Iron Age Bodies Show Good Grooming

Life in the Iron Age may have been nasty, brutish and short, but men still found time to style their hair and polish their fingernails, according to researchers who have been examining the two latest preserved prehistoric bodies to emerge from Ireland’s peat bogs. Both were tortured to death.

One of the 2,300-year-old bodies, churned up by a peat-cutting machine at Clonycavan near Dublin in 2003, had raised Mohawk-style hair, held in place with plant oil imported from France or Spain. The other, unearthed three months later and 25 miles away in Oldcroghan by workmen digging a ditch, had well-manicured fingernails.