Otto and Max Müller were cutting peat on their father's land in the Köhlmoor, southeast of Osterby in Schleswig-Holstein, on 26 May 1948. Max noticed something leathery protruding from the working face — a hide, as it turned out, wrapped around a human head. It lay roughly sixty-five to seventy centimetres below the surface of the bog. The brothers reported the find to the museum in Schleswig, and then they searched, and others searched with them, and no further part of the man was ever recovered. However he came to be there, his head and the rest of him did not go into the peat together.

He was a man of about fifty to sixty. The left side of his head had been driven in by a blow from something blunt across an area some twelve centimetres wide; the bone of the left temple shattered, and splinters were pushed into the brain cavity. That injury may well have killed him. On the second cervical vertebra there are hack marks — the unmistakable signature of a head being cut from a body.

What the evidence does not settle is the order of events, or the reason for any of it. Whether the blow came first and the severing afterwards, whether either act was an execution, a punishment, a sacrifice, or a killing with no ceremony attached — none of that has been established, and the honest position is that it may never be. Bog bodies invite theories. This one supports fewer than most, because so little of the man survives to be questioned. What can be said is that he was middle-aged, that he was killed violently, and that someone then wrapped his head in a garment before it went into the water.

Bog is a strange conservator, generous and destructive by turns. The acid decalcified his skull until the bone shrank and darkened to brown, and the weight of peat above pressed it out of shape, yet the facial region came through comparatively well and the hair came through almost perfectly. The soft tissue of the face is gone entirely. A re-examination in 2005 added two quiet details to the record. Isotope analysis showed that in at least the final year of his life he ate meat remarkably rarely, and no seafood at all. A parasitological examination of his hair found no head lice, which for the period is unusual enough that the investigators thought it worth recording.

The hair is gathered above the right temple and tied in what archaeologists call a Suebian knot. Tacitus, in chapter 38 of the Germania, describes precisely this as the mark of a free man among the Suebi. Roman sculptors carved it. One other bog body wears it too — Dätgen Man, who tied his at the back of the head. The village of Osterby has carried the knot on its coat of arms since 1998. It is also the nearest thing this man has to a date, placing him in the late Iron Age or the Roman period; radiocarbon analysis of his hair returned 75 to 130 CE, though that sample came from Alfred Dieck's private collection, and material with that provenance is not something researchers accept without reservation.

The hide around the head was a cape, sewn from tanned pieces of roe deer skin; the surviving fragment measures roughly forty by fifty-three centimetres. The neck opening is edged with a leather strip about a centimetre wide, and every seam is worked in fine catgut stitching. Some of those stitches are repairs. Somebody sat down and mended this garment, at some point, before it ended up in a bog wrapped around a dead man's head. Capes of the same kind have been found with Elling Woman, Haraldskær Woman, Kayhausen Boy and others across the North European bog country.

The head itself has had an eventful afterlife. Peter Löhr carried out the anthropological analysis and, for his doctoral work, put the skull through cycles of soaking and drying, concluding that water restored it to close to its original dimensions. Later study established that when Karl Schlabow first prepared the find for exhibition, he attached a lower jaw that had never belonged to it. The man of Osterby belongs to the State Archaeological Museum at Gottorf Castle in Schleswig, a short drive from the field he was cut out of, though since 2025 he has been on multi-year loan to Museum Silkeborg in Denmark while Gottorf undergoes renovation — most of him still missing, the borrowed jaw a matter of record, and the knot still holding.