Impress your guests with these "£3,000 B.C." human remains in your 'den'

"Wooo, look what I've got,
a scary skeleton!"

What People Collect: Summers Place Auctions, Billingshurst, West Sussex  are "the world's leading auctioneers of Sculpture and Design for the House and Garden" but in a few days they have an auction coming up 20th May - Garden, Design and Natural History Live Auction. Besides the garden furniture and over-priced 'modern art' and in between the big game trophies and impaled butterflies, they have a whole load of dubious stuff, including 'tribal art' (with the emphasis on that made from human heads). Not a single one of any of these objects has any kind of collecting history cited, one of them is Lot Number 201, multi-use internal decor, a certain ice-breaker at the cocktail party or little Nigel's birthday party: A mummified Human head Estimated Price: £1,000 - £2,000 ("reputedly Egyptian, Ptolemaic the case 48cm.; 19ins high square"). You could put it alongside the broken-off 'Egyptian mummified hand' on its blue velvet cushion - oooooo! (Lot 200: "Estimated Price: £2,000 - £3,000 B.C. (sic) in later glass dome, the dome 23cm.; 9ins high by 33cm.; 13ins. wide, the specimen, 18cm.; 7ins long").

If that does not float your boat, then what about a "felon's skull"? (of a named and identifiable person executed in Gloucester)

"Tribal"  skulls Lot 172, lot 176 (Dayak),  lot 174 , 175 (Asmat, New Guinea)

There should be a law against this. At the very least, how do we know that these people died a long time ago, and these are not modern murder victims? Does that mouldy
mummy head have a C14 result?