'The bones don't lie'

Read the whole story here.

He suspects the mystery man -- he knows it is a man from the large pelvis -- is a drowned derelict. He has already made his “eyeball diagnosis.” A Mongoloid, most likely American Indian. He doesn’t need a computer, but he likes the extra affirmation.

“I’ve seen thousands of skulls. I know what a typical black male and a typical American Indian male and a typical Caucasoid male looks like. And females. The way I work it only takes three or four minutes of looking at the skull. The way I use this program, I go ahead and take the measurements and put them in here. And if the computer and I agree, then I’m home free.”

He punches in the measurements:

“Facial height.”

Click … click … click.

“Nasal breadth.”

Click … click.

“Orbital breadth.”

Click … click … click.

When the numbers are all in, he clicks “process” and the program checks his measurements against several hundred skulls -- many less than Snow has analyzed himself -- in a database managed by forensic anthropologists at the University of Tennessee.

The results come back in seconds. “American Indian male. And it’s 86 percent positive.”

Posted by Dienekes at July 28, 2004 07:49 PM | PermaLink