No, I don’t want to buy one. This came out of a discussion about my brother, who is so much weirder than me if you can believe it, who owns a real human skull.

I don’t know how he got it. I don’t know where he got it from, maybe this company, more importantly, I don’t know why he would want such a thing. He is not a scientist, he works in IT. He did get an MFA in theater, wanted to be a professional theater director and loves Shakespeare, I can’t believe the reason was because he wanted Hamlet to be super authentic.

We’re not all that close, so it really hasn’t come up in conversation. I only know about it because he posted elsewhere a while back that he was on a Zoom meeting at work and he showed it off and couldn’t understand why everyone stopped laughing and got silent. So obviously he thinks it’s cool to own it.

It used to be a person. I’m an atheist and I don’t believe in an afterlife, but that’s just basic disrespect.

Anyway… how can you ethically source a skull and then sell it on the open market?

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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    3 months ago

    For one thing, there is very little evidence that most other animals have any sort of reverence for the dead.

    • Akasazh@feddit.nl
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      3 months ago

      I could see how one voor find it enjoyable that their skull would be cherished by another human being.

      A guy I knew had a skull from the Roman era, that had a hole in it from a ballista arrow. Not the best way to go, but how cool is it that your head can amaze people two thousand years from now

    • sicarius@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Probably not what you were thinking but there’s plenty of stories of dogs not leaving their owners after death like Greyfriars bobby.
      Also elephants are known for mourning their dead.
      I think if I donated my body to science and they were all done with it, and they could make more money for research by selling bits off to weirdos that would be fine by me. Maybe put a little QR code on it that people could scan and get a little biography of me. That would probably make archeology a lot easier.