More than a decade ago, a team of archaeologists found the buried bodies of a man and a woman in Scotland. They had died 3,000 years ago, but they weren’t buried right away. Instead, their bodies were thrown into the Scottish bog where they were preserved and mummified for 300 to 600 years before they were finally put underground. But the skeletons looked weird, to modern scientists. The woman’s jaw was a little too large for her skull, and the man’s limbs seemed out of place.
According to new isotopic dating and DNA experiments, the mummies— both the male and the female—were assembled from the body parts of at least six people! The woman came from individuals who died around the same time. But the man’s … components? … came from people who died hundreds of years apart.
Not only were the bodies assembled like Frankenstein, but they were interred in an odd way too. The bodies were removed from the peat bog after preservation, but before acid destroyed the bones, and then re-interred in soil, where the soft tissue broke down but the bones were preserved.
Why the burying, digging up, and burying again? Why the Frankenstein mismash of multiple bodies? Modern scientists have no idea, but there are plenty of theories, each a little wilder than the last.
