05-17-2022, 10:17 PM
https://www.takimag.com/article/the-week-that-perished-190/
The Week’s Most Ellipsing, Eclipsing, and Apocalypsing Headlines
SKULLED LABORERS
There are many indicators that you may be living in a crappy country. Frequent coups and juntas, plagues of diseases born of poor hygiene, streets running with human excrement, towns controlled by warlords, famines killing every other child.
But nothing says “crappy country” quite like police discovering the skulls of 150 tortured and executed people and realizing that the remains might be from 1,000 years ago, or yesterday.
Ten years ago, Mexican police uncovered just such a cache of craniums in Chiapas. Between drug crimes, kidnappings, and insurrections by leprous natives straight out of a 1980s Italian jungle flick, Chiapas is the kind of place where the locals think Mad Max is a utopian fantasy.
When cops found the skulls in 2012, the condition of the remains—teeth bashed in and holes in the head—led them to suspect local drug lords. But just last week, forensic scientists at Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology dated the skulls to between 900 and 1200 AD.
Yes, it took ten years to run the tests, because the scientists were working a second job doing drywall for San Diego homeowners.
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