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?

  • Shard@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    They only really say their skulls are legally obtained. i.e. it wasn’t stolen and no one was murdered for it.

    We are committed to ethical sourcing. We follow all relevant laws and regulations to ensure that our specimens are obtained legally and responsibly.

    Likely many of these are discarded donations to science, legally purchased from the organization doing the “discarding”. It absolutely does not follow that it was ethically sourced.

    Unless you have traceability of each and every skull and a proof of informed consent (from the person whose skull it was, saying that they donate it for sale)for each skull there is no way to properly claim it was done ethically.