Atmospheric river floods in British Columbia unearthed human remains, prompting a flurry of death investigations. While all turned out to be ancient Indigenous ancestors, a new diet analysis method is significantly speeding up the process of identifying old bones from modern ones.
When an atmospheric river hit B.C. in November 2021, reports of mudslides, washed out bridges and flooded homes dominated the headlines.
'Dramatically different' diets Yazedjian is the woman in charge of the province's 180 current cases of unidentified human remains, found between 1962 and early 2024, and mostly held at the coroner service's Coquitlam storage facility. "The ratio of heavy to light isotopes of carbon and nitrogen indicates what kind of protein we regularly ate during our lives," said Damon Tarrant, the SFU PhD student who authored the paper.
The difference between Indigenous ancestors from B.C.'s Interior who ate terrestrial diets is also different from people today, but not different enough to rule them out as being modern. Samples have to be sent away to Ontario and results take between six to eight months, while isotopic testing takes just a couple of months, according to Yazedjian.
The 48 skeletal remains at the centre of Tarrant's paper were tested over a period of more than 10 years.It was the atmospheric river that ultimately helped push the sample size over the threshold.
DIET ANALYSIS HUMAN REMAINS INDIGENOUS ANCESTORS ARCHAEOLOGY BC CORONERS SERVICE
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