The Specifics

• On Facebook there are now at least several dozen human remains groups with a growing membership of more than 300,000 active users.

• By hosting private and secret groups online, dealers in human remains provide an environment that offers anonymity and peer-to-peer payment systems.

• Demand from medical schools, including in South Asian countries where many remains originate, drives a large part of the global trade.

• Collectors also purchase mummies and other items of Indigenous cultural heritage such as bones, jarred body parts, and artifacts made with bones or teeth.

• The human remains trade perpetuates a fundamental disrespect for the dead and resurrects dark Colonial-era bone-collecting practices.

• Rising demand has sparked growing instances of grave-robbers looting cemetaries and burial sites in developing countries in order to sell plundered body parts online.

• In 2018 and 2019, thieves robbed medieval ossuaries in France and the U.K. stealing more than a dozen 700year-old skulls. Some were later posted for sale on social media.

• The human remains trade is growing online at the same time that many cultural institutions around the world are recognizing that they ought to repatriate stolen human remains.