Human Remains Discovered Turn Out To Be Centuries Old

Centuries-old human remains have been uncovered by workers developing a community garden in England.

The discovery was made in the center of Thetford, a town in the county of Norfolk in eastern England, the Eastern Daily Press reported.

The bones were revealed during works being carried out by Thetford-based company Bush Adventures, which is planting the garden.

"We had a digger in to level the topsoil and as we were raking it, we were finding little bits of bone," Rory Townsend, operations manager for Bush Adventures, told the newspaper.

Initially, workers suspected that the bones were animal remains. But as they found more fragments, they came to realize that they were of human origin. The workers subsequently alerted Norfolk police.

"We were called to the site at 9 a.m. on Friday, February 23," a police spokesperson said in a statement provided to the media. "We attended and sought expert advice, which confirmed that the bones found are several hundred years old."

An archaeologist determined that the bones are between 600 and 1,000 years old, which would date them from the late Anglo-Saxon period to the medieval period, the spokesperson told Newsweek. The Anglo-Saxons were a cultural group living in England prior to the medieval period who traced their origins to Germanic peoples that settled in Britain after the period of Roman occupation ended.

"The site [where the bones were found] has been disturbed numerous times so it cannot be confirmed if they're from one individual or several people," the police spokesperson said.

The site where the bones were found used to part of the now demolished St. Giles' Church graveyard. The church, which dated back to Anglo-Saxon times, was de-consecrated during the Reformation in the 16th century and subsequently demolished.

The Reformation was a process by which the Church of England broke away from the authority of the Catholic Church. This process, initiated by Henry VIII (who ruled England from 1509 to 1547), eventually established the Protestant Church of England, with the English monarch becoming its supreme head.

After the 16th century, St. Giles' church was re-purposed, being converted into a barn and a wheelwright's shop. The church gradually demolished over the years, with its stones being re-used in nearby buildings. Now, no remains of the original structure are left standing.

Townsend said he and his colleagues would re-bury the human remains at the site alongside two walnut trees and a plaque.

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