#jonsbones

[kitkatisvibing]

what do you MEAN the wall of spines guy is back

[exdivine]

“brooklyn bone museum” and it’s just a sick man’s collection of marginalized people’s remains with no clear answer on how they were obtained (stolen)

[mother-of-stones]

when you're mean to me this is who you're being mean to

[carrioncoyote]

Caitlin Doughty's new video is a prime example of why I don't trust people who "sells human specimens/uses them in junk art because wow I am so dark and artistic and quirky."

[bluenoo42]

Today I found out something wild.

So there’s this band I like who make kind of stone/bronze/Iron Age themed music (the band is called Heilung for anyone interested), they are known for using human bones as instruments in their music.

Of course this naturally sparked the question of where/how one legally procures human bones. Some questionable incognito browsing later I discovered you can just BUY THEM ONLINE (plain: buy them online)! Some of them are under like £100! The website even has a page where you can sell them bones.

Here is an excerpt from the ‘sell your bones’ page from a website: “Sell Us Your Bones. Well, not yours specifically. Whether you’re an avid bone collector or you’ve just stumbled upon a family heirloom and are looking to give it a new home, please reach out to us. JonsBones is committed to responsibly sourcing and protecting human osteology.”

So that then prompted the question, whose bones are these? According to my research, many of them are decades or centuries old sometimes from grave robberies or war casualties (someone was saying their skeleton was a woman from the Vietnam War). Some of them are modern and are (speculated to be) people in developing countries who couldn’t afford a funeral, Political prisoners from China, ‘retired’ anatomical specimens etc.

Basically, this is wild and completely legal and reasonably popular in the UK (and many other countries) and I had no idea until today.

In case you’re wondering my views on this, I think that if a person gave permission for their bones to be used like this while they were alive, then it’s fine. If not, then it’s super unethical.

Did any of you guys know about this?

[thistlekiss]

I'm sure there was another one after the BSW, and i think JonsBones and the Bone Museum made their way here in the last couple of years

i feel like the knowledge that there are some medical databases with free-to-use 3D scans of various human organs available for 3D printing would have drastically reduced tumblrs amount of bone stealing scandals. plus you can make ones that glow in the dark.

look at my glow in the dark humerus boy

[fdfsfewqw]

#FOHpetittion https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/jeremy-pauley-oddities-industry-jonsbones-cumberland-county-pennsylvania-harvard-medical-school-anatomical-gift-program-department-of-justice-buying-selling-body-parts-documentary-february-12-2024

[lolitslloyd]

Update on the tiktok bone guy

[kyidyl]

Me reading the notes on the JonsBones post trying not to reblog everyone who is like "JonsBones is so good and pure uwu" and correct them:

That idiot is not an anatomist, professionally trained, involved in education, or an osteologist. He's a dude who profits off of human suffering without even *acknowledging* the ethical concerns involved in the trade of human remains. He's a fucking *artist*, not a scientist, and he is a charlatan.

[themintycupcake]

Apparently the guy who works in Jonsbones who actually handles the bones has a BA in anthropology. They also happen to be the only member of the team who stays anonymous. I bet it's because they'd be fucking exiled from their discipline if any of their colleagues found out they were doing this shit. The company doesn't have anyone who's actually qualified to be handling bones because anyone qualified wouldn't do that shit.

[byjove]

I wish that Tumblr was the only site with a bone stealing major controversy but alas, it is not. Human remains continue to be sold, traded and displayed on many social media sites. Unethically sourced human remains continue to be a huge problem not just in oddity collecting markets but in the context of medicine, anthropology and archeology.

There was a huge controversy on TikTok when JonsBones, a human remains retailer, was selling the remains of a Sami man on his website. Indigenous people are still pleading with museums and institutions all over the world to repatriate human remains in their collection, sometimes hundreds of years after they were desecrated and stolen by colonial forces, sometimes only decades after the individual died.

The "ethically sourced" child spine purse. That's effin' cursed

YEAH. there is no ethical way to make a child’s spine into a purse. that’s not even the one I’m thinking about though, there was a girl on this site with a the skull of a small child of Southeast Asian ancestry and NO provenance and the skull didn’t show signs of patina indicating it was a more recent death. this was during/right after the bone stealing witch era so someone having human remains in their procession wasn’t completely shocking but the fact that it was the non-historical remains of a child had everyone telling OP exactly how fucked up they were.

[gay-robotss]

It’s been said before that tiktok is literally going through the exact same life cycle as tumblr did, but I didn’t realize just how identical the two are until I hopped on the clock app and watched boneghazi 2.0 unfolding before my eyes

[cassowariess]

I wish people would stop calling that jonsbones TikTok asshole “white.” He’s mixed race. I saw instantly that he was mixed race. Why is this relevant? Because I’m tired of people calling someone who is abhorrent “white” when they’re clearly not just to make themselves feel better. Guess what, us mixed race people and POC are capable of being garbage human beings now and again.

You’re also then arguing that being part of a marginalized community (whether that be queer, mixed, POC etc) is somehow a shield against you being capable of any wrongdoing, which is exactly what he was trying to do when he held up his Thai passport.

This guy doesn’t need to be white to be a piece of shit complicit in the exploitation of indigenous peoples.

[abandoned-accnt]

There’s a whole ass bone stealing witch 2.0 going on on tiktok rn…

I did not sign up for this timeline wtf

[rubensmuse]

if we're gonna turn the Jonsbones Bone-Selling Scandal into solely a witchhunt of a specific dude rather than actually digging into the reasons it is unethical for anyone to sell antique medical bones for a profit* and why that's a practice that shouldn't be engaged in, i literally don't wanna hear about it

*those reasons being, imo, that 1) a person consenting to donating their body to science doesn't necessarily consent to their skull eventually being a useless heirloom, and 2) there is a high likelihood a lot of the very old remains "donated" to those defunct medical companies he talks about buying from were not done so with the consent of their former owner or their family

[luckys-last-brain-cell]

So I get that the whole JonsBones thing maybe doesn’t seem like a massive deal, but suffice to say if someone is selling bones and they can’t or won’t tell you where they’re getting them from and how, or they say “oh they were procured for medical studies in the 1800s” that is a really bad sign. If they have so many bones that their cat is throwing them off shelves or playing with them, and are posting videos of geckos climbing in eye sockets, they’re not a responsible and ethical seller.