A physical anthropologist is someone who is studying human biological and physiological characteristics along with their development. This definition gives a broad understanding of an anthropologists life and the roles associated within it. This roles help understand why and how humans evolve and diversify. The field of anthropology is divided into different subdivisions, although they were all fascinating, forensic anthropology, caught my eye. I never realized how much forensic anthropology was around us until I started reading more information on theabfa.org which made me start thinking about crime cases to bring relative points home from this website. Unfortunately, we have been hearing a lot about missing people lately, I never though this class would show me how these people are being identified.
American Board of Forensic Anthropology is the website and is the board regarding all forensic information to further educate. In doing so the ABFA uses “the science, methodology, and technology of physical/biological anthropology and related fields to help address medicolegal issues.” (ABFA). These anthropologist are specifically trained with Skelton, because they are so widely specialized with the bones, a lot can be answered based on the bones. This includes, age, gender, career, ethnicity, illnesses, etc. Bones basically hold clues to that individuals prior life and for example if someone is found In woods who’s decomposing, based on what’s left and their knowledge of bones, that person can be identified and the case can be solved. Bones recovered from burns, as well as normal bones discovered found anywhere.
Once the bones are discovered, it takes a lot of preparation before determining the person. Starting with is this bone human or not, there is a lot of indication regarding the bone. If human the bones will be looked at throughly. Cleaning is key as well as building a biological profile which categorizes the findings of the bones in order to start finding out who this bone belongs to. This was a huge tactic in WWII and other wars. Soldiers went though heavy examination before being sent off in the event they were missing. Mostly this was done by craniosacral measurements, which involved dental records and eye socket distances. This is established for all age and race groups. This really started everything we have today with forensics, especially dental records identifying people a lot of the time because of documented work that was done in their mouth.
With all these mysteries going on with missing people, this was more fascinating to me now, it’s so interesting how cases are getting solved now from the 70s. It’s crazy how we all look so different on a daily basis and have the same bone makeup, but once we start decomposing we are just bones. Something that’s inside of me that I will never see, can one day determine who I am in the event anything happens. It’s a scary thought, but crazy to think how specialized these people are in bones help so much. Without forensic anthropologist, half of the missing people today probably wouldn’t be identified. From age 1 to now, my body has changed a lot which shaped me. I never thought it would be shaping my bones one day at a time.
Works cited: http://theabfa.org/faq/
I found this post about forensic anthropology very helpful. Forensic anthropology is a special sub-field of physical anthropology. It involves applying skeletal analysis and techniques in archaeology to solving criminal cases. This is super interesting to me because so many people go missing each year and not many are found. I bet this process really helps people trace back human remains to missing people. As well as help give some closure to families on how their love one may have of died. Forensic anthropologists are very important because they play a very important role in criminal investigations. They determine the cause of death for a body and if the death was natural , forced or the person was poisoned. This job helps put criminals in jail and is super important in my option to the justice system.