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Putting that QR code in the video suddenly made me wonder, how do I point my phone camera at my phone screen? Jokes aside, I love your videos because they are simultaneously extremely interesting and very calming
I’m always a little bemused when Western content creators, especially the academic channels, say they can’t pronounce a non English word or name. I mean, you’re a researcher, it takes 30 seconds to google a pronunciation. It shows respect for your subject imo.
I am Polynesian and we used to bury our relatives under the floors of our traditional homes, but these days they are buried right next to our homes, or even in front (in the front yard), they are really gorgeous graves and beautifully decorated - every family home has them. So children grow up playing or relaxing on the graves. Anyway, a few years ago, my aunty in the islands tells me how they had a burial and they had to re-dig up some older graves - she said the old bones were carefully washed and lovingly oiled with coconut oil before being placed back - makes me wonder how they put the bones back together? Would they get mixed up like in your story?? We've been on that island for like 3000 years, so lord knows how many relatives are piled up.
That sounds like such a beautiful and healthy way to honor the dead and cope with grief as a community instead of alone. Thank you for sharing your experiences!
I love the image of children relaxing over the graves. I know it would be strange to do in a cemetery here but the way you describe it sounds so peaceful. Yeah you have to wonder if any got mixed up, but I’m sure the ancestors wouldn’t mind. Thanks for sharing
It’s the same in Madagascar too, particularly in the countryside where they regularly take out the ancestors from the family mausoleum to give them a referb and a party before replacing in their resting place. Others may be able to describe this in more detail.
I would not be surprised if what happens in old Polynesia is the same thing that happened in old Scotland. Ancestors' bones were cleaned and reassembled periodically. It's a solid theory and makes sense. Not such a crazy mystery after all
fun fact milo rossi ranked you his favorite youtuber in his latest AMA video, which i must admit I couldn't agree more the way you narrate your script is so cozy and inviting for someone like me who knows nothing about archeology
Using my qualification as some guy on the internet, i want to put forward a hypothesis. Even in our rational age, we treat remains with reverence and will often give a ceremonial reburial. Perhaps coastal erosion or marshland drainage exposed and disarticulated old burial sites and the communities that found the remains felt the need to give the remains a respectful burial. It may have been accidental that the remains were mixed up, or those that found the remains believed that symbolically burying an intact body was the most respectful way to honour those who were there before them.
From the various cultures that we know of that see the afterlife as needing a complete body to enter, it very well could be an attempt to give someone a chance to have that body when it otherwise was impossible?
Let me just say how much I've enjoyed your content. From starting with a spoon mic behind your house, to the fancy wall of skulls and lighting. It's the content that keeps us coming back. Thank you.
You're both not reading the entire comment from @chadgrant3355. They're saying it's a reburial of found bones of a washed out cemetery, not that the bones magically washed out in that formation. I was thinking the same thing. That they found this disturbed burial area and some part of their views on the afterlife made it esthetically pleasing to them to place the bones in the form of a complete body.
@geneticjen9312 ah I see lol! I was thinking it would be very lucky if they washed up in that order lol! It is late and I've been christmas shopping I think my brain has dissolved in the shopping mall!
Would love an entire episode going over Roman grave inscriptions. Almost done with my thesis which I'm doing on a Roman cemetary at Carthage, and I have that same feeling you describe of learning a name of a long dead person. One of my favorite inscriptions is of a very elderly couple who are commemorated by their son: '"Dedicated to the spirits of the dead. To Victor and Urbica, slaves of the emperor, the most pious parents. Iucundus, freedman of the emperor and assistant of the judicial office, restored this as long as time permitted. Victor lived 102 years, and Urbica lived 80 years. Here they lie." (CIL VIII 12613 = D 01680)
I got to work with Barbara a couple weeks ago. We excavated an urnfield consisting of about 150 early iron-age cremations, she and her team are researching the remains. It's been a great project to work on.
My thought was the accidently dug up the grave and tried to cobble it back together. Like Milo mentioned they could of done it to avoid disturbing the dead. Totally possible it was a composite grave from the get go too and the Roman added the head because they couldn't find the original one
0:15 If you're English: The œ is pronounced like the "i" in "bird" (or the "u" in "curly" if you like) If you're German or Swedish: œ is the French way of writing ö If you're Danish or Norwegian: œ is the French way of writing ø
@@StefanMilo It is the e in bed, in an American or most British accents, but rounded like an o. Australian and New Zealand English have some vowel shifts so I'm unsure for them.
Thanks for all you do! I wasn’t able to afford my courses this semester, but you’ve helped me continue to learn and stay engaged this semester. Appreciate you!
It made me think of the book One Hundred Years of Solitude, when the girl carried the bones of her parents in a bag to the next place she went. I think when people left their homelands in a time so long ago (not the book, but these burials) they knew they may never return to where their ancestors died. So they might have brought some bones from the ancient burial grounds where they knew their ancestors were buried, and put them all together in the new place, still leaving some behind in the homeland.
My day has been made! You never disappoint Stefan! I have said this before and I will say it again. You deserve millions of followers. You are unlike any other educational channel I’ve ever come across. Please never stop doing what you do. We are a smarter world with you in it
I love your content, Stefan. I'm an American archaeologist specializing in the Prehistoric Period Hohokam Native American culture, pre-writing obviously. I would give my arm to know the names of just one of the people I've excavated. I'm happily jealous of all of you archaeologists working in UK and Europe.
Domitius was the name of the family that produced emperor Nero. Good chance this guy was a freedman or descended of a freedman from this gens, they always took the gens name of their former masters (owners)
I saw this story. My theory is that the neolithic inhabitants of the area practiced some kind of mummification of important ancestors, who'd be kept somewhere safe and maybe brought out for festivals. Over the centuries the mummies would get damaged and fall to bits, but they'd attempt to 'repair' the most important ones using the available parts, re-wrapping them with a spare head or hand. Eventually the dominant belief system changed to the extent where nobody could look after the composite mummy any more, so they opted to give it a respectful burial. Of course, we'll almost certainly never know, but it's still absolutely fascinating. Hope that while you were walking in the woods thinking about neolithic funerary practices and Roman attitudes to death you also managed to take a few spare moments to think about mammoths...
That's a bit like my comment. There is a current practice in some Middle Eastern countries that if you lose a finger, arm, etc. it must be retained for burial with the original owner.
@pablolongobardi7240 I'm no kind of expert, so please don't give my theories any significant credence. My idea came about because I thought the 'combing ancestors' idea sounded a bit improbable because of how far apart some of the dated bones were, and because some of the bones were very different ages and even different sexes. The 'combing ancestors' idea is completely possible, but it's just my personal (amateur) belief that it was more likely to be from ad-hoc repairs to mummies. It just seems like the simpler explanation from a purely practical point of view.
@@chrisball3778 well, to somehow support your point, I really doubt that people from that time had the systematic approach to be able to identify sex or age of a long dead skeleton, so fixing a mummy fits. Tbh, I think this is the kind of scenario where random ideas from non expert people can help. Even if not accurate, may inspire lines of thought that could later be pursued
Reburials happen even this day. Maybe it was a collection buried with its owner? On a more serious note: Medieval cemeteries often had bone houses, some of which exist to this day: Place on the cemetery was limited, so graves were reused after a certain span of time (as it is done still today), and any bones found while digging the new grave were collected in bone houses, sometimes, but not always marked with the name of whom they belonged to. In the bone house they were however sorted by type, not by person: if you stack ribs to ribs and femur to femur, you can store far more of them in the same space. Maybe some neolithic cultures had similar practices, and at some point of time they decided to give the bones again a proper burial - either because they needed a patron for a new house or simply because customs changed. That does however not necessarily explain the cranium from the Roman period...
What I really appreciate about your videos is that you lay out the facts as you see them and then don't jump to hasty or clickbaity conclusions. Thank you for treating your viewers as adults.
In our mobile society today,, which has broken links to ancestral lands, it is often forgotten how important the continuity of ancestors linked to a particular place, was. Maybe this Roman family considered the older remains to undoubtedly be parts of their linked family chain going back in history (echoing the previous mixed burial too) and so by having disturbed them accidentally, they had no problem reassembling and reburying them to continue this link to their family's past.
For the burials in the outer Hebrides my first reaction was to think that a member of the community had disappeared and they didn't have a body to bury. So they scrounged up so bits and pieces and put them together to represent the missing person, carry out a ceremony and give them closure
Seems like the Romans found and moved a graveyard at some point and made a few errors with the reassembly/re-burial. It makes me think of the catacombs in Paris.
The relevant attitudes may be those of the Belgae since they lived around there. We aren’t entirely certain the Belgae were Gallic, there is a possibility they were Germanic. As were their northern neighbours the Batavi.
I love that you also love the feeling of knowing the name of a long dead person. One who is not a king or who did anything of note. I wonder if any language does have a name for that feeling...
I always fit these mysteries into Julian James’s “bi cameral mind” theory which is to say people back then heard their ancestors speaking to them in thier heads which he praises is a previous form of self awareness. That ideas came to us in the form of an ancestor or diety speaking. He thinks that is the reason people kept parts of people at hand, as 17:58 you said. I’ll admit that it’s hard for me to not see things this way now that I’ve learned the theory so learn it at your own peril =]
As a german I am here to find the word! I am not aware of one... I have to make some up, you can decide which is the best.... Ewigkeitsruf, Zeitseele, Erinnerungsecho, Ewigkeitsbrücke. However, they don't really resemble the feeling. It's way to complex even for german...
The agglutination characteristic of Deutsch is, AFAIK, only surpassed by Turkish, which can render an entire sentence into one extremely [i.e. paragraph] long word. As a native English speaker, I found Korean far easier to learn and employ than German.
Hey Milo, audio level is pretty low on this one. Armchair producer over here (actually probably not that far, big up PDX) - apply a tad of compression with a threshold high enough to just knock down any peaks, then normalize to -0db. Cheers, love your work man.
Here's your dirty little secret that RC dating experts cannot tell you - contamination, even ancient contamination, can throw the calculated age WAY off. So far off that the number could be completely meaningless. The experts kind of already know this, and so they ask for the age of related materials in the dig, and/or an estimate of the site age. 😢🤯
@@TheDanEdwards Not so, more just stating some already known facts about RC dating. Even an intelligent non-creationist would agree that it is less than perfect. DNA testing is far ahead of the DNA testing of 40 years ago. RC is way better than it use to be. Much advancements will be realized in the future. But for now, this is what we have to work with.
I love this content. Stefan does a great job. I love the accent he picked up here in America. We need him to come to Texas so we can fix it to proper English.
First idea that popped into my head was that they were trying to give the deceased a better body to go the afterlife with. Maybe they thought that, if someone died shortly after getting paralyzed, they would remain paralyzed in the afterlife. So they stuck her head onto a new body just to be sure? Something like that.
That would be "mageía tou thanátou," or a form of the Egyptian beliefs that required the perfect bodies be buried with organs wrapped separately or preserved in jars. Some people, even today, have odd ideas about the dead and disposal thereof.
First thing that came to my mind was a possible forgery. Maybe whomever handled the body pre-burial wanted to keep the head (for who knows what reason) and replaced it with bits and bobs they had available to them, some old cranyum here, and old mandibule there... presumably it would be all wrapped up so no one would know the better
Seems possible if its only the bones in a museum box. A clerk worrying that he had allowed somone to steal a head replacing it then another clerk at the storage place replacing a finger. Seems unlikely that so many people would replace so many bits woth so many other bits. Maybe they were trying to literally souture bits of other people onto live or sick people and they were botched frnakenstein experiments.
I wonder if there was a practice of taking parts of dead relatives with you and reburying them when the community moved? Or after a disaster to pacify ancestors who were perceived to be angry, wandering ghosts? Or they were a lot better at Dr Frankenstein style reanimation than we realised ;)
Could be body bits found on the beach. They were then buried. Just as we might today after shipwrecks. To make the person whole for the afterlife journey.
I thought that!! Maybe there was a belief (like today in places) that to move on, you need to be buried whole? So if they have anyone who died where they can't bury them whole, they wait and add them to other burials later? Would explain the difference in ages?
I really love your videos, Stefan! There's a lot of history and archaeology channels on RUclips that seem to just repeat the same set of popular facts on and on, but you always find really interesting and engaging stuff I've never heard of before. A while back you inspired me to write the wikipedia article on the Bonn-Oberkassel dog after namedropping it in a video.
There are two possible explanations for "Frankenskeletons." Either an early attempt was made at transplantation, or, more likely, a belief on proper condition for burial or providing for a complete body/experience in the afterlife. I know of one culture that requires the dead to be interred with all parts, so if a digit, limb or organ is lost, it must be retained until the owner is interred, even if years later. Thanks Stefan for another fascinating and thought-provoking video. Carry on carrying on with the good work!
Over thousands of years? I don't think so- none of us know who our ancestors were 1000s of years ago unless you're really lucky I'm sure it was even worse in the past
@seantherevelator4896 seems not all of the mixed burials are separated by thousands of years. If enough DNA is recoverable between the mixed bones why wouldn't they be able to discern if these remains are related?Even over a larger time frame like thousands of years if the DNA is still "readable" they should be able to at least disprove family relation.
It got me thinking.... Imagine every November 11 we dig up the "unknown soldier" and replace ONE SINGLE BONE in the grave with the same bone from an unknown deceased soldier from the last year, and we bury it again. And then same thing every year. There is a very stark kind of respect in that concept. I just think it's fascinating. 😅
In French, including Belgian French, the letter is pronounced like German ö, if you're familiar with that. If not, it's like the vowel sounds in "say" or "said" but with lips rounded like an O-sound. There is a slight difference between and , like the differences between the in "bet" and the in "bait" but in the case of , it's in fact the same as , that is the shorter, lax sound. French also uses and to represent these sounds. I think in English, where we don't use the /œ/ sound, an approximation with the long O-sound would be slightly better than the U-sound you used, so like "pom-er-OLE."
You are really close to 500 K subs! I hope you will get there soon and many more subscribers after that. You deserve it and earned each and every one of us!
Could it be a situation where the bodies are all already skeletonized somewhere and someone later tried to bury them not knowing for certain which bones went to which person and just did their best? Ha!
"Don't humans get up to some funny old stuff." There must be a contest of some kind among Brits, to use the greatest understatement for the most crazy thing happening.
I remember a seminar in which the topic was sacrifice and composite burial prior to building bridges and communal building in classical europe and among central america and south america. This was a couple decades ago but it covered things like wells etc.
Having done some field work on the beaches of Lewis this sunmer, I can confirm they're gorgeous, and the wind didnt even howl that much! And it only rained once in a week! I did get bogged several times however and my boots still smell so its not all perfect.
Occams razor- the romans somehow uncovered neolithic bones and had no idea what they were, maybe even thought they were roman, so re assembled them and buried them?
Perhaps when a group split off from a household to go and found a new household, they would take part of these mummified bodies with them to bury under the foundations and keep part of their ancestors with them. Maybe, the missing parts of the ancestor are filled in with the parts of the founder of the new household.
The symbolic community hypothesis is intriguing. My first thought was deaths where the body couldn't be recovered (taken out to sea in storm, gone missing, fallen from cliffs etc) and the loved ones believed they still needed a grave and would still need a body buried perhaps for use in the afterlife. All just my gut feeling of course
Very cool video. It is particularly interesting learning the name of a person from so long ago. Seems to give them realness and agency that that makes them a person instead of a skeleton.
Stefan in anticipation of your inevitable second career as a narrator can I put in a bid for something suitably prehistoric like The Clan of the Cave Bear?
Among the many fanciful superstitions was the idea that being buried without your head would prevent you being saved. So a natural response would be to substitute a skull.
Who among us has not bopped down to Crania-R-Us or the local ossuary to pick up spare parts when a bit of flooding or other disturbance has made dear old Granny's Granny's Granny look a bit incomplete? 🤔 We don't want to hamper their abilities in the afterlife, most especially those that would make them angry at us! 🫣👻
It was the first frankenstein monster cobbled together with parts from an old grave pit. That's why they had to burn it-- in order to release the evil spell. Geez Milo, DUH! It's Clatu, Veratus, N...
Very interesting Stefan, I wonder if it could also have something to do with animals or dogs digging up the bones and dragging them away, then the residents of the time tried to reassemble the graves. I suppose we might have seen evidence of chewing though, just a thought.
I read that there was a custom of burying the dead from several generations under ones house but if a family member moved far away they would take a part from each ancestor and bury them under their home. Hence several generations parts would be found in one grave.
Bit of an idea here, dude... the originals could have buried their leaders in two stages, with the first body having a regular burial, and their descendants would later have a token piece added to the puzzle as they passed. I would presume that either a Roman joined the family as a hero, or treasure was added to the burials, which later became known to the invaders, and a dispute over the loot landed a Roman in the grave. Have a good Xmas!
We like our mementos. Before pictures people might’ve kept a loved one’s bone. Whatever the vulture flung around the sky burial site. Some people might’ve had collections of bones from past ancestors that the kids disposed of by adding them into the dead memento collector. I remember throwing out tubs of pictures of people only my grandma knew during her life. It was really sad. But I don’t have room to store 5 tubs full of strangers I never even met.
a. I wondered if they were all related. b. I pondered whether the most recently buried had died in battle and kin folk culture had a belief system that the body ought to be buried as whole as possible for some sort dignity. Interesting stuff..
Stefan, considering that you seem to have South Slavic roots (and me being West Slavic), I wish you did more content on Slavic archaeology and prehistory. Just a thought. Thanks for all the fascinating content.
it isn't surprising if you're managing a graveyard that you would run into other older burials, and may accumulate or consolidate older graves onto one.
A more likely scenario is that this is a reflection of how Rome, albeit an empire, was not homogenous within its borders. The iron age-roman times divide is much less marked than we tend to think. Local traditions, particularly in such remote corners of the empire, would remain and mix with the roman way of living for centuries.
Was having "ancestors" around important? So maybe (as suggested elsewhere) people moved with the bones of their people, and then when settling, would protect themselves by burying their ancient ones with their new homes. And maybe over time, with marriages and the like, it was more important to have a complete ancestor than the ancestor be complete so bones from different families got mixed together. What's blowing my mind is that this is very RECENT ancient history. We aren't talking neanderthals, this is us, with significant technology. Well past the time of agriculture.
Lots of old burial practices involve trying to give the person tools they need for life. I'd guess there's good odds that in cases where Neolithic people lacked enough remains they maybe kept whatever they could to eventually bury with a 'complete body' ready for the afterlife?
My thought with these is maybe they are primarily the burial of one person (because I’m assuming in each case a majority of the remains come from one individual with some smaller amount of bones from another person/people) but that perhaps there was a belief that a person couldn’t rest or be considered properly buried without most of the component pieces of a body (to be reanimated in the afterlife or whatever) so if they had say a person who was killed and some parts of their remains were not recovered maybe they would delay burial until additional parts (perhaps scavenged from other earlier ‘non group’ burials) could be found. Then the person is mummified, uniting the outside remains into one body. This might be a weird concept for most people today who come from belief systems where the preservation of the corporeal remains isn’t essential for the afterlife but we have cultures like the ancient Egyptians who seem to have believed you needed your body to be preserved for your spirit to survive. This idea might indicate an ancient equivalent of funeral homes where an incomplete body could be stored or augmented to make it complete for proper burial.
People aren’t generally stupid. That should be the starting point of the analysis of why these bodies are put together. We also know that Romans, at least some, were ancestor worshippers. Could it be that a Roman family kept track of their ancestor’s bones for a very long time? Perhaps they knew the names of particularly important members of their family, and from time to time heirs would divide the bodies. Maybe if they divided a body they restored it with a more recent important ancestor. That’s wild speculation, but it was a fun exercise to me. I guess the only problem is that there isn’t a mention of such practices that I know of. But then again, a lot of religions were very secretive.
These seem like they could be an attempt at replacing missing or damaged body parts for a loved one to take with them into the afterlife. Maybe they just found any bones lying around that were usable and threw them into their dead loved ones burial?
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Putting that QR code in the video suddenly made me wonder, how do I point my phone camera at my phone screen? Jokes aside, I love your videos because they are simultaneously extremely interesting and very calming
@@benjaminplotke4716 Because this video is intended to be watched on a computer, not a phone.
I’m always a little bemused when Western content creators, especially the academic channels, say they can’t pronounce a non English word or name. I mean, you’re a researcher, it takes 30 seconds to google a pronunciation. It shows respect for your subject imo.
I am Polynesian and we used to bury our relatives under the floors of our traditional homes, but these days they are buried right next to our homes, or even in front (in the front yard), they are really gorgeous graves and beautifully decorated - every family home has them. So children grow up playing or relaxing on the graves. Anyway, a few years ago, my aunty in the islands tells me how they had a burial and they had to re-dig up some older graves - she said the old bones were carefully washed and lovingly oiled with coconut oil before being placed back - makes me wonder how they put the bones back together? Would they get mixed up like in your story?? We've been on that island for like 3000 years, so lord knows how many relatives are piled up.
That sounds like such a beautiful and healthy way to honor the dead and cope with grief as a community instead of alone. Thank you for sharing your experiences!
I love the image of children relaxing over the graves. I know it would be strange to do in a cemetery here but the way you describe it sounds so peaceful.
Yeah you have to wonder if any got mixed up, but I’m sure the ancestors wouldn’t mind.
Thanks for sharing
It’s the same in Madagascar too, particularly in the countryside where they regularly take out the ancestors from the family mausoleum to give them a referb and a party before replacing in their resting place. Others may be able to describe this in more detail.
I would not be surprised if what happens in old Polynesia is the same thing that happened in old Scotland. Ancestors' bones were cleaned and reassembled periodically. It's a solid theory and makes sense. Not such a crazy mystery after all
fun fact milo rossi ranked you his favorite youtuber in his latest AMA video, which i must admit I couldn't agree more the way you narrate your script is so cozy and inviting for someone like me who knows nothing about archeology
Well *one* of his favourites anyway :) but yeah, could not agree more!
Oh shoot I had no idea I’m glad you said that. I’ve got to tell him thank you
EDIT: he spelt my name with a ‘ph’. Thanks retracted
So nice of you guys to share a name too
OP gotta link?
@@StefanMiloI was glad to see you on his list of recommendations too
Using my qualification as some guy on the internet, i want to put forward a hypothesis. Even in our rational age, we treat remains with reverence and will often give a ceremonial reburial.
Perhaps coastal erosion or marshland drainage exposed and disarticulated old burial sites and the communities that found the remains felt the need to give the remains a respectful burial. It may have been accidental that the remains were mixed up, or those that found the remains believed that symbolically burying an intact body was the most respectful way to honour those who were there before them.
From the various cultures that we know of that see the afterlife as needing a complete body to enter, it very well could be an attempt to give someone a chance to have that body when it otherwise was impossible?
Let me just say how much I've enjoyed your content. From starting with a spoon mic behind your house, to the fancy wall of skulls and lighting. It's the content that keeps us coming back. Thank you.
bring back the spoon!
It’s taped to my RUclips subscribers plaque thing
@@StefanMilo Acceptable
Graveyards are often uncovered or washed up during floods or other natural reasons. This could be a reburial from some found bones.
Hmm you think they would wash up in the right order to form a whole skeleton? I highly doubt that. How unlikely.
@@Padraigp OP is suggesting the arrangements is done by people using the washed up bones. The arrangement wouldn't be caused by the flooding itself
You're both not reading the entire comment from @chadgrant3355. They're saying it's a reburial of found bones of a washed out cemetery, not that the bones magically washed out in that formation. I was thinking the same thing. That they found this disturbed burial area and some part of their views on the afterlife made it esthetically pleasing to them to place the bones in the form of a complete body.
@geneticjen9312 ah I see lol! I was thinking it would be very lucky if they washed up in that order lol! It is late and I've been christmas shopping I think my brain has dissolved in the shopping mall!
We all know that it's time travel, but the government doesn't want to tell us the truth that time travel is real
Would love an entire episode going over Roman grave inscriptions. Almost done with my thesis which I'm doing on a Roman cemetary at Carthage, and I have that same feeling you describe of learning a name of a long dead person. One of my favorite inscriptions is of a very elderly couple who are commemorated by their son: '"Dedicated to the spirits of the dead. To Victor and Urbica, slaves of the emperor, the most pious parents. Iucundus, freedman of the emperor and assistant of the judicial office, restored this as long as time permitted. Victor lived 102 years, and Urbica lived 80 years. Here they lie." (CIL VIII 12613 = D 01680)
Iucundus was quite the social climber. It's good to see he wasn't ashamed of his origins.
I love that! Thanks for sharing
"What were the ancestors up to?" Is what I think everytime I see a notificarion from you!
"How are we going to bury Ben, we only have his head? Have you looked in the bone pile? There is probably enough?"
LOL this was my thought, too. We can't bury Steve without his right leg, just keep him over there until we've got a spare
I got to work with Barbara a couple weeks ago. We excavated an urnfield consisting of about 150 early iron-age cremations, she and her team are researching the remains. It's been a great project to work on.
That’s fantastic I’m jealous
I imagine a roman gravedigger restoring a cementery and founding this remains close of one another, so he tryed to reassemble
My thought was the accidently dug up the grave and tried to cobble it back together. Like Milo mentioned they could of done it to avoid disturbing the dead. Totally possible it was a composite grave from the get go too and the Roman added the head because they couldn't find the original one
0:15 If you're English: The œ is pronounced like the "i" in "bird" (or the "u" in "curly" if you like)
If you're German or Swedish: œ is the French way of writing ö
If you're Danish or Norwegian: œ is the French way of writing ø
And in dutch it's the same as the eu sound in deur
Now I’m even more confused
@@StefanMilosay "curly bird" out loud the way you naturally do. And then play Manfred Mann's Earth Band's _Blinded by the Light_ for good measure.
Well... it depends. For french speakers and Pommerœul is in Wallonie œ can be pronounced [œ], [ø] or [ɛ]. You have to ask local people to know...
@@StefanMilo It is the e in bed, in an American or most British accents, but rounded like an o. Australian and New Zealand English have some vowel shifts so I'm unsure for them.
Thanks for all you do! I wasn’t able to afford my courses this semester, but you’ve helped me continue to learn and stay engaged this semester.
Appreciate you!
I’m glad I could help. Hope next semester goes a little better for you!
It made me think of the book One Hundred Years of Solitude, when the girl carried the bones of her parents in a bag to the next place she went. I think when people left their homelands in a time so long ago (not the book, but these burials) they knew they may never return to where their ancestors died. So they might have brought some bones from the ancient burial grounds where they knew their ancestors were buried, and put them all together in the new place, still leaving some behind in the homeland.
That's an interesting idea.
My day has been made! You never disappoint Stefan! I have said this before and I will say it again. You deserve millions of followers. You are unlike any other educational channel I’ve ever come across. Please never stop doing what you do. We are a smarter world with you in it
Last time I was this early I was in Fennoscandia before yersinia pestis
I love your content, Stefan. I'm an American archaeologist specializing in the Prehistoric Period Hohokam Native American culture, pre-writing obviously. I would give my arm to know the names of just one of the people I've excavated. I'm happily jealous of all of you archaeologists working in UK and Europe.
Domitius was the name of the family that produced emperor Nero. Good chance this guy was a freedman or descended of a freedman from this gens, they always took the gens name of their former masters (owners)
Oh that’s a sweet nugget of info!
@@StefanMilo I thought you might like it haha you are awesome man, love yr channel
I saw this story. My theory is that the neolithic inhabitants of the area practiced some kind of mummification of important ancestors, who'd be kept somewhere safe and maybe brought out for festivals. Over the centuries the mummies would get damaged and fall to bits, but they'd attempt to 'repair' the most important ones using the available parts, re-wrapping them with a spare head or hand. Eventually the dominant belief system changed to the extent where nobody could look after the composite mummy any more, so they opted to give it a respectful burial.
Of course, we'll almost certainly never know, but it's still absolutely fascinating. Hope that while you were walking in the woods thinking about neolithic funerary practices and Roman attitudes to death you also managed to take a few spare moments to think about mammoths...
Fascinating idea! What do you think of the idea of combining legendary ancestors together as one?
That's a bit like my comment. There is a current practice in some Middle Eastern countries that if you lose a finger, arm, etc. it must be retained for burial with the original owner.
I agree. Great idea.
@pablolongobardi7240 I'm no kind of expert, so please don't give my theories any significant credence. My idea came about because I thought the 'combing ancestors' idea sounded a bit improbable because of how far apart some of the dated bones were, and because some of the bones were very different ages and even different sexes. The 'combing ancestors' idea is completely possible, but it's just my personal (amateur) belief that it was more likely to be from ad-hoc repairs to mummies. It just seems like the simpler explanation from a purely practical point of view.
@@chrisball3778 well, to somehow support your point, I really doubt that people from that time had the systematic approach to be able to identify sex or age of a long dead skeleton, so fixing a mummy fits.
Tbh, I think this is the kind of scenario where random ideas from non expert people can help. Even if not accurate, may inspire lines of thought that could later be pursued
clearly a Neolithic "hey, lets prank the future" situation 😊
My thought exactly! Might rank up there with the Nefertiti bust.
I just mentally replace "ritual" with "bored teens"
Reburials happen even this day. Maybe it was a collection buried with its owner?
On a more serious note: Medieval cemeteries often had bone houses, some of which exist to this day: Place on the cemetery was limited, so graves were reused after a certain span of time (as it is done still today), and any bones found while digging the new grave were collected in bone houses, sometimes, but not always marked with the name of whom they belonged to. In the bone house they were however sorted by type, not by person: if you stack ribs to ribs and femur to femur, you can store far more of them in the same space. Maybe some neolithic cultures had similar practices, and at some point of time they decided to give the bones again a proper burial - either because they needed a patron for a new house or simply because customs changed. That does however not necessarily explain the cranium from the Roman period...
Love this theory! I kinda thought medical students or whatever ancient equivalent, but this is far more precise
I think Greeks have something like this. A body is placed in a sarcophagus, and when the body is reduced to bones a new occupant is installed.
Not sure if you saw the pics of the burial, but they were shaped into a single person.
What I really appreciate about your videos is that you lay out the facts as you see them and then don't jump to hasty or clickbaity conclusions. Thank you for treating your viewers as adults.
In our mobile society today,, which has broken links to ancestral lands, it is often forgotten how important the continuity of ancestors linked to a particular place, was. Maybe this Roman family considered the older remains to undoubtedly be parts of their linked family chain going back in history (echoing the previous mixed burial too) and so by having disturbed them accidentally, they had no problem reassembling and reburying them to continue this link to their family's past.
That's what i was thinking.
For the burials in the outer Hebrides my first reaction was to think that a member of the community had disappeared and they didn't have a body to bury. So they scrounged up so bits and pieces and put them together to represent the missing person, carry out a ceremony and give them closure
Seems like the Romans found and moved a graveyard at some point and made a few errors with the reassembly/re-burial. It makes me think of the catacombs in Paris.
2:25 The "M." is the standard abbreviation for "Marcus", so his name was Marcus Domitius Primigenius.
The relevant attitudes may be those of the Belgae since they lived around there.
We aren’t entirely certain the Belgae were Gallic, there is a possibility they were Germanic. As were their northern neighbours the Batavi.
I love that you also love the feeling of knowing the name of a long dead person. One who is not a king or who did anything of note. I wonder if any language does have a name for that feeling...
I always fit these mysteries into Julian James’s “bi cameral mind” theory which is to say people back then heard their ancestors speaking to them in thier heads which he praises is a previous form of self awareness. That ideas came to us in the form of an ancestor or diety speaking. He thinks that is the reason people kept parts of people at hand, as 17:58 you said. I’ll admit that it’s hard for me to not see things this way now that I’ve learned the theory so learn it at your own peril =]
As a german I am here to find the word! I am not aware of one...
I have to make some up, you can decide which is the best....
Ewigkeitsruf, Zeitseele, Erinnerungsecho, Ewigkeitsbrücke.
However, they don't really resemble the feeling. It's way to complex even for german...
Vorfahrenwiederbelebungsschauer
The agglutination characteristic of Deutsch is, AFAIK, only surpassed by Turkish, which can render an entire sentence into one extremely [i.e. paragraph] long word. As a native English speaker, I found Korean far easier to learn and employ than German.
Hey Milo, audio level is pretty low on this one. Armchair producer over here (actually probably not that far, big up PDX) - apply a tad of compression with a threshold high enough to just knock down any peaks, then normalize to -0db. Cheers, love your work man.
Proposal for the German word descriping the spezial sensation after learning the name of a long deceased person: "Ehrfurcht"
”Why was this one burial made up of body parts separated by 1000s of years?”. Asks the guy with a shelf full of sculls. 🤨☺
Here's your dirty little secret that RC dating experts cannot tell you - contamination, even ancient contamination, can throw the calculated age WAY off. So far off that the number could be completely meaningless. The experts kind of already know this, and so they ask for the age of related materials in the dig, and/or an estimate of the site age. 😢🤯
You sound like a creationist.
@@TheDanEdwards Not so, more just stating some already known facts about RC dating. Even an intelligent non-creationist would agree that it is less than perfect.
DNA testing is far ahead of the DNA testing of 40 years ago. RC is way better than it use to be. Much advancements will be realized in the future. But for now, this is what we have to work with.
@@TheDanEdwards You sound like a minor attracted person who hates science.
Every idea I have for how this happened would make a great slapstick comedy plot
This was mentioned in a lecture I had a couple of weeks ago! It's honestly fascinating
NEW STEFAN MILO JUST DROPPED
I love this content. Stefan does a great job. I love the accent he picked up here in America. We need him to come to Texas so we can fix it to proper English.
First idea that popped into my head was that they were trying to give the deceased a better body to go the afterlife with. Maybe they thought that, if someone died shortly after getting paralyzed, they would remain paralyzed in the afterlife. So they stuck her head onto a new body just to be sure? Something like that.
That would be "mageía tou thanátou," or a form of the Egyptian beliefs that required the perfect bodies be buried with organs wrapped separately or preserved in jars. Some people, even today, have odd ideas about the dead and disposal thereof.
I wish i had heard about composite burials before i started my dissertation, would have been a great topic
First thing that came to my mind was a possible forgery. Maybe whomever handled the body pre-burial wanted to keep the head (for who knows what reason) and replaced it with bits and bobs they had available to them, some old cranyum here, and old mandibule there... presumably it would be all wrapped up so no one would know the better
Theory, but possible
Seems possible if its only the bones in a museum box. A clerk worrying that he had allowed somone to steal a head replacing it then another clerk at the storage place replacing a finger. Seems unlikely that so many people would replace so many bits woth so many other bits. Maybe they were trying to literally souture bits of other people onto live or sick people and they were botched frnakenstein experiments.
I wonder if there was a practice of taking parts of dead relatives with you and reburying them when the community moved?
Or after a disaster to pacify ancestors who were perceived to be angry, wandering ghosts?
Or they were a lot better at Dr Frankenstein style reanimation than we realised ;)
That's interesting! Like my family is now part of this land too
The Others, ossified mementi morii
Could be body bits found on the beach. They were then buried. Just as we might today after shipwrecks. To make the person whole for the afterlife journey.
I thought that!! Maybe there was a belief (like today in places) that to move on, you need to be buried whole? So if they have anyone who died where they can't bury them whole, they wait and add them to other burials later? Would explain the difference in ages?
I really love your videos, Stefan! There's a lot of history and archaeology channels on RUclips that seem to just repeat the same set of popular facts on and on, but you always find really interesting and engaging stuff I've never heard of before. A while back you inspired me to write the wikipedia article on the Bonn-Oberkassel dog after namedropping it in a video.
There are two possible explanations for "Frankenskeletons." Either an early attempt was made at transplantation, or, more likely, a belief on proper condition for burial or providing for a complete body/experience in the afterlife. I know of one culture that requires the dead to be interred with all parts, so if a digit, limb or organ is lost, it must be retained until the owner is interred, even if years later.
Thanks Stefan for another fascinating and thought-provoking video. Carry on carrying on with the good work!
Can they tell if the different bones in a given burial are family related? Maybe a distant relative mixed with a more modern descendants?
Over thousands of years? I don't think so- none of us know who our ancestors were 1000s of years ago unless you're really lucky I'm sure it was even worse in the past
@seantherevelator4896 seems not all of the mixed burials are separated by thousands of years. If enough DNA is recoverable between the mixed bones why wouldn't they be able to discern if these remains are related?Even over a larger time frame like thousands of years if the DNA is still "readable" they should be able to at least disprove family relation.
They’ve been able to do a genetic family tree on a large group of burials in a Neolithic long barrow in Britain, so it’s not unheard of.
It got me thinking....
Imagine every November 11 we dig up the "unknown soldier" and replace ONE SINGLE BONE in the grave with the same bone from an unknown deceased soldier from the last year, and we bury it again.
And then same thing every year.
There is a very stark kind of respect in that concept.
I just think it's fascinating. 😅
In French, including Belgian French, the letter is pronounced like German ö, if you're familiar with that. If not, it's like the vowel sounds in "say" or "said" but with lips rounded like an O-sound. There is a slight difference between and , like the differences between the in "bet" and the in "bait" but in the case of , it's in fact the same as , that is the shorter, lax sound. French also uses and to represent these sounds. I think in English, where we don't use the /œ/ sound, an approximation with the long O-sound would be slightly better than the U-sound you used, so like "pom-er-OLE."
You are really close to 500 K subs! I hope you will get there soon and many more subscribers after that. You deserve it and earned each and every one of us!
Brilliant video! Thank you, Stefan. Seeing a new video from you always makes my day.
Let’s go classic Stefan talking about archeology tidbits. My favorite videos on RUclips
class as always stefan 🙌
Quite the Curious conundrum you have brought to us this time!😊 Also,loved the forest shots from your walkabout. Nice!
He was a CONSOLE OF ROME
😂
You said it right though
Absolutely fascinating, Stefan. Nice one. Great work 👍
The word you're looking for is Langevorhergestorbenernamenentdeckungsgefühl.
Probably.
Oder LGNE?
I was going to ROTFL this but that would have been trite.
Could it be a situation where the bodies are all already skeletonized somewhere and someone later tried to bury them not knowing for certain which bones went to which person and just did their best? Ha!
"Don't humans get up to some funny old stuff." There must be a contest of some kind among Brits, to use the greatest understatement for the most crazy thing happening.
I remember a seminar in which the topic was sacrifice and composite burial prior to building bridges and communal building in classical europe and among central america and south america. This was a couple decades ago but it covered things like wells etc.
That is so cool. I really enjoy watching and learning from you
Having done some field work on the beaches of Lewis this sunmer, I can confirm they're gorgeous, and the wind didnt even howl that much! And it only rained once in a week! I did get bogged several times however and my boots still smell so its not all perfect.
Occams razor- the romans somehow uncovered neolithic bones and had no idea what they were, maybe even thought they were roman, so re assembled them and buried them?
Well Stefan, let's call that special feeling 'the existence realization thrill'.
In the thumbnail, it looks like Jack Skellington.
Perhaps when a group split off from a household to go and found a new household, they would take part of these mummified bodies with them to bury under the foundations and keep part of their ancestors with them. Maybe, the missing parts of the ancestor are filled in with the parts of the founder of the new household.
The symbolic community hypothesis is intriguing. My first thought was deaths where the body couldn't be recovered (taken out to sea in storm, gone missing, fallen from cliffs etc) and the loved ones believed they still needed a grave and would still need a body buried perhaps for use in the afterlife. All just my gut feeling of course
Very cool video. It is particularly interesting learning the name of a person from so long ago. Seems to give them realness and agency that that makes them a person instead of a skeleton.
Stefan thanks for upload keep up the good work. Wishing you and your family a lovely Christmas and prosperous New Year.
Simple answer in one of G Hancock earlier books... "Time Travel"! 😮
Kidding 🥜
Stefan in anticipation of your inevitable second career as a narrator can I put in a bid for something suitably prehistoric like The Clan of the Cave Bear?
Dude you make archaeology come alive, even if the topic is composite burial!! Prester Bob
Among the many fanciful superstitions was the idea that being buried without your head would prevent you being saved. So a natural response would be to substitute a skull.
Who among us has not bopped down to Crania-R-Us or the local ossuary to pick up spare parts when a bit of flooding or other disturbance has made dear old Granny's Granny's Granny look a bit incomplete? 🤔 We don't want to hamper their abilities in the afterlife, most especially those that would make them angry at us! 🫣👻
It was the first frankenstein monster cobbled together with parts from an old grave pit. That's why they had to burn it-- in order to release the evil spell. Geez Milo, DUH! It's Clatu, Veratus, N...
Very interesting Stefan, I wonder if it could also have something to do with animals or dogs digging up the bones and dragging them away, then the residents of the time tried to reassemble the graves. I suppose we might have seen evidence of chewing though, just a thought.
...and nobody knows for sure... It's a fine line to walk between assumption and fantasising... Thank you Stefan for another interesting research!
I read that there was a custom of burying the dead from several generations under ones house but if a family member moved far away they would take a part from each ancestor and bury them under their home. Hence several generations parts would be found in one grave.
Bit of an idea here, dude... the originals could have buried their leaders in two stages, with the first body having a regular burial, and their descendants would later have a token piece added to the puzzle as they passed. I would presume that either a Roman joined the family as a hero, or treasure was added to the burials, which later became known to the invaders, and a dispute over the loot landed a Roman in the grave.
Have a good Xmas!
We like our mementos. Before pictures people might’ve kept a loved one’s bone. Whatever the vulture flung around the sky burial site. Some people might’ve had collections of bones from past ancestors that the kids disposed of by adding them into the dead memento collector.
I remember throwing out tubs of pictures of people only my grandma knew during her life. It was really sad. But I don’t have room to store 5 tubs full of strangers I never even met.
a. I wondered if they were all related. b. I pondered whether the most recently buried had died in battle and kin folk culture had a belief system that the body ought to be buried as whole as possible for some sort dignity. Interesting stuff..
Stefan, considering that you seem to have South Slavic roots (and me being West Slavic), I wish you did more content on Slavic archaeology and prehistory. Just a thought. Thanks for all the fascinating content.
I love your videos so freaking much
it isn't surprising if you're managing a graveyard that you would run into other older burials, and may accumulate or consolidate older graves onto one.
A more likely scenario is that this is a reflection of how Rome, albeit an empire, was not homogenous within its borders. The iron age-roman times divide is much less marked than we tend to think. Local traditions, particularly in such remote corners of the empire, would remain and mix with the roman way of living for centuries.
Interesting site, thanks for explaining in the video
Was having "ancestors" around important? So maybe (as suggested elsewhere) people moved with the bones of their people, and then when settling, would protect themselves by burying their ancient ones with their new homes. And maybe over time, with marriages and the like, it was more important to have a complete ancestor than the ancestor be complete so bones from different families got mixed together.
What's blowing my mind is that this is very RECENT ancient history. We aren't talking neanderthals, this is us, with significant technology. Well past the time of agriculture.
The background music is so pleasant
Lots of old burial practices involve trying to give the person tools they need for life. I'd guess there's good odds that in cases where Neolithic people lacked enough remains they maybe kept whatever they could to eventually bury with a 'complete body' ready for the afterlife?
Interesting hypothesis
Yess!!! Genuinely excited you brought another video out, love your channel!
youre talking pace is perfect, everyone talks like tiktok nowadays
skeletons just be doing stuff like that when they're bored
Thanks!
Love ya videos mate
id love to hear more about the theories on composite grave sites! what an interesting topic
My thought with these is maybe they are primarily the burial of one person (because I’m assuming in each case a majority of the remains come from one individual with some smaller amount of bones from another person/people) but that perhaps there was a belief that a person couldn’t rest or be considered properly buried without most of the component pieces of a body (to be reanimated in the afterlife or whatever) so if they had say a person who was killed and some parts of their remains were not recovered maybe they would delay burial until additional parts (perhaps scavenged from other earlier ‘non group’ burials) could be found. Then the person is mummified, uniting the outside remains into one body. This might be a weird concept for most people today who come from belief systems where the preservation of the corporeal remains isn’t essential for the afterlife but we have cultures like the ancient Egyptians who seem to have believed you needed your body to be preserved for your spirit to survive.
This idea might indicate an ancient equivalent of funeral homes where an incomplete body could be stored or augmented to make it complete for proper burial.
I speculate on something simpler. Digging a grave for a later grave they turned up some random bones and tipped them in together.
'what a beautiful place to do research' i thought that if i ever formalized my education i would study the archeology of tahiti and bora bora.
I knew time travel was real!!!
People aren’t generally stupid. That should be the starting point of the analysis of why these bodies are put together.
We also know that Romans, at least some, were ancestor worshippers. Could it be that a Roman family kept track of their ancestor’s bones for a very long time? Perhaps they knew the names of particularly important members of their family, and from time to time heirs would divide the bodies. Maybe if they divided a body they restored it with a more recent important ancestor.
That’s wild speculation, but it was a fun exercise to me. I guess the only problem is that there isn’t a mention of such practices that I know of. But then again, a lot of religions were very secretive.
These seem like they could be an attempt at replacing missing or damaged body parts for a loved one to take with them into the afterlife. Maybe they just found any bones lying around that were usable and threw them into their dead loved ones burial?