7,500-year-old deer skull headdress discovered in Germany indicates hunter-gatherers shared sacred items and ideas with region’s first farmers
A headdress shaped like a deer skull discovered at an archaeological site in Germany reveals that Stone Age hunter-gatherers shared sacred objects, tools and ideas with an agricultural community around 7,500 years ago, according to a new study.
The ancient farming village near Eilsleben, about 100 kilometers east of Hanover in northern Germany, was “a kind of outpost” for some of Europe’s first farmers, according to the study’s first author. Laura Dietricharchaeologist at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in Germany, told Live Science.
Deitrich said the villagers belonged to the LBK culture of the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, which migrated to central Europe 7,500 years ago from the Aegean region and Anatolia, now Turkey. (The culture is named for its unique ceramics; LBK, or “Linearbandkeramik” in German, translates to “Linear Band Pottery.”)
The earliest stages of the ancient village date to the first generations of these Neolithic farmers, and the site still contains archaeological evidence of their distinctive houses, Dietrich said. But “there are also many Mesolithic remains [Middle Stone Age] artifacts”, indicating that the villagers interacted with the hunter-gatherers who already lived in the area.
Technology transfer
The headdress is made from the skull and antlers of an adult deer (Capreolus capreole) and could be the most striking discovery of the site; but it is clearly Mesolithic and not Neolithic, the researchers reported in the study published in the January issue of the journal Antiquity.
Similar headdresses in the shape of deer skulls have been found at Mesolithic archaeological sites dating back 11,000 years ago, including more than 30 discovered in the Star Carr website in the north of England.
At Eilsleben, the headdress appears to have been part of a “technology transfer” between Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and Neolithic villagers, Dietrich said.
Archaeologists also found tools at the site made from wood and shards of deer antler, a material not generally used by the LBK. However, it is likely that Neolithic villagers made deer antler tools after copying the practices of hunter-gatherers.
Dietrich said the remains of a rampart and a ditch indicate the village was fortified against attacks – but it is not clear by whom.
“It was a paradoxical relationship,” she said. “The Neolithic fortifications say ‘we live here’, but there are a lot of Mesolithic hunter-gatherer elements in the settlement, which is amazing.”
Ancient Europe
Genetic traces of the Neolithic peoples of the Aegean and Anatolia whose descendants formed the LBK culture are still visible in the genomes of many modern Europeans.
The other two major genetic ancestries among modern Europeans are a wave of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers from about 14,000 years ago; and the later Yamnaïa people (“Indo-Europeans”) of the Pontic-Caspian steppe – Bronze Age nomads who competed over herds of horses, cattle, sheep and goats.
Scientists believe that Neolithic people were the first to introduce agriculture to Europe – a crucial technology copied wholeheartedly by the people already living there and those who arrived later.
But how they interacted with the Mesolithic peoples already living there is not yet clear. “It may be that the relationships between early farmers and hunter-gatherers were very complex, and we are only beginning to understand them now,” Dietrich said.
Previous genetic studies have found very little evidence of interbreeding between the two ancient groups, she said. But the village near Eilsleben appears to have been a place of exchange, “not only of material objects, but also of symbolic meanings,” Deitrich said.
Dietrich, L., Knoll, F., Piezonka, H., Orschiedt, J., Heikkinen, M., Becker, F., Zamzow, E. and Meller, H. (2026). LBK outpost of Eilsleben: meetings between hunters and farmers on the borders of Central Europe in the Early Neolithic. Antiquity, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2025.10270
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