built. When a mandible, or any other bone, was robust and heavily ridged and roughened by muscle attachments, it meant that the muscles that had been attached to it were strong and well-developed. And if the mandibular muscles were well-developed, it was reasonable to assume that the cranial and neck muscles were well-developed, and if that was the case, then it was only reasonable to suppose that the trunk and limb muscles were well-developed, etc., etc. The good old Law of Morphological Consistency.
So it was possible, even from a single bone-the mandible-to make some assessment of overall size and physical condition. Of course, the Law of Morphological Consistency wasn’t exactly a law, it sometimes happened that a person might have a strongly developed jaw and neck coupled with a weak thorax, or thick arms coupled with spindly legs, and when such things occurred, anthropological assessments went awry. But they didn’t happen very often, and unless something turned up to contradict it, Gideon would stick with his reading. He’d rather have had a few more bones to look at, but in this kind of work, fragmentary remains were the rule.
Ageing skeletal material was trickier than sexing it (to begin with, you had a lot more than two possibilities), but in this case it was made easier by the presence of the two partially erupted third molars-the deservedly much-maligned wisdom teeth. Inasmuch as third molars, the most variable of the human teeth as to time of eruption, generally came in (when they came in at all) somewhere between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, and these particular ones had not quite broken all the way through, it followed that the person had probably been somewhere between those ages when she died. (Forensic anthropology, he thought, not for the first time, involved an awful lot of “probablys.”)
The eating disorder? That had been easy, the work of a single glance. The edges of the incisors were thinned and “scalloped,” almost as if they’d been gently filed. And the lingual surfaces-the sides toward the tongue-were deeply eroded and discolored, almost through the enamel. On the two central incisors, it looked as if the dentin might be showing through in spots. When you saw incisors like these, especially on a young person, the most likely cause, and the first thing that came to mind, was bulimia: the habitual, repeated vomiting that went along with it brought up stomach acid that ate the enamel away.
Ergo, he was looking at the mandible of a large-boned female. In her early- to mid-twenties. With an eating disorder.
Claudia Albert. And the fact-well, the high probability-that it was Claudia Albert added weight to the idea that Magnus Torkelsson had been aboard, too, even if nothing of him were to turn up.
All these observations had been made without benefit of measuring instruments, regression equations, or statistical tables, but he had been at this long enough to feel reasonably comfortable about his conclusions without them. The numbers and tables came in handy when you were trying to convince a jury or a skeptical defense lawyer that you knew what you were talking about, but Gideon, like most of his colleagues, trusted more to his instincts-that is, his educated and well-honed instincts-than anything that came out of a computer. Anyway, in this case, there were no lawyers or juries to worry about.
Drowsy with the heat, his back against a post, his head drooping, he sat musing over the mandible for a while. If she had lived, those third molars would have given her a lot of trouble. They were both impacted-tipped toward the second molars in front of them-so that when they had fully erupted they would have been pressing hard against them, putting a strain on the fabric of the entire mouth. Most likely, they would have had to come out.
Wisdom teeth, he reflected; one of those little mistakes that the evolutionary process makes, or rather one of those little lapses. What most people
So it was possible, even from a single bone-the mandible-to make some assessment of overall size and physical condition. Of course, the Law of Morphological Consistency wasn’t exactly a law, it sometimes happened that a person might have a strongly developed jaw and neck coupled with a weak thorax, or thick arms coupled with spindly legs, and when such things occurred, anthropological assessments went awry. But they didn’t happen very often, and unless something turned up to contradict it, Gideon would stick with his reading. He’d rather have had a few more bones to look at, but in this kind of work, fragmentary remains were the rule.
Ageing skeletal material was trickier than sexing it (to begin with, you had a lot more than two possibilities), but in this case it was made easier by the presence of the two partially erupted third molars-the deservedly much-maligned wisdom teeth. Inasmuch as third molars, the most variable of the human teeth as to time of eruption, generally came in (when they came in at all) somewhere between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, and these particular ones had not quite broken all the way through, it followed that the person had probably been somewhere between those ages when she died. (Forensic anthropology, he thought, not for the first time, involved an awful lot of “probablys.”)
The eating disorder? That had been easy, the work of a single glance. The edges of the incisors were thinned and “scalloped,” almost as if they’d been gently filed. And the lingual surfaces-the sides toward the tongue-were deeply eroded and discolored, almost through the enamel. On the two central incisors, it looked as if the dentin might be showing through in spots. When you saw incisors like these, especially on a young person, the most likely cause, and the first thing that came to mind, was bulimia: the habitual, repeated vomiting that went along with it brought up stomach acid that ate the enamel away.
Ergo, he was looking at the mandible of a large-boned female. In her early- to mid-twenties. With an eating disorder.
Claudia Albert. And the fact-well, the high probability-that it was Claudia Albert added weight to the idea that Magnus Torkelsson had been aboard, too, even if nothing of him were to turn up.
All these observations had been made without benefit of measuring instruments, regression equations, or statistical tables, but he had been at this long enough to feel reasonably comfortable about his conclusions without them. The numbers and tables came in handy when you were trying to convince a jury or a skeptical defense lawyer that you knew what you were talking about, but Gideon, like most of his colleagues, trusted more to his instincts-that is, his educated and well-honed instincts-than anything that came out of a computer. Anyway, in this case, there were no lawyers or juries to worry about.
Drowsy with the heat, his back against a post, his head drooping, he sat musing over the mandible for a while. If she had lived, those third molars would have given her a lot of trouble. They were both impacted-tipped toward the second molars in front of them-so that when they had fully erupted they would have been pressing hard against them, putting a strain on the fabric of the entire mouth. Most likely, they would have had to come out.
Wisdom teeth, he reflected; one of those little mistakes that the evolutionary process makes, or rather one of those little lapses. What most people
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