Death's Acre: Inside The Legendary Forensic Lab The Body Farm by Bill Bass (essential books to read txt) 📕

cataloged more than eighty years ago: Corrugated or bumpy during a female’s late teens, the pubic symphysis smoothes out during the twenties and thirties; by age forty or so, its face begins to erode and acquires a porous, spongy look. Considered along with other skeletal features such as teeth, cranial sutures, and the degree to which the ends of clavicles (collarbones) have fused to their shafts, the pubic symphysis allows an anthropologist to estimate age with remarkable accuracy—often within a year or two of the victim’s actual age.

For determining race, though, we had everything we needed in the skull. I directed the students’ attention again to the woman’s mouth. Her teeth jutted sharply forward; so did her jawbones in the region where the teeth were rooted. It’s a trait called prognathism (from ancient Greek, meaning literally “forward jaw”); even novice anthropologists can readily recognize it as one of the hallmarks of Negroid skulls.

There’s an easy test for prognathism, I told them, and I demonstrated with the skull in my hand. Take a pencil and press one end between your upper lip and the base of your nose. Holding that end in place as a pivot point, swivel the pencil downward. If it contacts the lips and teeth but can’t touch the chin, your skull is prognathic and probably Negroid; if it can touch both the base of the nasal opening and the tip of the chin, your skull is orthognathic (flat) and probably Caucasoid.

Our skull passed the pencil test for prognathism with flying colors; her jaw morphology was a textbook example of Negroid structure. The teeth themselves were further confirmation: The tops of her molars were rugged and bumpy—crenulated, anthropologists call it—unlike the smoother cusps of Caucasoid teeth.

A word about race: In recent years, the very concept of distinct races has come under attack. Race is merely a cultural construct, says one recent school of thought, not an objective physical or genetic feature. On the one hand, it can be useful to question and rethink our notions of what race means; on the other hand, I’ve examined tens of thousands of skulls over the course of nearly half a century, and their features—visually distinct, numerically measurable, and statistically graphable—correspond quite consistently to three main groupings: Negroid, Caucasoid, and Mongoloid. (Anthropologically, Mongoloid refers to Asian, Eskimo, or Native American ancestry, not Down’s syndrome.) As the world’s peoples increasingly mingle, traditional racial distinctions and labels may eventually blur and even disappear, but in the meantime I’ll hang on to them, because they help me identify the dead and they help police solve murders.

By now, the students had absorbed enough knowledge and enough odor for one hot afternoon. I returned the skull and femur to their plastic bag, closed the box, and took it to my car. Unlike the KBI agents, I put the box in the trunk. I wasn’t quite willing to put the remains in the passenger compartment, but I was willing to bring them into our kitchen and simmer them on Ann’s stove.

To refine my estimate of age and to gauge the woman’s stature, I needed to remove the remaining tissue from the bones. Short of leaving the skull and femur outdoors and allowing insects and scavengers to pick the bones clean—a slow process, and one that could mean losing the femur or mandible to some scavenging buzzard or coyote—the only good way to clean the bones was to simmer them in a covered steam vat for the better part of a day, then scrub off the softened tissue with a toothbrush (not my own personal one, mind you).

Ann was a nutrition scientist; she took her cooking, and her kitchen, very seriously. Needless to say, she wasn’t thrilled when she arrived home to the stench of cooking flesh and found a decaying human skull and femur simmering in her eight-quart kettle. She’d walked in on this more than once: Part of the University of Kansas anthropology department, including my office, was housed in the Museum of Natural History; it was a grand old building, but it was built to house old, dry bones, not process fresh, tissue-covered ones. As a scientist herself, Ann realized I had to get the work done any way I could. Marriage survives on compromise, and we had hammered out some unorthodox but workable ones: She tolerated my occasional use of her stove for processing remains, but her pots and pans were strictly off limits—I had to provide my own.

It’s true what they say: A watched pot never boils. However, an unattended one—at least if it’s filled with human bones and decomposing flesh—swiftly bubbles over. I left my post at the stove just long enough to go to the bathroom; when I returned, a froth of water, brain soup, and other foul-smelling components was pouring over the rim and seeping into every recess of Ann’s stove. It would never be the same. From that day on, moments after a burner or the oven was switched on, that same foul odor would curl upward and fill the kitchen. Exercising my incredible powers of scientific deduction, I swiftly deduced that daily reminders of my lapse at the stove might not be conducive to marital harmony, so in very short order, Ann was the proud owner of a new kitchen stove.

Meanwhile, I had scrubbed the bones and set them out in the early-September sunshine to dry. Scrubbed clean of all its soft tissue, the skull gleamed with a smooth, ivorylike sheen—another characteristic of Negroid skulls, whose bone is denser than Caucasoid skulls. The mouth’s prognathism was even more pronounced, now that there was no tissue altering the skull’s contours. The nasal opening was broad, with vertical “guttering” in the upper jaw—distinctly different from the horizontal sill or “dam” at the base of a Caucasian’s nasal opening. (The broad, unimpeded nasal opening in the Negroid skull evolved to promote rapid air exchange and cooling in hot climates; the narrower opening and nasal dam in Caucasoids evolved to keep cold European