Welcome to the first Skolls blog post! I'm a science journalist investigating the human remains trade, past and present.
I've been obsessed with this admittedly rather morbid subject since 2021. Back then, I was looking into the illegal wildlife trade by joining taxidermy groups on Facebook to see what endangered species were for sale. But as my feed began to fill up with dead animals, I came across a post that stopped me dead in my scroll. The post read, "Real people noggins… $1,800 for both."
Finding human skulls for sale on Facebook led me down a rabbit hole I've been unable to escape. That's partly because it's less of a hole and more of a morbidly fascinating warren. Every tunnel you pursue leads to several more. Take the law, for example. When I first saw human skulls for sale, I did what most people would do and hastily Googled, "Is it illegal to sell human skulls?" You'd think the answer would be a reassuring "of course," but it's actually a rather complicated "not really."
In the UK, there's nothing to prevent people from buying and selling human remains, provided they're not used for transplants. I'll get into laws in a future blog post, but in general, there are surprisingly few protections offered to the dead, and that lack of legislation enables all manner of mistreatment.
The "real people noggins" turned out to be one small piece of a collectors' market thriving on social media. Facebook and Instagram are the major hubs for dealing in the dead, with the remains of thousands of people available for sale. Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, says it prohibits the sale of body parts and fluids on its platforms, but the bones of adults, children and babies are easy to find once you start looking.
Collectors congregate in private Facebook groups dedicated to trading human remains, while some dealers offer their wares openly to thousands of supportive followers. The more paranoid sellers use thinly veiled codewords such as "hooman skulls" and "skolls" — blog name alert — though, in my experience, they have little to fear from Meta.
Almost a year after I stumbled across the Facebook skulls, I published an investigation into the UK arm of the collectors' market with Live Science. The investigation highlighted a network of collectors buying and selling remains as part of oddities businesses, antiques businesses, taxidermy businesses and just as a kind of ghoulish side hustle.
I'll get into why people collect human remains in a future post. Still, it's important to remember that they are often law-abiding citizens engaging in an activity that we, as a country, have never properly condemned.
People have been collecting, trading and displaying human remains for centuries. While the social media-fuelled collectors' fad is a new phenomenon, there have long been legitimate and even noble reasons for wanting dead bodies, like for advancing medicine. The problem is that living people have always been rather reluctant to agree to give up their bodies post-mortem, and so the dead have also long been a commodity.
Those "real people noggins" for sale on Facebook were labelled as "old medical," which means in decades past, they were likely purchased as learning aids by aspiring doctors or dentists. Medical students are no longer encouraged to purchase human bones with their books, but most of the bones never left private 'ownership.' The "old medical" bones dominate the modern collectors' market, so it makes sense that I encountered them first, but there was so much more to come.
In this blog, I want to explore the history behind the modern collectors' trade, as well as the ethics of keeping, displaying and selling human remains. I plan to write something every month, whether it's a quick explainer, a deep dive into whatever skull I've stumbled across, or my reaction to a human remains-related scandal — they're surprisingly common.
If you can't wait for my next post, then I made my podcasting debut this week in Head Number 7. I'm a contributor to the series, which explores how bodies donated to medical science ended up in the collectors' trade. Head Number 7 is exclusive to Wondery+, but episode 1 is available now on all major podcasting platforms.
Into the warren we go!
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