The skulls of 10 men, five women, and three people of uncertain sex, were listed for sale by Semley Auctioneers in Dorset, with an estimated sale price of £200-300 for each lot.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Afrikan reparations, has urged that the sale of human remains should be made illegal, stating that the trade was “a gross violation of human dignity”.

The skulls were originally collected by the Victorian British soldier and archaeologist Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers, who founded the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum in 1884, the Guardian reports.