This thigh bone whistle is on display at the Wiltshire Museum in the UK.
The burial rites of ancient and exotic peoples can seem strange to us, but there's nothing particularly normal about the funeral traditions in the United States, such as attending a funeral over Skype which is now commonplace.
It's hard to say if high-tech mourning rituals like turning human remains into playable vinyl records brings us closer to accepting dead bodies, but they certainly bring us closer to an ancestral prehistoric past when at least some Bronze Age Britons turned the bones of their dead into musical instruments.
Through radiocarbon-dating, the researchers were able to determine that ancient people who lived between 2500-600 BC were keeping and curating bones of people they knew well.
The researchers who made this discovery published their findings in the journal Antiquity under the title: Death is not the end: radiocarbon and histo-taphonomic evidence for the curation and excarnation of human remains in Bronze Age Britain.
The discovery making headlines today is a human thigh bone that had been carved into a whistle and buried with another adult male. When dated, it revealed that the thigh bone came from a person who probably lived around the same date as the man that it was buried with.
There doesn't seem to be any suggestion that this was a common or widespread practice, but it's not that dissimilar to wearing the remains of the dead as jewelry which the Romans did, the Persians did, the Maya did and the Victorians also. So, 4,000 years after our ancient ancestors have come and gone, the technologies have changed, but the basic human experience of death, loss, and mourning remains the same.
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