River Thames Has Been a Burial Site for 6K Years

Researchers taking the most comprehensive look yet at ancient bones dredged from the River Thames in London have dated some of the remains back 6,000 years, reports Gizmodo. However, Live Science reports that most of them date from the Bronze Age (2300 to 800 BC) and the Iron Age (800 BC to AD 43), and one theory is that ritualized water burials were in vogue in this span. "We can now say with confidence that these don't appear to just be bones that have steadily accumulated in the river through time," says Nichola Arthur, a curator at the Natural History Museum in London, and lead author of the study in Antiquity. "There really was something significant going on in the Bronze and Iron Ages."

The findings appear to dispel previous theories that the bodies were deposited there by tides or by the erosion of riverbank burial plots. Instead, the researchers think they were placed there deliberately. The New York Times notes that the research syncs with what it terms archaeology's "missing dead" problem—a dearth of physical evidence about ancient funeral practices. If water burials were common, that could help explain it. For the study, researchers conducted radiocarbon dating on dozens of human skulls from the river, including nearly 30 that were never dated before. Further analysis of the remains is underway, which might shed further light on how they ended up in the river. (More River Thames stories.)