Archaeologists Baffled By A 2,000-Year-Old Skeleton Found In Scotland With Its Brain Scooped Out And Its Bones Turned Into Tools

Marks on the interior of a cranium are, by definition, accessible only through an opening in the skull.

The fracture of the cranial base provided the pathway through which a tool could have been inserted to reach the interior.

The combination of the fracture type, the location of the cut marks, and the morphology of those marks led the researchers to conclude that the most parsimonious explanation was the use of a tool inserted through the broken cranial base to cut and clear soft tissue from the skull interior.

For the long bone modifications, the evidence of whittling — the systematic removal of the outer cortical bone to expose and shape the cancellous bone interior — was distinguishable from animal gnawing by the regularity and directionality of the marks, by the specific pattern of bone removal, and by the presence of a functionally specific end form: a sharp point, rather than the irregular damage pattern produced by animal gnawing.