dismemberment. If you hold the adjacent bones together in their natural positions, you can see how some of the marks start on one bone and end on the other. How could that happen unless they were together when the cuts were made? Case closed; We're dealing with a single body.'
He put the vertebrae down. “Now get going with your analysis. And remember, start with the sex.'
'What difference does it make what we start with?” someone wanted to know. “Why the sex first?'
'Partly because you have to know the sex to draw other conclusions from it. Men and women have different proportions, as you may have noticed.'
'No shit,” one of the Americans said.
'But also,” Gideon said with a smile, “sexing a skeleton is easier than anything else, and it's nice to start with something easy. If you just flipped a coin you'd be right half the time. Compared to determining age, there's nothing to it.'
'For you, maybe,” someone muttered.
'For you too,” he said, not quite truthfully. “You've all watched me do it. Now let's get to it.'
The exercise went slowly while the groups measured, calculated, and debated. Gideon was itching to have a go at the new material himself, but resigned himself to wait, enjoying the teacherly satisfaction of watching his students put to competent use what they had learned from him.
At a little before ten, the three groups began their reports. They were unanimous in their determination of sex: the skeleton was that of a male. Gideon congratulated them and announced his agreement. A moment's glance at the pelvis had confirmed what he already knew.
The groups also agreed on height; not surprising since all the long bones were there, and the application of the Trotter and Gleser equations was an easy task. But the estimate was surprisingly low: five-feet-four, plus or minus two inches. His own quick and dirty estimate from the vertebrae had been five-eight, and he couldn't possibly have been four inches off. Two, maybe. Besides, Joly had already told him his findings matched Alain's description. The attendees had fouled up somehow. He'd go over their work with them in a few minutes and straighten them out. Odd that all three groups should get it so wrong.
The reports on race were next. Given the complexity— some anthropologists said the impossibility—of determining ancestry from the skeleton, he hadn't been going to ask it of them. But they had wanted to try, using the few simplified guidelines he'd given them (and, he was sure, the various stereotypes about skull thickness, brain-cavity-size, and “primitive” features that many of them had brought with them). Gideon let them go ahead, confident the experience would be instructive if nothing else.
It was. Two of the groups couldn't agree among themselves and gave up trying, their preconceptions in tatters. This Gideon thought of as salutary and not unexpected. But the final group's report was a dandy.
'We have determined,” said the grave, slow-spoken female CID inspector who presented their report, “that the remains are those of a person of the Mongoloid race.'
'Mongoloid,” he was assured. “Quite probably northeastern Asiatic.'
Anyone but the solid, relentlessly sober Inspector Hawkins and he might have thought his leg was being pulled. “Now where the hell did you get Mongoloid from?” he asked.
Inspector Hawkins was unfazed. “We applied intermembral ratio analysis and got a tibial-femoral index of 81.4,” she replied without tripping over a syllable.
Well, she had her theory right, if nothing else. A tibial-femoral index of 81.4 meant that the tibia—the shin bone—was 81.4 percent as long as the thigh bone. And anything less than 83 percent was generally accepted as Mongoloid, reflecting the shortness of the Asiatic lower leg compared to the upper leg. In other races the typical ratio was much higher.
'Did you take the physiological lengths of the bones, not the maximum lengths?” he asked.
For the first time the sturdy Inspector Hawkins faltered. “The...ah...physiological lengths?'
That explained it, he thought with some relief. For a moment there he'd started to wonder what was going on. As racial criteria went, intermembral ratios weren't bad, but they required trickier measurements than he'd been able to present in class. He'd spent a few minutes talking about the principles involved, but he hadn't expected anyone to try and apply them. Fine, it would be one more good lesson for them to take back: using half-understood techniques was a mistake that could result in ludicrous errors. Better to call in an expert when you weren't sure what you were doing.
'Here, let me show you how it's done,” he said, and taking the sliding calipers he moved to the table and picked up the right tibia. “Now, the physiological length of a long bone is its functional length, which you...'
His voice faded as he became aware of the odd heft of the bone. Puzzled, he looked more closely at it. Then quickly at the other tibia, and then both femurs. It was the first time he'd really examined them, and after twenty or thirty seconds’ study, he was still puzzled.
For one thing, Inspector Hawkins was right, even if she'd gone about it wrong. He didn't need the calipers to tell him that the tibia was quite short compared to the femur. But it was the lightness of these normally dense leg bones that bothered him; that and their shape. There was something odd about them; not wildly odd, but . . . something.
'Strange...” he said, more to himself than anyone else, and ran his fingers down the dusty, dry, brown length of a femur.
The class had seen him at work before and they were used to this. They waited patiently.
Not Joly. He stepped up to the table. “What's strange?'
'The bowing,” Gideon said abstractedly, continuing to move his hand over the bone. “Look at the shaft. And do you see the torsion in both tibias—just a little, as if someone grabbed each end and gave it a small twist?'
'No,” Joly said.
'Do you know what that means?” Gideon went on, still staring at the bones.
