Habitat’s new product range ‘made out of human bones’

Retail News: Habitat is to launch a new ‘human bones’ range, available online to customers across Europe, after the British Museum sold the high street giant thousands of ancient skeletons in a bid to cover a funding shortfall.

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Using pre-historic human skulls, legs and ribcages, household items such as bowls, coat hooks and even tables will go on sale this week, tapping into what Habitat CEO Andy McVant describes as “an emerging market of people willing to pay for a sense of history – but who hate antiques.”

The skeletons range from Lower to Upper Paleolithic periods, including Cro-Magnon and even some late examples of the Neanderthal lineage found in Gibraltar – though the British Museum admits that it isn’t really sure “which is which anymore”.

According to archive director William Deville, funding cuts and staff reductions have meant that when the original labels fell off “no one was there to stick them back on again.”

“In the end we just piled them all into a warehouse with a forklift and stuck them on ebay as a job lot. When Habitat won the bid were both surprised and, may I say, delighted.”