Skulls Buried in Florida Backyard Date to 1200 AD

Police in Florida investigating two skulls found in a backyard say that while they definitely have a mystery on their hands, they're not looking for a killer. That's because investigators have determined that the skulls belong to a man and a 10-year-old boy who died in Peru as far back as some 800 years ago, ABC reports. The skulls, one of which had a scrap of mummified flesh still clinging to it, were uncovered by a workman installing a pool, who notified police.

Shards of pottery and textiles were found with the bones, along with part of a newspaper from 1978. "The mystery is how they ended up there," a medical examiner says. "We don't have any way of finding out." She speculates that the skulls may have been brought back from South America by a tourist who later buried them, or brought to the US by the migrant workers who camped in the area for decades before it was sold to developers in the mid-1980s. More research is planned, but authorities plan to eventually return the skulls to Peru. (More archaeology stories.)