New Historical Matches Could Connect You to the Shaman of Bad Dürrenberg and the Early Farmers Who Lived in Central Germany After Her

Key Takeaways Through 23andMe’s Historical Matches® feature, 23andMe Premium members can now find out if their DNA connects them to the Shaman of Bad Dürrenberg, a Mesolithic woman from what is now central Germany whose richly furnished grave has fascinated researchers for nearly a century. A 2022 study resequenced her genome, then used her DNA as a benchmark to measure if her hunter-gatherer ancestry was present in the farming communities that settled the region roughly 2,000 years later. From the same study 15 members of that farming community have been added to Historical Matches, descendants of migrants who carried agriculture out of Anatolia and into Europe, part of one of the most significant demographic shifts in the continent’s history.

Did you know that many of the historical and ancient individuals we feature in Historical Matches were discovered by accident during construction work? For instance, in 1903, workmen digging a drainage trench in England’s Gough’s Cave stumbled on the skeleton of Cheddar Man, one of the oldest near-complete human skeletons ever found in Britain. In 1954, construction crews building a fire station in Hungary uncovered a hilltop site that turned out to be the long-lost monastery and burial ground of an 11th-century Hungarian king, Sámuel Aba, and his descendants. And in 2012, workers in Blihun Hanben, Taiwan, uncovered burials dating to the Iron Age while they were constructing a highway. 

This September 14–18th is National Construction Appreciation Week, so we thought it was the perfect opportunity to highlight the unexpected role that construction work (and construction workers) often play in the historical and ancient stories you love learning about. This month, we’re adding one of the most interesting burials construction workers have ever uncovered to Historical Matches: the Shaman of Bad Dürrenberg.

Found During a Water Pipe Job

In 1934, construction crews digging a trench through a spa garden near Bad Dürrenberg, in what is now the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, uncovered a grave dating to the Mesolithic Period, roughly 9,000 years ago. Inside was a woman, seated in a flexed position in a small pit lined with red ochre, buried alongside an infant. Around her lay hundreds of objects, including a pair of roe deer antlers likely worn as a headdress, pierced teeth from wild boar and aurochs, tortoise-shell containers and a bone tool researchers think was once used to apply pigment.

Researchers also noticed an indentation at the base of her skull, once mistaken for evidence that she had been decapitated. It’s now understood to be a congenital condition of her first two vertebrae that may have caused symptoms like dizziness or unusual bodily sensations during her life. Between the richness of her grave and this anatomical quirk, archaeologists have interpreted her burial as that of a woman who held a distinctive spiritual or social role in her community, which is how she came to be known as the Shaman of Bad Dürrenberg.

Her fame has only grown since. A reconstruction by artist Karol Schauer has been on permanent display at the State Museum of Prehistory in Halle, Germany, for years, and in March 2026 the museum opened a dedicated exhibition on her life and burial, with loans from collections across Europe and the Near East. And ongoing studies of the artifacts she was buried with keep yielding new details. For instance, researchers recently identified microscopic traces of feathers, including goose feathers, suggesting her headdress may have been more elaborate than anyone initially realized.

An Old Genome Gets an Upgrade

The Shaman of Bad Dürrenberg’s DNA has been studied several times. Mitochondrial DNA extracted from her remains in 2009, and a full genome sequenced in 2020, already placed her ancestry firmly among Europe’s Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. This was enough information for researchers who were interested in studying her physical appearance to predict that she likely had dark skin and light eyes, a combination common among hunter-gatherers across Europe at the time.

In 2022, researchers sequenced her genome again, this time to a much higher quality, as part of a study of Neolithic farmers who settled the same general region around 2,000 years after she lived. Her high-quality genome gave them a detailed benchmark for local hunter-gatherer ancestry, which they used to measure exactly how much of it was present in the incoming farming population. The answer: very little. These farmers did carry hunter-gatherer ancestry, but this ancestry was likely acquired earlier, as farming populations expanded through southeastern Europe.

Neighbors, Two Thousand Years Later

The same 2022 study analyzed the genomes of 32 individuals from a Linear Pottery culture cemetery near Derenburg, in the same general region the Shaman once called home. These farmers descended from migrants who carried agriculture out of Anatolia and into Europe, part of one of the most significant demographic shifts in the continent’s history. Their DNA showed that farming spread through Europe primarily via the movement of people themselves, not just the exchange of ideas and technology, and that very little hunter-gatherer ancestry, like the Shaman’s, made it into this new farming population. Fifteen of these individuals are also joining the Shaman in the Historical Matches feature.

Learn More

Curious whether your DNA connects you to the Shaman of Bad Dürrenberg, one of the Neolithic farmers who came after her or any of the hundreds of other historical figures in our database? 23andMe Premium members can explore the Historical Matches feature to find out.