A Matter of Life and Death. Sue Armstrong

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      When I went to university I had no idea what I wanted to do eventually, except that it had to be something vaguely biological. At the end of second year the only two subjects I was any real good at were anatomy and botany. I went to see both tutors, and the botanist – bless his heart – was the most boring person on earth. I thought, ‘I can’t name and draw plants for the rest of my life. I can’t! I’ll do anatomy.’ So I went into anatomy.

      The third year was dissection and I absolutely loved dissection. But in fourth year you had to do a research project, and they all involved things like ‘lead level in the rat brain’, ‘carcinomas in the hamster pituitary’… and nothing could persuade me to lift a dead rodent out of a bucket. It’s a complete and utter, illogical fear because of my father. So I told the tutor, ‘Look, I can’t do mice, rats, hamsters – can’t do them alive or dead.’ And she said, ‘Well, we can put a project together on human bone; how about that?’ Perfect! As long as it didn’t involve a rodent, I was happy.

      So I did my honours project in the identification of human bone. Then my head of department, John Clegg, said, ‘We’ve got some money if you want to do your PhD here.’ So I’ve fallen into it the whole way along – which is a nightmare for any school that’s trying to use you as a career model!

      I did my PhD, and then a very dear friend of mine, Louise Scheuer, contacted me to say there was a vacancy in the department she worked in at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. It was a fairly aggressive interview panel, but there were two people who wanted somebody in the post who could teach anatomy. At that time there were so many people in anatomy departments who couldn’t teach anatomy: they were cell biologists, biochemists, etc. The head of department then was Michael Day and his final question to me was, ‘If I needed you to go into my dissecting room this afternoon to teach, could you do it?’ I said, ‘Yes, of course I could,’ and that sealed it.

      So I started lecturing at St Thomas’. One day Iain West, the forensic pathologist, phoned the anatomy department and said, ‘I’ve got some bones; does anybody up there know anything about bones?’ I was sent down, and the most miserable policeman was standing there. He looked me up and down and you could see him thinking: ‘Slip of a girl, what’s she gonna know?’ But we took the bones and put them in a plastic bag. They’d been found in a rubbish tip and were suspected to be a missing person. We put the plastic bag on the radiator and left the bones there for about 10 minutes, then I opened the bag and stuck it under his nose and said, ‘What can you smell?’ He said, ‘That smells like roast lamb,’ and I said, ‘Exactly. They’re sheep bones.’ And he was so impressed, this policeman, that he’d got it right that next time there were some bones he said, ‘Oh, I’ll have that woman from anatomy.’ So I just started doing more and more of the bones work around London, and then ended up doing work for the Foreign Office. It just sort of spiralled from there.

      And what did you learn about bones? What can you tell from bones?

      When you’re given a pile of bones – it might be something to do with the World Trade Center; it might be the London bombings – the first thing is: are they human or not? It’s easy to tell if you’ve got a skull. But if it’s a tiny bit of bone from a finger or something …

      You’ve got to bear in mind that with things like the World Trade Center, there were restaurants, so there was beef, pork, lamb in the remains. When the London bombs went off there were people carrying shopping – you know, they had Sainsbury’s chickens and things. Or there would be cats or dogs in the tunnel. So you’ve got to separate out: is it human or not? Once we’ve established it is a person, we might be asked, ‘How long has this person been dead?’ Because if it’s more than 70 years before the current date, then it’s no longer a forensic case, it’s technically archaeological.

       Literally? That’s the cut-off point?

      Yes. It’s man’s ‘three score years and ten’, and if it’s a murder case the chances of the perpetrator still being alive are, of course, slim, so there’s little technically for police to investigate. You will always get cases that won’t fall neatly into that category. For example, if you find children’s remains on Saddleworth Moor, then it doesn’t matter whether it’s 100 years from now, they will still possibly be the Moors Murders. Certain cases have a notoriety.

      So, is it human? How long has it been dead? And then, what more can I tell? Are you male or female? How old were you when you died? It’s much easier to assign an age to a child than to an adult, because children go through a phase of quite regular growth, so that you can go into Marks & Spencer and buy a pair of trousers for a six-year-old. You can’t buy them for a 42-year-old. Because growth and age are so closely related in a child, we can get very close. With a fetus, you can identify age to within weeks. With a young child it’s to within months, and with an older child it’s to within a year or so. By the time you reach puberty it’s to within a couple of years. But once all the growth changes have stopped, then the human body goes through a stage of maintenance, in the twenties. So if a body is in a maintenance phase we can say that person is in their twenties. But beyond the twenties – unfortunately it seems very young – everything’s degenerative. And some of us will degenerate quicker than others, so it becomes very unreliable to assign an age if you’re over 30.

      So, we have to assign a sex; we have to assign an age. We can then assign a height. Height’s not very useful for separating people unless you’re exceptionally tall or exceptionally small. Then the fourth indicator of biological identity is your race. But race is such a contentious issue, for a number of reasons. It’s also a fact that we have such an admixture between the races that it’s very, very difficult.

      So that’s the first thing we’ll produce: a biological profile that says, he’s male, aged between 25 and 30, 5ft 6 to 5ft 8 tall, white. Then you want to establish the personal identity. What information can you take from these remains that will separate two individuals with an identical biological profile? When it comes to DVI – Disaster Victim Identification – we have four principal means of identification: dental work, DNA, fingerprints and any unique medical condition, such as a hip replacement or a pacemaker with a unique serial number.

      But that’s not really forensic anthropology. Dental records are the odontologist; DNA is the forensic biologist; fingerprints are the fingerprint officer, and unique medical conditions are the pathologist. What does that leave for the anthropologist? In many ways we get the scrapings at the bottom of the barrel. We know our position! That is, if you can’t get identity by any other means, come back to the anthro.