In 1944, at the height of World War II, ditchdiggers working in a field known as Alken Enge, on the Jutland Peninsula in Denmark, made a gruesome discovery: human bones. It was quickly determined that the bones were not evidence of a recent murder—they were actually thousands of years old. Alken Enge itself has long been used as a “water-meadow,” an area that’s regularly flooded for controlled irrigation, and 12 years later, in 1956, another crew of ditchdiggers maintaining the field made another disturbing find: more human bones, including dozens…
