If a person were a time traveler how might that show up in their skeleton, eg in the isotopic analysis of their teeth?
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Microplastics?
I do remember one science fiction story where a human fossil was obviously a time traveller, because:
A) a human skeleton was found in Cretaceous rock, 60 odd million years before anything human evolved
B) the scientist studying the fossil compared an x-ray of the unique pattern of bumps inside the skull, and found a modern human who matched 100%...himself.
Well, at least one would know you'd have exciting times in your future.
60 million years ago is an interesting period in ant evolution. The ancestor of Titanomyrma was probably around and there are so many gaps in the preservation of insects you could see some really amazing things.
Before ending up like a fossil...
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I'm late to the party but shrimp was the first thing from the sea that started to taste good to me
I love it hot in stews and things like that. The occasional order of popcorn shrimp. I'll still give shrimp cocktail a miss
@catmisgivings
My favorite way to prepare shrimp is lightly sautéed with butter, garlic, and course ground black pepper. But I'll eat it no matter how it's prepared. Please don't overcook it, though. -
Well, at least one would know you'd have exciting times in your future.
60 million years ago is an interesting period in ant evolution. The ancestor of Titanomyrma was probably around and there are so many gaps in the preservation of insects you could see some really amazing things.
Before ending up like a fossil...
Was that the (as far as we know) biggest ant ever?
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If a person were a time traveler how might that show up in their skeleton, eg in the isotopic analysis of their teeth?
@futurebird radioactivity and microplastics? those’ll last forever
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Was that the (as far as we know) biggest ant ever?
Yes! They found a fossil ant queen the size of a humming bird. Just a massive ant. Magnificent.
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Well, at least one would know you'd have exciting times in your future.
60 million years ago is an interesting period in ant evolution. The ancestor of Titanomyrma was probably around and there are so many gaps in the preservation of insects you could see some really amazing things.
Before ending up like a fossil...
@davidtheeviloverlord @futurebird It is still something to aspire to.
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Well, at least one would know you'd have exciting times in your future.
60 million years ago is an interesting period in ant evolution. The ancestor of Titanomyrma was probably around and there are so many gaps in the preservation of insects you could see some really amazing things.
Before ending up like a fossil...
@futurebird @davidtheeviloverlord madly trying to gather the materials to carve notes in a material that will survive fossilisation
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@Moss @futurebird or the opposite...
ranjit (@ranjit@friend.camp)
@anna @futzle@old.mermaid.town there was a humorous sci fi story in which teleportation not only doesn’t send your clothes, it also doesn’t send your bones. Those show up later. So they find a way to cope. I had a comic book adaptation of this story when I was a kid! Look for “Rabbits to the Moon” by Raymond Banks, in this collection: https://archive.org/stream/A_Decade_of_Fantasy_and_Science_Fiction_1960_ed._Robert_P_Mills/A_Decade_of_Fantasy_and_Science_Fiction_1960_ed._Robert_P_Mills_djvu.txt
Friend Camp (friend.camp)
@ranjit @futurebird If the bones “show up later”, does that society have a lost and found office where you can collect your own bones?
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If a person were a time traveler how might that show up in their skeleton, eg in the isotopic analysis of their teeth?
For time travelers who were alive in the 1950s-1960s:
Traces of zirconium-90 in the teeth and bones - looks like that would be the end of the strontium-90 decay products.
There are plenty of other radioactive isotopes, of course, but strontium is special because biological processes react with it like calcium, meaning it rapidly gets incorporated into bones and teeth.
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If a person were a time traveler how might that show up in their skeleton, eg in the isotopic analysis of their teeth?
@futurebird Mercury fillings. Braces, perhaps. Hip replacement composition/technology. Spine shaping due to osteoporosis. Spaceflight osteopenia bone texture patterns.
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@futurebird Fluorine in the teeth; dental work generally. (Orthodontics leave traces! Implants on titanium posts rather more so.)
The other thing is that this kind of thing is generally very coarse; "its diet was C4 plants" has been the result for jaguar skeletal remains. (They were ritual jaguars fed on corn-fed turkeys, far as anyone can tell.) Absolute proof of time travel would take something impossible at tech level like that titanium post.
@graydon @futurebird Fluorapatite happens naturally too some places. That's how people figured out it helps.
Nitinol skeletal implants (hip, knee, etc.) would be pretty obvious. Probably some prompt fission daughter products in skeletons that supposedly died before 1945 would also be suspicious.
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@graydon @futurebird Fluorapatite happens naturally too some places. That's how people figured out it helps.
Nitinol skeletal implants (hip, knee, etc.) would be pretty obvious. Probably some prompt fission daughter products in skeletons that supposedly died before 1945 would also be suspicious.
@AMS @futurebird It does happen naturally but so far as I recall, natural occurrences are rare. And you could presumably correlate isotope traces in the bones with the environment and go "this is a surprise".
Which is very much what this kind of thing is; you need a lot of context to know if the bone isotopes are interesting and even more to know where to associate what you got with if it seems like it's most probably not local.
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If a person were a time traveler how might that show up in their skeleton, eg in the isotopic analysis of their teeth?
@futurebird Way too much fluoride in the apatite. UV-cured ceramic fillings in the teeth, perhaps. Post-WW2 nuclear testing changed the isotope ratios of some elements: the traveler might appear to be a different age from other remains in the vicinity, and results inconsistent with ratio tests on other elements. Not enough evidence of parasites during childhood.
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Yes! They found a fossil ant queen the size of a humming bird. Just a massive ant. Magnificent.
@futurebird @davidtheeviloverlord
Magnific-ant
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I assume you already know about the Baby Tooth Survey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Tooth_Survey .
@michael_w_busch @futurebird Sr-90 was my first thought too, not least because it accumulates in bones so it would be in the skeleton (and I *did* know about the baby teeth) and wouldn’t be found at all pre-1945. So my next thought was that I needed to know when the travelers were coming from, and also when the bones were found.
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@futurebird Fluorine in the teeth; dental work generally. (Orthodontics leave traces! Implants on titanium posts rather more so.)
The other thing is that this kind of thing is generally very coarse; "its diet was C4 plants" has been the result for jaguar skeletal remains. (They were ritual jaguars fed on corn-fed turkeys, far as anyone can tell.) Absolute proof of time travel would take something impossible at tech level like that titanium post.
@graydon @futurebird There are many naturally occurring fluorine sources (that’s how we figured out that it helps prevent caries) so its presence wouldn’t be at all definitive.
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For time travelers who were alive in the 1950s-1960s:
Traces of zirconium-90 in the teeth and bones - looks like that would be the end of the strontium-90 decay products.
There are plenty of other radioactive isotopes, of course, but strontium is special because biological processes react with it like calcium, meaning it rapidly gets incorporated into bones and teeth.
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If a person were a time traveler how might that show up in their skeleton, eg in the isotopic analysis of their teeth?
@futurebird Fillings in the teeth or false teeth are a common trope in science fiction for spotting time travellers. So are other surgical things like replacement hip joints.
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If a person were a time traveler how might that show up in their skeleton, eg in the isotopic analysis of their teeth?
@futurebird so the thing about carbon dating
(note: we are not experts on this, this is our lay understanding)
it's based on the observation that a living thing ceases to take carbon into itself when it dies, which means its radioactives start to be a smaller proportion of its mass compared to things that are still alive
but that only helps measure duration since death
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@futurebird so the thing about carbon dating
(note: we are not experts on this, this is our lay understanding)
it's based on the observation that a living thing ceases to take carbon into itself when it dies, which means its radioactives start to be a smaller proportion of its mass compared to things that are still alive
but that only helps measure duration since death
@futurebird there is a nuance, though, that we suspect must be part of this methodology when it's applied for-real, but don't know enough about
which is that the total isotope balance in the ecosystem is not necessarily constant over time. we have no intuition for how it would vary but suspect it's not uniform.
so if you had a time traveler who you knew just died, and they hadn't been in the present day long enough to have exchanged much mass with it, they might indeed be noticeable
