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by mschuster91 928 days ago
> Why on earth do they need the permission of the descendents of someone who lived 500+ years ago?

Because there has been a rich history of Western (colonial) powers looting graves or remembrances of the dead (e.g. shrunken heads) in the past, and there are numerous legal issues being fought to this day about repatriation of human remains back to their home countries. There is no need to pile more case on the already large pile.
2 comments
KaiserPro 928 days ago
> there has been a rich history of Western (colonial) powers looting graves or remembrances of the dead

There is a rich history of everyone looting graves. This isn't a colonial vs other thing here. Sacking of places is common and still happens (see syria, afganistan & the sudans. ) We just happen to know about the stuff the western people did because they documented it and put it on display. (unlike the romans, persians, greeks, byzantines, ottermans, et al. didn't loose it to the next empire, yet.)

There used to be a bunch of TV shows where they'd routinely dig up bones and put them on shelves in storage.

Applying to exhume a body isn't that difficult in the UK either: https://www.gov.uk/apply-for-an-exhumation-licence

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eigenket 928 days ago
That license is not relevant here, thats for relatively recent bodies where you want to dig them up to move them to a different grave or cremate them or something.

The most relevant thing here is that the remains are being taken outside the UK (the study is being done by US and Australian universities) so you need some permission to export them.

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leoedin 928 days ago
These bodies are British.
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happymellon 928 days ago
Being studied by Americans and Australians.

If it is bad for the British to take human remains from other countries, then we should apply the same logic to exporting British human remains.

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qwytw 928 days ago
> Being studied by Americans and Australians.

And therefore are also very likely to be descendants of those people to some (possibly non insignificant extent) extent.

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eigenket 928 days ago
> And therefore are also very likely to be descendants of those people to some (possibly non insignificant extent) extent.

We (the UK) don't care. If you try to export human remains from the UK to another country (the study is being done by US and Australian universities), without the correct permissions you're going to have a bad time.

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