GROUNDBREAKING SCIENCE
Bone Diaries

As UT's Richard Jantz reads skeletons, he finds that modern Americans exert less effort and eat more nutrients than their ancestors.

University of Tennessee Anthropology Professor Richard Jantz likes to read biographies, but not the kind you might think. What he likes best is the history recorded in the human skeleton.

Human skulls, such as this skull sticking out of the snow at the UT Anthropological Research Facility, help Richard Jantz build a skeletal record of changes in the U.S. population.

"You write your biography on your skeleton," says Jantz. "Like a diary, it records all kinds of bumps in the road."

Jantz scrutinizes the structural variations in modern Americans for clues to the long-term effects of nutrition and physical activity on the skeleton. His opinions on the much-publicized debate on Kennewick Man and the origins of the first Americans have been broadcast on NOVA and British television, and he has been quoted in the Washington Post and the New York Times .

"Modern Americans live in a unique environment," he says. Never before has over-nutrition been a bigger problem than under-nutrition, or have humans exerted as little effort as we do now. We have bigger bodies. And infant mortality is far below what it used to be."

As studies at the Jamestown reconstruction project and similar projects elsewhere in America have shown, colonial Americans experienced quite the opposite. While struggling to survive, many actually starved to death.

As conditions improved, the body responded in unique ways, according to Jantz. "We're taller than we were more than 100 years ago. The shape of the skull is higher, narrower, and longer. The teeth and jaws, like the rest of the skeleton, are experiencing less stress, so they are becoming smaller."

Jantz and Doug Owsley of the Smithsonian Institution are assembling a skeletal record of Americans since colonial times. Their goal is a 300- to 400-year skeletal history of both black and white modern Americans. Jantz is director of UT's Forensic Anthropology Center, which includes the Anthropological Research Facility, dubbed the "Body Farm." Founded in 1972 by Dr. William M. Bass, this facility is a laboratory for ORNL's Arpad Vass, who seeks clues from decomposition to determine precisely how long someone has been dead.

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