Bronze Age people kept human remains as relics and turned them into things like musical instruments, according to research.
Academics said that while the findings may seem eerie or gruesome by today’s standards, they show a way of honouring and remembering the dead.
Radiocarbon dating and CT scanning was used to examine bones from 4,500 years ago and revealed a tradition of retaining and curating human remains as relics over several generations.
In one example from Wiltshire, a human thigh bone had been crafted to make a musical instrument and was included with the burial of a man found close to Stonehenge.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/bronze-age-musical-instruments-made-from-human-bone/
Did Neanderthals have a society?
Neanderthals had sophisticated tools, a playful childhood and a place they could call home.
What do you think of when you read the word “Neanderthal”? Is it clunky cavemen, with tools made of little more than hunks of rock, wandering the landscape aimlessly? Or is it something intriguing, but confusing: another kind of human which you’ve heard gave us some of their DNA, and perhaps weren’t as stupid as long proposed?
In truth, while Neanderthal discoveries are always guaranteed headlines, the things that make it into the media can only convey a fraction of the incredible new understanding archaeologists have produced in the past three decades.
Aside from the fact that some of the most amazing stuff never gets seen outside scientific journals, new findings often come buffed up in press releases, and crucially they lack the Big Picture context.
In reality, our entire view on who and what Neanderthals were has been revolutionised. The seismic discovery that they were our direct ancestors, contributing to somewhere around 2 per cent of the genome to most living humans, happened a decade ago.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/did-neanderthals-have-a-society/
