PINNING down the age at which someone died is a lot harder than you might think – the standard tests are often way off the mark.
Tania Kausmally and Jelena Bekvalac at the Centre for Human Bioarchaeology in London, analysed 26 skeletons from an excavation of the city’s Chelsea Old Church cemetery in 2000 to compare the accuracy of standard methods with historical records. In 66 per cent of cases the estimates were wrong.
And they found that different people using the same methods often came up with completely different estimates, with variations of up to 81 per cent for a…
