After a Century and a Half in Sweden, Finnish Skulls Return Home

About 150 years ago, Swedish researchers dug up dozens of human skulls and remains from graveyards across Finland and took them to Sweden to study their racial characteristics as part of an effort that they said was to understand how the Nordic region had been populated.

On Sunday, 42 of those skulls were returned and reinterred in Palkane, a small community in Finland about 80 miles northwest of Helsinki, the capital, where residents hailed their homecoming as the righting of a historical wrong.

“They are our own people, even if they lived hundreds of years ago,” Pauliina Pikka, a local official, said in an interview before the ceremony. “They deserve, now, to come back here. They deserve to get rest.”

The skulls were taken in the summer of 1873 by three researchers working for the Karolinska Institute, a medical university in Sweden, who dug up graves in four communities in Finland. They returned to Sweden with human remains from the exhumations and measured and studied them. For decades until 2015, human remains taken by researchers were housed in various Swedish institutions before being returned to Karolinska.

Since then, the university has been researching the origins of some of the remains and repatriating them.