Charles Cecil compares being a forensic anthropologist to working on a puzzle-the more “pieces” one has, the better chance they have at solving the mystery.
     Cecil specializes in forensic anthropology and archeology; he works in the Office of the Medical Examiner of the City and County of San Francisco. Due to popular demand, the Anthropology Club organized a slideshow lecture with Cecil who spoke at Skyline last spring semester.
     In a specially crowded room, Cecil showed the audience a number of images from the work he has done from South America, where he did some forensic labor for the United Nations, all the way to Egypt.
     The forum mainly focused on forensic investigations; he showed how to figure out who human remains belonged to using forensic methods.
     “How can you work on someone who’s been in a creek for six weeks?” Cecil asked the audience during his lecture. “Things like age, sex, population and others are just pieces in a puzzle that help narrow down the number of people it could be; you have a better chance of identifying a body.”
     Cecil explained how-depending on what parts of a corpse one has-it is possible to tell the gender of a deceased person. He said that while there are differences in the way female and male skulls are shaped, the best aid for sexing is the pelvis. For instance, some characteristics of female pelvis is a wider bottom than males’ due to the need for a birth canal, which causes their femurs to be more inclined than those of men. He said that is what makes it somewhat easier to tell female from male.
     Cecil also mentioned that bone fusion and dental eruption are helpful in telling -with human remains-what age people were when they died. For instance, he showed an image of a skull for which it was possible to tell the age because the front teeth had not erupted yet.
     He also showed a few slides of skulls and femurs, which-according to Cecil-are a good aid to figure out what population cadavers belonged to because these bones have features that vary between different ethnicities.
     For example, he used some images to explain to the audience the similarities in femur shapes between Asiatic and Native American people and their differences to those of Caucasians and African Americans.
     He also pointed out the differences in the shape of craniums in African Americans, Native Americans and Caucasians. According to Cecil, he shape and length of the cranium as well as the shape of the palate are traits that anthropologists look at when investigating population.
     In addition, he talked about cause of death. For this, he used an example of a boy dead at age 5, who was exhumed years after. When forensics examined it, they found out that the boy had been a victim of child abuse; he showed-for instance-that the skeleton presented a number of fractures in different bones, such as a wrist, the cranium and one of the fore arms.
     Cecil also spoke about cadaver identification. He said that illness history often helps to identify dead bodies. Since certain health conditions leave distinctive marks on peoples bones, forensic anthropologists are able to find out a cadaver’s identity if they come across marks of an illness that a reported missing person had.
     He also showed the audience some pictures taken when he did United Nations work in El Salvador and other images of excavations for anthropology investigations in Egypt.
     Cecil closed the lecture after he answered some questions from the attending students.