You might think killer Ed Gein may have been one of the worst, having used the skulls of his victims as everyday eating bowls. A recent study in China unearthed over 50 individual human bones that show proof of having been used as tools, and even gobblets.
In the study published by Scientific Reports, the archaeologists found what could be skull caps and skeleton masks among a pile of 5,000-year-old bones alongside pottery and animal remains. The discovery has confounded experts.
The bones pertain to the Liangzhu culture, with the bones dating back to 3000 and 2500 B.C. It’s said to be from China’s Neothilica period.
While several Linagzhu cemeteries have been unearthed and studied before, this is the first time archeologist have found “sculpted” or “worked” bones. Their findings of the bones detail them as having been split, perforated, polished, or ground down with other tools.
Lead author Junmei Sawada, a biological anthropologist at Niigata University of Health and Welfare in Japan, reveals the bones have no trace of having been from violent deaths. It’s likely the bones were worked after the corpse decomposed.
Researchers also discovered the most worked bone was the skull. They discovered four adult skulls that had been cut horizontally to mimic “skull cups,” while another four were cut from top to bottom that resembled a mask.
Other skull cups were discovered in high-status Liangzhu culture and leads reasearchers to think they were used in religious or ritualistic purposes.
“The people of Liangzhu came to see some human bodies as inert raw material,” Elizabeth Berger, a bioarchaeologist at the University of California, Riverside, told Live Science.
As macabre as the findings may be, researchers suspect the the bones were seen as “trash” and many unfinished pieces were discarded. They believe the people responsible felt no remorse in experimenting on skeletons if they were not kin.
“We suspect that the emergence of urban society — and the resulting encounters with social ‘others’ beyond traditional communities — may hold the key to understanding this phenomenon,” said Sawada.
