Bones in the Attic

Well, it sounds like the title of a horror story… It could be much, much worse, but it is pretty creepy. After removing a massive mouse nest, about a dozen dead mice and two large hornets' nests from the bedroom walls, our contractor made a gruesome discovery.

As he was removing boards from the ceiling, in the back corner of the bedroom, a pile of bones began cascading down upon his head. There were rib bones, leg bones, knuckle bones, mostly seeming to have belonged to a goat or lamb. He was horrified (mostly because he didn't know what kind of bones they were). The bones were bleached white, gnawed clean, and there was an "enormous" pile of them (enough to almost fill a 5-gallon bucket).

There were, oddly, no skulls. The bones were all piled, very neatly, in the far corner of the attic, and into the eaves. The attic was otherwise very tidy, with no evidence of animal habitation anywhere. Amongst the bones were several fish jawbones.

How old are these bones? Who, or what, put them there? We are considering pack-rats, martin, weasel, squirrel and lastly, people. That would be the strangest explanation indeed.