he was placed in the bog stripped or whether the textiles simply rotted away is not recoverable now; the same ambiguity attaches to Tollund Man.

His death is not ambiguous. A single wide cut runs ear to ear, severing the trachea and the oesophagus, delivered with enough force to mark the upper vertebrae. Specialists reading the wound describe one forceful action rather than repeated cutting. A wound of that geometry and depth cannot be self-inflicted. Somebody stood behind or over this man and killed him, and then his body went into water that would keep it for two millennia. Whether the killing was sacrifice, punishment or something the categories do not cover, no evidence in the peat can settle.

For decades the standard account of Grauballe Man included a fractured skull — a blow to the head, delivered before or around the moment of death. It made a satisfying story. It was also wrong. When he was taken off display in 2001 and 2002 for a new programme of examination, CT scanning showed that the skull had been compressed by the weight of the peat above him long after burial, not shattered by a weapon.

That correction matters beyond one body. Bog burial does violence of its own: it flattens, twists, splits and dislocates, and it does so over centuries in ways that can imitate injury almost perfectly. The Grauballe team came out of the work recommending that trauma evidence on bog bodies generally be re-evaluated with modern imaging before anyone builds a narrative on it. A great deal of what museums once confidently called murder may simply be the bog.

Glob decided not only to study the body but to exhibit it, which had never been attempted with a complete bog body. Earlier finds were usually reburied, sometimes in consecrated ground; Tollund Man, discovered two years before, had only his head conserved. Some scientists urged that Grauballe Man be treated immediately. He was put on show instead, to capitalise on enormous public interest, and their fears proved justified — mould appeared on a corpse that had to be kept permanently damp.

The conservator C. Lange-Kornbak then had to invent a method. He chose to continue what the bog had already been doing for two thousand years: tanning. For eighteen months the body lay immersed in a solution of water and oak bark, after which it was worked with leather oils; upkeep since has meant little more than periodic applications of Turkey red oil. Lange-Kornbak's own verdict on the result was that the man was now as well-preserved as an old boot.

The remains describe a person, not just a death. He was around thirty. His hands were smooth, with none of the callusing that field labour leaves, so whatever he did with his days, it was not heavy farm work. His teeth and jaws record periods of starvation or serious ill health in early childhood. His skeleton shows significant calcium deficiency and the earliest stages of spondylosis deformans, the disc degeneration that comes with age. His hair was dark in life; the bog turned it the coppery red that visitors see. His final meal was mostly weed seeds with smaller amounts of grain and meat — a poor man's porridge, or a specific one.

He went on permanent display at the Moesgaard Museum near Aarhus in 1955 and is still there, about fifty kilometres east of the Bjældskovdal bog where Tollund Man was found three years earlier. Seamus Heaney gave him a poem of his own, "The Grauballe Man," in the 1975 collection *North*. Between the CT models, the facial reconstruction and the fingerprints, he is probably the most thoroughly examined prehistoric individual in Europe — and still nobody can tell you his name.