Ten years ago, archaeologists removed a couple of 3,000-year-old skeletons buried in a peat bog in Scotland. Recent DNA tests have determined that the male and female bodies, which were buried in a fetal position, were actually made up of body parts from at least six people -and that they had died hundreds of years before they were buried!
The reasoning behind such a scheme might never be known. It may have been symbolic or esthetic, or someone may have fancied themselves a "Dr. Frankenstein" of the era. Link
(Image credit: Mike Parker Pearson, University of Sheffield)
Terry Brown, a professor of biomedical archaeology at the University of Manchester, said there were clues that these bog bodies were more than they seemed.
On the female skeleton, "the jaw didn't fit into the rest of the skull," he said. "So Mike [Parker Pearson, of Sheffield University] came and said, Could we try to work it out through DNA testing?"
Brown sampled DNA from the female skeleton's jawbone, skull, arm, and leg. The results show that bones came from different people, none of whom even shared the same mother, he said.
The female is made from body parts that date to around the same time period. But isotopic dating showed that the male mummy is made from people who died a few hundred years apart.
The reasoning behind such a scheme might never be known. It may have been symbolic or esthetic, or someone may have fancied themselves a "Dr. Frankenstein" of the era. Link
(Image credit: Mike Parker Pearson, University of Sheffield)
I doubt that psychos are a modern invention.
They were digging to build something and dug up a bunch of graves. A hipster decided it would be cool to make art out of it, and this was the project.