Beneath this sheet lie the remains of a person.
But who were they and how did they die?
By examining the details of these remains,
what we hope to do is to reconstruct a life and to reconstruct a death.
How did they live and how did they die?
Good evening and welcome.
This is the first of three Christmas lectures from the Royal Institution,
revealing how forensic scientists use a range of tools to help
to investigate and bring criminals to justice.
In this first lecture, I'm going to show you how forensic
anthropologists, such as me, study human remains
to uncover the stories
that are written in our body and our bones.
I'm Sue Black, and I'm a forensic anthropologist.
And in my career, I've been involved in war crimes investigations,
in mass fatality events,
and in cases of suspicious deaths.
My job is to examine what remains of the person,
and through that investigation, to confirm who they were in life.
Because without a name, it's really difficult to investigate
a crime, and to determine if a crime has been committed.
You might have seen forensic scientists on programmes on TV,
and we've got a special guest this evening.
What I'd like you to do is give us a really warm welcome
for Amelia Fox. Amelia.
Not quite twins, but we're trying really hard.
Amelia, thank you so much for joining us this evening.
I'm really grateful to you.
Now, you will all know, I'm sure, that Amelia plays the character
Nicky Alexander, who is a forensic pathologist in the hit BBC show
Silent Witness.
And Amelia, there are lots of forensic experts out there.
I'm a forensic anthropologist, and you portray
a forensic pathologist.
The difference between that being I'm usually looking at people's
identity, and you're usually looking...
For the manner and cause of someone's death.
So you get the really exciting stuff, is what it amounts to.
Now, when you took on that role,
did you have to do research?
Oh, yes, absolutely.
I observed two real postmortems,
and seen the immensely skilled work
of pathologists who go through each and every part of the body, looking
for clues as to the cause of someone's death.
Was that challenging for you to look at those?
Well, I was a bit scared about whether I was going to faint.
And I put my scrubs on thinking, "Well, at least I can pretend
"to be a pathologist in the room."
And the first postmortem that I saw, he was of an old man
and he died of natural causes.
But what really struck me was that we can still tell so much
about a person's life and how they lived it, as well
as what caused their death.
And the second postmortem that I saw was of a young man,
and his life had been cut short far too early.
And that made me think we need to make the most of every day. We do.
Now, that's a really important fact, I think, for us to all hold on to.
So what we're going to ask you to do, if you don't mind,
is we're going to ask you to do a little bit of a game with us
to look at some of the remains we've got here, taking some
of our audience here to help you.
And the question is, are the remains we're looking at human or animal?
Can we tell the difference?
And we're going to start with this one.
So you might like to take that and you might like to show
it perhaps over on this side, and what we're looking for,
do you think this is human or do you think it's animal?
What do you think? Human or animal?
Animal. Animal, OK.
Why do you think it's animal?
Because it's, like, shaped weirdly.
Why is it an animal?
They're quite long.
So, long nails. Have you never been to a nail bar?
You get really long extensions on your nails.
Animal.
Definitely. Does anyone think it's human?
Oh, you're far too good.
It is an animal.
So what it is, is it's a seal flipper.
And so, frequently, because we're surrounded by sea, all sorts
of things get washed up on the shore.
And so we will get a phone call from a police force that will say
a member of the public phoned in,
they found a human hand on the beach.
No, they haven't.
What they've found is a seal flipper, but we can't always
be certain of that. So we will go away and check.
And then we usually say, "What did you do with the seal flipper?"
And they say, "We threw it back in the sea."
Don't do that, because the tide brings it in, twice in the weekend,
and we see the same seal flipper over and over again.
So, well done. You said that was animal. Well done.
This one, we're not going to ask you to move.
It's a bit heavy.
Is it an animal or human?
ALL: Animal!
Does anybody think it's human?
No.
You're teasing me. So that, it's obviously a very large boar.
A boar? A boar. Yes.
As in a wild pig.
And the skull is the most easy part for us to determine if something
is human or animal.
But of course, we don't always have the skull.
So what about if we had something really tiny, like this bone?
That's much harder. That gets much harder, doesn't it?
So maybe you'd like to take that - if you would, Amelia.
And up into... Maybe up into this corridor up here. Right.
Good luck, everyone.
This is a much harder task.
Is this going to be human or is this going to be animal?
What do you think? Human or animal?
Animal. Animal?
We've got lots of...lots of people saying animal.
We're going to take animal. Yes? Human. Human.
We've got one person thinking it's human.
Doesn't it show that it isn't always as easy as you think?
And, in fact, most of you who said this is animal have got it wrong
because it is human.
So, very well done. And what is it from?
It's from this part of the hand.
So it's from a metacarpal, which is the second one
on the index finger.
It's also very commonly compared to bones of a horse's tail,
for example.
So it's very difficult sometimes to tell those apart.
So that one we didn't do so well with.
Let's try this one, because I think this probably looks like a bone
that most people would recognise.
I think that might be from a leg.
Oh, well done, you have done pathology training.
So up onto this side, if you wouldn't mind.
So it's a leg bone.
Is it a leg bone from a human,
or is it a leg bone from an animal? Animal. Animal?
What kind of animal do you think it might be?
Dog? Go no further.
Well done. Spot-on.
A future forensic anthropologist.
I'm out of a job now. Well done.
So this is the thighbone, the femur of a dog.
And because it's doing the same function in the human, they look
very much the same.
So I wonder, are we ready to have a look at what's
underneath the sheet behind me?
I am. Are you guys ready? Are you ready?
You want to see what's under here? We're going to take it off.
Very gently. Animal or human?
Ah, well, there's a question, isn't it?
So...
It's not just a pile of bones, though, is it?
It is a human being.
And because it's a human being, it needs to be treated with respect.
This was somebody's son, somebody's daughter.
We need to remember that at all times when this is in the room,
it is another person.
It's not just a pile of bones.
So what we are going to do for the rest of this lecture
is we're going to reconstruct who this was.
We're going to learn a bit about the life history.
And I'm hoping that, at the end of it, we're even going to be able
to see what they look like.
So it has, at the moment, just a number.
And that number is SK, which is a skeleton, and 2057.
So, for the moment, 2057 is all we have.
Let's see what we have by the end of the lecture.
Very best of luck with the next series when it comes.
Thank you. Good luck with the identification.
When we try to identify someone,
and what makes us memorable,
we need to look at what it is that we remember somebody by.
When some of you sat down in your chairs, there
might be a mirror that was placed on your chair.
Have a look in it.
What did you see?
You see your face.
And isn't that a beautiful face?
It's the one you woke up with this morning.
You haven't changed it since.
Everybody recognises you because of that face.
And when you look at the human body, there's two parts of the human body
that are almost always in view to us.
And you can see it in yourselves.
We can see your face and we can see your hands.
And in another lecture, we're going to come back to looking
at identification of the hands.
So what I'd like to do is I'd like to welcome from the Face Lab
at Liverpool John Moores University,
Professor Caroline Wilkinson and Dr Jessica Loo.
Thank you, Caroline, thank you, Jessica, for joining us.
Caroline, would you tell us the process, perhaps, that you go
through - what it is that you do and then how you go about it?
Yes. So when the police can't identify human remains,
they will sometimes come to Face Lab
and ask us to produce a facial reconstruction.
And that image will be released to the public, in the hope
that somebody will recognise the individual and that will
then help with identification.
The fundamental premise behind facial reconstruction
is that our skulls and our faces are directly related to each other.
So the skull provides the proportions and the shape
of the face. And as your facial muscles grow and develop,
they leave their marks on the surface of the bone.
So we hope to be able to look at a skull and interpret it,
and predict the living appearance of an individual.
But it's a digital process.
This is our laser scanner.
It projects light onto the surface of the skull, and cameras collect
that data, and put the images together to make a full 3D model
of the skull of the individual. So clever.
So when we've got the fully-scanned skull, we can then take
that into our computer system.
We can see the 3D shape of the skull,
and the blue areas are the areas
that were missing, that we've remodelled.
We then use tissue depth pegs to help us estimate the amount
of soft tissue over and above the muscles.
And then we have a database of anatomical structures, mostly
muscles that we import for each skull, so that we're slowly building
the muscle structure onto the surface of the skull,
and building the face from the skull,
through the muscles to the surface of the skin.
What you used to do is you used to be able to mould
on with clay, didn't you?
Yeah, that was the traditional method. And now we can do it all
digitally in the computer.
So what we have here, because the most frequently asked
question to me is, "How accurate is it?"
We can do that using living individuals.
So this is a test that we produced a number of years ago.
A volunteer gave us his computed tomography, which is clinical
imaging that you might get in a hospital.
We could then take his skull without knowing what he looked like,
produce the reconstruction that you can see at the top.
This is his actual face from the scan on the bottom.
And then what you're seeing here is a comparison of those two
surfaces so we can see where the errors are, the blue areas
are the areas with the least error, and the red-orange
areas are the areas with the most error.
About 70% of the surface of the facial reconstruction
has less than two millimetres of error.
And you've scanned all the different parts of this skull. We have.
And I'm hoping you're going to come back and you're going to show us
what the face of this individual may look like. We will.
Now, I've not seen it yet, so you and I are going to see it
for the first time later on this evening. And I can't wait.
So, Caroline and Jessica, thank you so much indeed.
Thank you. And I look forward to seeing you later. See you later.
So, how are we going to tell whether
this individual died recently or a long time ago?
Now, sometimes it's about how the body looks, and sometimes,
I'm afraid to say, it's about how the body smells, as well.
So, something that's decomposing,
as I'm sure you can imagine,
doesn't smell terribly well.
So that we are going to use that to try to estimate something
that's called a TDI, or a time death interval.
And so that will allow us to determine whether this is
something that needs to be looked at by the police, or needs
to be looked at by an archaeologist.
And the cut-off point between those two is 70 years
before the present date.
So if you died 71 years ago,
you're technically archaeological.
If you died 69 years ago, you're technically forensic.
And it's all based around the fact that man is expected to live
three score years and ten.
And when you take back that 70 years, that takes us back to 1952,
just after the Second World War, so that bodies that we find
from the Second World War or before
are technically archaeological.
Now, I can tell you quite safely that our body here is not
going to be recent. The bones are very dry.
They don't smell at all.
Or you'd know about it, sitting so close to it.
This is going to be a body of somebody who's died
a very long time ago.
Now, we need to look at some features of decomposition to
determine how much time has passed since death.
Now, I want to show you decomposition in action.
One of the things that's really important, and that affects
decomposition, is insect activity.
So if you're a little bit squeamish, look away now and I'll tell
you when you can open your eyes again, because we're going
to look at a video, and we're going to look at a video of a specimen
of a fox head, and that fox's head is going to decompose
using dermestid beetles.
And these are flesh-eating beetles,
and they live perfectly normally in our soil every single day.
There's our fox.
Can you see the beetles starting to move?
Can you see the fur starting to shift?
Look at the fluid that's starting to come out from the head.
You can see the fur starting to pull away, clearing off all that
soft tissue, so that underneath it you have the white bone.
You can open your eyes again.
Our individual is dry and has no smell and it is not,
I promise you, going to be of any interest whatsoever to the police,
because it is clearly archaeological.
So let's start to build up a picture of who this person
may have been in life.
And what we will do is we'll develop some of the characteristics
that you would expect to hear in a police bulletin.
"A male, aged between 25 and 30, 5'6'' to 5'8'' in height,
"and white."
Those are the sort of main characteristics, and we call them
the Fab Four, because we can look at sex determination,
age determination, the height of an individual,
and what is their ethnic origin.
So let's start with the first of these.
How do we determine if a skeleton is masculine or it's feminine?
Now, what I want to have are two volunteers,
and I will certainly look at this young lady here,
and somewhere, this gentleman here.
Thank you very much.
And your name is? John. John and? Anna. And Anna.
And what we're going to do with John and Anna is we want to be able
to look inside them.
So we want to see what your bodies look like inside.
You're OK with that? Thank goodness for that!
So what we're going to ask you to do is to go behind the screen, OK?
Round the other side of the screen.
And, Anna, I'm going to ask you to come to this side here.
Now, we want to be able to look inside them.
And what would we use to look inside somebody?
We'd use an X-ray, wouldn't we? Of course we would.
But we're not going to do that to you because an X-ray
wouldn't be safe. But we're going to do something a little bit different.
We're going to show you what your skeleton looks like.
So we're going to do it on the countdown from three.
Are we ready?
ALL: 3, 2, 1!
There you go. That's what you look like.
Now, we can all see what you look like inside.
Would you like to see what you look like inside?
Come on round and have a look.
So what we've got there is... It's amazing.
You came round and your skeleton stayed there. It's incredible.
What we've got is a male skeleton, a female skeleton.
Can you see any differences between them, do you think?
Yeah. The male one's a bit taller than the female one. And it's maybe
a little bit bigger. The bones are a bit bigger as well.
What about the female one? Can you see any differences there?
The pelvis is different.
The pelvis is a bit different, isn't it?
So we can see some general differences.
And we know that most of the general differences that we find in relation
to the male skeleton are to do with levels of testosterone,
because what they do is that they affect muscle, and muscles
need some really robust bone to be able to attach onto.
So they tend to be bigger and taller.
And when we see the changes in the female, what we're looking
at are the relationship between the bones and oestrogen,
which is a feminising hormone, and we see those changes happening
in the pelvis. So thank you both very much indeed.
Thank you for letting us look at your body.
Thank you.
What we need to do now is we need to look at something
a little bit more specific.
And here we have some specimens.
Thank you very much indeed.
So, on this side, what we have is we have a male skull,
and on this side we have a female skull.
We're going to look at this area just above the eyebrows.
If I turn that around, can you see that there's ridges across the top
of those eyebrows?
That's a masculine trait.
If we look at the feminine skull, then they don't have that same
level of bridging.
It's only going to develop when you get towards the end
of teenage years, and it's all to do with the muscles associated
with chewing, and they dissipate up across the face.
So we find that bridging in males, we don't find it in females.
And right behind your ear, there's a lump of bones sits
behind your ear here.
And it's called the mastoid process,
which is this one there.
And it's got a big muscle with the most ridiculous name called
sternocleidomastoid, that attaches to that.
And because it's a much bigger muscle in men than women,
it's a much bigger bump in a male skull than it is in a female skull.
And then, at the back of your head, there is a bump right at the back
of your head, if you're masculine.
And that's got an equally ridiculous name.
It's called the external occipital protuberance.
You remember that one, and you'll impress everybody
at Christmas lunch.
What that does is, big muscles from your neck attach there,
and your head's something really incredibly heavy.
And if you're in any doubt, watch somebody who falls asleep
on the sofa, watch their head suddenly fall forward
like a nodding dog.
It's because the head's so heavy and the muscles have got
to hold it up.
We have this really well-developed occipital protuberance there.
And if we can have a look, if you could hold it for me, Isla,
that would be much appreciated.
We just don't have that same level of bump on the back.
So we can look at the skull and tell the difference between the skull...
Thank you. ..that is masculine and one that is feminine.
But in the pelvis we have something very different.
The male pelvis is quite childlike in terms of its development,
and we want to see it change at puberty in the female,
and we're going to want to see the pelvis change and grow
from side to side.
We're going to want to see it change and grow from front to back.
And we're going to want to see the whole of the pelvis lifted up
from the back. All of that happens in three or four years.
How amazing, the way the skeleton can change.
Why does it do that in the pelvis?
Why do we see changes in the pelvis compared to the female
rather than the male? Red jumper.
Because as females develop, they need to be able to carry a baby,
and so a bigger pelvis allows the baby to more easily fit through.
Absolutely. So we want to be able to see, can we get the baby's head
through the female pelvis?
Because if you're right, we should be able to.
So that the female pelvis,
it goes in, and if we get it in,
we want to be able to get it out, and we can.
So it's a much wider pelvis.
It doesn't happen.
So it's not changed in shape.
It's not changed in size.
So what we're seeing in the pelvis are differences that oestrogen cause
that allow that pelvis to change dramatically in size.
So if we go back to our skeleton,
what can we find in here that tells us about
what sex the individual may be?
And I'm going to go to the skull, first of all.
And the skull is very delicate.
So, at the front, can you see these brow ridges?
And we know that we find brow ridges in? ALL: Males.
Thank you.
If we look at the mastoid process at the side, it's quite large.
We find that in? ALL: Males.
Thank you very much.
And when we look at the back of the skull, look, we've got
a lovely little external occipital protuberance which we find in?
ALL: Males.
I have a roomful of forensic anthropologists. Well done.
So that skull tells us, and you've told me that you think
that's a masculine skull.
And the next thing we're going to do is to say, well, how tall
might he have been?
And most of our height comes from which part of our body?
The legs, doesn't it?
If you've got long legs, you're going to be tall.
If you've got short legs, you're going to be closer to the ground.
So we've got long bones, particularly in the legs.
And what we do, quite simply, is we take those long bones,
we'd measure them and we'd come out with the height.
And the height for this individual is around about 177 centimetres,
which is about 5'10''.
Now, bear in mind that this is an archaeological specimen,
that's actually quite tall, to be 5'10''.
The next thing I think we need to do in the Fab Four
is we need to look at determining age.
And there's one part of the human body that is really very useful
for determining age.
And what it is is...
Yeah, seriously.
Thank you very much indeed for a set of chattering teeth.
But teeth are incredibly useful for being able...
Oh, it's like my daughter, it keeps talking.
..are incredibly useful
for being able to tell us something about you.
And we have lots of things that we do to our teeth.
We go to the dentist, we have braces put on them, we have fillings
put in, we have implants.
I have got more fillings than I've got teeth because I've got
a good Scottish mouth with very, very bad teeth.
And that profile is mine.
And a forensic odontologist, which is a dentist, will be able
to look at my records and be able to look at my teeth and say
that they're a match.
Over a lifetime, humans have got three sets of teeth.
Have a set of teeth.
They have three sets of teeth.
And we have baby teeth - or milk teeth -
deciduous teeth.
We have adult teeth, or permanent teeth.
And then we have a third set, which are false teeth.
So, whether they're plastic teeth or they're porcelain teeth.
So we have three sets in total, and I'd like to show you
a really interesting set of those false teeth.
Can you see that these teeth are set in a horseshoe, and that horseshoe
is made out of ivory?
And we don't know what bone it is or what tusk it is,
but it's ivory.
And when you turn it over, you can see that the teeth
at the back are really quite crude.
They're just sort of cut out of that block of ivory,
but the teeth at the front are incredibly realistic.
That's because they're real teeth.
And these were called Waterloo teeth, and women used to be paid
to go out onto the battlefields, extract the front teeth
from the dead soldiers on the battlefields, take them back
to the dentists and sell them.
And you could go into your dentist and be shown a chart of teeth,
and you could choose your teeth that you wanted to build your set
of dentures from.
And it just shows the Hollywood smile that we want to be able
to get these days, we were still looking for it
200 years ago, but we were doing it in a slightly more grotesque way.
Those baby teeth are really important as well,
because if you remember back to when you were about five or six
years of age, and this is what a jaw would look like.
What you didn't know was, underneath that gum margin,
and what we've done is we've just cut away all of the bone
on this model, your grown-up teeth were growing underneath there.
And so we can see the crowns of the adult teeth developing
down in your lower jaw, up in your upper jaw.
You didn't even know they were there.
And as they grow and they develop their roots,
they're going to push the baby teeth out.
So we know that we can use teeth to help us determine age.
And one of the things that we can find in our skeleton, when we go
back to it and we look particularly at the mandible, which is the lower
jaw, what you can see is, although we've lost the teeth
at the front, that's just because of the process.
That's archaeological.
When we look at the teeth towards the back,
and these are the molars, there's the first molar, the second molar,
and the third molar, and the third molars we call the wisdom teeth.
And those wisdom teeth are because they come into your mouth
when you're suddenly supposed to be wise, and you become wise
when you're about 18 years of age, apparently, which is why
they're called wisdom teeth.
But you can see there's quite a lot of wear on the first molar,
less wear on the second molar, and very little wear on the third
molar at all.
That tells us those teeth, certainly the wisdom teeth have not
been in the mouth very long.
And I told you that they come into the mouth at 18 years of age.
What else can we tell about the age of this individual?
Well, we talk about three phases of ageing.
So, from birth, right the way through to the end of puberty,
that's where we grow. And then when we get to
the end of our teenage years and we get to, maybe,
into our early 30s, we kind of stop growing and we go
through a bit of stasis.
Once you get beyond your 30s,
everything's degenerative.
You start to break down, you start to get old,
and we start to see evidence of
that degenerative change post-30 years.
We have no evidence of degenerative change in this individual.
Two areas just that I want to take you to,
to see if we can narrow down his age.
This is the sacrum which sits at the back of the pelvis.
And what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take away
this little section of bone,
because it's not broken. It just hasn't fused yet.
And because it hasn't fused, I know this individual is under 25.
And one more bone, which is my favourite bone.
Every anthropologist needs a favourite bone.
So if you're going to be one, choose one.
Mine's the clavicle.
And this is a left clavicle, or collarbone.
And if you can see along the surface,
this is the articular surface around here.
And if you zoom in, maybe you can see there's a little flake
of bone there that looks as if it's been stuck on with glue.
That's a growth plate, and that bone is going to cover
the entire surface.
But because there's so little of it present that I know this individual
was somewhere between the ages of probably 17 and 19 years of age.
So this is not an old man.
This is a young man between the ages of 17 and 19 years of age.
So we know it's a male. We know it's a young male.
We know he was about 5'10'', maybe 5'11'' in height.
But the bones have got more to tell us.
There's still more of a story for us to find.
And have you heard the phrase, "You are what you eat"?
Well, we are literally what we eat.
And the human body is a recording machine.
It lays down all the information.
Everything that we eat, everything that we drink lays down the cells,
whether those cells are bones or other kinds of tissue.
What I'm going to do now is I'm going to hand over to a colleague
of mine who's been instrumental in taking this area
of research forward.
And I'd like you please to welcome Professor Wolfram Meier-Augenstein.
It is a great name, isn't it?
Wouldn't you want to be called Wolfram Meier-Augenstein? Wolfram,
tell us what it is that you do for a living.
I'm a professor for stable isotope forensics.
I'll occasionally help out police forces, law enforcement agencies,
nationally and internationally,
with crime investigations.
So you mentioned the word stable isotopes there. Yeah.
So what is...what does that mean? What are stable isotopes?
How do we explain that?
Obviously, what your body is made of has to come from somewhere.
And that is basically the food and the water you drink, and we can,
to a degree, track that, because nature has given us a marker
in our hands - stable isotopes.
And I think the best way to describe these - stable isotopes
are basically atomic twins.
These atomic twins are all identical, basically identical,
in virtually every shape or form that you can think of.
But they differ in one aspect.
They have a different weight.
Virtually every element that makes compounds in your body - hydrogen,
carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and sulphur -
they all have a twin that is just slightly heavier.
And this difference in weight we can measure in the way
plants make things.
And it also makes a difference for water.
And we have, actually, a map that illustrates this.
You see, that is an isotopic map of a landscape of water
across the globe.
And the differences in how much hydrogen two,
the heavier atomic twin of hydrogen,
is present is expressed by colours.
So what we saw on the global scale,
we also see on the regional scale.
This is a map of Scotland, and Isles that basically sit here
get the first rainfall.
That water that ends up then to be drinking water is heavier
in hydrogen two than the water in the Cairngorms, and these things
translate into your tissues.
So, for instance, hair, if we analyse your hair,
we can actually, we can actually say,
"Oh, you lived in Norway, you are Norwegian."
We can do it in nail, we can do it in bone, even in teeth.
And we have actually found a volunteer who very gladly gave up
a thick lock of her hair.
And there she is. Say welcome to Isla.
And I think the best bit is, Isla,
quickly tell us what happened, how it happened, when it happened.
Oh, as you said, it was definitely, I volunteered for this,
to have quite a substantial chunk of my hair taken from my head
and sent to one of your colleagues, I believe, up in Scotland.
And this is the really decent lock of hair that Isla donated.
So it was cut and sectioned by cutting segments of this hair,
to represent a fortnight of growth.
Because hair grows at a defined rate,
it typically grows at ten millimetres a month.
Before analysis, the hair has to be washed
and rinsed and dried.
And I know it sounds funny, but it has to be done.
And this is the result.
On the hydrogen, you have basically a kind of a plateau line
here and the plateau line here,
and the same is repeated throughout
all the other isotopes that make up the hair.
This drop in between those lines happens between
months eight and six, relative to the point when the hair was cut.
So what we can definitely say from this,
this person lived at two different locations, along those 20 months
that her hair length represented.
First she lived here, then she did something we don't know exactly,
but she definitely moved away.
And then she arrived here, and for the last six months lived
in this area.
And if you would ask me where all this happened,
I would have to be honest and say, "No, I don't know exactly,
"but I can give you a scientific guess."
We can basically say, "Right, my guess would be somewhere
"on the other side of the globe, Australia."
And if you pressed me very hard,
the southeastern coast, coastal area
of Australia would be this part,
from -20 to -8, and from -6 to 0,
that could be Central Europe, that could be Belgium,
that could be Netherlands, it could also be England, especially
the South of England, Greater London.
The only person who can actually now say if I was talking
through the back of my head,
or if I actually said something sensible, is Isla, please.
I was living in the southeastern corner of Australia
up until about eight months ago and then I moved
to the United Kingdom about six months ago.
And what did happen in between here?
I was travelling around Central Europe and the Middle East.
Wonderful. So that's great. Thanks very much, Isla.
And that is basically as much as I can... Oh!
Thank you. And thank you, Wolfram, for explaining that.
Amazing. Did you manage to have a look at the
isotopic signature associated with our skeletons?
I saw the reports of the analysis that was basically taken
from samples of the femur,
because even bones retain information.
And there were two sets of data. One was from radiocarbon,
which gives you an indication when the person passed away, that came
up with roughly 1,000 years before now.
So this skeleton is a thousand years old?
Yes. And from the stable isotope data,
oxygen data and carbon and nitrogen data,
they point to an individual that had quite a large element
of marine-derived protein, you know,
fish or maybe seaweed, I don't know, sushi.
They were found in Oxford.
There's not a lot of marine fish in Oxford. Not really, no. No.
So it's not likely this individual grew up there?
Not even that. Somewhere else? Yes.
Where? I would say Scandinavia.
So, Denmark, Sweden, maybe.
So, Wolfram, could our skeleton be Viking?
It could be a Scandinavian warrior. Yes!
That's what we want, isn't it?
What we've got is we've got a Viking loose in Oxford.
Good. That would be great. So, a thousand years old,
Danish background, eating fish,
could have come from Denmark.
Yes. I like it. I like it very much. I'm so glad you like it.
Wolfram, thank you very much indeed. Thank you. My pleasure.
Thank you. Thank you.
We've got a Viking! Thank goodness for that!
Doesn't that make it twice as interesting as it was?
Now, listen, what we now want to do is we want to know something
about, how did this individual die?
So we need to look at trauma and
anything that might suggest a cause of death.
Now, there's three important things that we find around about injury,
and that's when they occurred.
So we like groups of threes.
Injuries are antemortem, which means they happened
before the person died.
And we know that that happens because we see healing in bones.
The injury could have happened around the time of death,
and we'd call that peritrauma.
And that's going to be really important to talk about the manner
of death, which is the way in which the death occurred,
and the cause of death.
And the third one is going to be, if they're postmortem injuries,
that means it happened after death, maybe when the body
was being excavated or being buried.
And we're going to look again - I told you we like groups of threes -
for the three types of injuries that we might see.
We can have injuries that result from ballistic or projectile trauma,
we can look at injuries that result from blunt force trauma,
and we can look at injuries that result from sharp force trauma.
So, first of all, we're going to look at ballistics
and we're going to look at projectile trauma
and we're going to see whether we can find
any of those on our skeleton.
Please welcome Dan from our demo team, who's carrying an air rifle.
It's an ostrich egg. OK.
Can I have the safety marshals in position, please?
Safety is off, firing in 3, 2, 1.
Gun is safe.
I have to ask, do you want to see it in slow motion? ALL: Yes!
Of course we do.
Let's have a look at what happens in slow motion.
You can see the laser.
So that's where we're going to hit the egg.
That's where the shots happened.
You can see that fracture hid up there,
and can you see that there's debris coming out the back?
A good shot.
And when we have ballistic trauma, or we have projectile trauma,
what we want to be able to determine is, what's the entry wound and
what's the exit wound?
Because that tells us something about where the gun
was and the position of the gun.
So if you have a look at the front here, this is the entry wound.
And the entry wound is when the bullet is travelling
at its highest velocity, and it punctures cleanly
through the bone, and it's punctured just as cleanly
here through the egg.
When it goes through the content of the egg, then it slows down,
and it loses some of its velocity.
So when it comes out the other end, it's a bit more messy.
So when we turn round and we look at the exit wounds, look at the nice,
neat entry wound. The exit wound is much bigger.
And so that, we know, is the exit wound because it's sprayed out
and it's not expected that in our body we're going to find ballistics,
because we didn't have guns at that time, but we can find
projectiles, and we'll come back to that in a little bit of a moment.
But what we want to be able to do first is we want to now introduce
the next type of trauma that we might see,
which is blunt force trauma.
So, for blunt force trauma,
we're going to cause some fracturing in the bone.
And I can show you quite easily what that looks like.
But what I do need is a volunteer - red jumper.
Please come down.
And as if by magic, we have another ostrich egg.
Your name is? Noah.
So, Noah, what I'm going to ask you to do is I'm going to ask
you to inflict some blunt force trauma on the egg.
And, of course, the only way you're going to do it with an egg
is with a spoon, isn't it?
Now, are you right or left-handed?
Right. Right-handed. So pick up the spoon for me.
If you come round that side for me, what I'm going to ask you to do
is I'm going to ask you to hit the egg just once, about there.
So you're going to have to hit it hard enough to break it.
So we're going to go in...
ALL: 3, 2, 1.
Yes! Well done!
Can I just say this?
A lovely smell of ostrich egg down here, which is not very nice.
Now, that's the impact.
And so when you hit it with a spoon,
then that pushed it in, and it hit the egg behind.
And as it bounces out, you get what are called concentric fractures.
You can see it going around the impact zone,
and that's because they've bounced back.
But there's other fractures that radiate out from it,
and those are called radiating fractures.
So this is classic blunt force trauma that says
there is the impact, there is the concentric fractures
around it and there's the radiating fractures around it.
Now, that's really useful, but there's something else
that we can do, is that we can sequence events.
So if you were to hit it again,
I should be able to tell you which was the first hit
and which was the second hit.
So I'm going to turn it around to here,
and I'm going to ask you if you can aim for about there.
Perfect. Thank you very much.
Oh, and you couldn't have done that better, so we had an impact.
But can you see this radiating fracture coming up there?
What happens to it?
It looks like it kind of, like, joined with the other one.
It stops, doesn't it?
And so what's happened is this radiating fracture,
with all the force that's coming out of it, suddenly falls
off a cliff because there's a hole in the egg.
And so it can't jump over that line.
And that tells us when a line of a fracture intersects with another
one, this was the first impact,
this was the second impact.
And the more impact you have, the more difficult it becomes,
and the more complex.
Good job. Thank you for blunt force trauma on an ostrich egg.
Well done.
What I want to do is I want to say, do we have any evidence
in here of blunt force trauma?
And the answer is, no, I don't.
So I might have projectile, but I don't have blunt force.
So, what's left to us?
Yeah? Go on, shout it.
Shout it out for me.
Sharp force trauma.
So we need to be able to see whether, using a weapon,
we can leave cut marks on bone.
So, to do that, I'm going to need a volunteer, please.
Would you come forward for me?
Thank you very much.
And your name is? Tilly.
So this is Tilly. Tilly, what we're going to do is
we're going to try and leave a cut mark on a bone.
Are you ready for this?
So here comes the bone.
And the bone is surrounded by some soft tissue.
Are you feeling as confident now as you were a few minutes ago?
We're going to have to cut through the soft tissue to get
to the bone, and it's a really big bone.
So we're going to really need a very big blade.
Bring on the dagger.
OK. I think you probably need some help.
Shall we get another volunteer?
Gentleman with sheep on the front.
Come down and help.
Your name is? Isaac.
So, Isaac, you're going to have to help Tilly if you would.
So we're going to have to lift
the blade at the front, please, Tilly.
Now, I want you to be able to get through the soft tissue to get
all the way to the bone so that we leave a mark.
So, moving forward gently, and you're going to push and aim
for the bone. Can you get there? Push. Can you get in there?
Almost, yes!
There we go. We've hit the bone. Thank you very much.
You must be exhausted now.
Thank you very much indeed to Isaac and to Tilly.
So what we're going to try and do is we're going to take off
the soft tissue into a bucket.
Can you see, on the side of the bone, just that mark
that sits there?
That was the little nick on the end of the knife.
So that when you have a stab wound into bone, then what will happen
is you will just see a little bit of that end of the blade.
And what we're going to do now is we're going to look at weapons
that were around at the time of our body,
and we're going to see what we can tell from them.
So I'd like you, please, to welcome Emma Mawdsley
from the Royal Armouries.
Thank you. A dangerous weapon. Indeed.
So, would this have been around at the time of our...?
I'm calling him a Viking.
I don't care whether he is or not, but our Viking.
This is a reproduction of an axe. But very similar.
Might have had a longer haft, but similar.
And you've brought on some other weapons for us.
So, first of all, anything that can stab
or can cut or can chop
will leave us with sharp force trauma.
So would you like to show us what happens if you put an axe,
maybe not too hard, into the foam?
There you go. Look how easily it went through. So that, with an axe,
we're going to get just a straight cut and we're going to have,
if you could imagine, going deep into that cut, we're going to get
a V shape, because we're going to have the very narrow blade
and widening towards the back.
But with an axe, often you don't just cut once, do you? You chop.
And so, often with axes or something along those lines, we'd find
multiple chop marks.
So that's what we'd have with that.
This looks like something a little bit dangerous,
inside the scabbard.
And what is this?
So this is a sea axe. A sea axe? Yeah.
And so what I'd ask you to do with that is just cut the foam,
and then... And what happens when you do that, if you turn
it around, and you can see it very clearly in these,
is that where you were cutting down,
you've got a very, very smooth surface.
But once you got down to the point that you are breaking through it,
you can see that it becomes much more rugged and a bit more messy.
You've got something else, and I know this is a ridiculous thing
to say, but that's a very long arrow.
And presumably, is this a normal sort of length?
Yes, this is quite a standard.
So this one, does it have a name, this type?
Well, this one here is a bodkin.
So it's a similar but a different shape.
So you have a different-shaped head, this one is full-size.
So could we look at the shape... Bodkin, did you call it? Yes.
Because if we want to get the tip of it in and see what kind
of a pattern we're left with, what you get is a square shape,
don't you? And I wonder if I could keep
that one for just a moment. You may. Thank you.
Could I ask you, though, when you leave, to take your axe
with you, if you don't mind? Of course.
Emma, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.
Now, if we come back to our skeleton, if we come to the skull,
first of all, and I'm going to turn it around,
so we go to the back of the skull,
and we go to the left-hand side.
When I do that, can you see...
..this area around here?
That's an antemortem trauma.
So this is a sharp force trauma,
probably as a result of a blade.
But he lived through it.
He survived, because we know that because we've got healing
of the bone, because it's very smooth around the edges.
So, whatever caused that, maybe it was a blade, we don't know,
but it's a sharp force of some kind.
It happened maybe even years before he died, but he was only 17,
18, 19 years of age when he did die,
so it happened to him very young.
And I want you to come right to the end here.
Can you see a squared outline?
Where did we last see a squared outline?
We saw it on a bodkin arrow.
I'm hoping you can see how it would have fitted in there.
Going literally into the skull there.
I mean, for goodness' sake, how unlucky is it that not only
do you have a previous injury to your skull,
but around the time of your death,
what you also have is an arrowhead injury?
So, in your neck, you have seven cervical vertebrae.
And if we count down to the fifth,
which is one, two, three, four, five...
I'm hoping that when I pull out the fifth cervical vertebrae,
can you see another squared hole?
And so that's another arrow.
If that arrow has gone in to the left side of his neck,
roundabout here, if you put your fingers there,
can't you feel your blood vessels under there?
Can you feel your arteries pumping?
Huge arteries and veins in there?
If the arrow has gone in there,
the chances are that he's bled out,
and the cause of death was an arrow injury to the neck.
We can't say it killed him.
It might be the manner of death,
which we say it's a trauma,
but it's likely that the one at the neck is more likely
to have caused his death than it is the one at the back
of the head. Because, although it's pierced through the bone,
it hasn't gone all the way through to brain tissue underneath.
Now, if you remember, what we talked about was that there was a third
thing that the anthropologist looks for.
And what the anthropologist looks for is how many people are present.
And I should warn you that it's connected to the grim reality
of war, because he was found in a mass grave containing
over 30 other bodies.
And mass graves are particularly difficult to excavate as the bodies
can frequently become co-mingled or mixed.
And I worked on the recovery of bodies from mass graves
following the Balkan wars.
And in those graves we might have an excess of,
sometimes, 50 bodies in a single grave to excavate.
But this mass grave associated with our body was found
in the grounds of St John's College in Oxford, and it was just simply
as we were excavating to do some building.
Now, if we go back in time, what we know is that there's
an important source of English history, which is called
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
And in the year 1002, very precise, King Ethelred the Unready,
he was informed.
So he had an informant that said that Danish mercenaries -
and we can read that for meaning Viking -
were intending to beguile him out of his life.
So he'd been told that these Danish people were coming after him,
and he was scared.
So, being afraid of this Danish threat, he sent out a mandate
to kill all the Danes in England,
and this became known as the St Brice massacre.
And we actually know which date it happened.
His date of death was the 13th of November in the year 1002.
He was buried with over 30 other Danish men,
very few of them elderly, all quite young.
And the youngest was even younger than him.
And when they were killed, presumably by the arrows,
as we saw, their bodies went into a mass grave, and they lay
there undisturbed for a thousand years until the builders came.
And once the builders came in, we found them.
Now, we know that he was a male.
We know that he was a young man at the end of his teens.
We know he was about 5'10'' in height.
We know he was Scandinavian.
He was eating marine food, he was eating fish.
And we've even got a date of his death.
And we know that he was in good health when he was killed.
We know that he'd had a previous fracture to his skull
that he'd survived, probably caused by a blade.
But we suspect from the two projectiles that we found,
he had an arrowhead into the back of his skull, and he had another one
into the front left-hand side of his neck,
and that's probably the one that will have killed him.
So, coming in as he was, as a pile of bones,
we now know so much more about him.
But there is one thing that we still need to know.
Do we want to know what he looked like?
ALL: Yes!
Can I ask Professor Wilkinson, please, to come back in?
Can I just say, she always gets the best lines,
right towards the end of any work that we've ever done together?
What Caroline does is she recreates that face,
and I have not yet seen the face,
so I'm seeing this at exactly the same time as you.
So I apologise unreservedly if I get ridiculously excited
about it, because I'm looking to see the Viking for the very first time.
Caroline, will you take us through what you find, please? Yes.
So we can see here, there's the skull from the two views,
so that we can see this healed wound on the back side of the head.
The blue areas are the missing parts that we've remodelled.
Then you can see the muscle structure and the skin layer
in place. And you can see the injury at the back there.
You can see the injury. Wow.
If this was a forensic case, we would probably stop here.
It probably would be black and white rather than colour,
because we don't have the information about eye colour
and hair colour and skin colour.
But you can do something a little bit more? Yes. Go on.
So, because we've got information from yourself
and from the archaeologists, we can add hairstyle, we can add
facial hair that was suggested,
and we can add clothing appropriate to this period of time,
from this part of the world.
Isn't that just amazing?
He's darn good-looking, isn't he,
our Viking from Oxford?
So a young man at the end of his teens, a really young man,
and suddenly, doesn't he look like a person?
He started out as a pile of bones.
I just think that is absolutely astounding.
And I told you, she always gets the best lines.
She always ends everything, so incredible.
Caroline, thank you for your talent. Pleasure.
So, in normal circumstances, if this was a forensic case,
we would never assign a name to an individual,
because the name that you have is the name that you were given.
But we thought that in this case,
it might be appropriate to think
about a name that we could give for this individual.
Now, he came and was found in St John's College in Oxford,
and we thought if we turned John into something that is a little bit
Danish, maybe he might be content if we were to call him Johannes.
So I'd like to introduce you to Johannes,
who is the very attractive Viking from Oxford.
Thank you very much indeed.
So, in this first lecture, what I've shown you is how I use my
forensic anthropology training
to restore identities to dead bodies.
And in the next lecture, what we're going to look at is
what happens when there isn't a body.
How do we actually progress that story when the body is missing
and we have to rely on other types of evidence and different forms
of forensic science as we start to look to a crime scene?
And the one thing that you will understand in forensic anthropology,
more than anything, is that when we have remains in front of us,
we have nothing but total respect, dignity and decency
for those that have passed before us.
So I think the last thanks that I would ask you all to give
is to Johannes. Thank you.