In the late 1990s, rabbits digging burrows in a remote corner of northern Scotland stumbled upon something extraordinary: a human skull buried beneath a pile of stones near Loch Borralie. When archaeologists later excavated the site, they uncovered the remains of two people who lived roughly 2,000 years ago, during Britain's Iron Age. Now, a new study has revealed that one of these skeletons, belonging to an adult woman, bears strange and deliberate modifications. Her brain appears to have been removed after death, and several of her bones were broken, sharpened, and possibly turned into tools. Researchers say these findings may point to a previously unknown funerary ritual, one that reveals just how complex Iron Age attitudes toward death and the dead really were.
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