Each case in this series has its own specific features, but they share a common structure.

Scientific researchers argue that the ancient remains are irreplaceable sources of information about human prehistory that benefit humanity broadly, and that their reburial permanently forecloses the possibility of answering questions that future science might be able to address.

Indigenous communities argue that their ancestors deserve the same respect accorded to any other human beings, that the history of treating Indigenous remains as scientific objects has been part of a broader pattern of colonial dispossession, and that the determination of what happens to ancestral remains belongs to the living descendants of those ancestors.

Both of these arguments are morally serious.