• Question: what dose your jod mean?

    Asked by 10mmogi to Anna, Craig, Richard, Sue on 23 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Richard Case

      Richard Case answered on 23 Jun 2011:

      Hi 10mmogi,

      I’m reading this as What does your job mean?… but if its not that let me know….

      Well I am classed as a fingerprint expert… which means that if a criminal touches something when he / she is doing something wrong, they will leave their fingerprints behind.

      Its up to me to look at those prints and to work out who the criminal is.

      I can do that by putting the fingerprint in a computer that can search 20,000,000 (20 million) sets of fingerprints in a few minutes, or by looking through a magnifying glass and looking at them one at a time.

      The computer only works if they leave enough of a fingerprint behind.

      I can also look at the fingerprints of dead bodies and try to tell who they are.

      Sometimes I have to go to court to talk about my results.

      Hope this helps 🙂

    • Photo: Anna Williams

      Anna Williams answered on 23 Jun 2011:

      Hi 10mmogi,
      I am a forensic anthropologist. An anthropologist is someone who studies mankind. The word ‘anthropos’ means mankind in Greek and ‘ology’ means the study of something. There are lots of types of anthropology, that focus on all sorts of aspects of mankind. For example, there is SOCIAL anthropology, which is concerned with how people interact with each other – how people live together, marry, have children in all sorts of societies all over the world. There is also CULTURAL anthropology, which looks at how different societies and cultures view things differently. There is also PHYSICAL anthropology, which is concerned with human bodies. It looks at how humans evolved, how they are similar to primates, their growth and development and anatomy.

      FORENSIC anthropology is a part of physical anthropology. A forensic anthropologist uses techniques of measuring the skeleton to tell us about the similarities and differences between individuals, and how an individual lived. A skeleton can tell you (if you know how to look at it in the right way) about the sex, age and height of a person, where they came from, what their lifestyle was like, if they had any diseases that affected their bone, and how they died. This is the bit that is relevant for forensic anthropology – I can (most of the time) tell the police these details about a skeleton or bones or a badly decomposed body, which will help the police find out exactly who they were (identify them) and work out how they died.

      I hope that answers your question!

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