5,000-year-old tools made of human skulls unearthed, including masks and cups

These ancient tribes were bad to the bone.

Drinking from skulls might not be limited to lurid serial killer movies. Archaeologists have exhumed skull cups and skeleton masks among a repository of 5,000-year-old bones in China, per a macabre study published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Originating from Liangzhu culture, the ghoulish skeletal artifacts date back to 3000 and 2500 B.C., during China’s Neolithic period, Livescience reported.

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While Liangzhou cemeteries had been discovered before, this was the first time they found an ancient boneyard with sculpted specimens. Over 50 individual human bones that displayed evidence of being split, perforated, or otherwise bone-scaped like something out of the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” or other grisly goresploitation flicks.

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“The people of Liangzhu came to see some human bodies as inert raw material,” Elizabeth Berger, a bioarchaeologist at the University of California, Riverside, told Live Science.

The most common among the refurbished remains was the skull with four human craniums having been been sliced or split to create these noggin goblets while others had been severed vertically create a “Day Of The Dead”-evoking skeleton masks.

Among the most unique of the cranial creations was a skull with perforations on the back and a lower jaw that had been purposefully flattened.

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Despite their ghoulish appearance, experts believe that the noggin goblets and bone masks were processed after the people had decomposed as there were no signs that they’d perished violently.

The purpose of these post-mortem modifications is yet unclear.

However, study lead author Junmei Sawada, a biological anthropologist at Niigata University of Health and Welfare in Japan, noted that the fact that “many of the worked human bones were unfinished and discarded in canals suggests a lack of reverence toward the dead.”

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Berger noted that the tampered “human bones were essentially trash,” which the researchers attributed to shifting perceptions of the dead amid the rapidly urbanizing Liangzhu culture.

“We suspect that the emergence of urban society — and the resulting encounters with social ‘others’ beyond traditional communities — may hold the key to understanding this phenomenon,” Sawada said.

In other words, when neighbors are not kin, people are more likely to experiment on their skeletons sans remorse.

The real mystery is why, according to radio carbon dating, these post-mortem modification rituals only lasted for around 200 years.

“What caused that to happen and why did it only last for a few centuries?” inquired Berger.

The researchers hope that they can shed light on this question by conducting further studies that reveal the source of said bones.

Of course, this is far from the first time that people have repurposed people’s remains.

In 2023, archaeologists identified a hair comb made from part of a human skull among thousands of ancient artifacts recovered during archeological excavations around Cambridge, England.