Written in Bone

by Sue Black

  We could tell quite a lot just from this one bone. First, it was, most likely, that of a male. We can determine that from the shape and relative proportions. Simply from its size we could say that it belonged to quite a big male. He would have been elderly when he died, judging by the extent of the arthritis at various joints. From Hogarth’s sketch and contemporary accounts, we knew that Fraser was tall (nearly six feet), and a man of considerable girth. He was around eighty years of age when he was executed and had suffered from gout and arthritis. So far, so good. The first bone out of the coffin seemed to confirm many of these descriptors.

  In his excitement Dan was all set to declare that we had found the body of Lord Lovat. Much as we hated to rain on his parade, we had to remind him that we really needed to wait to see what else was in there before jumping to any conclusions. Dan decided to leave us to it and disappeared off to do some filming near Culloden battlefield.

  The second piece of bone to appear was from the left knee region of an adult femur (thigh bone). This showed no sign of arthritis, which made us suspicious that it might not belong to the same person as the sacrum. It was the third find that confirmed beyond all doubt that what we had was a commingled burial. At the head end of the coffin, Lucina removed seventeen tooth crowns that had come from a child of about four years old. We had no idea why these might have been in the coffin, or of the whereabouts of the head to which they belonged. They may just have been a collection of baby teeth kept by a mother, which had to be put somewhere. Teeth can end up in some strange places. The tooth fairy let me hold on to all my children’s first teeth and eventually they became part of a scientific experiment on estimating age from teeth.

  We also uncovered the ribs and sternum (breastbone) of another small adult. They had been placed in an anatomically correct position under the base plate of the wooden part of the coffin, down at the foot end. Now, where was the rest of that body? We had no answer to that question. What we could say was that we were looking at the partial remains of four separate individuals: child, small adult, mature adult and elderly male.

  But there was more. Lying along the bottom of the coffin, on top of the wooden base plate, in an articulated anatomical position, was a very poorly preserved skeleton—minus its skull. Lucina had come upstairs to give me the news of this find in a whisper, to avoid raising anybody’s hopes too high. We also wanted to keep this information quiet until we had all our ducks in a row and could orchestrate a large-scale, public revelation of our conclusions. It was looking as if the clansmen had fooled the English in the end and had managed to bring their chief home to Kirkhill after all.

  On his return, Dan expected to hear that we had identified the remains of an elderly male, as suggested by the sacrum we had examined. The name of this bone is an eighteenth-century abbreviation of its Latin name, os sacrum, or sacred bone. In English and German it was also known as the holy bone. Quite why it was considered holy is open to interpretation. One theory is an ancient belief that, being strong and resistant to decay, it will form the basis for corporeal resurrection on the Day of Judgement. Another is that it is a reference to its protection of the sacred organs of reproduction. Whatever the etymology, Dan had his hopes pinned on this particular sacrum providing the confirmation he wanted of the Old Fox’s cunning plan for his body to be snatched from beneath the very noses of the Crown and transported home in glory.

  When we broke it to him that there were at least five people in the coffin, he was aghast. He asked us how this could have happened. As the coffin had been breached, we believed that what we were probably looking at was graveyard tidy-up time. Pretty much whenever an animal or a human digs a hole in a cemetery, a bone will come to the surface. And when you find them, you have to do something with them. The obvious solution here was to slip them through the opened edge of a coffin in the crypt, where they would remain on sacred ground. It is the graveyard equivalent of sweeping dirt under the carpet. It is likely that the ribs and sternum were put in the coffin before the headless body, and that the other pieces had been dropped in after the lid had been breached.

  We cleared the crypt of everyone who did not need to be there so that we could film our discussion of the headless individual we had found in the coffin. Everyone present was sworn to secrecy until the big night of the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s lecture. All the tickets had been sold and Dan’s TV company was live-streaming the event across the world to Outlander fans. Around four hundred people were in attendance and over half a million tuned in on TV that night or have seen the film since. It was the biggest audience the Royal Society of Edinburgh had ever had in its history of public engagement. The Old Fox could still draw the crowds.

  Several journalists, reasoning that there was no way we would have gone to all this trouble if the Old Fox was not in the crypt, tried to get us to tip them off on what we had discovered, but we remained tight-lipped. On the night of the lecture, you could really feel the electricity in the room as we deliberately built the tension. Eric Lundberg, the custodian of the mausoleum, provided some background to the exhumation; Sarah Fraser, the celebrated historian and author, who married into the clan Fraser, gripped the audience with her talk on the importance of her family’s ancestor in the time in which he lived. To sprinkle a bit of showbiz glitz, Dan Skyped into the event to tell everyone what this investigation meant to him and to show film clips of the progress of the exhumation.

  Then Lucina got to her feet to set the scene in the crypt before I revealed what we knew of the headless person in the coffin. You could have heard a pin drop as I announced that if Lord Lovat was a twenty- to thirty-year-old woman, then we had indeed found him. The gasp around the room was audible. I genuinely don’t think anybody expected this outcome. But that is the nature of science. It doesn’t mould itself to accommodate the desires of humankind, it is there to convey truth.

  We now had to explain our findings. The honest answer was that we did not, and still do not, know who this woman was. One suggestion is that a coffin, with its appropriately inscribed name-plate, was prepared for Lord Lovat but that ultimately the mission to spring his body from the Tower of London failed. Did the family simply remove the plate from the lid and use the coffin for somebody else? If they did, then they did not give this woman the courtesy of recording her name. How do we know she was a female? The shape of her own sacrum, and of her pelvis, left us in little doubt.

  As Lucina and I had theorized, it was likely that the coffin had become a handy receptacle for various isolated finds elsewhere in the graveyard once some curious person had first opened it to have a look inside. Given the myth of the repatriation of Lord Lovat’s body, it is also likely that in the intervening 250 years, others couldn’t resist having a peep into the coffin—if the lead had become fragile and the soldered edges started to sag, it would have been even more of a temptation—and that this was responsible for the damage.

  So where was the woman’s head? There was no evidence that she had been beheaded, it was just that her skull was no longer there. Had one of these inquisitive people perhaps removed it? Did they look in the coffin and think, if this is the Old Fox, then that shouldn’t be here, and take away the skull to keep the myth alive? Or did they believe it was in fact Simon Fraser’s head and steal it as a trophy? We will never know.

  Whoever the person in the coffin was, she deserved the dignity and decency of a secure reburial. My family has long known another branch of the Fraser clan, a renowned dynasty of funeral directors in Inverness. I phoned Bill and Martin and asked if they might be willing to donate a coffin for someone who was perhaps a Fraser, too, so that we could replace her remains in the crypt of the mausoleum. Of course they agreed, and with due solemnity the bones were reinterred and a service held. So the crypt now houses all the original lead coffins, plus a shiny new wooden one containing what is left of an unknown female, together with the bits of the four other people who have kept her company for generations. Knowing what we do of the Old Fox, I think if
he was watching this story unfold, he would find it mightily amusing that over 250 years later he was still calling the shots. Probably laughing his head off.

  The quest for the body of Lord Lovat may have begun and ended with the discovery of the sacrum of a well-built, elderly, arthritic male. However, it was not only the recognition of individual bones, but the ability to interpret information about the sex, age and other characteristics of the lives they had sustained that held the key to solving at least one element of the mystery and to figuring out how many bits of different people shared the coffin.

  ◊

  Our vertebral column, like that of all mammals who habitually walk on four limbs, was originally a horizontal structure. It was over 4 million years ago, according to the fossil record, that the ancestors of the modern human started to spend more time on two legs than four and the spine became vertical rather than horizontal. This was largely a bad idea, biomechanically speaking, as it placed tremendous compressive and tensile strains on the spine, with the result that most of the afflictions of our old age reflect a life of locomotion for which the axis of our bodies was simply not designed.

  It should come as no surprise that when small children begin to become mobile, they start off on four legs, with their spines horizontal, the posture in which they are the most stable. When they start to become bipedal their movement is very tentative and wobbly until the muscles, bones and neurology get to grips with the ridiculous notion of such a small centre of gravity positioned precariously over two tiny feet. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, either, that when adults become neurologically impaired, perhaps after one too many libations, reverting to all fours proves a much safer, if less elegant means of locomotion, especially when going upstairs. Some babies, of course, go through an intermediate stage in which the ischial tuberosities—known to most of us as the sitting bones—offer a steadier means of locomotion and they become bottom-shufflers before finally dispensing with the stabilizers and taking to their feet.

  The core purpose of the backbone in all vertebrates is to protect the incredibly delicate spinal cord and its coverings, which pass down the length of the body from the brain. At the top, this nervous tissue still consists of brain stem, officially becoming the spinal cord by the second vertebra in the neck. This remarkably thin, white cord, in its bony tunnel, carries all of our motor information, which instructs our muscles to work, while the sensory messages of touch, temperature and pain go in the opposite direction from the body up to the brain. The vertebral column is longer than the spinal cord, which stops short of the sacrum and coccyx in the lumbar region, around the first or second lumbar vertebrae.

  This is why a lumbar puncture, or spinal tap, is carried out between two lower lumbar vertebrae (usually L3 and L4). This allows a frighteningly long needle to be inserted between the bones to get at the cerebrospinal fluid surrounding the nervous tissue without running the risk of hitting the spinal cord itself. Having experienced one of those myself while being tested for meningitis, I can attest that it is incredibly unpleasant, especially when the doctor, knowing that you are an anatomist, provides a running commentary listing every tissue the needle is penetrating. “Oh, there goes the posterior longitudinal ligament. Did you feel it pop?” is not something you need to hear.

  When we decided to stand up on two legs, we asked our vertebral column to do some things it simply wasn’t built for. As well as needing to balance the whole of our upper body on the lower limbs and our head on our neck, we required sites of attachment for the muscles controlling posture, with a sensitive nerve supply that could tweak them continuously to balance flexion with extension and keep us upright.

  We are mostly unaware that we are constantly performing this delicate balancing act. It is a subconscious activity because, frankly, we can’t be trusted to remember to keep doing it all day. When it is noticeable is when we fall asleep in an upright position. Humans can fall asleep standing up but they will quickly topple over if not supported when the muscles of postural balance become inactive. If you are in any doubt, watch as someone drops off to sleep on the sofa. That “nodding dog” impression they do when they jerk awake again is their subconscious nudging their conscious to tell it that the muscles of the neck have relaxed.

  Like the bones around the brain, the vertebrae surrounding the spinal cord start to develop very early on in fetal life, within the seventh week, and, as might be expected, the bone formation starts at the top of the column, closest to the brain. By the time the baby is born, the spine will comprise nearly ninety different little bones that look like the jacks used in the game knucklebones (which is no coincidence, as the game was originally played with sheep vertebrae). The column grows so swiftly that by the age of four the separate pieces of bone will have fused together and consolidated into our thirty-three vertebrae, with the five sacral bones finally fusing together in a block in late childhood.

  The fetal vertebral column curves in a C-shape with the concavity to the front. But something quite miraculous happens around two or three months after birth. The muscles in the baby’s neck start to strengthen and it becomes able to support and balance the weight of its own massive head on the top of the spinal column. That spinal curve begins to reverse in the cervical vertebrae and becomes more convex towards the front of the neck. At around six to eight months, the muscles in the lower back develop and the baby is able to sit up unaided, balancing its whole body as it sits. This results in a further alteration to the shape of the column in the lumbar region as it, too, starts to become convex towards the front.

  Before the candles have been blown out on baby’s first birthday cake, the whole vertebral column has been transformed from the fetal C-shape into an S-shape, something seen only in bipedal animals. This shape is maintained by changes not to the bones, but to the pads of cartilage, the discs, that sit between them. As we start to age, the process reverses as the discs lose their elasticity and begin to collapse, and our vertebral column starts to revert to the C-shape of our formative years. We lose our ramrod-straight structure and become increasingly hunched and bent over. This shifts our centre of gravity, which using a walking stick helps us to stabilize.

  The neck, or cervical, region, where the vertebrae help us to balance our head on our column, is very flexible. The shape of the vertebrae allows extensive rotation, so that we can turn our heads to look over our shoulders and nod it up and down.

  The vertebrae that make up the chest region of the column provide sites of attachment for the ribs. These are the vertebrae most likely to show evidence of fracture in the elderly as a result of osteoporosis and those responsible for the rather cruelly named “dowager’s hump.” It is this area of the column that is most likely to fuse in old age as the bony bridges of osteoarthritis link adjacent bones and limit movement. These changes are most commonly seen for the first time in individuals in their fifth decade but they can happen much earlier.

  The vertebrae of the upper thoracic region are not symmetrical. Each has a little flattened area where the aorta, the body’s largest artery, lies next to the bone. In those who have died of an aortic aneurysm—a ballooning of the aorta which results in its walls becoming thinner and thinner until they eventually burst, as my Uncle Willie’s did, very suddenly, at our Sunday lunch table—the traces of the aneurysm can be visible on the upper thoracic vertebrae even after the soft tissue is long gone.

  The vertebrae in the small of the back are the largest of all the bones in the spine because they need to transfer all the weight of the body down to the sacrum and then to the lower limbs and on to the ground. Sometimes the last lumbar vertebra doesn’t form properly and the different parts don’t fuse as they should, resulting in spondylolysis. This condition turns into spondylolisthesis when the two parts are forcibly separated, which can happen while we are performing the simplest of actions, such as putting the cover on to a duvet (as my husband discovered to his cost). Sometimes we ask too much of the vertebral column and when it finally rebels,
the consequences can be spectacularly disabling.

  Around puberty, the five separate vertebrae of the sacrum will have formed a single bone. What happens to our coccyx, or tail bones, is very variable, in terms of both fusion and the size they become. The human does not, of course, have a free-hanging prehensile tail; instead the terminal bones of the coccyx are tucked under the natal cleft, the deep groove that runs between our buttocks. They are an important anchor for the attachment of ligaments and muscles. It is essential that, having decided to stand up on our two legs, we have a strong pelvic floor: this acts as a sort of anatomical hammock to prevent our guts from falling out of our bottoms.

  Most of the time, all of this anatomical busy-ness around the vertebral column runs smoothly but—not surprisingly, given that the body is having to co-ordinate the development of ninety little pieces of bone—occasionally things don’t go as anticipated. Some vertebrae may not form properly (resulting, for example, in butterfly vertebrae); others might fuse together when they shouldn’t (diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis, or DISH), and some will stay apart when they should have fused, which is what causes spina bifida. Such anatomical variations, some of which go totally unnoticed by those who possess them, can help the forensic anthropologist to find some evidence as to who they might have been in life, especially when what we find can be corroborated by previous medical imaging.

  The first two cervical vertebrae, at the top of the column, are of particular interest and anatomically very different from the rest. The first, C1, is almost a circle of bone. This is known as the atlas, after the Greek Titan who was condemned by Zeus to hold up the heavens on his shoulders for all eternity. In humans, the atlas has only to hold up the head, which is no mean feat in itself. The joint between C1 and the skull is highly specialized: it is this that enables us to nod our head.