Several small, slender pendants uncovered from Stone Age graves on an island in a Russian lake more than 80 years ago have been reinvented.
The raw material of some of the specimen turned out to be human bone, according to the archaeologists.
Mannermaa was part of a team that uncovered the remains of a child who was buried in a grave covered in feathers and fur.
The Stone Age people who lived thousands of years ago saw their lives as equally important with the animals around them.
The largest cemetery in northern Europe from the last part of the Stone Age was located on the island of Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov.
Archaeologists first excavated the graveyard in the 1930's, but only with this latest analysis did researchers identify the origins of bone fragments fashioned into pendants found in six graves.
Researchers studying burials on the island had overlooked the bone pendants because they were so modest.
Archeologists were drawn to teeth that were easier to identify based on structural features because there was not much more than one or two grooves carved at the narrow end of the bone pendants.
Twelve of the 37 pendants sent for re-analysis were made from human bone, with two of them thought to be human.
The researchers used mass spectrometry to show that a third of the ornaments were made from the bones of animals.
The human bone pendants are part of a long history of ornaments made from bone.
The earliest evidence of human bone to fashion ornaments is a collection of teeth that were found in France around 35,000 years ago. The Czech Republic is one of the places where human tooth pendants from the past have been found.
The bone pendants from Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov were poorly preserved, fragmented, and worn away at the edges, so it's possible they were made from fresh bone.
In Mexico, remnants of musical rasps made from human bones have been found with marks indicating they were taken from dead people. There was no evidence of ritual cannibalism on the bone pendants.
The human bone pendants were finished and indistinguishable from those made of animal bones until this latest analysis showed their true origin.
Mannermaa suggests that the fact that human bone was treated as a raw material just like any other might indicate that animals and humans were very much intertwined.
The people who carved the pendants might have seen little difference between humans and animals if the type of bone used to make them was unimportant.
The ability of humans to transform into animals in their minds, as well as the belief that animals were capable of taking human form, may have been symbolized by the use of animal and human bones in the same ornament or clothing.
Blurring forms and boundaries is a part of the worldview of indigenous people.
The research was published in an archaeological journal.
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