A Guardian investigation found UK museums and university collections hold more than 263,000 human remains from overseas, prompting MPs and experts to call for urgent review of curation, provenance, and repatriation policies. Relatives of Zimbabwe resistance fighters have specifically asked Cambridge and the Natural History Museum to locate looted skulls. > The findings put pressure on university museums, anthropology departments, and archives to accelerate provenance research, update access policies, and negotiate returns. Administrators should expect parliamentary inquiries, new funding requests for cataloguing work, and community engagement obligations tied to collections that date to the colonial era.