The incident occurred in Hunnebostrand, Sweden, in March 2023 and was initially investigated by the police as a homicide.
Swedish media now reports the skeleton dug up by the man has been buried in the ground since the Viking Age.
I have never experienced anything like this," says coroner Peter Karan.
"We noticed that there were fractures on the skeleton that were a bit strange, transverse fractures, so we thought at first that it could be a murder," says Peter Karan, a forensic pathologist at the Medical Forensic Agency, RMV.
Experts examined the remains and could quickly determine it was not a recently deceased person.
"We understood that it was old but thought it might be from the 19th century or so", says Peter Karan.
"Analysis of a wisdom tooth showed that the skeleton belonged to a person who lived in the Viking Age, around the year 1,000," Nyheter 24 reports.
It is naturally almost impossible to say who the man was, but researchers could determine he had died at the age of 20. He was not particularly tall, no more than 160-170 cm and he was not of Nordic origin.
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