Instant Genius - Brian Switek: How did bones evolve?

Episode Date: December 5, 2019

Brian Switek, the pen name of science writer and fossil fanatic Riley Black. This year she released a book called The Secret Life of Bones: Their Origins, Evolution and Fate (£9.99, Duckworth), which as well as explaining how and why we evolved bones, explains the relationship us humans have with these sturdy struts of osseous tissue. In this week's episode of the Science Focus Podcast, she helpfully explains what a bone is and how they turn into fossils, as well as how they revealed Richard III’s diet, were historically used to justify scientific racism, and why Hollywood is getting aliens all wrong. Let us know what you think with a review or a rating wherever you listen to your podcasts. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Bill Bryson: What should we know about how our bodies work? Gaia Vince: What part does culture play in our evolution? Angela Saini: Is racism creeping into science? Neil Gemmell: The genetic hunt for the Loch Ness Monster Nathan Lents: Everything that's wrong with the human body Steve Brusatte: The truth about dinosaurs   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit namea audio.com to learn more. So here's a little secret about what is and what is not a fossil. It's really only determined by time. So it's generally argued that anything more than any remnant of life, older than about 10,000 years, counts as a fossil. Whereas anything younger than that, anything more recent than that, does not.

You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com. We'll look out for us in your app store. Hello, I'm Alexander McNamara, online editor at BBC Science Focus. And this week, I got the chance to talk to Brian Sweetech, the pen name of science writer and fossil fanatic Riley Black.

This year, she released a book called The Secret Life of Bones, which as well as explaining how and why we evolve bones, explains the relationships as humans have with these sturdy struts of osseous tissue. I won't lie, other than first-hand experience of what happens when they break, I didn't know much about bones before we spoke, so she helpfully explained what a bone is and how they turn into fossils, as well as how they revealed Richard the Third's diet, were historically used to justify scientific racism,

and why Hollywood is getting aliens all wrong. Let us know what you think with a review, wherever you listen to your podcasts. I didn't really think of bones as being much other than that sort of thing that keeps your body in some sort of rigid shape and break when you play sports too much. So can you just explain what exactly is a bone? Right. So when we talk about bones, we're really talking about two different things, even though we use the same word. There's the material bone, the tissue bone, and that's made

up of collagen, which is a flexible protein. material and hydroxy appetite, which is the mineral part. So you basically have a soft, flexible part and a hard part in different proportions that make up the tissue bone, wherever it appears, whether we're talking about, you know, the leg bone, a skull bone, a piece of armor from crocodile's skin, anything like that, it's made of the tissue bone. But oftentimes we talk about our bones, pluralizing our skeleton, we're talking about elements of that skeleton. So individual bits and interlocking pieces or sometimes not interlocking pieces that make up what the skeleton is. So, yeah, bone has those two distinct meanings.

There's the element itself, like a femur or, you know, a frontal bone or something like that. But then there's also the tissue bone. And they don't always necessarily go together. A good counter example is sharks. That sharks have skeletons. They have bones, but they're not made of the tissue bone. They're made of cartilage. So that's a good example of how bone can sometimes have different meanings.

That's funny. I don't sort of imagine when I think of fish, and I guess sharks are different from fish and the fact that their bones are different. Yeah, so sharks are fish, and that they share a common ancestry and they belong to the larger group of animals that we call fish. But, yeah, they have skeletons that are made of cartilage instead of ossified bone. This seems to be an evolutionary reversal that earlier fish, that their shark ancestors may have had bony skeletons, skeletons made of bone. and that they eventually switched this out for cartilage. It used to be thought it was the other way around. The sharks were relatively archaic or primitive animals, and it seems that they're quite advanced in a lot of ways.

But, yeah, that's one way to separate out what we call the cartilaginous fish, so basically sharks and rays from their living relatives. But that only makes sense, basically, from our modern viewpoint. If you follow that deep into the past, you're going to find all these changes to and fro in terms of where bone shows up in the fossil record. That's interesting. That point of evolution is that bones seem like something that a lot of animals have in some shape or form.

How did we actually evolve bones from the very beginning to what we know of them now? Yeah, so there are the two distinct parts of the early prehistory of our own skeletons. The first is laying out the body plan of what our skeleton would eventually become. So if you were to go back about 515 million years ago, so to what we know is the Cambrian period, to a place like the Burgess Shale that's been found in Canada, or there are some sites in China that preserve these records. You would mostly see a world of invertebrates.

You'd see lots of arthropods and things with jointed appendages and compound eyes and stuff all over the place. They see the little squiggly things that might just look like a worm. In fact, this is what we thought they were when they were first discovered in the fossil record. but these are proto-vertebrates, things with names like Pecaya, and they had a head end, so all the sensory basically apparatus put in a single place towards the front of the body, and along their back, they had what's called a Noda cord, the sort of flexible cord that was the precursor of our own spinal columns. This is pretty important already, so you not only have bilateral symmetry, you not only have the beginnings of a spine, but you have the major sensory organs of the body all in one place,

So the skull is eventually going to wrap around. So this is an important point, even though bone hadn't evolved yet and went for another 100 million years, and I'll get to that in just a second, the fact that our proto-vertebral ancestors had this form basically laid out what our bodies were going to be. You stick a couple of fins on there around the chest and hip region. You have more or less what our body plan is. So bone itself showed up about 100 million years later. It started out as an external armor.

This material called Aspidin, that's a mineralized material that's almost like teeth, very, very hard. And it covered the bodies of some of these ancient fish. And basically when bodies evolved to make these mineralized materials, make these hardened materials that could act as exterior armor, the inside of the body, the internal skeleton that was already there and made of cartilage at this point, started to become ossified or started to turn to bone. So you basically had these multiple steps to create an internal skeleton that you had the basic layout that was formed, more or less in cartilage and other soft tissues. Then you had bone form on the outside, and then the internal skeleton started to change into bone as that outside armor got lost. So it's not this easy straight line progression, but a lot of shifting back and forth.

And what's the difference between something that's had this outside armor as compared to the inside? What was the benefit of the bones going inside? So the bones growing inside bodies provided more structural support in some ways, allowed it stronger anchor points for muscles. At least this is the hypothesis. It's difficult to test some of these things unless we can go back 400 some odd million years. But the general idea is that they provided this internal structure, much the way that our skeletons and our own bodies work for this push and pull of the muscles

to allow bodies to move with a little bit more power. get in these early fish, these swimming muscles to twitch a little bit faster or a little bit stronger to evade their predators, also be a little bit perhaps more resilient. The bone is self-repairing in a really wonderful way. So if these fish were injured, somehow, you know, the initial bone as spidden, it was just like a tooth that wouldn't repair. But eventually, as bone became more interactive, more reactive to the world around it, is able to repair itself. And that's a pretty handy adaptation to have. And that's why even our own skeletons, you know, you break your wrists or you fall down and you break a toe or something. That bone, you know, you still want to go to the doctor, but that bone will start to repair itself almost immediately. That's such a mind-bogglingly large amount of time. I always say, like, it's taken 500 million odd years, give or take, to get us this far. Is it, like, how come it's taken, like, you know, what sort of directions and paths have we taken along that huge amount of time? Yeah, so bone is very versatile.

Some of my favorite bones are bones that we don't have. So sort of these alternate evolutionary forms that we might be similar in some ways because all vertebrates, we share a basic body plan thanks to those very ancient ancestors. But for example, in a giant ground sloths that used to live in the Americas, that they have bones that grew in their skin called osteoderm. So they had bone armor, these little pebbles that you sometimes find, that cover their bodies as a form of protection. In terosaurs, the flying reptiles that lived alongside the dinosaurs, they had specialized bones

that stuck up from their equivalent other collarbone and pointed inward towards the neck to hold up this bit of membrane that gave them a little bit more surface area to stay aloft. And there are all these other bones that we don't have. But if you look at most vertebrate skeletons, if you go to a museum and you look at the skeleton of any given dinosaur, or a skeleton of a lion or tiger, whatever mammal that you're looking at, you can find most of the same bones in our own bodies, that you can identify the frontal bone, the parietal bone, the dentary, which, you know, those are all skull bones, you know, the dentry that holds the teeth.

You can see the femur or thigh bone. You can see ribs and vertebrae. So the expressions might be different because of different, you know, adaptations, different modes of living, different ecologies, different history. but what's really wonderful about skeletons is how many different forms have evolved basically along the same evolutionary chassis that you can look at something like a T-Rex

or like a river otter or a hedgehog or something like that and see pretty much the same bones that are in your own skeleton just slightly differently shaped. And so how far back do we have to go to sort of get to a point where you go, okay, this is the first, is it say, proto-vertebrate or the first sort of kind of vertebrate who said,

okay, you know what, having femurs and collarbones are a good thing, make that the blueprint for everything. Right, so for many of the vertebrates that live on land, so this would be accepting fish. So we're talking in these terms, in terms of amphibians, in terms of reptiles and birds and mammals, about 375 million years ago, and this is when this great,

what's often been called this, or the invasion of land, or sort of the transition to land occurred, where you had fish that looked somewhat like lungfish or like the sealicant, that fish that was rediscovered and thought to be extinct and found off South Africa and now lives throughout the Pacific. Their lobed fin fish and that their fins have these clumps of bone in them that are arranged more or less the same way that the bones inside our limbs are, that these are some of our closest fishy relatives and what the first land-dwelling vertebrates are tetrapods. that means vertebrates with four limbs, you know, tetrapods, meaning basically four limbs, evolved from.

And they initially lived at the water's edge. They lived in these swamps. They were trying to catch insects that had already moved onto land. So it was kind of a buffet for whoever could drag themselves out along the water line and snap things up. And that might have been the initial impetus to get these fish onto land. So you had something like a lungfish that evolved. limbs and fingers in swampy environments to basically push themselves around and paddle around in this weed-choked environment. And then because plants and insects were already on land and nobody was eating

all this food, there's ripe opportunity for them to become more and more adapted to life on land. And that's when we get the beginnings of amphibians and reptiles and eventually mammals and birds and vertebrates as we know them. But they're all based upon the same body plan that has a skull that's attached to a spine that has a, you know, pectoral or chest region with arms sticking out of it and the pelvic region or hip region with legs sticking out of that. So, you know, any bird, any reptile, any mammal that you can think of, is either a direct expression of that body plan or have been modified from it. So snakes, for example, even though they've lost their lens, are still considered tetrapods. It's weird. I guess now that I think about it, when I think of like all the truly

sort of alien-looking creatures that I can think of. They tend to be fish or, you know, live not fish, exactly. That would be the wrong term, but they live in the sea. And those are the sort of weird ones. I guess that's, they've had a different evolutionary path to everything else that I sort of think of when it comes to land animals. Absolutely. So, you know, in the oceans, you have things like starfish, for example, you know, kinoderms that have radial symmetry or symmetry that's based in a circle, pretty much, that you can divide them in any number of ways and still get two identical halves. You can't do that to us for most vertebrates or, you know, arthropods things with, you know, all kinds of what we consider extra legs or cephalopods,

things like octopus and squid that seems so different from us. And I think this is, you know, worth noting. I talk about this a little bit in the book that, you know, if you look at most aliens that are created for Hollywood films or science fiction in general, they're more or less humanoid or they're more or less like a vertebrate with usually just a couple of, you know, extra legs stuck on or maybe antennae or something like that. But we don't really have as much imagination as, you know, you might think when it comes to imagine these, these beings that don't exist because we're just so used to the kind of symmetry that we have, the kind of body plan that we have. Like, for example, like the Avatar movies, you know, create this whole lush,

alien world, you know, totally open to creativity. And yet every single animal is basically like a horse with another pair of legs or a person with another pair of legs. It's a quick and easy way to make something seem unusual when it's really just one mutation away, you know, if we're able to go back in the past. And this gets, I guess, why we have four lens instead of six instead of just two, these early fishy things. And initially they didn't have any fins. And the pectoral fins were the first to evolve that, you know, assisted with steering once they appeared. And somewhere along the way, there was probably a blip in development, a mutation that basically told the, one of these developing fish or in a population of these fish, that, okay, as we're putting the body

together through embryonic development, let's make another pair of those arms, but further down the body. And this is why not only do we have four limbs, but if you look at the bones or the structure of your legs compared to your arms, it's the same layout that you have a large upper bone that connects to the body, which connects to two bones in your lower limb, which can, you know, connects to all the little fiddly bits in your hands and fingers or your feet and toes. So this is all because of a genetic accident. So if that hadn't happened, then vertebrates may have only ever evolved arms and not legs, or if that happened again, then we might have many more legs and our anatomy might be very, very different. So a lot of this is this deep, basically happenstance that, you know,

these evolutionary accidents that then, you know, for whatever reason it hits on something that's useful or assist survival and we got locked into a particular form when it didn't necessarily have to be that way. It seems, you know, this is sort of natural selection, I guess, or just evolution in a really, really sort of simple and easy way to understand is just by looking through bones. Yeah, so we can understand how natural selection works by looking at living animals. You know, after all, if you go back and you read on the origin of species, Darwin begins this book with talking about pigeons and artificial selection. And how if we're able to specifically pick pigeons out for certain traits, whether that's being like a tumbler and tumble through the air, have a big fan tail or a certain color, why can't nature do the same thing? We've already proven that organisms are variable and those variations are inheritable and they can change organisms over time.

So of course, the same thing happening in nature. So we're able to look back in the fossil record and we can't watch natural selection or evolutionary forces because it's not just natural selection. occur in real time, but it can still act as a test of what we expect about evolution that we can say, okay, we have all these critters without limbs that seem related to vertebrates during this time period, and they've got, say, a hundred million year gap, and we have all these critters that seem to have some similar traits, but now they've got limbs, and they're doing all these interesting things. If we go back in that gap, like we can sort of get an idea of where to find them, what they might look like, And then what's uncovered becomes a test of that in the fossil record.

In fact, that's how one of the most important fossils in our backstory called tectolic was found is that there was a gap in our knowledge about some of these vertebrates that were evolving limbs and lived in this critical window where life in the water was moving on to land. So paleontologists identified where they were likely to find such an animal. And they went to Ellesmere Island, Canada. And lo and behold, it turned up. So even though, you know, modern genetics and, you know, ecology and biology looking at, you know, life around us now provides ample proof of evolution and how it works, some of these, you know, huge transcendent changes, the changes that we talk about when we talk about fish moving on to land or feathered dinosaurs becoming birds or whales like living on land and then living in the sea, you can only really appreciate that and see that through the fossil record. That's really interesting because it sort of brings me to a point which is that so obviously you're your chiefly paleontologist aren't you so how do we learn all of this from just the fossil records? Because as far as I see fossils, they are interesting things set in stone. How do bones become fossils?

And then how do we use those fossil records to be able to understand what life was like, you know, 100, 200, 300 million years ago? Right. So that's a big question. I mean, that's probably a book by itself. But so here's the little secret about what is and what is not a fossil. It's really only determined by time. So it's generally argued that anything more than any, you know, remnant of life, older than about 10,000 years counts as a fossil, whereas anything younger than that, anything more recent than that does not, which is really kind of arbitrary because, and it doesn't mean fossil is not the same thing. as petrified or turned to stone. For example, there are fossil mammoth bones that are not fossilized at all that are basically, you know, they're a little bit worn with age, but they're still fresh. They haven't been replaced by minerals, but they still count as fossils. But when we often think about fossil bones, we think about, you know, those big petrified dinosaur bones that have been replaced with minerals.

So typically, in ideal circumstances, to get a body fossil, there's a whole other class of fossils called trace fossils, there are like footprints or, you know, drags made in the mud or things that organisms did that are recorded in sediment, but a body fossil, the skeleton, you would want that body to be covered relatively rapidly by sediment, either a collapse in the sand dune or if it settles to the bottom of a lagoon or something like that, and have it be not disturbed by scavengers or any other activity. And over time, the soft tissues will, for the most part, decay. And as As water carrying minerals basically percolates through bones. Bones are sturdy enough to last a long time.

Parts of those bones, parts of the skeleton and teeth as well, will become replaced by some of those minerals that are in that local area. And this is part of why skeletons in different places are different colors in the fossil record, depending on the minerals that get deposited inside of them. And then you've got what we typically think of as like a fossil skeleton. And each of those is a time capsule. So paleontology really relies not just on geology, but on comparative anatomy. So even if you find a single bone, you can get an idea of what kind of bone it is.

Maybe by the texture or the shape, you can compare that to mammals, reptiles, birds, what have you, get an idea of what class of organism this belonging to. If you cut into that bone, you can use a science called histology that's very important in medicine, but also important in paleontology, where you can see how this organism was growing. Was it fast? Was it slow? were they old, were they young? Did they have a warm-blooded metabolism? Where they more, you know, did their temperature vary with the environment? We can get geochemical isotopes. So these chemical traces that involve signatures from what the animal was eating or what they were drinking or, you know, other aspects of their environment. So a lot of modern paleontology is involving paleobiology. It's not just collecting these bones and organize them and saying, you know, we have a new species of Tyrannos. or what have you. It's really looking into, you know, even a fragment of bone and seeing what these secrets are, what stories it can tell about life.

So really using what we know about modern life and finding ways to draw that out of these bones from the past. And really, it's such a complicated process. We only have a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of all the vertebrates that ever existed. I actually just wrote an article about this, about, you know, how many dinosaurs are there left to find? It's like there are probably thousands of species left out there. And there are probably many more that existed that were never going to find because they didn't get buried in the right circumstances or their bones got destroyed. So really, when you look at the fossil record and all the amazing things that we've found so far, it's kind of amazing that we have them at all, given all the different circumstances that could destroy those or prevent them us from finding them. That's really interesting.

I've never really sort of put two and two or thought about how, how the bones turn into it. But that's a really, really good explanation of how they form. And I think I'll look at them, well, really differently now, from now on after that. Yeah, well, that's what I want to do with this book, and that, you know, I make my living as a science writer, that's my career, is writing about paleontology and natural history. I also go out in the field and dig things up, but I'd focus so long on, you know, my favorite sort of charismatic megafauna things like, you know, saber-tooth cats and dinosaurs and whatever was weird. And one of the other. wonderful, you know, over the past 500 million years or so. But I didn't really pay all that much

attention to our own skeletons. Because to me, you know, we don't have, you know, spiky tail or really impressive teeth. And, you know, humans compared to some of the animals that we love from the fossil record seem kind of plain. And, you know, that was my own bias, I guess, against myself and against my own species. But I started thinking about, it's like, well, what if I took that same approach? What if some of these questions I love to ask about fossils? Like, when I find something in the field. I was just out in eastern Utah looking in Jurassic Age sediments a few weeks ago, you know, found some bones in this pile like out on a hill and started to ask, okay, well, what element is this, what animal was it? You know, where did it live? How did it move? Where did it look like?

How old was it? You know, all these things that I ask about ancient life, I could ask the same questions about my own skeleton or the skeleton of my own species. So it was really taking those questions that, you know, seem so apparent when we think about dinosaurs. And turning them inward to say, okay, well, if, you know, basically coming from the perspective of if, you know, the human race, if humanity went extinct, you know, at some point in the near future and, you know, 100 million years later, you know, a paleontologist from another species, however you want to describe them, found our bones, what things would they be able to tell about us? What stories about ourselves and our history do our bones say?

Yeah, no, I imagine there must be a different way of approaching that, because obviously, you know, dinosaur bones are millions of years old, whereas human bones are a far shorter scale of time. Yeah, so the oldest humans, so what are technically called hominins, go back to about five million years or so ago. There's a little bit debate about, you know, who's the first human, as there always is, and paleoanthropology. But it's in that window that we see humans as a distinct lineage of apes that, you know, evolved from this, this wider family. And in terms of our own species, I think it was just in the past year or two that the oldest Homo sapiens representatives were dated to about 300,000 years ago.

So when you're looking at some of these other timescales, you're really quite recent. Although then again, this is our pull of the recent. This is our modern perspective, where we often tend to lump dinosaurs or prehistoric organisms. We mush them together in time, more or less, or species that never would have seen each other. You buy them in the same place at the museum gift shop or wherever, see them in the films together. To give you an example of just the span, the time span involved, you know, everybody knows Stegosaurus, that plate-backed spiky-tailed dinosaur that lived in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago. And everybody knows T-Rex, of course, which lived about 68 to 66 million

years ago. So, you know, those are just numbers. And, you know, sometimes we see these dinosaurs together like in Disney's Fantasia. But in fact, they lived over 80 million years apart from each other. They never were even close to each other in time. And what's neat about, I like that statistic because you could fit the entire sort of post-rein-of-dinos history of the world. The past 66 million years in which mammals came into their own, that's so important to our own history, in that gap and still have room to spare.

that's how long that is, that you could take the entire, you know, post-Cretaceous extinction history of the world and slot it between those two dinosaurs. And you're not even getting to the very beginning of when they appeared. So some of these timescales, yeah, it's absolutely mind-boggling trying to understand them. But I so I guess for human history, I guess you have to look a lot more at the cultural things, you know, how societies have responded to bones and that sort of thing to be able to get an understand of what we can learn? Absolutely. So that's, you know, something that's different about us. I mean, there are other species who have certain left their mark on bone or even use bone as

tools, including some of our, you know, close extinct human relatives. But for us, you know, it's really apparent that throughout human history, we've had a fascination with bones, you know, our own bones and the bones of other species, whether we've fashioned them into tools. or collected them or, you know, various cultures, you know, around the world throughout history, seem fascinated with creating cups out of skulls. I don't know what it is about the skull that makes people want to drink out of it, but it seems to be a common theme. And this is this whole other gloss, and we're still with it, you know, today that, you know, we, you know, in some religious practices, for example, in, you know, Catholic religion, you have reliquaries and sort of retaining these, you know,

elements, you know, sometimes bones of, you know, holy people and, you know, asking them for intercession or, you know, people who collect bones, who, you know, the market to buy and sell human remains on the internet that's still going on today. And we're just starting to, you know, really question that and try and remedy some of the damage that's done through that. But, yeah, that's the whole other aspect of this. There's the natural history of our bones where we came from and what our bones do and what they say about our deep past. But there's also our perspectives on bones that have, you know, constantly been changing. And they often tell us a lot about our own humanity or what we think about ourselves and the people

around us. You know, the bones, it's, you know, a natural history, you know, object, for lack of a better term, that, you know, this is something that, you know, is part of our own nature. But depending on who's looking at it and what context, what they think that means or what that is might be entirely different. So, you know, I think I make this point late in the book that, you know, you can have a physician look at a bone and talk about pathology or the health of the individual. You can look at an anthropologist can look at it and maybe get an idea of who this person was an individual and maybe where they came from. And you can have your bone collector look at something and say, I want that on my mantelpiece. Like really depending on who you are and what your perspective you have, dictates how we feel about bones.

I think that when I see a bone now, well, when I see something like a skull, like a skull is very powerful imagery now of sort of like death or danger or something. But has it always been the case that we've had this sort of, you know, grisly perhaps impression of things like skulls and bones? You know, it's difficult to say because we're dealing with so many different, you know, cultures over the past 300,000 years. likely before that. But in terms of our grizzly association with bones and death, particularly skulls, a lot of that came out of the black plague. And death as a character, like death personified, as we often think of death as wearing a black robe with the scythe or whatever, you know, agricultural tool you might make see death with, that really came after like that just horrendous tragedy where death was everywhere. Prior to that, there wasn't necessarily that same association.

And I should point out that that's very much a Western idea as well, that, you know, there's certainly other cultures and other places around the world even today where, you know, bones and skeletons and the idea of death as a personified character or not nearly as grim. So that's something that's, you know, relatively recent and dictated by culture and, you know, even, you know, aspects of pop culture. influence this. You know, it's really no coincidence that death metal, you know, bands and stuff use bones and skeletons all over

everything that you have, you know, sort of goth aesthetic, you know, Tim Burton films like, you know, Nightmare Before Christmas, where you're our hero is, you know, dancing, singing a skeleton. So, you know, all these things influence our perceptions of bones. So we both, you know, bring up this, you know, visage of death that can be so

terrifying. But at the same time, you know, we often imbue bones with a certain, vitality and they're still alive, so it might not be quite as dark as during other times in history. So yeah, really it's a matter of the eye of the beholder. What you see in a bone or a skeleton really depends on your background culture and how you're perceiving that. Now, there's sort of related to that in a way, is that what you see from these bones. There's one part in the book, which I know will be of interest to everyone and certainly in the UK, which is

You're going to a lot of detail about the body of Richard III? That's right. Yeah, so I just found that a fascinating case because, you know, so often, you know, whether it's a forensic anthropologist or an archaeologist, you know, people are looking at and studying bones constantly. And depending on, you know, who that person is, you know, what people want to know, research questions. The ethics certainly involved, you know, it will determine, you know, what tests are carried out, what we can learn about the skeleton. But I picked Richard III, particularly because, you know, this. that he got a kingly treatment for someone whose skeleton was found that normally the number of tests and analyses that they ran on his remains, you know, not everybody gets that. So I figured that was a good example to show the kinds of things that we can learn from, you know, a skeleton

that's discovered because, you know, they had a hunch when they initially uncovered those remains in the car park that it was there. But, you know, how do you be sure, you know, in a previous decade or a previous century, if those remains were found, there'd be no way to really be sure. There's no context. There are no cultural artifacts or anything to really say that this is who they thought it was. So they had to go into a genetic material that was recovered from that skeleton that our bones, you know, starts decaying at death, but their bones do preserve our DNA, that they were able to look at these geochemical isotopes to, you know, see what Richard was eating at different times of his life. and if the historical records about his life are accurate. And it seems more or less that they were on the mark. And you can actually see in some of these geochemical signatures when he became king, his diet

changed, as you might expect, is much less grain-based and a lot more game and fish and things like that. And they're able to study the fact that he had a form of scoliosis, that his spine did have a bend in it and how that affected his life. And I think the most, you know, this is where it does get grisly is the various wounds that were on those bones. So basically, what happened at the end of and following the Battle of Bosworth and the sort of insults and injuries that his body suffered as it was taken from the battlefield to wherever it was taken next. So it really was all these stories that would be able to

be drawn out of the skeleton, I think really summarized the sort of power of this idea of our skeletons as a kind of time capsule that we don't just have them while we're alive, but they preserve evidence of who we were. Does that mean that his his body, Richard the third's body that we found? So we were able to say that he is,

it was interesting when you said we had a hunch about what they find. He was obviously quite famously portrayed as having a hunchback. How were we able to say actually, you know what? It wasn't as bad or it was as bad as we thought or that sort of thing. Yeah, this has to do with the entire field called

a pathology. And pathology roughly is anything that seems unusual about a skeleton. Often it's because of disease or injury, but it can also be intentional modification. So I mentioned this in the book as well. People who were extremely corseted for most of their lives during the 16th and 17th century,

their skeletons are modified. So even though it didn't affect their health, that difference caused by that cultural effect, we would consider a pathology or something that's different. So in the terms of Richard III and his famous spine, they're able to see the bent sideways. So he would have seen relatively short statured, but as the anthropologist carrying out the analysis noted that,

you know, by the time that, you know, he became king, that a good tailor would probably be able to, you know, create armor and clothing that would basically cover that up. And you probably wouldn't, it probably wouldn't have been obvious. So this wasn't the band of Cumberbatch kind of stooped over, you know, withered arm, hunchbacked version that, you know, you might have seen on the hollow crown, that, you know, unless you knew better at the time, you just thought he was a relatively short statured man and no one really would have been able to tell.

So is our analysis of bones sort of confirming some of the things or disproving some of the things that we take for granted in history? You know, I think one of the biggest areas that, you know, bones have, you know, they've always told the truth, it's our perceptions that have changed that, you know, it's the, you know, it's somewhat disturbing to talk about, but the scientific racism that existed for so long that, you know, people in positions of power often, you know, colonizing forces throughout the world, would look at, you know, the bones, particularly the skulls of indigenous people, whether in Australia or in South Africa or certainly in the Americas, and, you know, try and use science to say that these people are inferior or that white-skinned people are superior, or that white-skinned people are superior. or basically impose the existing power system. They're writing books and treaties and holding meetings and taking cranial capacity and all these things

to try and prove a point that the bones don't actually say, if you look at bones honestly, the story is one of variation. The races that we believe that we see are cultural constructs. There's no biological backing for this. These divisions that they made in the past don't actually exist. but that skeletons and bones and skulls in particular were used to harm people for a very long time. And thankfully, you know, after World War II, and we saw what kind of endpoint that this kind of racism and this kind of ranking led to that, you know, is largely shifted.

I mentioned this in the book primarily because, unfortunately, I still see echoes of some of these arguments, these same thought processes that have harmed people for so long, you know, in our modern 21st century world and they still need to be rooted out. but that I think is one of the largest changes. One of the biggest examples of, you know, our bones have been the same as they always have. They're these permanent documents of our lives and our history. But particularly for people who want to maintain positions of power or suppress other people, they become dangerous things.

They've been terrible things. And thankfully, we're starting to remedy that. But it took a pretty dramatic shift. an example of who you are and what your perspective is really does influence what you see in nature. And it's good to be mindful of that, that science, you know, as much as it's such a wonderful and useful tool for understanding the universe that, you know, it's done by people. It's not done by robots. We can't just say, well, the data don't lie. It's like, well, who's taking the data and how did they collect it? And how are they analyzing this? It's something

that I think makes science more powerful when we recognize the human element. to it. Do you have a favorite bone? Geez, a favorite bone. You know, it's difficult to say, you know, I'm just going to go with my gut here. It's funny how these expressions turn to the anatomical so often, isn't it? For now, I'm just going to say my collarbone, because I just find it so fascinating that it's there, that when you think about your arms, they seem like such a sturdy, important thing. We use them for everything. I'm using, you know, right now it'll hold my phone as I'm talking to you. And they're connected to our bodies by so little that you've got your shoulder blade that slides back and forth over your back that's connected to your upper arm.

So you're humorous. So there's a cup in your shoulder blade that the humorous fits into. And then the collarbone reaches over and it connects to that junction and goes to the top of your rib cage. But that's how your arm is skeletally connected to the rest of your body. It's not by this really firm apparatus. It's not like a ball and socket joint, like your femur, your thigh goes into your hip, and it seems really sturdy. It's just this really small connection made possible by that collarbone. So, yeah, I encourage listeners to take a moment and appreciate your collar bones, because without it, your arms would probably be on the floor.

Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week talking to former astronaut Catherine D. Sullivan about being the first American woman to walk in space. Until then, if you want to bone up on a little bit more science, the later. issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is packed full of eye-opening features and interviews. In the December issue, we're heading to Venus to explore the surface of Earth's toxic twin. There are, of course, plenty more episodes of the Science Focus podcast to listen back to, so why don't you dive back in and let us know which is your favourite with a rating, or tweet us at Science Focus.

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