The infant buried with the shaman of Bad Dürrenberg was not her son but a descendant four or five generations down, added to her grave decades later

In 1934 workers laying a pipe for a fountain in the spa gardens at Bad Dürrenberg struck a grave. Conservator Wilhelm Henning dug it out in a hurry so the gardens could reopen the next day; no photographs were taken. It held a woman of 30 to 40, about 1.55 metres tall, and an infant. She wore a roe-deer antler headdress and was buried with boar tusks, terrapin shells, pierced animal teeth, stone and bone tools and red ochre. A malformed vertebra may have pinched a blood vessel to her brain and caused involuntary eye flutter, which Jörg Orschiedt suggests reinforced her role as a shaman. For decades the pair were described as mother and son, and in the Nazi period she was presented as an Aryan forebear. A 2023 study by Orschiedt, Wolfgang Haak and Harald Meller sequenced both. The boy was related to her in the fourth or fifth degree. Haak said "the boy was added many decades later to the grave of his ancestor"; she may have been his great-great-great-grandmother. Her genome points to dark skin, dark hair and blue eyes. Digs before the 2024 State Garden Exhibition recovered more of the burial. She is shown in the State Museum of Prehistory in Halle.