i took forensic anthropology in college and my awesome coffee-addicted hippie teacher echoed this exactly. from the bones you can tell not only what race someone is, but generally what region they predominantly are from. you can tell age, gender, congenital defects, lifetime trauma, diet, muscle mass, and BMI ratio from the bones. the series “Bones”, though dramatized, is very much based on this concept, and occasionally they get the science right.
As well as career and jobs done based on the wear of the bones or strengthening of certain muscles leading to tendon and thus bone changes if I remember correctly
Well yes. And no. Generally speaking we can tell things like general state of development and thusly infer she from bone. Generally speaking there are certain features prominent or largely representative of a given group. So we can INFER things like age, sex, socioeconomic status, ancestral lineage from skeletons. We can do so with a decent degree of accuracy, although various factors can make certain identificaron improbable and there are cases where information like sex is disputed or ambiguous. Obviously the more recent the remains are, the more favorable the conditions they were found in are, the more complete and intact the remains are, the more accurate we can often infer certain facts.
Context can help or hinder accurate identification as well. Finding remains that are somewhat ambiguous but favor being female, in a setting that historically females aren’t believed to be found, could cause the remains to be assumed male even if they are actually female, but finding remains that are ambiguous but with a setting and artifacts that support a certain ethnic or sex identification for example, can help make a determination.
Overall ancestry can be determined through skeletal remains with fairly high accuracy when dealing with remains of the relatively recently deceased however.
Of course the point of that meme isn’t generally that we are literally all the same “inside.” You’d have to be pretty foolish to think that given that without some fancy degree or study in bones… you probably have seen taller and shorter people and if you are over the age of 6 or so and have an IQ higher than 40 you probably realize that means their bones are different than yours. So, derp. Yeah. Human skeletons aren’t all exactly identical. Asides height, looking at maybe 5-20 human faces in your life might clue you in. It’s more metaphorical- and to the average person who hasn’t studied skeletal identification… they probably cannot tell two skeletons or similar size apart by sex or ancestry etc. unless they are VERY different or distinct in their features.
So to carry the metaphor a bit further- maybe you can tell people apart if you have invested the equivalent hours into identifying differences between human beings, but to anyone who hasn’t they will more or less be the same.
Yes. As said- If the pelvis is present. I wrote a lot because there is a bit of detail in there. The gist of which was that identifying specific demographic and gender information from complete or adequate and reasonably preserved skeletal remains has a high level of accuracy, but where there are incomplete remains, deteriorated remains, or in some cases, where there is ambiguity for misc reasons including abnormal structures, like most things it is not 100% accurate 100% of the time.
The point being that it is not “racist” or some type of eugenics to state that our skeletons are different, but the image is also metaphorical and not literal so while we can be as pedantic as we want, metaphor is generally flawed but broadly illustrates a concept.
Overall ancestry can be determined through skeletal remains with fairly high accuracy when dealing with remains of the relatively recently deceased however.
The point being that it is not “racist” or some type of eugenics to state that our skeletons are different, but the image is also metaphorical and not literal so while we can be as pedantic as we want, metaphor is generally flawed but broadly illustrates a concept.