The bones of a woman who lived 2,000 years ago, and found in a bay off the Isle of Wight, are to be gifted to Island’s museum.
Brothers Hubert and Graham Smyth discovered the skeletal remains as they set a string of swinging boat moorings at Fishbourne Beach at low tide.
Graham Smyth, who is a radiographer, gently lifted out one of the bones and was confident it was a human radius, so he left the rest of the skeleton in situ and called the police.
Caroline Sumeray, a barrister with No5 Chambers and HM Senior Coroner for the Isle of Wight, takes up the story.
“A decision was made to recover as many of the bones as possible from the surface of the mud before the tide came in.
“My first job was to establish if this was a recently deceased person or something a little older – possibly from a long washed away graveyard attached to the nearby Quarr Abbey. If the body was recently deceased, I needed to rule out an unnatural death.”
Home Office pathologist Dr Basil Purdue carried out a post mortem, and reported that the bones were ancient, the remains of an adult human female who died almost certainly beyond living memory. The cause of death could not be established but there was no evidence of injury or dismemberment.
