THE MYSTERY behind a 2,500-year-old skeleton formed of bones belonging to different people has finally been solved after it left experts baffled.
Scientists in Belgium believe the bizarre find made up of bones from five separate individuals was a complete accident.
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Even stranger, the bones are thought to belong to people from two different periods of history.
Radiocarbon dating in 2019 found that whilst parts were of Roman origin, others somehow came from the late Stone Age.
It is highly rare for archaeologists to find assembled bones from different people.
But reports suggest the Stone Age burial was disturbed by accident and the Romans reworked it 2,500 years later by adding a new skull to the grave to cover it up.
In a published research paper, a group of Belgian researchers wrote: “Disturbance of the burial may have necessitated reparations through the completion or construction of an individual with agency in the afterlife.
“A second possibility is that the entire ‘individual’ was assembled during the Gallo-Roman period, combining locally sourced Neolithic bones with a Roman-period cranium.
“Either there was originally no cranium and the Roman community that discovered the burial added one to complete the ‘individual’, or they replaced the existing Neolithic-date cranium with a Roman-period one.”
The discovery was initially made in the 1970s after the skeleton was unearthed in a Roman cemetery.
However, there was disagreement over when the bones were actually from.
They were initially thought to be from the second or third century AD despite the fact the fetal position they were found in was unusual for the Roman period.
A Roman bone pin near the skull led archaeologists to link the remains to a woman who lived between 69 and 210 AD during the Gallo-Roman era.
But then the 2019 breakthrough shattered these findings.
It is unclear exactly if the Romans simply replaced the cranium or added it themselves.
Although the motivation is unknown, researchers conclude that “the presence of the ‘individual’ was clearly intentional”.
SOCIAL MEDIA REACTIONS
The reactions to the unusual discovery acknowledged just how strange it was to find a multitude of historically different bones.
On X, where researcher Dr Barbara Veselka posted the paper, people saw the funny side.
One person commented: “Gallo-Roman skull reburial in a Neolithic tomb… Never heard that one before!”
Another quipped: “Hèhè it seems they had some fun back then :)”.
The abstract of the research paper reads: “Post-mortem manipulation of human bodies, including the commingling of multiple individuals, is attested throughout the past.
“More rarely, the bones of different individuals are assembled to create a single ‘individual’ for burial.
“Rarer still are composite individuals with skeletal elements separated by hundreds or even thousands of years.”
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