A complete skeleton unearthed in a 2nd century cemetery in Belgium has mystified scientists after it was found to be made up of bones from multiple people – and even more bizarrely, those individuals lived thousands of years apart.
Details about the strange discovery are outlined in a paper in the journal Antiquity, titled “Assembling ancestors: the manipulation of Neolithic and Gallo-Roman skeletal remains at Pommerœul, Belgium“. The skeleton was so convincingly put together that for the first five decades after its excavation in the 1970s it was assumed to be a single person’s remains.
However, as New Scientist reports, Dr Barbara Veselka – head of the Osteoarchaeology Laboratory at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium – and her colleagues recently had doubts:
The skeleton’s side-lying position was typical of Early Bronze Age burials, in contrast to Roman burials with people laid flat on their backs. And despite being perfectly aligned, the vertebrae looked like a mix of adolescent and senior bones, and the femur looked too big for the pelvis. “I started thinking, okay, something really weird is going on,” she says.
So the team ran radiocarbon dating on the arm and leg bones, the skull and five toes. They also ran ancient DNA analysis on several long bones and the skull. To their surprise, their results pointed to at least seven unrelated individuals spanning several generations 4212 to 4445 years ago.
Radiocarbon dating on the skull was inconclusive, but DNA analyses revealed it belonged to a Gallo-Roman woman whose genes closely matched those of two young siblings buried in a Roman cemetery 150 kilometres to the east about 1800 years ago.
In all, the skeleton features bones from seven unrelated Stone Age men and women, separated in time from each other by several centuries – as well as the skull of the Roman woman who died 2,500 years later.
The researchers note that this is not the first time such a skeleton has been discovered. Two other examples of such post-mortem manipulation come from the Bronze Age sites of Cladh Hallan and Cnip Headland in Scotland, where skeletons were assembled using body parts from several different individuals. The researchers also cite a non-European example from the Roman cemetery of Ismant el-Kharab in Egypt.
In any case, researchers say the anatomically convincing nature of the skeleton’s construction meant that whoever put it together “knew what they were doing, for sure.” However, why they did it remains a mystery.
