In 2021, Cambridge University Press published a scholarly paper titled The Last Meal of the Tollund Man. Using new analysis of plant macrofossils, pollen, non-pollen palynomorphs, steroid markers and proteins found in its gut, experts were able to conclude that Tollund Man ate 12 to 24 hours before he was killed.
He ate porridge containing barley, pale peach (a plant in the buckwheat family) and flax, and perhaps some fish.
It turns out that the last meal was an ordinary bowl of porridge.
“The proteins and eggs of intestinal worms indicate that he was infected with parasites,” the study also says. But it was not this fact that alarmed scientists, but the presence of pale peach seeds in the intestines. Such seeds were usually removed from the grain as threshing waste.
