differences between human and animal bones?
so! like many others, I am attempting NaNoWriMo this year! without getting into the details, my universe is pretty close to ours socially, a little set back technologically, and still polytheistic in a pretty Greco-Roman way.
There is a scene in a temple/shrine where one of my characters basically notices that supposed animal bones are actually human bones. my problem is sort of two-fold. the fact that these are human bones can't be super obvious, because someone else probably would have noticed, right? But! the characters won't be able to handle the bones or be super close to them at this point (I'm sort of thinking they might have to break in later to get a better look at them, one character being sort of "okay, that looks human" and another character being like "have you lost your mind")
It's not that I haven't found information like this, but its either too simple - humans have chins! - or way way wayyyyyy above my head. I'm hoping someone here can dumb it down for me to write about, even though one of my characters would be a kind of doctor-in-training and therefore pretty knowledgeable about what they're seeing. based on what I've read, I'm assuming a fairly "easy" indicator would be cortical bone thickness, animal being quite a bit thicker than what you would see in a human, less porous, greater density? although that would be more difficult to tell if the human who was killed was a child, yes? I'm having trouble figuring out what would be possible and believable in this situation!
There is a scene in a temple/shrine where one of my characters basically notices that supposed animal bones are actually human bones. my problem is sort of two-fold. the fact that these are human bones can't be super obvious, because someone else probably would have noticed, right? But! the characters won't be able to handle the bones or be super close to them at this point (I'm sort of thinking they might have to break in later to get a better look at them, one character being sort of "okay, that looks human" and another character being like "have you lost your mind")
It's not that I haven't found information like this, but its either too simple - humans have chins! - or way way wayyyyyy above my head. I'm hoping someone here can dumb it down for me to write about, even though one of my characters would be a kind of doctor-in-training and therefore pretty knowledgeable about what they're seeing. based on what I've read, I'm assuming a fairly "easy" indicator would be cortical bone thickness, animal being quite a bit thicker than what you would see in a human, less porous, greater density? although that would be more difficult to tell if the human who was killed was a child, yes? I'm having trouble figuring out what would be possible and believable in this situation!