It’s a mystery

In Schleiden, Germany, on May 11, high school students laid to rest a classmate who had been with them for generations: Anh Bian, the human female skeleton that had dwelt in the school’s biology classroom since the 1950s, and whom they had given the Vietnamese name for “mysterious peace.” Students, teachers and town officials buried the anonymous woman in the town’s Protestant cemetery in a coffin marked with symbols of all the world’s major religions, but before doing so, they collected DNA so that they might later learn her identity.