E-mail (and a call for a forensic examiner at the end):
Rich… Yet another angle on the skull incident.
Here’s the key passage:
“One private, infamous as a joker and troublemaker, found the top part of a human skull, which was almost perfectly preserved. It even had chunks of hair, which were stiff and matted down with dirt. He squealed as he placed it on his head like a crown.”
As some have pointed out, this seems unlikely to have been the conduct of an American soldier. But there’s another problem here, too.
This was supposedly a Saddam-era mass grave, buried underground in a desert climate for years or even decades. The human remains purportedly included “bones” that were anatomically identifiable even in fragment form — tibias, shoulder blades, pieces of hands and fingers. And then the platoon discovered “the top part of a human skull, which was almost perfectly preserved.”
Now imagine what that looks like — a “perfectly preserved”
piece of human skull that has been buried for no fewer than five years and perhaps many more, deep in the ground in a desert climate and surrounded by bare bone fragments. Form a mental image. Now ask yourself:
Does that piece of skull have hair attached to it? CAN it? Hair isn’t woven directly into a human skull. It’s attached by roots to flesh, which is in turn wrapped around the skull (as I understand it) and held in place by a combination of muscles and tendons (which attach muscle to bone). Is it possible that after such a passage of time, in such conditions, tendons were so well preserved that hair was still clinging by its roots to chunks of flesh that remained attached to the skull? Surrounded by other bones that were NOT attached to any flesh, as evidenced by the ease with which the “witness” was able to identify them like so many verses of the Hokey Pokey?
On this question, at least, I bet a forensic examiner (which I am not) could weigh in authoritatively . . .