Death's+Acre+Notes+33-45+AF

-the body was found by three dove hunters and one bird dog, floodplain, the "bottoms" -soil is soft and sandy -forensic anthropologist-looks at bodies that are bloated, blasted, buggy, rotted -flesh decays and bones endure -when examining a body, the goal is to make a positive identification, want to determine the cause of death -Big Four: sex, race, age, stature -the face was gone, absense of flesh simplifies the task -a corpse's skin can be deceptive, if a body is bloated, the facial tissues can swell, which is harder to tell the person's gender -had a full set of teeth, 30, wisdom teeth -evolutionary changes humans undergo- without gnawing on animal bones is loss of our third molars -if you find a skull where the third molars havent erupted, does not mean the person was not an adult -if the third molars have erupted then 18 years or older -they were looking at an adult woman -adult pelvis-the sacrum, the two hipbones, the right innominate bone and the left innominate -the sacrum acts as a weight distributor -before puberty each inominate bone consists of three separate bones: the ilium, the ischium, and the pubis -pubis-the bone that spans the front of the abdomen -to allow the baby's head to pass through, the female hipbone gradually broadens and the pubic bone gets longer, angling father foward to form more of an arch for the birth canal -male pelvis is narrower, his femur hangs straight down below his hipbones, in an adult female the femurs incline slightly inward beneath the hips -having a pelvis would mean tat the skull was a woman -pelvis helps to tell age -if your skull can touch both the base of the nasal opening and the tip of the chin, your skull is orthognathic (flat) and probably Caucasoid -nasal opening broad, with vertical guttering in the upper jaw, which is different from horizontal sill at the base of a Caucasian's nasal opening -cranial vault is a complex assembly of seven separate bones; the frontal bone, a pair of parietal bones, temporal bones, sphenoid, the occipital bone -where the cranium's seven bones meet, sutures