The skull was on a display case at a thrift store in North Fort Myers. The price tag? 4000 dollars (more than 3700 euros). “I thought, if I make it expensive enough, no one will want to buy the skull,” the store’s owner, Beth Meyer, told The Washington Post.
‘Already had a suspicion’
Meyer suspected that the skull might be real, because she had worked with fossils before. She thought Halloween, which is always celebrated in a big way in America, was a great opportunity to put the skull in the store.
Last weekend the object was still there when an anthropologist entered the business. He immediately saw that it was a real skull and may have suspected that it was a very old specimen. Together with Meyer, the anthropologist contacted the police.
It is illegal to sell human remains in Florida, but the police don’t seem to be so concerned about that this time. There is no question of a suspicious situation, officers write in a message Facebook.
‘Amongst a lot of strange rubbish’
Meyer discovered the skull last year in a garage that a sick man had sold to her. “He said there were a lot of stones, one of my specialties. But there was no stone, just a lot of strange rubbish and a lot of books. I was disappointed.”
The owner of the store in The Washington Post calls the discovery of the skull ‘very exciting’. If the anthropologist is right and the braincase does indeed belong to a Native American, she may have to hand it over.
A law in the US requires that these human remains be returned to descendants.
2023-11-07 23:13:06
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