TAUNTON, ENGLAND—According to a BBC News report, radiocarbon dating has revealed that some of the human remains found in two boxes stored at the Somerset Heritage Centre are more than 9,000 years old. Osteoarchaeologist Sharon Clough of Cotswold Archaeology said the bones were first discovered in a cave near a Roman cemetery in southwest England in the 1960s, and at the time, had been thought to date to the Roman era as well. “But they’d been picked out of the rubble in the cave and weren’t seen as part of the main dig so they were only mildly interesting and were archived and forgotten about,” Clough reasoned. The bones, which include thigh bones, cranial pieces, and pelvis fragments, belonged to at least seven different people, she added, and are remains of some of the oldest-known people to have lived in what is now England. The cave where the bones were discovered was destroyed by quarrying in the 1990s. To read about an 11,000-year-old engraved shale pendant found in England, go to "Mesolithic Markings."
