Imagine you're just fucking around with something because you're bored and then leave it there and forget about it and 2000 years later archaeologists find it and wonder "how odd, I wonder what the deep significance of this might be"
My story about it is that in Roman times, someone deeply revered or loved a person whose head or skull they possessed, perhaps of a family member, a mentor, or a romantic partner. The individual sought to restore dignity and completeness to the deceased. They turned to a collector of old bones, perhaps an anatomist, who helped them reconstruct a body and bury it, along with the head. This was a personal, unique act of grief or honor, since a whole, intact body was not necessary in Roman funeral rites.
“Whether the assembly of the bones occurred in the late Neolithic or in the Roman period, the presence of the ‘individual’ was clearly intentional,” write the researchers.”<p>I would like the researchers to explain to me what hypotheses they consider to suggest that in the Neolithic they had bones from the Roman period.
The source article[1] suggests that (in my own words) it may have to do with several kins that were brought together and tried to seal their bond by assembling a fictive individual from several deceased relatives. Or that an original important burial site was disturbed and they tried to restore the body.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/assembling-ancestors-the-manipulation-of-neolithic-and-galloroman-skeletal-remains-at-pommeroeul-belgium/A25B2FBB53A9DE7665F30AD14F06A22A#" rel="nofollow">https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/as...</a>
I saw something recently that the Vikings practiced similar bone replacement for their guys who lost limbs in battle. One poor guy was emasculated with an axe and had to be buried with a replacement boar's tusk 'down there'.
Maybe it was used for educational purposes, someone collected bones from different places until they had a whole skeleton?<p>And then when they died, nobody wanted to keep it and it was buried as it was human remains after all.
I love how we create stories of bones we find whose original tale is long gone. I have no idea where this thread of human exploration will take us but I look forward to hearing the story’s evolution.
A lost ancient technology that allowed you to replace your missing or damaged limbs with spare parts built from revivified millennial old remains? Haha