#human skeletons

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

[strangebiology]

John Oliver just did an episode on body donation, which was very well-reported as usual.

It cites some older news including this amazing series on body brokers by Reuters. Some thoughts on anonymity being an issue:

It is shocking that there is no regulation on what it means to donate your body to "science," although, I'm not sure exactly who can say what that definition is or should be. Also, plenty of people would be happy to have their bodies used in a museum, but you CAN'T, because body donations are shuffled around and anonymized. We wouldn't have any issue with consent if we let people who WANT to be on display be on display.

Here's Why You Can't Keep Your Loved One's Skull

Mortician Caitlin Doughty explains why you can’t take a human skull home, from a lack of dermestid beetles to vague abuse-of-corpse laws.

When I read The Red Market, an amazing book about the trade in human body parts, it really highlighted the issues with mandated anonymity. WHY does a deceased heart, kidney, or blood donor need to be anonymous? That policy has led to horrific abuse of donors all over the world (egregious examples are given in China and India), living and dead, and the recipients have no idea because of that mandate. Mandated anonymity is a shield against regulation, public understanding, and accountability.

I wonder if people believe in anonymizing things because they think that makes the death not real. I've noticed people selling all sorts of human and animal remains with no description as to where they came from, and no one asks, and no one complains. I understand; sometimes some information is lost to time, or a business owner maybe can't take the time to verify the exact origins of things. Fine.

But take for example all these human fetuses for sale on Facebook. I'm not here to argue about that, although it's odd, and I understand both sides of the controversy regarding selling them. When I saw those posts, no one bats an eye.

Then when someone offered to sell her own aborted fetus (context: this person went in for an abortion but was told the fetus was dead anyway) people freaked out. In the same group where they're buying the fetuses of strangers. So...it's only ok to sell body parts when the person whose body it came from did not consent? That's our standard?

The same goes for animal body parts. "Hey, buy these dead rats!" Fine and dandy. "Buy these dead rats! Here is some context about their lives and/or deaths--" Disgusting! How dare you! Those were living things!

Death is disgusting and horrifying and I'm NOT saying that everyone has to think about it all the time or look at dead bodies or even understand it. What I am saying is that when we complain about transparency and enact policies that make it impossible to actually understand who these body parts are coming from, or to track them, that breeds an industry where abuse of consent is hard to avoid.

Human Skulls Are Being Sold Online, But Is It Legal?

Last month, eBay banned human bone sales. But it’s still happening on other websites, and lawyers and academics are starting to take notice.

Lastly, the end of the Last Week Tonight show showed what happens when you let donors be known. It's beautiful.

[kyidyl]

Kyidyl Explains Bones - Part 3

Well, I had this halfway done and then TUMBLR ATE IT, so let me start again.  UGH.  

(These posts are collected under the KyidylBones tag. Do with that information what you will, lol.) 

So what are we getting into today? Sex determination! 

Ethical Note: I’m adding this bc not everyone who sees this post saw my post yesterday and this is important info, especially on Tumblr.  Anthropologists of all stripes are well aware that sex and gender are extremely complicated.  Trust me, we know.  But we still do sex determination for a few reasons.  First, because missing persons databases are arranged on a male/female binary, and if we’re comparing a set of remains to that database to identify the remains then we need that info.  Second, demographic info for populations that have disappeared is important, even if those populations are historical.  This might shock you (<--sarcasm), but written records are usually either lacking or inaccurate.  Third, if we know the sex of the skeleton we can compare that to the grave goods and learn some interesting cultural things, including possibly being trans, because none of the signs of being trans survive physically in the skeleton.  So I am going to be using male/female binary language, but it isn’t to exclude the wide variety of sexes and genders that don’t exist on that binary, it’s because it’s what I’ve got to work with.  And if you have questions about this, feel free to ask, but please be respectful.  

Alright, so there are some vocab words for today’s post and I had them all nicely written out in an easy to read paragraph, but it got eaten, so I’m just gonna present them in list fashion this time: 

Characteristic - All physical markers of human variation exist on a spectrum because humans are varied and we invented the categories to begin with.  If something is characteristic of, say, a male? It means that it is very, very distinctly male.  It matches the stereotypical expectation of what you’d see in a male.  It’s a standard for an obvious example of a given thing.  

Landmark - A landmark on your bones is a feature of the bones that is always in the same place.  We use this to help us identify a bone and to help us know what side it is on.  IE, your lesser trochanter is a bump on your femur (thigh bone) that is on the inside towards the back.  It’s always in that spot, so we know which direction it should face and ergo which side it would be on.  Landmarks are unique to the bone in question.  

Foramen - A hole on a bone.  The big one in your skull that your spinal cord goes through is the foramen magnum and it literally means big hole.  But there are a lot of little ones all over your skeleton so your nerves and blood vessels can do to your skeleton what the weirwood did to Bryden Rivers.  I said what I said. ;) 

Bilateral - Both sides.  Humans have bilateral symmetry and so one side is symmetrical (externally and WRT your skeleton, but not always your organs.) to the other.  You can split us down the middle and the two sides are basically the same.  

Ok, so there’s another set of terms that you need to know, but I’m going to be copying and pasting this into every post going forward so I’m making it separate.  Anyone who works with any kind of anatomy uses these terms to be very specific about the location of something on the body.  They are: 

Anterior/Posterior - Front and back respectively.  I remember them because my mom used to say posterior when she didn’t want to say butt, and because A comes before P the way front comes before back.  Sometimes people say dorsal and ventral, and I remember that because a dorsal fin is on a whale’s back.  

Proximal/Distal - Near and far vertically in relationship to the center of your body.  I remember it because one end of the bone is in close proximity to me and the other one is distant.  

Medial/Lateral - Near and far horizontally in relationship to the center of your body.  I remember it because medial is closer to the middle of my body, and lateral isn’t medial.  Also, if you are reading left to right L comes before M and you’d get to a lateral body part before a medial one.  

So, where to begin? How do we know what sex people were assigned at birth from just their skeleton? Let’s start with what everyone is most familiar with: 

The Pelvis

The pelvis of an adult human is a really common thing for an archaeologist to find.  And by the time we find it, it’s usually in three pieces (excluding your tailbone aka last vertebra).  Your left and right hip bones, called the innominates, and your sacrum.  Mind you, the pelvis is made up of a number of bones, but they all fuse in adulthood except these three (fun fact: I’m so used to using the individual names for them that I had to *google* the word innominate.), so this is what we usually find.  If it’s a kid, they still survive well because they’re thick, heavy bones, but they aren’t fused.  Another fun fact, the bumps of bone that you feel under your ass are called your ischium and I’m only telling you that because I think it’s a fun word to say.  Your hop bones, like the actual entirety of the flat bladed part at the top, that’s called the Illium.  I like that word too.  Aaanyway, here’s a human pelvis: 

(Source)

These are actual bone specimens in the top down view, both are women, but they are of different ethnic origin.  

(Source)

This is a cast (IE, plastic), front view of a male pelvis.  

You can see those 3 pieces I’m talking about.  The only joint there that remains unfused is the sacroiliac joint, IE, where the two halves of the pelvis join the sacrum.  However! You sacrum is technically a series of fused vertebrae and your spinal cord runs almost all the way to the very tip.  There are some conditions which cause these not to fuse, or to not fuse properly, or to not properly encase the spinal cord and it causes all KINDS of issues.  But anyway, yeah, your sacrum is a really tough hunk of bone because it carries a lot of weight.  The bit in the front is called the pubic symphysis and, despite what certain tumblr posts would have you believe, having children does NOT leave a notch on the inner side of it from the muscle tearing away tiny chunks of the bone.  In fact, it is hotly debated whether or not pregnancy leaves behind any skeletal evidence at all.  

Alright, so basically speaking, females make da babies and males don’t, so the different equipment is differently shaped......

.....wait, no, that’s not right.  Let’s back up.  Male and female humans are differently proportioned and their center of gravity is, on average, different.  This is the whole thing about men having upper body strength and women having thighs that can crush watermelons.  This is on *average* (I will be saying a lot about averages in these posts.) true.  And so the physics of the forces exerted on your bones is different.  Males are top-heavy, and so their pelvis is shaped in response to their gate and muscle structure because the pelvis supports and distributes the weight of your entire body.  And bipedalism means that the shape of the pelvis is very, very different depending on the weight distribution.  These changes to the pelvis are really obvious, which is why we can tell from just a few bones whether or not a hominin was bipedal.  It changes the *entire* body.  

It is true though that the pelvis of a female is different than a male, because a female pelvis has to be able to support the weight of a developing child while still allowing the individual to walk.  So the interaction of average size, a uterus, and the bipedal gate means that male and female pelvises are a different shape.  

Here is a comparison: 

(Source)

So firstly, that angle is called the sub-public angle, and because a females pelvis is wider and flatter than a male’s (when viewed from the front) it’s wider in the front.  This also gives any babies more room.  Secondly, you can see the difference in the tilt of the sacrum - in the female you can’t see the tailbone.  This, again, is due to the confluence of weight distribution and the necessity of passing a baby’s head through that space.  It would be a lot harder to push it out if you had a tailbone in the way.  Lastly, you can see that the shape of the circle when you look top down and bottom up are different - wider on the woman because of the same reasons I’ve already mentioned.  There is one more major difference between the male and female pelvis, and that’s the sciatic notch: 

(Source)

Characteristic of male on the left, intermediate in the middle, and female on the right (and dang, she was young, too.).  Thinner is male, wider is female.  Usually you can fit your thumb in a female’s notch but barely or not at all in a male.  I personally find the subpubic arch and the sciatic notch the easiest to use because, fun fact #2, those 3 sections are a bitch to hold together with your hands and that makes it hard to see the other shapes.  The amount of sacrums and pelvic bones I’ve accidentally dropped while trying to determine sex....it’s a lot, ok? It’s a lot.  I only have two hands and pelvises are big.  

There are also several less obvious ways of determining sex from a skeleton, so you guys should definitely visit the source for the above image because they go into it deeper and there are several excellent images of public bones.  

So how else do we determine sex? The next easiest way is from the skull, because the features are distinct and skulls survive well.  

The Skull

In my opinion the easiest landmark to use on a skull for sex determination is the jaw.  There are several features of the jaw that can be used here - and, mind you, when determining sex we measure every small and large sex-linked feature according to a scale and then average it all out.  We never look at any single thing (although sometimes the individual has something so characteristic that you can’t help it.  The individual in my position has a brow like a neanderthal, so it was pretty obvious.).  Anyway, there are several features here but the easiest is to look at the shape of the lateral distal posterior portion of the jaw.  It’s called the masseteric tuberosity.  Basically, it’s a little bit of bone that sticks out of the back of your jaw.  It’s one of the attachment points of the masseter aka chewing muscles attach.  Because males have stronger muscles pulling on that part of the jaw and exerting more force, it flares out further for them when you look at it from the front, like this: 

(Source)

It’s that sticky-outy thing thing that I circled in red.  Here is an example of the same thing on females: 

(Source)

Female jaws are rounder, and so that bit is less defined, flares out less, and is not as sharp as it is on males.  And this is a reminder that these measures aren’t absolutes - humans have a lot of variance in them.  The female asian and the male on the right both have somewhat atypical structures, while the female european and the two other males have a very characteristic structure.  

The two other easiest to identify are the shape of the brown line and the shape of the chin (the mental protuberance).  Here is an image of the comparison: 

(Source: Pinterest, but this images are from the Human Bone Manual text that I use and I used this image so I wouldn’t have to make my own. :P) 

You can see in the profile that the female skull has a higher, more vertical forehead with less pronounced brow ridges.  If you look, you can also see that her chin protrudes less in profile, and is softer and less pronounced in the frontal view.  The angle under her teeth is less severe.  

So these three things, the chin, the brow, and the jaw, are the easiest to identify the most likely to be characteristic of the sex of the individual.  But, if you compare the images I’ve used here you’ll also notice that there are other differences in the skull.  Females have more of a slope to the bottom of their jaw, the bump on the back of their heads (the occipital protuberance) tends to be far less pronounced; and this is the case for all muscle attachments generally speaking.  On average, males are more easily able to build muscle mass and are larger, and so their muscles pull harder on their skeletons and create larger muscle attachments.  The round, blunt thing to the right of the back of the jaw that sticks out from the skull (the mastoid process), is also at a different angle and is larger in males.  This is another case of the muscles being bigger and stronger - the mastoid process is where several of your jaw and neck muscles attach.  

There you have it, then.  The easiest ways to tell the sex of a skeleton.  :) 

This post has been approved by Gage the science doggo: 

[evitcani-writes]

Don’t Buy Human Bones on the Internet

it’s 2 am and I’m still thinking how messed up laws about human skeletal remains are

i posted this on my twitter earlier, but to get ya’ll up to speed:

In 49 out of 50 states, it is not only legal to own human bones (that did not belong to Native Americans) but you don’t need any permit, license or paperwork proving you obtain the bones legally

Legal means of obtaining bones is:

the bones are currently yours (or previously yours)

a scientific institute (Skulls Unlimited is the only entity legally allowed to clean the skulls of dead persons and only sells to medical people with proof of a degree from an accredited college) who used the body of the previous owner for scientific study with written consent

just buying them from someone who (supposedly) obtained them legally

This loophole in laws concerning human remains baffles me. If you don’t see the problem, cite point 3. You don’t need any paperwork proving you obtained the bones legally in order to sell them.

Even ones obtained with written consent are sketchy as all get. People or families of people who think they are donating a body to science accidentally donate bodies for commercial use. Often, the victims of these schemes are poor people who are offered free funerary services in exchange for body donations to “advance medical science”.

Really, that tissue and the skeleton is sold and often people aren’t compensated the way they said they would be.

You might be thinking “why would people do this?” Well, hold up there pal.

The person who is selling those bones may have obtained them a number of illegal ways:

the bones belonged to someone who was Native American (which would also implicate you in this felony)

stole the bones from a cemetary (or anywhere else really)

took bones they found in the woods, on their property, in their house or while found doing construction work (which would be an active crime scene)

buy the bones from the black market, usually from illegal human remain imports from other countries (which are usually obtained from India, who has banned the export of human remains)

straight up murdered the person and dissolved their flesh to sell the bones

Lets talk point 3: absolutely wild things to do but might be more common than we think ??? (it could account for at least a few cold cases of missing persons presumed murdered bc no body was ever found)

On point 5: THIS IS A LOT MORE COMMON THAN I EVER HOPED

“America’s first serial killer”, H. H. Holmes used this as his preferred method for disposing of bodies. After him, some serial killers realized it was a viable way to avoid prosecution. It’s extremely difficult to prove a murder with no body.

Again we’re back at “Why would anyone do go to these lengths to sell bones?!?!?!”

Well. Science and education create a need for human bodies. These are used in dissection, study and research. Human skeletons obtained through proper science donation programs are usually completely destroyed during dissections and end up cremated.

So there’s the demand.

Which brings us to supply.

[Image source]

There’s a LOT of money in human remains.

For people who want to own human bones for non-medical reasons, you’re looking at human skulls being between $1,000-$3,000 EACH.

Almost all of those will come from India (I did a casual glance at places who specialize in selling human bones and almost all of them say “Indian Man”). Which is, again, illegal. However, it is extremely difficult to prove since no paperwork is typically provided or needed to own a human skeleton. Those bodies will come from victims of violent crimes or poor people whose graves were robbed in India.

The reason India banned the export of human remains in 1985?

A man was found with the skeletons of 1,500 children. The bones of children are worth more than an adult’s. It is believed that most of those children were murdered for their bones.

In America, some people think owning human bones is cool. It is cool if and only if those bones originally belonged to your ancestors or someone you knew and are part of specific rituals around death that your culture or heritage engages in.

If they are just somebody’s body you purchased on the internet... don’t you start thinking about who that person used to be? Were they murdered and they never got justice because YOU, SPECIFICALLY, contributed to the demand for bodies? Do their families hope they’re still alive as they sit on your mantle? Will they wait for someone who is never coming home?

I’m far from the only person to question the commodification of skeletal remains by non-medical persons on the basis they may be of “archeological or forensic significance”. At the end of the day, it’s just really gross. It’s gross to see other people’s bodies (especially the bodies of people of color who make up a disproportionate amount of skeletal remain trading) as things you can or should own because you think it’s edgey or cool or whatever.

Which brings me to “okay cool cool cool why’d you bring this up”

Close to where I live is a costume shop. Outside was a plastic skeleton prop so real I thought it was REALLY more than it was. It cost $3,000, the same pricetag as real remains. Inside, they have a centuries old coffin with some fascinating local history. It had been used for rituals in local fraternity that had since disbanded. It wasn’t meant to be buried, to hold people. Glass lay over the top, displaying the coffin’s contents.

Inside: A real human skeleton.

The skeleton was bought legally from India in the 70’s. They were the remains of an Indian man who drowned in the river. The owner, telling us this story, said he paid $500 for “it”. He implied the man had never been identified, never been known.

I thought the plastic skeleton in the display window looked more real. The man in the coffin did not grin as skeletons often do. He frowned, a harsh unhappy arch from my angle far below him. His ribs were poorly articulated, dark material and metal loops. The coffin was lined with black velvet, but it was too small for him. His neck was bent slightly, his head brushing the velvet above him. I had no idea about India’s illegal trades, about any laws, about anything at all.

“There’s so many people,” the owner said. “India has too many people. Millions. Not all of them get to—they have to do something with all the bodies. There’s too many.”

And there he sat, that man, among a million animantronic decorations, just another body. Just another prop nailed to the pillar above fake spider webs and plastic bones.

A drowned man with no name in a coffin never meant for a person.

[imperium-romanum]

Isotope data showing ancient humans travelled long distances may be the result of farmers using lime. Andrew Masterson reports.

Research indicating that some Bronze Age people travelled far and wide may be completely wrong and the result of contaminated evidence, a pair of Danish scientists say.

Writing in the journal Science Advances, geoscientists Erik Thomsen and Rasmus Andreasen of Aarhus University suggest that isotope analyses of famous Danish ancient skeletons – such as the Egtved Girl and Skrydstrup Woman – might have been distorted by the presence of modern agricultural waste.

Continue reading

[natural-selections]

"Draw me like one of your French girls..."

[egbertdogefromut]

I have arrived! Sans and Papyrus were there to greet me and we all went home. Sans talked about how maybe we’d change back sometime, but so far, nothing’s happened. It’s actually kind of crazy how we’re what the other used to be! I showed them a little bit of my magic and everyone, especially mom and Papyrus was really happy! Dad was already proud and Sans I think had a lot on his mind. At least I think, though he smiled widely so I’ll take it!

((This will be the last day of them being the way they are! You may send in questions and if I don’t get to it all, I’ll answer them tomorrow with them like this and then change them after! :)  ))

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]