Let’s just call a spade a spade
Excavations at Cladh Hallan, a Bronze Age-Iron Age settlement on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland, revealed the skeletons of two adults, a sub-adult and a child buried beneath the foundations of three roundhouses. Osteological and isotopic evidence has shown that the male adult skeleton is a composite made up of parts of at least three different individuals. To test the hypothesis that the female skeleton was also a composite we examined ancient DNA from four of its components: the skull, mandible, right humerus and right femur. […]
It was concluded that the mandible, humerus and femur come from different individuals. Insufficient data were obtained to draw conclusions regarding the origin of the skull.
The presence of two composite skeletons at Cladh Hallan indicates that the merging of identities may have been a deliberate act, perhaps designed to amalgamate different ancestries into a single lineage.
{ ScienceDirect | Continue reading }
Mummies found off the coast of Scotland are Frankenstein-like composites of several corpses, researchers say. […]
Carbon dating these remains and their surroundings revealed these bodies were buried up to 600 years after death — to keep bodies from rotting to pieces after such a long time, they must have been intentionally preserved, unlike the bodies of animals also buried at the site, which had been left to decay. […]
The first composite was apparently assembled between 1260 B.C. and 1440 B.C., while the second composite was assembled between 1130 B.C. and 1310 B.C. “There is overlap, but the statistical probability is that they were assembled at different times,” Parker-Pearson said.
photo { Ron Jude }
