#forensic science

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To mummify a modern person in the fashion that ancient Egyptians used, the donor's family gave written permission for his body to be used in a controlled scientific study. The researchers settled on a 76-year-old Caucasian man who died of a heart attack. They nicknamed the man "E. M. Balm." Researchers aimed to replicate Egyptian mummification circa 1250 BCE using only period-accurate materials and the same tools ancient Egyptians used. Following ancient texts, they extracted the brain, which Egyptians believed was useless, through the nasal cavity using hooked bronze instruments. They first tried scooping the brain out using a hooked rod, but the tissue was too soft & wouldn't come out. They finally took to squirting water up E. M. Balm's nose, then used the rod to whisk the brain into a slurry. After that, it poured right out, like a milkshake—a strawberry milkshake, to be precise. Following this, they made a 3 1/2 in. (9 cm) incision in Balm's abdomen & removed the spleen, liver, gallbladder, lungs & 22 feet of intestines.

With organs removed, they cleaned the abdomen with palm wine & myrrh, then stuffed frankincense into the skull. Ancient Egyptians also used pistachio resin, beeswax & castor oil. Ramses the Great had peppercorns shoved up his nose. Next, researchers dehydrated the body using natron (a mineral of equal parts salt & baking soda). This sucks moisture out of flesh, making it essentially jerky. Balm looked just like Ramses the Great, with his skin tightening & shriveling, lips retracting & the skin turning a brownish yellow. His limbs became as stiff as tree branches, & his weight dropped from 188 lb (85 kg) to 79 lb (36 kg). They massaged his body with lotus, cedar, & palm oils, making the mummy easier to handle. His weight dropped after another 3 months to 51 lb (23 kg). He was wrapped in linens.

A plastic bottle bobbing off Okinawa, Japan, looked like an ordinary piece of ocean litter until researchers peered inside. They found a live, swimming female three-spot swimming crab inside, still healthy & growing in its prison for 62 days based on goose barnacle growth. The rate at which barnacles grow is a known ecological "clock," allowing researchers to estimate how long an object has been at sea. The crab entered the bottle as a juvenile & was still small enough to slip through the neck of the plastic wine bottle easily. But as it grew inside, the shell (carapace's width) was more than 3x the bottle opening, making escape impossible. The bottle opening was only 0.96 in. (24.5 mm), while its carapace's width was 3.47 in. (88.23 mm). The bottle was high-density polyethylene (HDPE), which made it buoyant & durable, allowing long drift times.

Researchers were puzzled about how the crab managed to stay alive for 2 months trapped in such a small enclosure, so they cut the bottle open & took out the crab, surprised to see it healthy & swimming. But the only way to determine what it ate during the two months was to dissect it to reconstruct its survival conditions. This is standard practice in ecological forensics. It turns out that small fish, like rough triggerfish & Indo-Pacific sergeant fish, swam inside the bottle, & once inside, they didn't recognize the exit "door." To a fish, the bottleneck looks like a dark, dead end, not an exit. This provided the crab with an easy meal. Fish entering the bottle essentially swam straight into the crab's mouth. The crab also ate some green & brown algae that drifted inside the bottle. Since the bottle's neck allowed water flow, it prevented suffocation by supplying oxygen.

This story is sad. Archaeologists working in Tell Brak, one of the earliest known cities in the world located in ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day Syria), found the skeleton of a baby who lived about 6,000 years ago. By studying the baby's teeth, scientists estimated the age of death to be 6-9 months—roughly the age when modern infants begin to sit up. When they7 exAmined the bones, they were dismayed to find that the infant had 4 broken ribs, an abnormally shaped thigh bone & porous lesions on both sides of the skull. These lesions show that the body was trying to heal, meaning the baby didn't die immediately after the injuries. Researchers ruled out natural causes like disease, birth trauma, or vitamin deficiency like rickets. The pattern of injuries instead looked like repeated physical abuse, attributed to its caregiver, because researchers cannot know that it was the parents, because in many ancient cultures multiple family members, not just parents, helped raise children.

If this interpretation is accurate, it may be among the earliest, if not the earliest, recorded cases of child abuse—proof that human cruelty coexisted with innovation and advancement even in the earliest cities on Earth. Scientists considered that the child may have had osteogenesis imperfecta (OI), a genetic disorder that affects how the body makes collagen, the protein that gives bones their strength & flexibility. People with OI (or infants) can suffer multiple fractures from very minor bumps or even normal handling. In the case of the Tell Brak infant, however, they found that the fractures were localized (4 ribs & 1 thigh bone) & didn't match the typical pattern of OI, which is usually widespread with symmetrical fragility across the skeleton.