Soon after the British raised Henry VIII’s flagship, the Mary Rose, from the ocean bottom off the Isle of Wight in 1982, scientists found one whole group of human remains that had extra deposits on a small bone at the tip of their shoulders which had also become forked. The anomaly indicated that the men had been longbow archers, their bones deformed by habitually drawing back and holding the taut bowstring, and showed how heavily defended the king’s conveyance was. When human-rights campaigners in Argentina challenged revisionists who had denied that the Army had “disappeared” thousands of citizens between 1976 and 1983, forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow of Oklahoma confirmed, from the edges of bullet holes in bones, that the victims had been executed. “History,” says Dr. Marc Micozzi, director of the National Museum of Health and Science in Washington, “is being rewritten by forensic scientists.”
Even in burials short of mummification, bones, hair and nails can endure for decades. To the 100 or so forensic anthropologists in this country, who handled 2,000 police cases last year, bones are biographies that reveal not only such basics as sex, race, age and height but even such details as where the deceased grew up. Pelvic bones distinguish a male from a female with 95 percent accuracy, says Snow: women’s pelvic openings are low and broad, to permit childbirth, while men’s are high and narrow. Men’s skulls are also thicker than women’s and have a prominent brow ridge. Bones can also reveal whether a woman was a mother. A groove on a bone in front of the lower spine and hipbone widens and deepens when a baby passes through - which is how Snow determined that about 400 of Argentina’s desaparecidos had given birth shortly before being executed.
Races differ from the neck up. Narrow nasal passages and a short distance between eye sockets mark a Caucasian, distinct cheekbones identify a Mongoloid and nasal openings shaped like an upside-down heart typify a Negroid. Scientists can deduce age at death by which teeth have erupted and by the size of gaps between still-fusing bones of the skull, pelvis and limbs. Another clue, says Judy Suchey of CalState Fullerton, is that the front part of the hipbone has furrows at the age of 16 that become flat and then concave by 35.
Now forensic anthropologists are putting flesh on the bones. Kenneth A. R. Kennedy of Cornell University has documented more than 140 correlations between bone marks and activity, including a forward-thrusting jaw in woodwind players and an extra bone in the joints of violinists’ left hands. An enlarged forearm bone indicates that massive muscles were attached, in the service of, say, pitching a baseball. Finger bones retain the marks of ligaments exercised by habitual grasp of a pen and have identified Egyptian mummies as court scribes. Smithsonian anthropologist Douglas Owsley concluded that the skeleton of a woman from Colonial Virginia was that of a seamstress: she had notches in her teeth from holding pins or needles.
Anthropologists find that you are what you eat: bones of carnivores contain more copper and zinc, vegetarians more magnesium and manganese. Different soils typically contain different isotopes of strontium, which find their way into the food chain and ultimately into teeth. Whatever was deposited over the first 12 to 15 years of a person’s life is covered over by dental enamel and preserved. By matching strontium in teeth to strontium in soils, anthropologists can tell the source of the food the person ate - provided, of course, that he died before transcontinental food shipping began.
