Iron Age Woman in Scotland Had Brain Removed Before Burial

A woman buried roughly 2,000 years ago under a stone cairn in northern Scotland had her brain deliberately removed and four of her long bones whittled to points, before the modified bones were placed back in the grave in their correct anatomical position, according to a study published this month in the journal Antiquity. The same cairn also held the remains of a teenage boy, and DNA evidence now suggests the two were maternal second cousins with family ties that reached communities spread across Scotland’s far north coast.

The researchers describe the treatment of the adult woman’s body as a “previously unknown” Iron Age funerary tradition in Britain, and a possible glimpse of a wider pattern in which the dead were exhumed, modified, and curated by their living communities rather than left untouched in the ground. Lead author Laura Castells Navarro, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of York, told CNN that whoever handled the remains had “an insane knowledge of anatomy.”

Cut Marks and a Break at the Base of the Skull

The woman was most likely over 30 when she died. When Castells Navarro and her colleagues examined the inside of her cranium, they found straight, parallel incisions clustered where the ligaments that anchor the brain to the skull would have sat. The marks, the team wrote, were “probably caused by deliberate scratching or cutting with a sharp tool.”

The base of the cranium was also broken in an “unusual” way that the researchers describe as “an intentional targeted impact.” Together, the fracture and the cut marks are, in their words, “suggestive of deliberate removal of the brain soon after the death of this individual.” Castells Navarro noted that the base of the skull is “the easiest way to access” the brain while preserving the cranium, and said the break looked “very, very fresh” at the time of the woman’s interment.

The marks cluster in a region that modern anatomists call the cranial fossa, where connective tissue holds the brain against the inner surface of the skull. Cutting there, the researchers argue, is consistent with someone trying to free the brain rather than break into the skull by accident.

Long Bones Snapped, Whittled, and Polished

The modifications were not limited to the head. At least four of the woman’s long bones were altered after her death: a femur from her thigh, both humeri from her upper arms, and one ulna from her forearm. The ulna and humeri had been snapped in half and then whittled down to “a very sharp edge” tapered to an elongated point, Castells Navarro said. The femur was finished differently, with a “flat and smooth” surface.

For years after the dig, the simplest explanation was that rodents had gnawed the bones. A 2003 report on the same cairn concluded exactly that, and the marks at the base of the skull were likewise read as natural damage. The new study pushes back on both readings. Rodent gnawing, Castells Navarro said, is “never smooth”; what the team observed was “an actual polishing of the remains.” The intent behind the reshaping is not settled. The researchers list two possibilities in their paper: respect for a valued member of the community, or what they call “purposefully abusive treatment of the body of an outsider or low status individual.” What they reject is the middle ground of accident or scavenging. The clean cuts and the fresh break, they argue, point to people who knew exactly what they were doing.

Reassembled With “an Insane Knowledge of Anatomy”

After the modifications, the four altered bones were placed back in the grave in their original anatomical positions, and the researchers treat that detail as the heart of the find. “Clearly there has been some kind of thought and respect and care on putting them together,” Castells Navarro said, along with “an insane knowledge of anatomy.” The study reads the reassembly as “a sign of reverence rather than denigration.”

Iron Age funerary practices are absolutely phenomenal and you really need to be very open-minded because they could come up with all sorts of things.

Laura Castells Navarro, lead study author and archaeologist at the University of York, in a statement to CNN.

The cairn itself sits at Loch Borralie in Sutherland, near the north-west extremity of the Scottish mainland. Two skeletons were recovered during the dig: the adult woman (Individual 1 in the published analysis) and a juvenile male aged about 15 at death.

The boy’s skeleton shows no “complex patterns of trauma,” the researchers wrote, and no signs of the same postmortem treatment. He was laid to rest without the same reshaping that singled out the woman beside him.

A Family Line That Stretched Across the North Coast

The two were not strangers buried together. Ancient DNA, radiocarbon dating, and isotope analysis of their molar teeth suggest the pair were close kin. The most likely relationship, the team writes, is maternal second cousins, sharing great-grandparents. Both appear to have died between 50 BC and 70 AD, though the study leaves open the possibility that they were not interred at the same moment. Where they grew up is also a surprise. Isotope analysis of the teeth indicates both individuals spent their early years around 80 kilometres south-east of Loch Borralie, not at the cairn itself. Their DNA, meanwhile, links them to other Iron Age burials on Orkney, around 175 kilometres to the north-east, and at Applecross, around 225 kilometres to the south-west.

For Castells Navarro, the spread of relatives is the larger point. “Our research shows that prehistoric maritime communities periodically moved around the north coast and Northern Isles of Scotland, possibly in small groups,” she said. “This movement allowed for the spread and maintenance of cultural practices and traditions.” The same mobile networks that connected families across hundreds of kilometres of coastline may also explain how a burial practice this unusual ended up at a single cairn on the north-west coast.

Why Some Researchers Are Not Yet Convinced

The brain-removal reading is not unanimous. Richard Madgwick, an archaeologist at Cardiff University who was not involved in the new study, told New Scientist that he agrees the skull was manipulated in some way, but is “not convinced” the marks prove the brain itself was removed.

The Antiquity paper itself notes that the treatment “cannot be paralleled in detail” elsewhere in Britain and lists cannibalism as a possible alternative reading. The authors flag the option without endorsing it, and note that there is no corroborating evidence such as cut marks consistent with butchery.

Other outside archaeologists lean the other way. Adelle Bricking, an archaeologist at Museum Wales, told New Scientist that the broader pattern of moving and modifying the dead is well established in the region. “They are exhuming them, selecting certain remains, working them, handling them and then finally placing them in a special place as their appropriate next step in their afterlife,” she said. What the two outside archaeologists do agree on is that the dead in this part of Iron Age Scotland were being worked on after burial, in a tradition that has only started to come into focus.

A Wider Tradition of Moving the Dead in Iron Age Britain

Castells Navarro’s paper sits inside a broader pattern in which Iron Age communities in north-west Scotland treated human remains as objects that could travel. “Most of the remains are found in very unlikely places, like in a house, at the door of the house, in pits, natural caves and stone cairns,” she told CNN. Single cemeteries, in the modern sense, are rare.

Modified body parts have turned up in other parts of the region. There was a tradition, the lead author said, of taking fragments of skulls and drilling a few holes in them that may have been used to hang them, and cut marks to open a cranium have been found on at least one other skeleton at a separate site.

The cairn at Loch Borralie is “very unique” in the combination of practices it documents, she added, but “it does fit into a wider interaction between living and the dead” across the British Isles. The wider Iron Age in Britain runs from about 800 BC to AD 43. The Loch Borralie burial sits at the very end of that range, in the century or so before the Roman arrival in Scotland.

The paper, “Reconnecting the dead in Iron Age Britain: funerary processing and long-distance connectivity at Loch Borralie, Scotland,” is published in Antiquity and is available through the Cambridge Core record for the published study. Castells Navarro’s broader findings on the burial’s family network are summarised in the Antiquity journal’s own news release on the paper, which also gives the full author list and DOI.

A separate cumbernauld-media review of how ancient DNA reorganised burial history in Scottish Stone Age tombs shows what the older end of that DNA revolution has already done in the region; the Loch Borralie study extends the same toolkit into the Iron Age and applies it to the question of mobility along the north coast.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where was the Iron Age woman with the removed brain found?

The remains were excavated in 2000 from a low stone cairn at Loch Borralie in Sutherland, near the north-west extremity of the Scottish mainland, and are dated to between 50 BC and 70 AD.

Who led the research into the Loch Borralie burial?

The lead author is Laura Castells Navarro, a postdoctoral research associate and archaeologist at the University of York. Her co-authors include researchers from UK and US institutions, with the study published in the journal Antiquity in June 2026.

Could the brain removal be evidence of cannibalism?

The Antiquity paper lists cannibalism as one possible reading of the marks, alongside deliberate brain removal for ritual or display reasons. The authors note there is no corroborating evidence such as cut marks consistent with butchery, and that the four reshaped bones were then carefully placed back in anatomical position, which they read as reverence rather than denigration.

How old is the burial at Loch Borralie?

Radiocarbon dating places both individuals between 50 BC and 70 AD, making the burial roughly 2,000 years old. The site sits within the British Iron Age, which runs from about 800 BC to AD 43.