"A new study conducted by researchers at the University of Oxford ... has challenged previously held views that brain preservation in the archaeological record is extremely rare. The team compiled a new archive of preserved human brains, which highlighted that nervous tissues actually persist in much greater abundances than traditionally thought, assisted by conditions that prevent decay."
'The return of the ancestral human remains of Australian and other Indigenous peoples held in anthropological collections could be sped up using machine-based deep learning according to a new study led by QUT computer scientists.'
The Navajo nation expressed concerns that human remains would desecrate the Moon. The concerns were ignored. Astrobotic’s Peregrine Lander containing human remains was launched anyway and something has gone wrong. It won’t make it to the Moon.
The #Navajo Nation voices objection to obscenely rich private individuals placing #humanremains on the Moon:
'...the President of the Navajo Nation, Buu Nygren, has filed a formal objection with NASA and the U.S. Department of Transportation over what he calls an act of desecration. "It is crucial to emphasize that the moon holds a sacred position in many Indigenous cultures, including ours," Nygren wrote in a letter dated Dec. 21. "The act of depositing human remains and other materials, which could be perceived as discards in any other location, on the moon is tantamount to desecration of this sacred space." '
THE CARE/REPATRIATION OF HUMAN REMAINS HELD IN MUSEUMS.
As @ricketson points out, this is a problem that has been tirelessly debated for many years. And it is a multifaceted problem. Some examples (there are, of course, many more):
AMERICA’S BIGGEST MUSEUMS FAIL TO RETURN NATIVE AMERICAN HUMAN REMAINS (ProPublica, by Logan Jaffe, Mary Hudetz and Ash Ngu, 2023).
"As the United States pushed Native Americans from their lands to make way for westward expansion throughout the 1800s, museums and the federal government encouraged the looting of Indigenous remains, funerary objects and cultural items. Many of the institutions continue to hold these today — and in some cases resist their return despite the 1990 passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act."
Despite the warning, a lot of strangers clicked through, and then sent me angry messages about how I was a bad person for asking about such a taboo subject.
I touch on a lot of difficult topics in my polls. I ask questions because they're things I'm wondering about. It's a way for me to interrogate my own ideas. I try to CW everything that could cause harm in all my posts.
I'm the Assistant Registrar of burials for Ontario, Canada. I was composing a response to the poll when I saw you'd taken it down.
Thank you for doing so, but also thank you for acknowledging that this a complicated issue with many different perspectives and, often, a distinct element of colonialism.
I know my knowledge is different from most people, and I'm here to encourage everyone to learn, not to chastise. Please consider my comments in this light.
A bipartisan group of 13 U.S. Senators asked universities and museums with large collections of Native American human remains why they’ve failed to repatriate them to tribes—more than 30 years after a federal law was passed that compelled them to do so.