Europe's Oldest Battlefield Has Secrets Revealed | Ancient Unexplained Files

The Tillensa Valley, northeast Germany. In 1996, a gruesome archaeological discovery sparks national interest. An amateur archaeologist finds a human arm bone with a flint arrowhead embedded in it, right next to a wooden club. A vast excavation begins, lasting two decades. What's uncovered astounds archaeologists. They're just finding bone after bone after bone. Thousands of bones. We can estimate that roughly 2,000 people likely fought in this battle. This was a major, major engagement. What could explain this giant heap of 3,000-year-old bodies? The sheer carnage on display shocks even seasoned battle experts. It's really clear that the trauma exercised on these bones was tremendous. Some of these bodies show evidence of sharp force trauma and others of blunt force trauma. There's evidence of flint and bronze arrowheads. There's a sword. There's an axe. There's wooden clubs. The scale of this find is just unparalleled. Now, after decades of inquiry, can a new investigation finally identify the trigger point for this battle of the ages? This actually could be our first proof of a battle of this size and complexity anywhere on the Earth at this time. The task of cracking the battlefield mystery falls to scientists from the Tolensa Valley Research Project. First, they radiocarbon date the human remains to around 1250 BCE, the tail end of the Bronze Age. We now have comprehensive evidence that makes the Tolensa Valley the oldest battlefield in Europe. And this is an amazing find in and of itself. To understand who fought in this battle and why, archaeologists turn to science. So the goal is to find additional evidence, and one way to do that would be to look at the age and sex of the individuals. They begin with a forensic analysis of the bones. Anatomical features of the pelvis, skulls, and long bones reveal the sex and age of the bodies, helping create a picture of the combatants at Tolensa. There are virtually no women or children here. Over 90% of the bones have been identified as male, age 20 to 40. These were fighting-age males, clear evidence that this battle was an organized skirmish. But what drove so many Bronze Age warriors to spill blood at this picturesque river valley? To find the answer, investigators want to know where the warriors came from. They take samples of teeth from the remains and send them for isotope analysis. Isotopes in tooth enamel tend to reflect the food and water that was ingested when a person was young, so they can show us where somebody grew up. The signatures are really varied, which means that many of these individuals were from the local region, but others were from hundreds of miles away. In northern Europe, there are few major settlements. The people lived off the land, and they learned to work metal. They made objects out of copper, gold, and, of course, bronze. And the population is scattered thinly across the region. We're talking about less than 13 people per square mile. That's roughly the density of South Dakota. The number of dead at Telensa and the breadth of their geographical origins is a revelation. Gathering this many people would have been an amazing feat of organization and, frankly, communication. The new evidence from the Telensa battlefield challenges preconceptions about Europe's Bronze Age tribes. Now, scientists want to understand the battle and the people who fought it in more detail. They turn to the bones themselves and send a selection for micro-CT scanning. Our advanced digital lab allows biomedic Greg Sulcott to analyze the results. I'm looking at this guy who's got a nasty injury. The top of his femur has just snapped like a twig. If we zoom right in, I can see a small impression in the bone, and it looks like something sharp has penetrated here. Well, scientists at the University of Hamburg have spent months digitally modeling a variety of Bronze Age weapons, and here's what they think is the best fit. It seems that a lance has been driven full force into the femur, fracturing the bone. Then, as the attacker levers the weapon free, it splits the femur in two. This is astonishing because it suggests that the Telensa combatants were not just regular farmers. The lance is a specialized weapon used by trained elite. But there's more. Here is a micro-CT scan of an injury to a pelvis. It's so detailed that you can see the internal structure of the bone. It also reveals this area of damage where something is sliced right through the pelvis. Computer modeling shows us that this is most likely an arrowhead that's hit with such force that it's passed through three-quarter inch of bone. Found near this victim were horse skeletons, so it's quite possible that this arrow could have been released from a mounted archer. This Telensa evidence is really eye-opening. It reveals that this unprecedented battle may have been far more sophisticated than we ever thought possible for Bronze Age Europe. The presence of highly trained soldiers on the battlefield of Telensa raises the stakes dramatically and forces experts to re-evaluate Bronze Age warfare. This was a skirmish that involved short-range fighting and long-range fighting. Introducing technological advances to the battlefield would have required new forms of training to be more effective and the emergence of a real warrior class. In combination, the presence of horses and sophisticated metal weaponry at this battlefield indicates that these bronze weapon-wielding horse riders were some kind of officer elite, and if so, this is classic military tactics. These revelations lead experts to ask what could have sparked this battle. They consider the river close to the epicenter of the conflict. Divers search for clues amongst the silt. Here there's an unusually high concentration of artifacts in the water. Many of the finds date to the same period as the battle, but some of them date much earlier, stretching back to the Neolithic around 3000 BCE. This range of artifacts tells us that this site was deeply significant for some reason. People kept coming back here, but why? The answer emerges in the gloomy depths of the river. Hidden beneath the water's surface are numerous oak posts, as well as a horizontal and upright wooden structure that formed some sort of bridge. In Bronze Age Europe, a reliable river crossing would have been invaluable, as important as the Brooklyn Bridge today. But could this alone have sparked Europe's first organized battle? This suggests there was something really important about this area of land. What other secrets could this valley be hiding? Geomagnetic surveys are conducted in hope of further clues. Every material has unique magnetic properties, even those we don't think about as being magnetic. Materials such as iron, brick, burned soil, different types of rock can all cause local disturbances within the Earth's magnetic field. The cutting-edge scan winds the clock back thousands of years, revealing a series of intriguing ancient features. We see a pathway over 350 feet long, running east to west and flanked on either side by boulders. There's also a smaller path that leads off towards the river, which is near where the wooden artifacts were found in the water. These trails likely extended up the eastern valley slope. So when we take a step back and we consider the components discovered underwater with the components discovered on land, the picture we have is of a vital travel and communication point spanning the river. Evidence suggests this bridge could have been the fulcrum of an extensive trade network stretching across northern Germany. A vital intersection for Bronze Age traffic, carrying goods, and spreading wealth.