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

The stones held the bones.

And the bones, examined with care two thousand years later, held the memory of what was done — even if the memory of why remains just beyond reach.

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The Landscape That Kept the Secret

Sutherland is not a landscape that gives things up easily.

The geology is ancient — the Lewisian gneiss that forms the bedrock of much of the northwest Highlands is among the oldest exposed rock in Europe, pushed up from depths where it had crystallized under conditions of heat and pressure more than two billion years ago.

Over that ancient basement, the Torridonian sandstone that caps many of the most distinctive mountains of the region was laid down around 800 million years ago as river sediment.