@futurebird @CStamp There was a scene at the end of the 1968 Planet of the Apes, not involving chemical analysis, where they looked at an artificial heart valve in a human grave as evidence of an ancient human technological civilization.

@futurebird @catmisgivings

That seems unlikely given how much shrimp we eat today. It's a lot.

@futurebird oh I was just imagining that cesium-137 continues turning up in shrimp
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/business/radioactive-shrimp-walmart-recall.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FFA.CwHN.m87yL68TGK2o&smid=nytcore-android-share

@futurebird@sauropods.win Certain types of surgery and dentistry would be pretty obvious, but not for everyone.

Maybe some kinds of microbes that persist after death? If the species on the skeleton are significantly different from other skeletons from that time, it'd be suspicious. Probably not a smoking gun, though.

@karabaic @futurebird @CStamp The point of that scene was to show that humans were weak and fragile, if I remember correctly.

@futurebird @CStamp

There are bands across my teeth showing when I started drinking fluoridated water.

But that wouldn't tell someone in the late 1800s if someone was a time traveler or if they simply grew up in Colorado.

@bruce @futurebird I wish I remembered the figure for what proportion of the Lenape diet was fish and seafood at the time the settlers came, but I was astonished. A third? Half? The catch was ridiculously abundant

And these guys who came over from England wanted MEAT and perceived that they were gonna starve on Lenape land

@futurebird If someone had been born after a nuclear war, that would show up in their teeth and bones in terms of much higher levels of radioactive strontium compared to contemporary humans.

@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.

@futurebird @CStamp There's a scene in Robert J. Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax where the modern Neanderthal who crosses accidentally into our reality is X-rayed, and they note the reconstructive surgery on his jaw. So some guy got surgically altered to look like a Neanderthal? No, the rest of the bone structure matches too.

@catmisgivings @futurebird
I would eat seafood every day if I could. And if I didn't have to worry about mercury contamination. Oh, and radioactive shrimp.

@futurebird I’m just imagining a time traveler skeleton showing up, like maybe the secret to time travel is to abandon soft tissue

@bruce

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

@bodhipaksa @futurebird @CStamp I think that's right. Zaius denied the valves were what Taylor said they were, an interesting kind of doublethink.

@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)

@futurebird

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.

@davidtheeviloverlord

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...

@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.

@futurebird

Was that the (as far as we know) biggest ant ever?

@futurebird radioactivity and microplastics? those’ll last forever