Bones specialists try to prise
When the soft tissue of bodies found in Gauteng’s veld has decomposed and all that’s left is the skeleton, it’s even more difficult to ID a corpse
If it wasn’t for the smell, no one would know there was a body there. The savannah grass reaches above the waists of passers-by sweating under the Gauteng summer sun. If the body has been there for a while, the soft tissue of the face will have decomposed. There is often no identification on the body — no ID, no cellphone, no wallet — and the clothes have been shredded into faded, unrecognisable rags by the elements.
There is no data on how many of Gauteng’s 15000 to 16500 annual unnatural deaths are found in this way but the occurrence is common enough for these bodies to have their own moniker among the officials who dread having to deal with them: veld bodies.
Identifying them is important. A perpetrator of unnatural death could be at large. Families need to know what happened to loved ones. But it is also a near-impossible task.
To confirm someone’s identity so that it will stand up to the scrutiny of the justice system, the police need either fingerprints, a dental match or DNA. Popular television series such as and show investigators using science to piece together someone’s identity from the flimsiest of evidence. But real life is not so simple and all too many of Gauteng’s veld bodies remain anonymous.
DNA breaks down when exposed to sunlight or water. Even if it is there, the police need a direct relative to compare it with. Fingerprints disappear along with a person’s soft tissue and the majority of people on the African continent do not have dental records.
So the search for identity must begin elsewhere. But where do you start when you can’t even tell whether the body is that of a male or female?
Such a veld body could end up on the stainless steel gurney of Professor Maryna Steyn, a forensic anthropologist and head of anatomical sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand.
In her laboratory in the bowels of the university’s health sciences building, collections of bones lie spread on counters, fanning out in twodimensional skeletons. “If there’s a full body, full tissue, the forensic pathologist can handle it and do an autopsy,” she says .
A forensic pathologist, employed by the department of health in one of the country’s medico-legal laboratories, performs an autopsy to determine the person’s cause of death.
This can be difficult when a corpse is fully, or even partially, decomposed. A forensic anthropologist starts where the forensic pathologist leaves off and tries to establish from their bones a person’s identity and what happened to them.
“Once it’s skeletonised and decomposed and full of maggots and bits of flesh, it needs to be cleaned, and then from a skeleton we analyse the age, sex, ancestry, trauma,” Steyn says.
For police even to begin the process of identifying a person, they need to know a body’s sex, age and race.
This is more difficult than it sounds. Sex is fairly easy in adults because women’s child-bearing pelvises give them away. In children, there is little sex differentiation. It is easier, though, to determine children’s ages from their bones than from those of adults. Because of their rapid skeletal growth in childhood, forensic anthropologists can tell you a child’s age to within a year.
This is useful because South Africa’s forensic anthropologists say they are receiving more children’s bodies than before.
But adults’ skeletons don’t really change until they are in their autumn years, so an age estimate can span decades.
Race is even trickier. “History is not on our side for this one,” says Professor Ericka L’Abbé, at the University of Pretoria’s Forensic Anthropology Research Centre.
In the past, scientists looked at the skeleton, particularly the skull, to confirm ideas of racial superiority. Although this racist science has been debunked, there is a stigma attached to acknowledging the biological differences between races.
“But there are differences between races and, while they have no social [value] attachment, what we are socially and how we identify ourselves socially is important for our identification. Our culture has affected our biology in that we are segregated socially, culturally, from various groups,” L’Abbé says.
“You can, with a certain probability, say this unknown person, based on these biological characteristics, will more likely align with this group than these others.”
L’Abbé has spearheaded a drive to create a database of “biological distance” for South Africans. Biological distance is the physical similarity or difference between groups of people who have been separated by time or geography. She says there is biological distance between the skeleton of a white and a black South African, but scientists cannot currently distinguish between different black groups.
South Africa is a complex continuum of race and culture. Race is not a discrete factor, with people fitting into neat boxes. “It all comes down to a game of statistics,” L’Abbé says with a sigh.
“Currently, we can tell if someone is South African but we can’t really tell if they are not South African.”
This is a problem, considering the assumption that the vast majority of Gauteng’s unidentified dead are foreigners.
L’Abbé has been trying to get measurements for Shona, Ndebele and other Zimbabwean groups but she has had little success.
“We have gone to various public hospitals in the country trying to access CT scan data that could assist with this but we have run into problems: while we are asked on every single form in South Africa about our self-identified race, we are not asked it in the hospital setting. It is the only