SOMEWHERE IN DENMARK 6000 YEARS AGO
That man is one of the most important people in all of Denmark's history.
With his arrival, everything changes -
- for future generations.
For us.
We're in the very first chapter in our story: the Stone Age.
A period of thousands of years, when men first settle in our country -
- and must constantly adapt to a changing, volatile climate.
But it's also a fascinating time, when our ancestors -
- encounter strangers from other cultures and the discoveries they bring.
Discoveries that will change our country forever.
But before we get to that, let's begin with the beginning.
This is The Story of Denmark.
The story of how a country became a country -
- and a people a people.
It's a story of a nation that experienced both staggering greatness -
- and total decline.
And about how we became who we are today -
- about kings and queens -
- peasants and nobles -
- from the distant ice ages -
- to millennia forward.
This is our story.
In Denmark, we love our white beaches -
- dunes where rose bushes bloom -
- and lyme grass that sways in the wind.
The roaring sea in the background.
But it hasn't always been like this.
Nature has transformed dramatically these last thousands of years.
And where we start our story -
- there are no white beaches, no dunes -
- and certainly not any roaring seas.
We're going 23,000 years back to the latest ice age on Earth -
- when most of the northern hemisphere was covered by ice and snow.
The lands in the north were long frozen with ice -
- in some places as deep as 2.5 km.
The Scandinavian Ice Sheet.
Underneath that enormous ice mass were Scandinavia and Northern Europe -
- a large, continuous land mass that stretched from Great Britain -
- over to Scandinavia, and way over to Siberia.
And the area that would become Denmark made up only a small part -
- of the large land mass.
Denmark had a totally different shape than the country we have now.
When we look at the landscape, we think of hills.
In reality, it's a mold of the underside of the ice.
It's the underside of the ice sheet's form that we see as the landscape now.
We can still see the effects of the weight of the ice sheet.
If you put several kilometers of ice on top of the land -
- it puts pressure on the soft areas down in the Earth's Mantle.
At this point, it's too cold for plants, animals, and humans to exist.
But in our story, something is happening that will soon change that.
The ice age is slowly loosening its grip on Northern Europe.
The ice is beginning to melt.
And out of that enormous ice mass a new landscape is born: Denmark.
In any case, what will eventually become Denmark.
The ice melted 15-16,000 years ago. It melts up through Sweden -
- and 14,000 years ago, it was on top of the great lakes in Sweden.
There, a glacial landscape waits -
- for vegetation and animals and humans to begin to occupy the land.
Over the next millennia, a new landscape appears.
A flat and barren area without trees.
The Mammoth Steppe.
Now simple grasses sprout, attracting spectacular species of animals.
There's fantastic wildlife. One giant after another -
- grazing side by side in the newly born landscape.
Bison, the Irish Giant Stag, or the Mammoth...
... the Tundra's colossi.
They're the first animals that arrive after the ice has melted.
We find the rest of them in Skåne, so they must have been there -
- and out by the North Sea. So they were in the area.
The ice age fauna, reindeer, mammoths, or woolly rhinos -
- and wild horses are what you see throughout a belt -
- stretching from Northern Europe right through Northern Asia -
- and straight into Alaska.
It was idyllic and very peaceful -
- because no humans had arrived yet.
It was a place where large, now-extinct animals -
- strolled around and waited for something to come eat them.
But in this period, an equally special animal shows up -
- in the region of Denmark.
It's now, in the era we call the Danish Stone Age -
- that it really begins.
The first immigrants in the region of Denmark -
- we call the reindeer hunters.
The first humans we find evidence of in Denmark -
- arrived from other places in Europe and trekked North.
For these humans, reindeer were crucial -
- and they lived on the move, hunting them.
The plain stretched all the way from England into Russia.
If you think it would be easy to find a couple thousand reindeer -
- there was also an enormous plain across which you had to find them.
Few traces of the reindeer hunters remain.
But the hunters left us something.
Finely worked flint tips used to hunt with bow and arrow.
It's important to know where the reindeer will travel.
If you're going to ambush and the animals go another way, you don't get any food.
You need to find where the landscape narrows -
- and the racing herd becomes trapped -
- so you can shoot as many reindeer as possible.
A successful hunt means survival.
Passing on the hunter's secrets from generation to generation -
- was a matter of life and death.
The reindeer's meat gave food, while the skin was used for clothing -
- and also for tents. They used antlers for harpoon tips -
- and spear tips and small axes.
The animal's tendons were used to sew with -
- and the animal's organs were rich in vitamins and minerals.
So everything from the animal was eaten or used.
For the thousands of years that follow, humans hunt reindeer in our region.
With warmer temperatures, the reindeer wander northward -
- and subsequent generations of hunters find new prey.
But slowly, something is happening that will change the hunters' lives.
For nature is undergoing yet another profound shift.
11,700 years ago, the ice age finally ends.
The hunters are up against a warmer climate -
- and the whole landscape changes.
Slowly, the tundra becomes forest.
In its retreat, the Ice drags over a large part of the land -
- and here a forest of birch trees takes root.
The region that will become Denmark begins to take shape.
The enormous ice caps over Scandinavia melt -
- and the land begins to form.
The boundary between land and water moves constantly.
The landscape rises from underground -
- where the ice has retreated. Enormous forces are in motion.
The melting water becomes rivers that run through the landscape -
- forming what will become the Belts, Øresund, and Limfjorden.
And with the milder climate, large forests and lakes arise -
- filled with new plants and animals.
Now the Stone Age people move into a new and important epoch.
The forest becomes pivotal to the hunters.
Looking at the first forest hunters, you see that they develop -
- thousands of years alongside the changing landscape.
And they lived more off the forest, and gathered things.
At this point, the forest isn't just a place they visit.
It's a gathering place for their whole existence.
They live here, hunt here -
- live here and die here.
The woman hunting there has a unique significance.
She'll become no less than Denmark's oldest human discovery.
In 1941, we find her remains in a peat bog close to Odense.
It's there that she got her name: Koelbjerg Woman.
Koelbjerg Woman's skeleton reveals she was about 25 when she died -
- that she had a strong skull -
- and well-defined eyebrows -
- and her teeth had been heavily worn.
Koelbjerg Woman was small in stature, but with strong bones.
She had an active and hard life. A bit of an extreme athlete -
- you'd say today, because she could survive in nature.
The early hunters in Europe and Denmark were people -
- who grew less than we do today.
They were shorter and they had very dark skin.
Really dark skin. Light skin color is something -
- that comes much, much later, maybe in the last 5000 years.
It appears that the dominant eye color among the hunters -
- was grey or blue-grey.
Women probably participated in the hunting.
When you look at other hunting cultures -
- that lived in small family groups, hunting together was a good idea.
Two of them could provide meat. Imagine if the man got sick -
- or died. Life was hard then.
If the woman could only cook and raise children -
- she would have certainly died.
It wasn't just the bow and arrow that decided if the hunt was a success.
Humanity had already allied itself with another skilled hunter.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The tamed wolf. Fetch! Fetch!
The dog was a very big help in the large forest.
Both as a hunting dog for their unmatched nose and for their instincts -
- to see if something was coming.
And the dog also gave protection to the camp, allowing people to sleep.
The dog could keep watch at night and bark if something came close.
So even then, the dog was man's best friend.
From the skeletal remains, we can see that the forest hunters hunted -
- everything from beavers, wild boar, stags, and elk to bears.
Winter is a fantastic time for hunting big game.
There are no leaves on the trees, so the animals are visible.
Moose, bears, and aurochs -
- one of the Stone Age's giant animals, a magnificent prey -
- that gave meat for a whole month.
It was a huge animal that trampled through the underbrush.
AUROCHS, FOUND NEAR VIG THE NATIONAL MUSEUM
This skeleton is from a specimen that weighed almost a ton -
- and had a shoulder height of two meters.
The magnificent animal was hunted by the hunters of the time -
- and their arrowheads still lie where they pierced the skeleton.
They needed a lot of arrows to shoot such a large animal.
The wounded aurochs must have fled into a forest lake -
- where the frustrated hunters saw the spoils sink to the bottom -
- leaving it to us in the future.
Just as meat was important for Koelbjerg Woman and her people -
- the forest was also rich in other edible things.
Bird eggs, roots, hazelnuts, waterlily tubers, and other water plants.
Everything was gathered for survival.
Maybe she dies while gathering water plants.
Maybe while having a swim. We don't know.
All we know is that Koelbjerg Woman's body lay resting in the mud -
- until 10,000 years later, when it was found by peat diggers.
Koelbjerg Woman is a unique find, because she can tell us something about -
- how our ancestors looked.
But now scientists, with the help of a new DNA method, have discovered -
- yet another secret hidden in her bones.
Koelbjerg Woman is the oldest skeleton we have in Denmark.
And when we began extracting DNA -
- there was joking among the archaeologists, who said -
- that the women weren't especially attractive. They were masculine.
And Koelbjerg Woman is very masculine. But we should say -
- that Koelbjerg Woman was instead a slightly feminine man.
Because it was a man. It wasn't a woman.
It doesn't surprise me because we often see -
- that the original gender analysis, determined by the bones -
- turns out to be wrong.
Whether Koelbjerg Woman will be called Koelbjerg Man -
- remains to be seen.
But what's certain is that science is always opening new doors -
- into our history.
Stone Age man's existence wasn't just about survival.
Like today, people had a need to explain -
- the unexplainable.
A bolt of lightning, an unlucky hunt, or a sudden illness.
Everything was controlled by a supernatural spirit world.
They believed everything had a soul, and that there was consciousness -
- in both animals and stones and plants -
- that could affect one's life.
Stones, animals, grass, even the shadows on the wall -
- were living creatures.
So they couldn't just go out and shoot an animal -
- and then eat it.
They had a moral responsibility to the animal and its spirit.
The special connection between hunters and animals -
- is seen here in an amulet.
A little moose head carved out of a piece of amber -
- 13,000 years ago.
But the hunters' beliefs in nature also included special rituals.
Like contemporary hunter-gatherers in the world -
- the hunters of that time also sought a connection with the spirits.
Rituals in the tribes that were led by a spirit man -
- a shaman.
A shaman was the closest to the spirits. But make no mistake.
Shamanism was an awful vocation -
- because the shaman was often used when the spirits didn't give animals.
When the community was hungry, the shaman had to use his magic -
- and coerce the animals through magic -
- to come so that the hunters could shoot them.
And the spirits would be furious -
- because they had good reason to not want to give themselves.
There were people in drum circles who could put themselves in a trance -
- simply by getting so riled up -
- that they suddenly lost consciousness.
So they would lie there unconscious -
- while their soul was in another place.
And the shaman's spirit wandered into the other world -
- where they could negotiate with spirits and forces -
- that they normally couldn't negotiate with.
And when the shaman came to, then he could talk about -
- what he experienced in his trance, and what his spirit was told.
The shamanistic rituals gave the lives of the hunters an extra dimension -
- and maybe an explanation for the changes nature was undergoing.
And here in our story, around 10,000 years ago -
- our country would once again go through a tremendous transformation.
The warming temperatures meant that the seas rose violently -
There was a huge ice sheet over the North American continent.
It melted, and with it came a lot of melted water.
Over a very short period, the sea rose between 18-30 meters -
- in 900 years.
Over the course of a generation, you could see a really violent change.
Over the next thousands of years -
- a large amount of water washed over the region we're part of.
The sea destroyed our connection to England.
Øresund, Storebælt and Lillebælt got their characteristic forms -
- and the new coastlines slowly carved out Jutland and the islands.
When nature today buries the old lighthouse at Rubjerg Knude -
- or an autumn storm erodes the summer cottage areas -
- it's just a continuation of the conditions -
- that have always formed life in Denmark.
From the reindeer hunters' time to that of the forest hunters -
- we now turn to a new era in the Stone Age -
- the coastal hunters' time.
Temperatures rise again, and they're 2-4 degrees warmer than today.
The new, moist climate changes the forest.
It becomes a swampy jungle -
- and people flock to the coasts where it's easier to get around -
- and where the seas are full of fish.
It's an extremely rich sea with lots of nutrients.
There are whales and fish and seals and everything imaginable -
- flowing into the coasts.
A new hunting culture rises with the sea as its central point.
It's now, for the first time, that we see permanent dwellings here.
The coastal hunters of the era settle near Vedbæk in North Zealand -
- where, in the Stone Age, there was a fjord protected by big spruce forests -
- and they settled on its banks.
It's because the fishing in the fjord was really good.
They could take all the excursions out on the strait and in the forests -
- to serve them for the year.
For the coastal hunters in Vedbæk, fishing becomes the most important food source -
- and they use fishing gear that is popular even today.
The basket does all the work.
The fish swim in themselves. You just have to empty it.
And in that way a form of fishing is developed -
- that gradually puts a whole lot of food on the table -
- in the end of the Hunter Stone Age that ought to be the Fishing Stone Age -
- because they were more fishermen than they were hunters.
It's easy to think that the hunters in the Stone Age are primitive people -
- but the truth is that the tribal people, through thousands of years -
- have gathered an impressive knowledge of the nature surrounding them.
And every member of the tribe has an important function.
Life in a settlement isn't much different -
- from life in hunting camps -
- in Greenland and North America and Siberia.
The men go on longer hunting expeditions -
- and the women take care of the children and the food.
That's how it was in our Stone Age, too.
The woman knows every plant in the forest, and she knows -
- that the tree's bark can be made into string and rope -
- when soaked for six to eight weeks.
The children also help by chewing soft lumps of sap -
- that they can use to seal boats or attach control feathers -
- to hunters' arrows.
There's one craft in particular the Stone Age people have perfected.
The ice age left the world rich in the Stone Age's most important material.
Flint.
And throughout the Stone Age, the hunters develop a wide variety -
- of vital tools like knives and scrapers for skinning -
- deadly weapons like spears and arrowheads -
- and last but not least, the indispensable ax.
The flint axes in Denmark are synonymous with the Stone Age.
You cut some big pieces off -
- and the shards have a sharp side that you can use as an edge for an ax.
And when you cut away what you can't use -
- you get a slicing ax.
It's a type of disposable ax that you can't repair.
You use it while it's sharp, and then you make another.
The flint ax was primarily used for working with wood.
You used flint to fell trees that you wanted to gouge -
- into the hollow of a boat.
The slim dugouts were up to ten meters long.
Finely crafted with sides -
- that could be as thin as a couple of centimeters.
The boat was an effective method of transportation -
- and on board they had little circles for fire on top of clay and sand -
- that they could use to cook food during long journeys.
Yes, even then we were a maritime nation.
And the boat is also a door to a bigger world -
- a world that will soon come knocking -
- because soon a people down in central Europe -
- will turn the lives of the Danish hunters upside down.
While the Stone Age people have lived as hunters and gatherers -
- since the first humans arrived, life was different in the south -
- because here people have used a more effective way of getting food.
Grain.
This man is a farmer in central Europe.
It's been a long time since he gave up hunting as his primary food source.
Agriculture is one of the hallmark moments for humanity -
- because we go from being dependent on nature -
- to controlling nature and its resources.
Agriculture created enormous growth and progress in central Europe -
- and in the Middle East, where they'd cultivated grain for thousands of years.
Here existed real cities with temples and kings.
Agriculture sets our civilization in motion.
When you have a stable source of food -
- and you're able to optimize production -
- it unleashes people's creativity to do all sorts of other things.
And so that community begins -
- to establish itself.
Despite the success of agriculture, some farmers from central Europe choose -
- to go toward Scandinavia.
A possible scenario for why the farmers in Europe move -
- could be because they can see -
- an increasing stress in the community.
Conflicts about territory and land rights make -
- the people in central Europe move northward.
The man leaves his homeland to find a better future.
With him, he has wheat and grain.
He's the Stone Age's immigrant, and with him, everything will change -
- for the Danish hunter-gatherers.
Not knowing what awaits them, carrying on life as usual -
- the coastal hunters live in settlements all around Denmark.
The hunters went hunting in the morning -
- but the rest of the day they used for maintaining their weapons -
- making new arrowheads, and repairing things.
They also needed to maintain their huts -
- and so they sat and talked and enjoyed themselves.
Danish coziness has many thousands of years behind it.
Maybe love blossoms and new families are established.
But as in all societies, death is always a close companion.
You can see it in this vertebra -
- that is pierced with an arrowhead.
The bone was found in a settlement near Vedbæk -
- but it's not the only skeleton archaeologists found buried here.
The Vedbæk graves were unique when they appeared.
It was a first look at the humans who'd chipped the axes and arrowheads -
- that we had been studying -
- when we occasionally found a bone or a tooth.
Suddenly we had almost 20 graves.
And here they lie. They found skeletons of children, adults -
- and even their dogs. It was almost a whole cemetery -
- that's given us crucial insight into how these people -
- lived and maybe thought.
But one grave was especially remarkable.
The mortality rate in the early hunter-gatherer communities is high.
The average life expectancy is around 35 years.
But not everyone lives that long.
She was only 18 years old, and the little boy by her side -
- was her premature son.
The birth probably cost them both of their lives.
She was buried with her head resting on furs.
Her clothes were decorated with snail shells and beads -
- carved from animal teeth.
And the little boy had a flint knife laid at his side.
It was almost unbearable to see a really young woman -
- with a newborn child, laid out in her fanciest clothes.
But what about the swan wing? Did that majestic white bird -
- bear a special significance for the tribe?
The notion that the bird would carry the child into the next world?
We can only guess. But seen with contemporary eyes -
- it bears an almost poetic grief for those lost.
The man from the south is on his way. A scout -
- who is sent to find suitable land for his tribe.
He's part of an emigration pattern we see all over Europe at this time.
They certainly found their way using the sun and the stars.
They didn't have any compasses.
Their biggest challenge was the people they met along the way.
They had to worry whether the other people meant them harm.
It wasn't safe along the way. They came across all kinds of things.
Hunters, for example, who didn't want agriculture.
It was a very difficult challenge.
6000 years ago, the Stone Age moves into a new era -
- the Farmer Stone Age.
The farmer from the south has arrived at the Danish coast.
And what he brings in his crock -
- will change the living conditions of the hunters forever.
That man changes everything. He's come from the south -
- and he's been traveling for weeks.
In his clay pot, the man has some of the grains -
- that will soon transform the Danish landscape.
Naked barley and varieties of wheat: einkorn, emmer, dwarf wheat -
- and bread wheat.
With him, agriculture begins in Denmark.
It must have seemed like magic to these hunter-gatherers.
"Oh! Here comes someone who can give us an extra resource -
- that we didn't know about before." That comes with the first farmers.
What went through the heads of the coastal hunters -
- when they were first introduced to that new food?
They may have known about grain, but they didn't know what to do with it.
It must have been strange for them to taste such strange things.
Now he explains that if they plant grain in the right place -
- then they can grow it.
The transition between the Hunter and Farmer Stone Ages -
- isn't just a turning point in Denmark's history -
- but in all of humanity's history.
The farmer from the south has reached his goal. He's found land -
- and made contacts. And now he's brought the rest of his flock up.
It's important for the farmers who arrive to interact with the hunter-gatherers -
- and to tell them, "Hey! Agriculture is amazing!"
This time the farmer has a special surprise for the hunters.
Imagine a farmer who's come with a cow.
They must have thought it very strange. They hunted aurochs -
- and then a huge mountain of meat comes along.
They must have bowed in the dirt to the people -
- who came with such a huge resource.
Until now, the changes in the hunters' lives -
- crept along over the course of thousands of years.
But with the farmers, progress rolls over the land -
- in only a few hundred years.
At the start, it was hard work. Keep in mind that a hunter -
- uses three hours a day to hunt.
A farmer works from sunrise to sunset.
So it's much more wearing, but the bonus is -
- that you can be more sedentary. You can store food.
And you can feed more people with less labor.
And so the wheel is in motion, and our civilization begins moving -
- in a totally different direction than in the Hunter Stone Age.
But that progress has a price.
Contact with the larger world brings completely new dangers.
Livestock can have diseases like pox and influenza -
- that the hunters have no defenses against.
One of the clearest pictures of the revolution the farmers set in motion -
- is in their relationship to the dead.
In the early Stone Ages, the dead were buried close to -
- if not in the middle of the settlement, as we saw with that swan grave.
But with the Farmer Stone Age, a transformation occurs -
- with burial rituals.
As the farmers become more sedentary and acquire more surplus -
- they begin to build the burial mounds we see in the Danish landscape.
The long mound here at Bygholm Nørremark is one of the early farmer graves.
They were constructed in places where the farmers cleared the forest.
They were the elite of the tribe. It was the most-skilled farmers -
- who deserved a place in that long mound.
You can see it in the gifts they were buried with.
The top of the top were put there.
The graves were made on an axis going from east to west.
East, where the sun rises.
After the long graves, they begin to make dolmens.
Constructed with huge stones that the ice age had left -
- these impressive stone dolmens stood as clear landmarks for the people.
In as little as 700 years, more than 40,000 dolmens were erected -
- all around Denmark.
People are no longer buried whole, but placed in the grave -
- after their bones are burned -
- broken into small pieces, or both.
Sometimes bones over 100 years old are laid in newly built graves.
But the stone monuments weren't just graves for the tribe's most important.
They were just as much a warning to strangers.
It's a way to say, "Our ancestors belong here -
- it's our territory. Keep out!"
You do that by building a monumental burial mound -
- for your tribe or your family -
- to mark the landscape and the clearing as yours.
The people who grow up in the Farmer Stone Age -
- also have an increasing need to defend their land.
Maybe disputes over land between competing tribes -
- are the reason for this grisly skull.
It was found near Porsmose, near Næstved.
The man was in his late thirties -
- when two arrows hit him.
One pierced his breast, and one went through his right nostril -
- and down through his palate.
Both arrows must have been fired obliquely from above, at short distance.
Yes, property ownership was important in the Farmer Stone Age -
- and farmers now mark that right with bigger grave monuments than ever.
Around 3200 BC, the farmers outdo themselves.
They begin to erect the so-called 'passage graves'.
The passage graves have several graves that are used again and again -
- through the generations.
The dead weren't directly buried in the passage graves.
First, the tribe buried them in the ground.
When the flesh rotted away, they dug them up again -
- and put the bones in the passage graves.
So it's a kind of house for the dead -
- that they stored their family remains in.
It's still a mystery how they were constructed.
Look at the construction of the roof in this passage grave.
It must have required incredible precision -
- to balance the large stones on top of one another -
- so that they wouldn't collapse on the room.
This keystone in the roof of the room -
- weighs over 20 tons alone.
The farmers also embarked on another time-consuming job.
The mining of flint.
Near Thy, traces of Stone Age mining were found underground.
Here, archaeologists uncovered wide shafts -
- and up to six-meter-deep mine shafts.
To make flint mines, you need something to start with -
- because they're not easy to dig.
There's all that limestone you have to hack through.
They used antlers. It took a tremendously long time.
The Danish flintsmiths produce thousands of stone axes -
- to fell the large forests.
But towards the end of the Stone Age, around 4000 years ago -
- flint competes with metals arriving from central Europe.
The flintsmiths copy the metal objects -
- that show up.
This flint dagger, with its small blade, is a copy of a bronze dagger.
It's evidence of the flintsmiths' excellent technical skill -
- but also a sign that the Stone Age in Denmark is on its way out.
With time, metal will replace flint -
- like agriculture outmoded hunting -
- and transformed our country into a farming community.
Even though there's a long way to go -
- the Denmark we know today has begun.
Because if there's one thing the Stone Age people have made clear -
- it's that our beautiful little archipelago is worth settling in.
The next chapter in The Story of Denmark:
The Bronze Age.
We travel into the world for a metal that will make us richer than ever before.
And at home, we build some of the world's most impressive burial mounds.
Our ancestors buried their most important family members in the mounds -
- whose contents reveal a whole new side to our history.