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?
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.
Look, you buy a car and add pollution in the air. You buy a skull and contribute to people being killed and harvested for skulls. What’s the difference?
Harvested skulls have to go to the Blood God, Khorne.
“Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne!”
Nazis?
There is nothing you can do to my body that I will find disrespectful.
John Oliver had an episode where the main story answers your question.
Basically, if you donate your body “to science” there’s a chance it could end up with such a company. I wouldn’t call it ethical, but as of now it’s legal.
Well that’s fucked. If I donate my body to science, it certianly isnt so my skull can sit in some dudes living room
I’d be totally okay with that, as long as he attempted necromancy
There’s this woman who donated her body to science when she died ended up in the army being blown by IEDs.
You say that like it’s a bad thing?
I believe the science company sold her body to the military.
Well yeah, I figure when she signed her body up for science she was thinking about Medical Science and not Explosive Device Science…
Historical digs, people donating bodies to science (but aren’t chosen to bomb tests), John/Jane doe.
I don’t think taking them from historical digs would be ethical (archaeologists certainly don’t), and people who donate their bodies for science are donating them for science, not for anyone to buy off of a website. So I don’t think either of those work here.
The article guy linked states that body donations are regulated at the state level, unlike organ donation. That means some states don’t regulate or poorly regulate body donations, and the organizations that accept donations are free to lie to donors and sell bodies and body parts to other organizations, like the military or who-the-fuck-knows. Without regulation, you can get some weirdo employee that just takes a skull after they’re done blowing up the body or studying it at Red State University and sells it privately.
Or it could be some weirdo died and his taxidermied great grandma from the box in the garage didn’t make the cut for the estate sale, so someone took it to the pawn shop. Watch the show Oddities. Fucked up shit gets bought and sold all the time.
See, that’s exactly why I’m thinking there really isn’t an ethical way to do this overall except in circumstances like great grandma (although even then, I’d call selling human body parts on the open market is pretty ethically questionable in general).
Yeah I agree it’s weird and unethical. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean it’s illegal.
I think it should be regulated at the federal level and everything that happens with a body donation should be transparent and traceable. That still wouldn’t affect the stuff that’s already in circulation and beyond identification though.
I don’t know about the law. I am only talking about ethics because the company claims it’s ethical.
Sorry, but I fail to see the problem with him owning a skull
You don’t see anything ethically wrong with “owning” a piece of a human that could be someone’s ancestor or relative? People really are disgusting pieces of shit.
Assuming the dead person didn’t mind, no. If I were in a situation where a proven relative of the deceased human would like the skull back, I would give it to them, sure. But if it’s just for art/fantasy, I do not see any problems. I don’t care what happens with my bones after I die.
I didn’t say there was a problem with him owning a skull. Other than how he’s weird about it, I mean.
I was talking about this company. I don’t even know how he got it. For all I know, someone who died willed it to him.
I don’t see how he is being weird about it. OK I wouldn’t show it to a zoom meeting full of random people, sure, but nothing else screams weird to me.
Then again, I work in IT have been described as weird by some people so I suppose I’m not looking at it like usual people would
That’s probably because you don’t know my brother.
Maybe
I think it is very unlikely that you know him. And certainly not as well as I do since, you know, I grew up with him.
I agree. I don’t know him. I meant that I don’t find him as weird as you do probably because I don’t know him as well
“that sounds awesome, I’d totally buy one!” i thought before looking at the price tags. I think I’ll stick with plastic.
That’s another thing I don’t want to know: how much my brother paid.
How much are they? The skulls never loaded for me, even on a VPN.
$2200-$2400, for the ones that were both complete and actually had price tags.
Hell they can have mine if they want, if they put me out of my misery they can have it right now.
Aww shit… here we go again
What kind of a bone headed idea is that?
yeah, I don’t entirely understand resource hoarding after death, or accepting peer pressure from dead people. make me into cat food and coffee table decorations, or fertilizer, I don’t care
what I’d rather not is have my flesh pumped full of chemicals that make my resources unusable to the local biome for a few decades.
I choose cremation but before, my penis will be removed and donated for politicizing as a gift to the world famous penis museum. It may not be much to look at, but maybe they can sell it as a chotchky or a keychain trinket. Maybe a guy will hang my jewels from his first cubicle to keep snacks. I’m creative, why not end as weird art. Right?
I’ve been there. It’s an awesome museum.
Somehow after all the years, I’m still at the level of key chain trinket. I need to invent something or become famous so I can at least advance to the $9.99 shelve. Maybe one day I could be at the level of resin in shot glass paper weight…you know, like $19.99 level?
What the hell are you talking about about hahahahahha!? I’ve been to the world famous penis museum in Reykjavik
Same same. Just thinking of how to get into the exhibits rather than just the gift shop when I donate my Johnson.
They are “Skulls Unlimited”.
I’m a little afraid that they have no limits to the skulls that they provide.
“What do you do? Oh, nice, sales! That’s cool. What do you sell?”
I’m not looking to buy either, that’s so weird… but I do have some to sell. They don’t ask questions do they? I just need to get these off my hands, literally, I’ve been carrying these bags around for awhile. Human skulls are heavy.
I consider myself to be my consciousness. When I die, I am gone. I have no emotional attachment to the body my consciousness existed in. I am an organ donor. I’d prefer my body go to help people, but if parts of it don’t - I have no possible way to care.
I am probably not the only person who feels roughly like this. Seems plausible to me that you could ethically source human skulls. 🤷♂️
I don’t see the problem. Loads of people have skulls of other animals on display. Why should a human be treated any different.
For one thing, there is very little evidence that most other animals have any sort of reverence for the dead.
I mean… Vultures and other carrion creatures revere the dead, in their own special ways.
/j
Probably not what you were thinking but there’s plenty of stories of dogs not leaving their owners after death like Greyfriars bobby.
Also elephants are known for mourning their dead.
I think if I donated my body to science and they were all done with it, and they could make more money for research by selling bits off to weirdos that would be fine by me. Maybe put a little QR code on it that people could scan and get a little biography of me. That would probably make archeology a lot easier.I could see how one voor find it enjoyable that their skull would be cherished by another human being.
A guy I knew had a skull from the Roman era, that had a hole in it from a ballista arrow. Not the best way to go, but how cool is it that your head can amaze people two thousand years from now
There’s no way that wasn’t a replica. How is that skull not in a museum or something?
It looked convincing enough, but we were quite young back then. The thing that always stuck with me that the hole in the skull was square shaped. It was only untill later that I learned that ballistae arrows did indeed have square arrowheads.
But it coud’ve been a replica, though I’m unsure where one would source one in a manner that wasn’t somehow more dubious than having a real one. (The guy was a historian of sorts). Then again, where I live the Roman history isn’t too far away.
People are saying that that website is selling skulls for 2000-3000$. A roman solider skull Would be a lot more expensive than that, I imagine. Given the age and the historical relevance. So that’s two things to be amazed by when looking at that thing, I think.
If I were him, I’d definitely not mind that fate.
