come back I'll be done, and we can see how well my findings match what you find out."
"Right, got it.” Parker took his flat-brimmed hat from a peg on the wall. “Anything you need here, Gideon? Paper...?"
"No, thanks. This is just going to be a quick-and-dirty run-through. I called my department from the lodge and asked them to Fed-Ex my tools. They ought to be here tomorrow or the next day, and that's when I'll get down to the nit-picking."
"Well, there's coffee if you want some.” He placed the hat on his head and carefully adjusted it. “I wouldn't mess with those donuts if I were you. Been here about three weeks."
[Back to Table of Contents]
Chapter 4
* * * *
Gideon started with the mandible. He picked it up in both hands, turning it slowly, his elbows on the table. Considering that it had spent thirty years or so grinding along in a glacier, it was in pretty good shape. It was male; he knew that at once from the ruggedness, the large size, and the double prominences of the chin. (In the old days, before the sexest terminology had undergone rehabilitation, males had had square jaws. Now they had chins with double prominences.)
And it was Caucasian, although here he was on less certain ground. Race was trickier than sex—to start with, you had more choices—and mandibles didn't offer a lot of clues. Like most physical anthropologists he didn't always find it easy to say precisely how he knew from looking at it that a certain mandible was Mongoloid, or black, or white. But—like most physical anthropologists—when he knew, he knew. And he had little doubt that the sophisticated calculations of discriminant-function analysis would bear him out when he got his tools to make some measurements (and his calculator to do some arithmetic).
Aging was more straightforward. The mandible had belonged to an adult; that was obvious from the one tooth in place; a third molar, a wisdom tooth with a good five to ten years’ wear on it. Exactly how old an adult? Well, if you took the average age of third-molar eruption—eighteen—and added that five or ten years to it, you came up with an age of twenty-three to twenty-eight, and that was Gideon's guess.
But here he was on shaky ground again. Eighteen might be the average age that wisdom teeth came up, but betting on averages would make you wrong more often than right, especially with something as wildly variable as third-molar eruption. As he liked to point out to his students, an awful lot of people had drowned in San Francisco Bay, which was just three feet deep—on the average.
And as for that “five or ten years of wear,” it sounded fine, but it was even less reliable. Tooth wear depended on what you chewed. If you ate a lot of gritty, abrasive stuff, your teeth were going to wear down quickly. If you lived on puddings and jellies, on the other hand, you'd have a few problems, but worn teeth wouldn't be one of them.
All of which suggested that twenty to thirty-five would be a more prudent estimate than twenty-three to twenty-eight. But what the hell, Gideon thought, why not go with his first impression, which was (as he often told himself) no mere shot in the dark, but the soundly based if intuitive assessment of a highly trained scientist? Well, make it twenty-five, plus or minus three. That would narrow things down and still be reasonably defensible.
Was there anything else the mandible could tell him? No dental work on the molar, of course; that would have made it too easy. And no signs of pathology. Eleven of the twelve tooth sockets were empty, but their margins, where they hadn't been broken or abraded, were crisp, without any sign of bone resorption, which meant that there had been no healing. Which meant in turn that they had loosened and fallen out after death. Which is what usually happened in skulls that took any kind of tossing around. The only reason the third molar was still in place was that it was slightly impacted, wedged crookedly into
"Right, got it.” Parker took his flat-brimmed hat from a peg on the wall. “Anything you need here, Gideon? Paper...?"
"No, thanks. This is just going to be a quick-and-dirty run-through. I called my department from the lodge and asked them to Fed-Ex my tools. They ought to be here tomorrow or the next day, and that's when I'll get down to the nit-picking."
"Well, there's coffee if you want some.” He placed the hat on his head and carefully adjusted it. “I wouldn't mess with those donuts if I were you. Been here about three weeks."
[Back to Table of Contents]
Chapter 4
* * * *
Gideon started with the mandible. He picked it up in both hands, turning it slowly, his elbows on the table. Considering that it had spent thirty years or so grinding along in a glacier, it was in pretty good shape. It was male; he knew that at once from the ruggedness, the large size, and the double prominences of the chin. (In the old days, before the sexest terminology had undergone rehabilitation, males had had square jaws. Now they had chins with double prominences.)
And it was Caucasian, although here he was on less certain ground. Race was trickier than sex—to start with, you had more choices—and mandibles didn't offer a lot of clues. Like most physical anthropologists he didn't always find it easy to say precisely how he knew from looking at it that a certain mandible was Mongoloid, or black, or white. But—like most physical anthropologists—when he knew, he knew. And he had little doubt that the sophisticated calculations of discriminant-function analysis would bear him out when he got his tools to make some measurements (and his calculator to do some arithmetic).
Aging was more straightforward. The mandible had belonged to an adult; that was obvious from the one tooth in place; a third molar, a wisdom tooth with a good five to ten years’ wear on it. Exactly how old an adult? Well, if you took the average age of third-molar eruption—eighteen—and added that five or ten years to it, you came up with an age of twenty-three to twenty-eight, and that was Gideon's guess.
But here he was on shaky ground again. Eighteen might be the average age that wisdom teeth came up, but betting on averages would make you wrong more often than right, especially with something as wildly variable as third-molar eruption. As he liked to point out to his students, an awful lot of people had drowned in San Francisco Bay, which was just three feet deep—on the average.
And as for that “five or ten years of wear,” it sounded fine, but it was even less reliable. Tooth wear depended on what you chewed. If you ate a lot of gritty, abrasive stuff, your teeth were going to wear down quickly. If you lived on puddings and jellies, on the other hand, you'd have a few problems, but worn teeth wouldn't be one of them.
All of which suggested that twenty to thirty-five would be a more prudent estimate than twenty-three to twenty-eight. But what the hell, Gideon thought, why not go with his first impression, which was (as he often told himself) no mere shot in the dark, but the soundly based if intuitive assessment of a highly trained scientist? Well, make it twenty-five, plus or minus three. That would narrow things down and still be reasonably defensible.
Was there anything else the mandible could tell him? No dental work on the molar, of course; that would have made it too easy. And no signs of pathology. Eleven of the twelve tooth sockets were empty, but their margins, where they hadn't been broken or abraded, were crisp, without any sign of bone resorption, which meant that there had been no healing. Which meant in turn that they had loosened and fallen out after death. Which is what usually happened in skulls that took any kind of tossing around. The only reason the third molar was still in place was that it was slightly impacted, wedged crookedly into
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