Book summary “Written in Bone”: summary

Introduction

You wonder what remains of your identity after flesh decays and memory fades. Death often feels like the absolute erasure of your personal story, leaving only silence behind.

Sue Black argues that your skeleton records every chapter of your life, disease, and trauma, waiting for forensic anthropologists to read its permanent traces. Bones are not static calcium sticks, but dynamic living organs that constantly archive your habits, injuries, and medical history.

This book guides you on an anatomical journey from the skull down to the feet, revealing how forensic science decodes human remains. You will discover the answers to specific forensic mysteries.

• How do skull structures and dental records establish personal identity?
• What do the spine and thorax reveal about violent assaults and child abuse?
• How do the pelvis and limbs betray your age, sex, and physical stature?
• What methods do experts use to solve historical murder cases through bone analysis?

1. The Skeleton As a Life Recorder

Bones are living, dynamic organs composed of an intricate combination of inorganic minerals for rigidity and organic collagen for flexibility. Bone requires constant nourishment through blood networks to transfer minerals like calcium and phosphorus along with trace elements. Purely inorganic bone without collagen would crumble into dust, while bone stripped of minerals via acid becomes rubbery and pliable like an eraser.

In school biology class, the author and her classmates burned rabbit thighs to remove organic elements and left others in hydrochloric acid to leach out minerals, demonstrating the necessity of both components.

The human skeleton continuously remodels itself, replacing its structure roughly every fifteen years, but loses mineral density and becomes more brittle with age or hormonal changes.

Cancellous bone reforms faster than compact bone to handle microfractures. Bone mineral density peaks in the fourth decade of life, after which resources are depleted, especially in postmenopausal women due to oestrogen reduction, leading to conditions like osteoporosis. You possess over two hundred bones in the adult human skeleton. Lifestyle habits, diets, injuries, and medical histories leave permanent traces and echoes within both soft tissues and the hard skeleton. A healed collar bone can serve as a physical souvenir from a past fall off a mountain bike.

Bone Composition and Remodeling

When confronted with human remains, forensic anthropologists must systematically address four fundamental questions to begin an investigation.

• Determine if the recovered remains are human by relying on knowledge of common animal species.
• Establish if the remains are of recent enough origin to hold forensic relevance rather than being purely archaeological.
• Identify the individual by extracting clues to build a biological profile.
• Assist the pathologist in determining the cause and manner of death by analyzing trauma or injuries.

A forensic investigator must accurately differentiate human bones from those of various marine, agricultural, domestic, and wild animal species. On the UK coastline, marine remains such as seals, dolphins, and whales are frequently washed ashore and must be identified.

The Four Fundamental Questions

Determining the time death interval is imprecise, but sets a cutoff point to separate recent forensic cases from ancient archaeological remains. Decomposition and skeletonization rates vary widely based on two weeks to ten years or more for skeletonization depending on conditions. You look at seventy years ago as a threshold beyond which a skeleton is unlikely to yield a criminal investigation. Radiocarbon dating using carbon-14 is suitable for five hundred years old or more for radiocarbon dating to assist. Manmade isotopes like strontium-90 from above-ground nuclear testing help date modern remains within the last six decades, relying on a half-life of only about thirty years for strontium-90.

Juvenile bones found on Saddleworth Moor in the north-west of England are always investigated due to a potential link to the 1960s moors murders committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley.

Forensic anthropologists establish a biological profile to narrow down missing persons by categorizing the remains across four core parameters. Extracting information from bones allows experts to determine sex, age, ethnicity, and height. In a recent case, a biological profile consisting of over 1,500 possible names generated in a recent case based on a biological profile resulted in a male, aged between twenty and thirty years, white, between 6 ft and 6 ft 3 ins in height for police investigation. While DNA identification is a powerful tool for matching remains to names, it depends entirely on the existence of prior source DNA records.

2. Unlocking Secrets of the Skull

The neurocranium and viscerocranium provide core clues for personal identity, trauma seriation, and forensic elimination through specialized bone microstructure.

The skull remains the core of human identity and intellect. Artist Damien Hirst created For the Love of God in 2007, a platinum cast of a skull set with 8,600 diamonds and real human teeth, purchased from a London taxidermy shop for £14 million with an asking price of £50 million. Such practices highlight the complex cultural symbolism of human remains.

Skull Anatomy and Trauma

A newborn baby's skull consists of nearly forty separate bones and six fontanelles that accommodate rapid brain growth. These fontanelles can take up to eighteen months to complete closing. Neurocranial bones develop as diploic bone, featuring a porous inner layer nestled between two hard layers resembling ivory. This unique microscopic structure helps you identify tiny, isolated fragments.

Forensic anthropologists know that finding a headless skeleton with cut marks on the cervical vertebrae strongly indicates foul play. Police discovered a headless skeleton buried under a patio in London after a carer hid the old lady's head in a plastic shed for about twenty years to conceal blunt-force trauma. Investigators must maintain rigorous laboratory testing to avoid confirmation bias. During the 2008 investigation at Haut de la Garenne on Jersey involving 170 suspected bone fragments, a piece initially claimed to be part of a juvenile human skull was proven to be wood from a coconut shell.

Positional anatomical elimination can resolve complex murder cases. In Scotland, experts identified a one-centimetre bone fragment from a washing machine as the left greater wing of the sphenoid bone belonging to a missing woman named Mary, securing the conviction of her husband, who had forged a £50,000 bank loan and received six years in prison for culpable homicide. Fracture analysis of a shattered skull lets you seriate injuries. Sue Black reviewed the cold case of a 92-year-old man named Colin four years after the event, deducing that he was struck with a bicycle pump, punched, swung head-first into a mattress, and stamped upon.

Facial Recognition and Dental Dating

Facial recognition abilities vary widely, with the average person remembering about 20 percent of encountered faces while super-recognizers recall around 80 percent. Following the 2002 Bali bombings, approximately half of the bodies were incorrectly identified by grieving relatives, proving that visual identification fails in traumatic circumstances. The Manchester method builds a face over a skull or 3D scan by layering forty-three muscles, glands, fat pads, and skin.

You can analyze the internal nasal structures during a postmortem examination:

• Remove the brain during the postmortem examination, cutting the olfactory nerves.
• Use the filtration properties of the cribriform plate of the ethmoid bone to direct a saline wash down the nose from the brain cavity above.
• Retrieve pollen, spores, or other debris from the collected nasal fluid to determine environmental context.

Teeth provide reliable age indicators for subadult remains because humans are diphyodonts with twenty deciduous teeth and thirty-two adult teeth. The 1833 Factory Act used dental development and the eruption of the first permanent molar to regulate child employment before systematic birth registration began in the UK in 1837. Excavations of the St Barnabas church crypt in London revealed custom dental appliances, including Sarah Frances Maxfield's gold bridge from 1842 and Hannah Lenten's Waterloo teeth wired with gold springs.

3. The Spine and Thorax

Your vertebral column consists of thirty-three bones segmented to provide central axis support and mobility. Moving from a horizontal quadrupedal spine to a vertical one placed heavy compressive and tensile strains on the structure.

Metameric segmentation of the vertebral column and the vulnerability of the chest cavity expose violent assaults, judicial hangings, and child abuse.

Vertebral Column and Neck Trauma

You develop from an initial C-shaped fetal spine into an S-shaped spine as you learn to hold up your head and sit up. This change is driven by cartilage discs rather than bones. You have thirty-three vertebrae altogether: seven cervical, twelve thoracic, five lumbar, five sacral, and four coccyx. You also start with ninety different little bones in the fetal spine and twenty-four pre-sacral vertebrae.

When forensic teams examined the lead coffin of Simon Fraser, the 11th Lord Lovat known as the Old Fox, they discovered a commingled burial. Fraser lived from 1667 to 1847 and was executed by beheading in 1747 at eighty years of age after the Jacobite rebellion. The Wardlaw mausoleum at Kirkhill, built in 1634, contained the partial remains of five separate individuals, including an unknown headless female skeleton rather than the executed Jacobite chief.

Judicial hanging can produce a specific fracture of the second cervical vertebra known as the hangman's fracture. The second cervical vertebra, or axis, features a peg-like odontoid process fitting into the atlas to allow head rotation. During a judicial long drop designed by William Marwood in 1872, the sudden halt drives the peg backward into the lower brain stem, causing instantaneous death if the ring breaks in two places. William Bury, the last man hanged in Dundee in 1889 for murdering his wife Ellen, suffered a classic hangman's fracture of C2. Fewer than 20 per cent of judicial hangings resulted in cervical fracture, and his cervical vertebrae were preserved in the Dundee university museum collection.

Marks found on bones during forensic investigations must be carefully differentiated between human tools and natural modifications like animal chewing. Three years after Jamal went missing with 78p left in his bank account, canine teeth from foxes left paired triangular punctures and characteristic chatter marks that can mimic blade cuts.

Mitochondrial DNA extracted from hair can serve as decisive forensic evidence in trials. In a Southsea murder case where a torso was split across the lumbar vertebrae using a power saw, cat hairs found on the pink shower curtain matched Tinker, the defendant's cat. This marked the first time cat DNA was used in a UK criminal trial, offering a 1 in 100 chance the hairs did not belong to Tinker and resulting in a twelve years minimum prison sentence for manslaughter.

The Chest and Skeletal Calluses

The thorax is the most frequent target for violent assaults because it houses vital organs and provides a large, easily penetrable surface area. Thirty-nine separate bones make up the thorax, featuring twelve pairs of ribs anchored to the sternum and thoracic vertebrae. Attackers frequently target the chest using sharp-force, blunt-force, or ballistic trauma. The UK paedophile Richard Huckle, charged with ninety-one counts of indecent acts, was murdered in prison when a fellow inmate rammed a sharpened toothbrush between the fifth and sixth ribs on the left side to puncture his heart.

The sternum serves as a reliable indicator for age determination and sex estimation. It consists of three parts: the manubrium, the mesosternum, and the xiphoid process. In children, it starts as separate pieces that fuse during the teenage years into early twenties. The sternum allowed Sue Black to analyze Jin Hyo Jung, a South Korean woman found in a suitcase, calculating she was between twenty and twenty-five years old.

Testosterone causes bone to form along the upper and lower borders of the costal cartilages, mimicking rib structure known as crab claws. Oestrogen causes dense, sclerotic nodules to form along the central core, resembling a string of pearls. In Scottish woodland, extensive crab-claw ossification overlaid by dense sclerotic nodules helped identify a victim as Yvonne, a transgender woman found with a size 8 high-heeled shoe.

Analyzing rib fractures and calluses provides a chronological timeline of repeated skeletal trauma. When a bone breaks, a haematoma forms, turning into a cartilage callus within seven to nine days, and a bony callus within three weeks. Five-year-old Harry showed fractures at different stages of healing, proving he suffered at least three distinct periods of prolonged physical abuse.

Police searching landfill sites for the remains of fifty-six-year-old mother of six Zaina required experts to differentiate between human and animal spare ribs. Seriating ribs involves sorting rights and lefts using positional indicators. You can follow these steps:

• Check the area of muscle closest to the bone to locate the holes conveying blood vessels and the white intercostal nerve.
• Confirm that the subcostal groove is on the bottom of the bone, with the outer surface convex and the inner one concave.
• Sort the ribs into rights and lefts using the positional indicators.
• Determine if the bone originates from the apex, upper-middle, lower-middle, or base of the chest.

4. Throat, Pectoral Girdle, and Pelvis

From hyoid bone fragility and clavicle fusion ranges to pelvic sexual dimorphism, these structures record age, sex, and violent trauma.

The Throat and Pectoral Girdle

The hyoid bone is a C-shaped bone located in the upper neck region. Its flimsy greater horns can be broken by pressure from an assailant, but such fractures are uncommon in young people and rare in children. Furthermore, a broken hyoid does not automatically prove strangulation because fractures can occur during life from other causes. Two-thirds of strangulations do not result in a fractured hyoid.

Jenny, a 37-year-old with a chaotic history, was found buried under rubbish in a back yard 19 months after going missing. Her hyoid bone had a healed fracture on the left greater horn, but it could not be linked conclusively to her cause of death.

The clavicle is the bone most prone to being broken in the human body, and its fractures can be life-threatening due to underlying major blood vessels. Shaped like an elongated S, the clavicle breaks at its weakest point over the subclavian artery and vein, running the risk of sharp shards rupturing these large vessels. Because of this risk, some historical jockeys surgically removed their clavicles. The clavicle starts to form in the fifth week of intrauterine life and grows at a regular growth rate of 1 mm a week. A newborn's clavicle is approximately 44 mm long.

Sir Robert Peel, the founder of modern policing, died after his horse spooked, threw him, and fell on him, fracturing his left clavicle and rupturing the subclavian blood vessels.

The fetal and infant clavicle is a reliable indicator for establishing age at death and determining legal viability. The 24-week gestational milestone is the legal limit for abortion and viability, at which point the clavicle measures 27 mm long.

In the Scottish isles, remodeling a cottage revealed the skeletal remains of three infants under the floorboards, whose clavicles indicated they were around 30 to 40 weeks old.

The clavicle is one of the last bones in the body to finish growing, making it highly valuable for estimating the age of adolescents and young adults.

Medial end ossification starts around fourteen years of age, and fusion of the growth plate typically completes between the mid-teens and mid-twenties, appearing like a flake of bone or scab before fully attaching. When the remains of the 19-year-old sex worker Marcella were found burned in a bonfire, a thumbnail-sized fragment of charred clavicle helped experts confirm her age range was between sixteen and twenty-one.

The Pelvis and Forensic Exhumations

The innominate bones of the pelvic girdle are the single most reliable skeletal indicators for determining both the sex and age at death of a deceased individual. While a whole skeleton allows correct sexing about 90 per cent of the time, the innominate alone achieves it around 80 per cent of the time.

Oestrogen reshapes the female pelvis during puberty to function as a birth canal, balancing bipedal locomotion with the passage of a baby's head. Because the female pelvic canal is on average an inch narrower than a baby's head, the baby's skull bones override each other and relaxin softens pelvic ligaments during birth.

Unviable abdominal pregnancies can result in a rare phenomenon where an undetected fetus calcifies into a stone baby. Medical literature recounts less than 300 authenticated cases of lithopaedia, with the oldest known stone baby surviving for thirty weeks and remaining undetected in the mother's body for forty years or more.

Impacts where knees slam into a car dashboard can fracture the pelvis and cause debilitating nerve damage. Because the pelvis is a ring, a break in one part is frequently accompanied by a second fracture, creating an unstable injury. You should follow these safety measures to protect yourself:

• Do not sit in a car with your knees touching the dashboard
• Move your seat further back
• Stretch out your legs

5. Limbs, Hands, and Feet

Long bones, intricate hand structures, and specialized foot anatomy provide definitive markers for growth interruptions, laterality, and human rights violations.

Humans share six primary long bone types on each side: the humerus, radius, and ulna in the upper limbs, and the femur, tibia, and fibula in the lower limbs. Over 4 million years ago, standing upright led anatomists to distinguish upper limbs for complex tasks and lower limbs for locomotion. Terrestrial animals with modified forelimbs often have them shorter than hind limbs.

Temporary interruptions in childhood bone growth caused by illness or malnutrition leave visible parallel lines of increased density known as Harris lines. Once normal growth resumes, the body eventually reabsorbs these white parallel lines.

A pathologist and the author identified multiple Harris lines on a deceased young boy's X-rays. These lines correlated with the annual trauma and stress of enduring abuse during his grandfather's visits.

Thalidomide, manufactured in the late 1950s and early 1960s to relieve morning sickness, disrupted fetal development depending on the exact day it was taken. It caused central brain damage around day 20, upper limb growth disruption around day 24, and lower limb disruption up to day 28. In the UK, the drug was withdrawn in 1961 by which time around 2,000 babies had been born with associated defects.

About 90 per cent of humans are right-handed, which correlates with right-side skeletal dominance. The dominant side's bones tend to be longer, wider, and stronger because of enhanced blood supply and increased muscle mass.

Hands, Feet, and War Crimes

Over a quarter of the 200-plus bones in the adult human skeleton are found in the paired hands. Thirty-four muscles operate each hand, providing versatility and precision movements. Lacking a true opposable thumb equivalent, the human foot still shares homologous structures with the hand and can be trained to perform complex tasks.

Police divers training in Loch Lomond found body parts in black bin bags. The author helped determine they belonged to a male in his late teens or early twenties with dark hair and a height just over 6 ft, leading police to identify the victim as 18-year-old Barry, murdered by William Beggs.

Clinical imaging of hand bones provides a scientifically reliable method for determining the age of living individuals. Majid, an Afghan refugee assigned an age of sixteen by social workers, was later arrested for rape and murder. Hand radiographs and clavicle scans proved his bones were fully fused, establishing that he was an adult when he entered the UK.

Footprints, shoe prints, and gait analysis provide forensic investigators with valuable clues about a suspect's height, stride, and movement patterns. You can examine these movement dynamics directly:

• Walk in slow motion and note where each limb is during the different phases of the cycle

Stable isotope analysis of toenail tissue reveals shifts in plant-based diets and can indicate a person's geographic migration. Professor Wolfram Meier-Augenstein used a child's big toenail to reconstruct his dietary life history, proving he had recently moved from Pakistan to the UK under his father's care before being fatally abused.

Forensic evaluation of photographic evidence from conflict zones can document industrial-scale torture and human rights abuses. A military police photographer code-named Caesar smuggled out over 55,000 images documenting more than 11,000 bodies from Syrian military prisons. You should process large visual datasets methodically to extract reliable evidence:

• Dip-sample into every folder of photographs to gather a broad representation of injury types
• Sort photographs into analytical categories such as ligature marks, bruising, emaciation, and lower limb trauma

6. Historical Milestones and Personal Inventories

Foundational forensic cases like the Ruxton murder demonstrate how multidisciplinary bone analysis solves complex crimes and shapes our understanding of mortality.

The Ruxton Case Foundation

The 1935 Dr Buck Ruxton double murder case served as a foundational milestone for forensic anthropology and interdisciplinary criminal investigation. Dr Buck Ruxton murdered Bella and Mary in Lancaster in September 1935, dismembered them in a bathtub, and dumped the parts over a bridge in Moffat, Scotland.

When Mary Rogerson's body parts were recovered from the water, her outer skin layer was destroyed, but experts successfully retrieved deeper dermal fingerprints and compared them against prints found on household items in her room. In the Ruxton case, scientists successfully used photographic skull superimposition to help confirm Bella's identity.

Exclusive reliance on DNA testing can create legal challenges in court due to unresolved questions surrounding transfer, persistence, and mixed profiles. Investigators must rely on traditional multidisciplinary scientific skills when DNA cannot provide answers.

Anatomical Self-Assessment

An individual's unique life history can be reconstructed by systematically examining the body from head to toe for distinct anatomical markers, scars, and variations. Sue Black inventories her own body, noting her 5 ft 6 ins height, red hair, a corned beef tin scar on her finger, a reversal of gynaecological sterilization, neck arthritis, and a broken collar bone from a motorbike fall.

You can uncover your own life story through a structured examination:

• Start at your head and work down to your toes
• Note all little things that in combination might create a likeness of you and your life

Sue Black plans to have her bones boiled down to remove fat and rearticulated to hang in a dissecting room as a teaching skeleton. Donating a body for anatomical study using advanced preservation methods allows ordinary remains to serve as an exceptional educational tool.

10 Key Ideas

1. Bones are dynamic living organs composed of inorganic minerals for rigidity and organic collagen for flexibility that continuously remodel themselves throughout life.
2. Forensic anthropologists establish a biological profile by extracting information from bones to determine sex, age, ethnicity, and height.
3. Neurocranial bones develop as diploic bone, featuring a porous inner layer nestled between two hard layers that helps forensic experts identify tiny, isolated fragments.
4. The Manchester method builds a face over a skull or 3D scan by layering forty-three muscles, glands, fat pads, and skin when visual identification fails.
5. During judicial hangings, the sudden halt of a long drop can drive the second cervical vertebra's odontoid process backward into the lower brain stem to cause instantaneous death.
6. The thorax is the most frequent target for violent assaults because it houses vital organs and provides a large, easily penetrable surface area with thirty-nine separate bones.
7. The innominate bones of the pelvic girdle are the single most reliable skeletal indicators for determining both the sex and age at death of a deceased individual.
8. Because about 90 per cent of humans are right-handed, the dominant side's bones tend to be longer, wider, and stronger due to enhanced blood supply and increased muscle mass.
9. Over a quarter of the two hundred-plus bones in the adult human skeleton are found in the paired hands, which operate with thirty-four muscles to provide versatility and precision movements.
10. The 1935 Dr Buck Ruxton double murder case served as a foundational milestone for forensic anthropology by demonstrating how multidisciplinary bone analysis solves complex crimes.