MOSCOW, Oct. 16 The American Museum of Natural History in New York will remove it from public display due to a new policy human skeletons, remains and objects made from human bones, The New York Times reported, citing an internal document.
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“The new regulations include the relocation of all human bones on public display and the modernization of the storage facilities where the remains are currently stored,” the publication writes.
As the newspaper notes, the museum has approximately 12 thousand skeletons or objects made from human bones. Among them, 2.2 thousand are representatives of indigenous peoples of America, about 400 remains of poor people who died in New York in the 40s of the last century. In addition, there are bones recovered from a slave cemetery that was liquidated at the beginning of the 20th century to expand Manhattan.
Museum head Sean Decatur said in a letter to employees that more thorough identification work is needed skeletons and treat them more carefully.
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“These are ancestors, and in some cases victims of cruel tragedies or representatives of groups that have been exploited or abused by us,” the publication quotes him as saying.
According to Decatur, many 19th- and 20th-century researchers used collections of human remains to promote “deeply flawed scientific trends based on white supremacy.” Thus, scientists tried to identify physical differences in the bones that would confirm assumptions about the existence of a racial hierarchy.