“Whew, John! Don’t
“You were so deep in thought, I didn’t want to interrupt.” John set down two paper coffee cups. His own was already emptied; he must have drunk it while watching. “With the great Italian coffee they brew here, I don’t know why anybody drinks this lousy instant, but that’s all there is. Here’s a magnifying glass. Do you still want calipers? So far I haven’t been able to figure out sign language for them.”
“No, a ruler would be fine.”
“Okay, back in a minute.”
Gideon took a swig of the coffee without tasting it, and put the mandible under the glass. Yes, he had been right. The cusps of the second molar were definitely worn down. The third molar showed less attrition—just a little abrading of the cusp tips and the tooth edges. It was impossible, of course, to make a reliable age estimate based on tooth wear unless you knew what sort of food had been habitually consumed. Diet could make all the difference in the world. The
His educated eye studied the two teeth. The second molar was roughly twice as worn as the third. Now, assuming that the second had erupted at twelve and the third at, say, twenty (here plain guesswork took over, third molar eruption time being notoriously variable), then—assuming that the teeth had been wearing down at the same rate ever since they had come up— what age would the person have been when the second molar had been chewing away for twice as long as the first and was therefore twice as worn?
It was like a Sunday paper riddle. He took another sip of the coffee, tasted this one, and grimaced. Then he made a simple matrix on one of the sheets of paper that John had carefully torn from his notebook, and filled it in.
Twenty-eight. At twenty-eight the second molar would have been masticating for sixteen years, the third for eight. But twenty-eight seemed young for these bones. What if the third molar had erupted late, at twenty-five? Then he would have been… thirty-eight, at which time the second molar would have been grinding away for twenty-six years, and the third molar for thirteen years. Thirty-eight looked about right for these remains. He wasn’t sure just how he knew that, but he had long ago learned to trust his instincts when it came to bones. Anyway, they weren’t instincts; they were intuitive responses to subliminal but well-learned cues. Yes, he’d bet on thirty-eight, plus or minus a couple of years.
What had he learned so far, then? He knew the envelope held what was left of a male, about thirty-eight, short and muscular, Oriental, and definitely not one of his attackers—at least not one that he’d seen. Who was it then? What had he been doing in the car?
Suddenly realizing that he’d been leaning stiffly forward in absolute concentration for fifteen minutes, he slumped back in his chair and finished the last of the coffee, satisfied and aware that he was enjoying himself very much. He picked up the mandible again. There was something else about the tooth-wear pattern, something that rang a bell…
John returned with a metal ruler. “Hey—” Gideon held up his hand and John stopped obediently, nailed to the floor.
It was the second molar that was bothering him—the oddly eroded, concave depression on the anterobuccal edge. He had seen something like that before; where was it?
With startling clarity, it came back to him. It had been one of the great triumphs of his graduate years at Wisconsin. He and the great, the studiedly eccentric, Professor Campbell had been in the laboratory studying a cranium and mandible that had been plowed up by a farmer and then turned over to the university’s physical anthropology laboratory by the Madison police, for help with identification. It was a routine occurrence. Usually such bones turned out to be remnants of centuries-old Indian burials, but this one hadn’t.
They had already identified the cranium as that of a Caucasian in his fifties, buried between ten and thirty years before. Professor Campbell had puffed away at his pipe, chewing audibly on the stem, his thick, carefully combed eyebrows arched high. He had muttered to himself about the remarkable, saucer-shaped depressions in the first and second molars. “Hmm,” he said (puff), “hmm. What do you think, Oliver? What could it be (puff-puff), what could have done it? Hm?”
Gideon, a second-year doctoral student, had sat, shy and deferential, waiting for the great man to answer his own question.
“Just don’t know,” Professor Campbell said, through a veil of fragrant smoke. “What could do that? Never seen it before.” The celebrated eyebrows frowned in defeat.
Gideon cleared his throat. “Sir,” he said, “could it be from a pipe? Would smoking a pipe for maybe decades do it?”
The professor had been delighted. He whooped, pushed his massive body from his chair, and shambled to his desk, rummaging in drawers until he came up with a dental mirror. Together they had explored his own right lower molars. Gideon was embarrassed and delighted by the intimacy, and they had quickly found it: the same depression in the same place.
“Oliver,” the professor said, “that’s splendid, splendid!”
After nearly twenty years, Gideon could still bask in the glow. There was even a little more. “Professor,” he had said, made bolder by success, “do you think we could hypothesize that he was right-handed? Don’t most pipe smokers hold their pipes in their dominant hands? And don’t—”
“Of course! Excellent! People who hold their pipes in their right hands generally put them into the right sides of their mouths. Wonderful! The police will never understand it. To determine handedness from a mandible! They’ll be talking about it for years!”
Gideon had checked that same afternoon on a sample of fifty pipe smokers in Sterling Hall (smoking pipes had been
And now here it was again, the same depression in the second molar. The man had smoked a pipe, and in all probability he’d been left-handed. Now—
“Uh, Doc,” John said, “do you mind if I watch?”
