a convenient excuse to ignore how awkwardly dinner had ended.
Miranda had keyed dozens of measurements into her laptop, and was running ForDisc, software we’d developed at UT to compare unknown bones with our forensic data bank, which included thousands of skeletons whose sex, race, and stature were known. Might ForDisc shed light on the racial and geographic origin of our John Doe—or Jesus Doe?
Miranda scrolled the cursor and clicked. “Gee, here’s a shocker,” she said. “It’s a dude.” I laughed; given the robustness of the skull and the narrowness of the pelvis, there’d been no doubt in my mind that the skeleton was male. “Hmm,” she mused. “You measured the stature directly, right?”
“I did—head to heel—and added a bit to make up for the missing cartilage.”
“And what’d you get?”
“About one hundred sixty-six centimeters; five five.”
“ Hmm, ” she repeated. “ForDisc puts him at one hundred seventy-five centimeters—nearly five nine.”
“That’s odd. Really odd.” Could my tape measure be off—by four full inches? I stepped back and took another look at the skeleton. Suddenly I was struck by how unusual the proportions were—an anomaly I’d registered subconsciously but had failed to appreciate fully. “Look how long of limb and short of trunk he is,” I said to Miranda and Stefan. “This guy was like a human stork.” ForDisc estimated stature by extrapolating from femur and tibia length, and normally that formula was quite accurate. But the formula was fooled by a leggy guy like this—a reminder that it’s the exceptions and outliers that make life interesting and keep science challenging.
The software was also handicapped by the age—or rather the youth—of its data. ForDisc knew nineteenth-and twentieth-century skeletons well—especially modern white Americans—but ancient bones were terra incognita to it. And so, like us, ForDisc didn’t know if our guy was first century or fourteenth, if he was Palestinian or Parisian.
“Well, rats,” said Miranda. “I want a ForDisc upgrade. One that has time-travel and crystal-ball features.”
I was disappointed, too, but Stefan seemed unfazed. “No problem. Let’s get the samples for the C-14 test. That’s the big question anyway: How old are the bones—seven hundred years or two thousand?” He turned to me. “Do you prefer to be a dentist or a bone surgeon? I brought a saw if you want to cut a cross section from the femur.”
“Dentist,” I said. “Pulling teeth is easier. Besides, it doesn’t fill the air with bone dust. Or with plague spores. What if this guy had the plague—wasn’t there an epidemic here in the fourteenth century?” Miranda nodded. “So shouldn’t we be worried? Shouldn’t we be wearing masks?”
“Yes, but no,” said Miranda. “It was really bad here. An infected ship anchored at Marseilles in January of 1348, and the rats swam ashore. Plague hit Avignon two weeks later. Within a matter of months, two-thirds of the people were dead—twenty, thirty thousand people. Corpses rotting in the streets, choking the river.”
“Terrible,” I said. “Must have been terrifying, too.”
“A lot of people blamed the Jews,” she went on. “All over Europe, Jews were driven from cities. Entire Jewish settlements were massacred. Horrific. But here, the pope at the time of the plague—Clement the Sixth—defended the Jews, said they weren’t to blame. He even offered them refuge.”
“That took guts,” I said. “The townspeople could’ve turned on him.”
“No kidding,” she agreed. “What’s the old saying? ‘The friend of my scapegoat is my scapegoat’? But plague doesn’t make hibernating time-bomb endospores the way some other bacteria do.”
“And you know this how?” I pressed.
“I studied up on the way over last week—journal articles on plague were my in-flight entertainment.” Despite my lingering annoyance about the unpleasant turn the
Miranda had keyed dozens of measurements into her laptop, and was running ForDisc, software we’d developed at UT to compare unknown bones with our forensic data bank, which included thousands of skeletons whose sex, race, and stature were known. Might ForDisc shed light on the racial and geographic origin of our John Doe—or Jesus Doe?
Miranda scrolled the cursor and clicked. “Gee, here’s a shocker,” she said. “It’s a dude.” I laughed; given the robustness of the skull and the narrowness of the pelvis, there’d been no doubt in my mind that the skeleton was male. “Hmm,” she mused. “You measured the stature directly, right?”
“I did—head to heel—and added a bit to make up for the missing cartilage.”
“And what’d you get?”
“About one hundred sixty-six centimeters; five five.”
“ Hmm, ” she repeated. “ForDisc puts him at one hundred seventy-five centimeters—nearly five nine.”
“That’s odd. Really odd.” Could my tape measure be off—by four full inches? I stepped back and took another look at the skeleton. Suddenly I was struck by how unusual the proportions were—an anomaly I’d registered subconsciously but had failed to appreciate fully. “Look how long of limb and short of trunk he is,” I said to Miranda and Stefan. “This guy was like a human stork.” ForDisc estimated stature by extrapolating from femur and tibia length, and normally that formula was quite accurate. But the formula was fooled by a leggy guy like this—a reminder that it’s the exceptions and outliers that make life interesting and keep science challenging.
The software was also handicapped by the age—or rather the youth—of its data. ForDisc knew nineteenth-and twentieth-century skeletons well—especially modern white Americans—but ancient bones were terra incognita to it. And so, like us, ForDisc didn’t know if our guy was first century or fourteenth, if he was Palestinian or Parisian.
“Well, rats,” said Miranda. “I want a ForDisc upgrade. One that has time-travel and crystal-ball features.”
I was disappointed, too, but Stefan seemed unfazed. “No problem. Let’s get the samples for the C-14 test. That’s the big question anyway: How old are the bones—seven hundred years or two thousand?” He turned to me. “Do you prefer to be a dentist or a bone surgeon? I brought a saw if you want to cut a cross section from the femur.”
“Dentist,” I said. “Pulling teeth is easier. Besides, it doesn’t fill the air with bone dust. Or with plague spores. What if this guy had the plague—wasn’t there an epidemic here in the fourteenth century?” Miranda nodded. “So shouldn’t we be worried? Shouldn’t we be wearing masks?”
“Yes, but no,” said Miranda. “It was really bad here. An infected ship anchored at Marseilles in January of 1348, and the rats swam ashore. Plague hit Avignon two weeks later. Within a matter of months, two-thirds of the people were dead—twenty, thirty thousand people. Corpses rotting in the streets, choking the river.”
“Terrible,” I said. “Must have been terrifying, too.”
“A lot of people blamed the Jews,” she went on. “All over Europe, Jews were driven from cities. Entire Jewish settlements were massacred. Horrific. But here, the pope at the time of the plague—Clement the Sixth—defended the Jews, said they weren’t to blame. He even offered them refuge.”
“That took guts,” I said. “The townspeople could’ve turned on him.”
“No kidding,” she agreed. “What’s the old saying? ‘The friend of my scapegoat is my scapegoat’? But plague doesn’t make hibernating time-bomb endospores the way some other bacteria do.”
“And you know this how?” I pressed.
“I studied up on the way over last week—journal articles on plague were my in-flight entertainment.” Despite my lingering annoyance about the unpleasant turn the
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