Aborigines who had camped on the sites. Alternatively, with respect to the presence at various sites of burnt and fragmented bone and teeth that may have been human in origin, Moran reports that the principal Aboriginal funerary practice in the area at the time was to inter the dead covered with bark and branches in hollows and forks of trees. Later, bones would be retrieved from the tree, divided between several bark-wrapped packets and deposited at various places considered to be significant in the life of the deceased, including in and near pools of water. Moran noted that at the Royal Commission, evidence was given that some of the bone fragments were retrieved from ashes around the base of a large tree which had been burned and also that Aborigines from the Mission, acting under Rev. Gribble's instructions, had retrieved other bone fragments and charcoal from the bottom of pools. Moran referred to the evidence given by a J.C. de Lancourt who saw large hunting fires when he travelled through the district in September 1926 and to the testimony of a Capt. Hepburn Tindale who also testified that he had seen large fires in the area that had been set by Aborigines. Natural and deliberately lit bushfires would inevitably result in some trees with human remains in them catching fire with the bones being burned, fragmented and scattered. Moran wrote that in 1934 anthropologist Phyllis Kaberry conducted research in the area and noted tree burials and the later dispersal of bones in the area as late as the mid-1930s. Another practice of the area related to 'the-close-up-dead', very elderly and frail people considered so close to the end of their lives that they were simply taken into the bush by a relative and left to die. Moran argues that these practices, over the thousands of years of Aboriginal occupation of the area, inevitably meant that fragmented human remains were widely scattered over the Kimberleys. He notes that the age of the bone fragments and teeth that were located was never determined and that they could have been decades or centuries old. In 1927, Commissioner Wood had specifically investigated claims that the remains were the result of tree burials affected by bushfires. Wood found that there was no evidence of bushfires at the sites in question; some bone fragments were found in a pool, others in heaps in a creek and,