In 2001, a team of archaeologists found something that didn't quite seem to make sense.

They'd been working for 13 years, studying the remains of two ancient roundhouses near

the village of Klaahalin in the outer Hebrides, a chain of islands off the northwestern

tip of Scotland, and it had been a lot of what you might expect for a settlement dating

back to 1300 BCE.

Except for what they found beneath those two houses, it was a pair of bodies, one man,

one woman, who'd been there for thousands of years.

But skeletons showed evidence that they'd once been preserved in a peat bog.

Long ago, it seems, the people of this settlement placed their dead in the bog for about

a year, and then pulled them back out.

It was enough to preserve the skin and hair, but also leave the bones intact, which the

acidic water usually dissolved.

It took these researchers another eight years to notice something else incredible about

these bodies.

They weren't the remains of two people.

Up and up between the two graves, there were body parts from six individual humans.

Body parts that had been preserved for a reason, and when the pieces fell into place, no pun intended,

it painted a grim picture.

The people of this ancient settlement had stitched body parts together to form new humans,

humans which were preserved in the bog, and then put on display in their homes.

And while we have no idea how long the bodies spent among the living before they were finally

buried beneath the houses, the bigger question is why?

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