- Deflesh them with bone knives.
- Let the wolves and ravens deflesh them.
- Gather them into skin bags and bury them under the hearth.
- Feed them beer.
- Dig them up every fall and dance with them.
- Dig ditches around them so the uninitiated cannot get too close.
- Build mounds over them so the otherworld can ascend and be closer to us.
- Organize them by size and type.
- Rearrange them into new, mash-up ancestors.
- Break them so they will not follow us in our dreams.
- Suck out the marrow so their spirits will protect us in our dreams.
- Burn them and place them in jars of clay decorated with rows of pits, as from missing teeth.
- Erect stones around them in a circle so they will remember us who stand in the light.
Dave Bonta (bio) crowd-sources his problems by following his gut, which he shares with 100 trillion of his closest microbial friends — a close-knit, symbiotic community comprising several thousand species of bacteria, fungi, and protozoa. In a similarly collaborative fashion, all of Dave’s writing is available for reuse and creative remix under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. For attribution in printed material, his name (Dave Bonta) will suffice, but for web use, please link back to the original. Contact him for permission to waive the “share alike” provision (e.g. for use in a conventionally copyrighted work).
I can’t believe I used bullet points rather than numbers, passing up a golden opportunity for a prehistoric listicle! (“Twelve great things to do with human bones in the Neolithic.”)