After 3,400 years, no one can say whether the Egtved Girl was a stranger where she was buried

In 2015 Karin Frei of the National Museum of Denmark and her colleagues tested them for strontium. It enters the body through food and water, and its isotope ratio shifts from one landscape to the next. Her tooth enamel, formed in early childhood, fell outside the values for nearly all of Denmark, and so did the wool of her clothes. Her 23 centimetres of hair, at least 23 months of growth, ran from a foreign signal to one like Denmark or northern Germany, then back to foreign at the end. The team proposed that she grew up hundreds of kilometres away, perhaps in southwestern Germany, though other parts of Europe share those values. Finds from the period hint at chiefs sealing alliances by marrying elite foreign women.

In 2019 Erik Thomsen and Rasmus Andreasen of Aarhus University questioned the Danish range itself. It rested largely on samples from modern rivers and lakes, and farm lime alters their water. Twenty untouched lakes, ponds and springs within 10 kilometres of her burial mound spanned a range wide enough to take in every value from her remains, assuming untouched water has stayed the same since. Their simplest explanation: she was born, lived most of her life and died, probably close to where she was buried.

Andreasen and Thomsen later studied a field years after it was heavily limed and estimated that most of the lime's strontium had left the shallow soil. Robert Frei, a co-author of the Egtved study, countered that their sums ignored a century of earlier additions. DNA was no help, as her hair held little or none. The strands do narrow at points, possibly marking spells when she went short of protein. Whether she lived through them at home or far from it, nobody knows.