New York's new Climate Change Museum

TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2009
GRAMMA BONES
James Latimer Jones, our mentor, upon his death, has his ashes and spirit set free along with the bones of more than one hundred ancient Native American Indians brought from across the Southwest by Gramma Bones to Hasler Research Center for study by Inductively Coupled Plasma Atomic Emission Spectroscopy.
On the phone I can barely understand her, and must frequently ask her to repeat herself. It was something about analysis of zinc in human bones she wants. How much would it cost? Several labs had quoted her fifteen to twenty dollars for each sample and for only one element, zinc, by atomic absorption analysis and she could personally pay for 20 samples or so.
I ask this person, a student at San Diego State University working on her masters thesis, to visit us at the lab and explain for us what she is trying to accomplish. We’d show her our capabilities and the lab. I was guessing and hoping that being in the same room and being able to see her would help facilitate communication.
Our Director of Research, Dr. Chris Anderson, thinks it might be a good idea to just go ahead, do the work as a freebie, and get a paper out of it. Anything to show that our Inductively Coupled Plasma (ICP) actually works! Claude Veillon and Marvin Margoshes, two of the resident spectroscopy gods at the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST, National Institute of Standards and Technology) in their earlier publication (1), were thorough in their condemnation of ICP’s as being subject to severe interferences and having no real quantitative analytical utility whatever in their concluding statement.
On the appointed day, our receptionist Norma Hampel calls back to the lab to tell me Pauline Stedt has arrived. She appears to be in her leathery late sixties, has a stuffed briefcase in one hand and a cane in her right hand. We greet each other while I fumble about shaking her hand without removing her cane support. One side of her face is drooped and I understand why I have such difficulty understanding her speech.
Then as quickly, I can see how difficult it is for her. Every word she chooses is an effort for her to recall, and then form into intelligible sounds what it is she wants to convey about her project work. On the way to the conference room and library she drags the leg corresponding to the drooped side of her face.
When we’re settled in, she explains that she has a simple hypothesis for her masters thesis in physical anthropology. She wants to settle the ongoing tug of war the cultural and physical anthropologists had been fighting for decades. Each camp would claim that a burial site had been inhabited by either of the two major Southwest Native American groups, the Freemont (hunter-gatherers) or Anasazi (sedentary-agricultural).
She hypothesizes that the Freemont would have higher zinc levels in their bones being meat eaters, and that the Anazazi would have lower levels of zinc because they ate more plant material containing phytate which would complex zinc making it less available for absorption in the gut and to be sequestered in bone tissue. Nice simple hypothesis. All she has to do is try to prove it!
Pauline digs a plastic bag of individually wrapped bone fragments out of her briefcase and she unwraps a few of them. There are digits, wrist and ankle bones, rib fragments, vertebra. They are identified by a numbering system she has in her notebook. I ask about the ink used to identify them. It might contaminate the analysis results, I point out. We’ll have to have a sample of it, or of them, or remove it before analysis by dry grinding with non-contaminating carbide tools. Does she have any of the soil from which these bones were excavated? No, but some notes kept by the archaeologists. Red and yellow ochre was part of the burial dress of some.
“Can you get some?”
“Maybe.”
It looks like we might as well run all 28 elements we have in the spectrometer array because we surely will find a lot more than just the zinc she’s looking for. Other elements may have been carried in or out of the bone based on burial conditions, and long term interactions with the surrounding soil and moisture conditions. There goes the neat hypothesis out the window!
Now she’s fearful and almost in tears that the analysis would cost a fortune she doesn’t have. I apologize, telling her that I had gone into our meeting assuming we are going to do her analyses free of charge. What a relief! Now she could continue going forward, she says.
Then, with intensity she asks, “When can we start?”
“Jon and I have some project work we need to finish.”
“How long will it take?”
“Maybe two months.”
She looks disappointed. I explain that when we get started we can rip through sample analyses at one every couple minutes, and for 28 elements simultaneously!
By the look that passes across her face something clicks in her head, but she makes no mention of it.
“Oh”she says, changing the subject, “I almost forgot. These are copies of the papers I could find on analysis of ancient bones.”
More homework for me. That’s a wrap for now, and I ask Pauline how she got started on this pursuit, not mentioning that it’s rather late in her life to set out to get one’s masters in physical anthropology.
She tells me she married a young sailor in San Diego, raised four navy brats while working as a nurse assistant to an orthopedic surgeon group, and her husband has finally retired from his military service.
It’s her turn now!
So, as a surgical nurse in orthopedics, she has a running start on the science background needed, plus the solid practical experience and background in bone structure and identification. Physical anthropology was a natural for her!
She gets half way through her second semester of anthropology classes and has a stroke, then another. Can’t walk, can’t speak, can’t write. She works at getting herself unaided into a wheel chair. Hires a student assistant to help get her to and from and around campus. Takes a tape recorder to class for notes (with permission of course) and types them manually (no laptops then, not even Apples) and starts all over again toward her initial goal.
Pauline leaves Hasler Research Center (HRC) and is off again on her mission. That afternoon I drafted a design for a plexiglass piston and cylinder with which to pulverize our bone samples for weighing, acid digestion and analysis without contaminating them with the metals we would be looking for.
We hadn’t heard from Pauline for over a month when she called from a museum out in the pucker-brush somewhere. She reported she’d traveled a great loop in the Southwest through Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Utah where she’d begged and pleaded with museum directors and curators pitching her thesis to obtain more samples of well-provenanced bone in the two categories, Anasazi and Freemont. Now she has seventy five more samples! Was that OK, she asks. Sure, I reply. I figure she’ll get some solid statistics out of this collection.
I finish reading all the reference papers Pauline has gathered on analysis of bone and find that regardless of analytical instrumentation or method employed, not a single author has wondered if their work was validated by analysis of bone with values obtained by definitive measurements, thus settling any question about analytical errors unwittingly committed.
Now, I’m becoming concerned about what we’ll use for independent well-analyzed certified reference materials to validate our methodology and work! I contact George Alexander at UCLA who routinely does trace element analysis of environmental samples for the good folks at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. George tells me there is no available human bone certified reference material, but he can give me some of “Oscar” for which he has generated trace element values, including the major elements Calcium and Phosphorus. This is a treasure! And even better is that “Oscar” has never been in the ground to get contaminated, or lose elements to the soil by leaching.
Earlier, Pauline had offered to obtain a 1 gram sample of Native American bone thought to be twenty to forty thousand years old. It was one found on the California coast and had been age dated by Dr. Jeffery Bada using his new aspartic acid recemization technique. It could be a good indicator of long term compositional drift of bone in soil, but it still wasn’t a beacon thoroughly established as having the “true values” ascribed to Certified Reference Materials produced by the National Bureau of Standards that all could reasonably agree were “true and correct”.
George at UCLA, who’s experienced doing work for nuclear agencies worldwide, directs me to the work of Isabell Tipton, a British chemist, who during and following the Second War established elemental concentration values for whole human cadavers for their nuclear development programs. I imagine her stirring up a giant pot of human stew (hair, toenails and all except the socks) until completely dissolved in acid. I wonder “Was she a vegan before, or after? Did she have a bowl of soup for lunch?”
Anyway, these data Isabell generated became known as “standard man”. Additionally, she broke her “standard man” tabulations down into separate organs such as liver, brain, heart, spleen, and others including bone. Here are at least literature reference values available to us for uninterred human bone tissue, in the absence of physical material other than “Oscar”.
My colleague, Dr. Jim Hinthorne, a geologist with a specialty in rock formation, suggests Phosphate Rock from the NBS (now NIST) pointing out that it was fossilized material from an ancient Pliocene seabed laden with bone and shark teeth. Its matrix and trace element composition is very similar to soil-contaminated human bone which is Pauline’s interest, but best of all, this bone is very well characterized by independent expert analysts who are in agreement about its composition within very narrow ranges. This becomes our beacon and anchor for valid objectively verifiable analytical results.
Pauline returns with over one hundred bone samples, intending to do her project up right. With the bones contributed by George Alexander we had a total of one hundred twenty bones. My young son, Russ, persuaded me to include a bone he excavated in Sycamore Canyon near Santa Barbara. As a youngster he’d been fortunate to be allowed on a National Geographic sponsored survey near Tonopah Nevada at a site which dated back five to ten thousand years. He is very interested in the procedures of archaeology, and inspired by Pauline, whom he dubbed Gramma Bones after she’d joined us for a few meals at our home as we worked on her analyses and their interpretations.
It is time to begin the sample analysis work now. The first task is to prepare the individual bone samples for analysis. I wait until the weekend when it would be quiet around the labs and machine shop. I need to concentrate and focus on the task without interruption or distraction. Everything is in place and ready, but I just can’t bring myself to start. A step in the process is missing.
I take a quiet time to “have a talk” with each and all of my subjects to explain why we are gathered here this Saturday morning. To explain exactly what we are doing. What will happen to them. That their spirit will be taken into solution and pass up through the core of this argon plasma, hotter than the surface of the sun, to be atomically excited, and emit their specific light telling their ancient stories to all of us who are living now. Then they will journey up into the sky, finally returning to re-join Earth as the original thermonuclear burnt and exploded star dust from which we, and all our ancestors, and all that we know, are made.
After that, the mundane repetitive process of sample weighing, dissolution, digestion, and presentation to the instrumentation flows through to a resulting blizzard of data which need interpretation. What is the story to be told in these snow banks of raw information?
These bones begin to tell their story right away, as part of the story becomes clear even before analysis.
I have a perfectly intact finger digit to crush for weighing. Upon crushing I find grains of sand as large as several
millimeters! How’d it get in there? No cracks, crevices or holes were evident before opening the digit.
These “sand” grains must have formed as fresh new crystals in the hollow space over time following burial,
because silicon is found only at low parts per million (ppm) levels in unexposed human bone. As much as thirty
eight weight percent (380,000 ppm) of one sample turns out to be nitric-perchloric acid indigestible silica grains.
This evidence of contamination from the outside is ominous for Pauline’s general hypothesis.
Essentially, the data show both major and trace elements alike have concentration ranges a factor of ten to one hundred times greater than expected for unexposed and uncontaminated human bone tissue. The story is that elemental bone composition is not stable over time when exposed to interaction with moisture, soil, and burial artifacts.
This is illustrated in Figure 1 where n is the number of bone analyses comprising the data presented. The horizontal axis is concentration of element found, and the vertical axis is a smoothed frequency of occurrence at concentration indicated. The hatched segments are the literature reported ranges of elemental concentrations for unexposed human bone. The very narrow range for K (potassium), Mg (magnesium), and Na (sodium) reflect that these elements in living bone are normally under tight homeostatic control, but when the bone is exposed to soil they literally drain out of this dead tissue.
The case for Cu (copper) and Zn (zinc) are debatable. However, Sr (strontium), Ba (barium), Mn (manganese), Fe (iron) and Al (aluminum) for the most part, appear to intrude into the soil-exposed bones we examine, as was the case for silicon showing up as “sand” grains inside the bones examined earlier at time of crushing for weighing. These results were devastating to the original general hypothesis Pauline had formed for testing.
Without fear or hesitation Pauline marched straight forward and boldly drew her conclusions. Her hypothesis had not been confirmed. Instead, she drew in her Masters Thesis a sizeable list of lessons to be learned about archaeometry of bone tissue for elemental composition, and validation of analytical methodology for trace and major elemental analysis of human bone tissue. Determined as ever, she decided she needed to continue her work and pursue her PhD.
In retrospect, we might have sieved through the samples analyzed qualifying for further examination only those for which concentrations of both major and trace elements fell within the ranges expected for unexposed human bone, only then, looking for possible significant differences between cultural populations for zinc in bone as she had originally hypothesized.
We did some follow up work for Pauline on the subject of intrusion and exchange of elements in bone. Another worker in the field, Gilbert, (2) had selected tibia (shin) as the best sample material to work with. This is the thickest cross section and highest density of all human bones, has none of the usual porosity of other bone, and has the least turnover thus being more likely to preserve nutritional history (living bone is constantly being destroyed by osteoclasts, and at the same time in another location is being built anew by osteoblasts).
She obtained a section of shin for us. One section we analyzed whole. With the next adjacent slice of tibia from the same individual we removed by abrasion with silicon carbide the outer “skin” of several millimeters which visually appeared to be stained when compared with the interior.
We were gratified to learn that the section which had been “peeled” of its outer layer showed concentration values more nearly comparable with “Oscar” and the literature values of unexposed bone, whereas the “unpeeled” section showed the drift of elements characteristic of leaching and intrusion illustrated in figure 1. Gilbert’s conclusions were congruent with our observations and measurements.
Pauline’s work pointed to what needed to be done in the future. A potential mentor for her, Professor George Armelagos, Department of Anthropology at University of Massachussets wrote her … “your thesis … should set the standards for methodology for years to come.”
I lost track of Pauline when she went East to explore possibilities of continuing her studies and work, and I relocated from Santa Barbara to the Los Angeles area, but I believe she completed her PhD at University of California Riverside.
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1) Hypothesis failed: knowledge gained. No loss: net gain.
2) Pauline’s willingness to ask for help … and get it … was a large lesson for me.
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(1) An evaluation of the induction-coupled, radio-frequency plasma torch for atomic emission and atomic absorption spectrometry Claude Veillon, Marvin Margoshes,
Spectrochimica acta. Part B, Atomic spectroscopy, Vol: 23, Issue: 8, Date: 1968-8, Pages: 503-512. ISSN: 0584-8547,
Abstract:
A study has been made of the induction-coupled, 4.8 MHz, plasma torch as a source of atoms for emission and absorption spectrochemical analysis. The factors evaluated include sensitivity, limits of detection, inter-element effects, limitations, and general convenience. In agreement with other reports, the plasma torch was found to give useful emission signals for several elements which are difficult to excite in chemical flames, such as B, Ta, and Ti. The value of the source for atomic absorption spectrometry was found to depend on the availability of bright line sources. Pronounced inter-element effects were found, affecting particularly the emission signals. In most cases, these inter-element effects were enhancements of the emission, although in one case a suppression was observed. Except for a few refractory elements, the 4.8 MHz plasma torch does not appear to be a suitable replacement for the chemical flame.
(2) Gilbert, Robert I. Trace Element Analysis of three Skeletal American Indian Populations at Dickson Mounds. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Massachusetts.
Footnote 1: [Since the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990 forbids any disturbance of burial sites and their contents, this avenue of inquiry was closed. Kennewick Man stirred the controversy again a few years later. Pauline’s kind of study would be prohibited in future.]
Footnote 2: [When James Latimer Jones, our mentor at Hasler Research Center died, Jon and I, with the support and encouragement of his wife Betty, ran a few hundred milligrams of his ashes through the same plasma which our Native American visitors had earlier traversed on the way to rejoining with all of nature.]
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POSTED BY RAF LEON DAHLQUIST AT 3:57 AM

But they’ll get to revise the museum every year, thus creating yet more work for otherwise useless climate-obsessed people.

Melting wax, of course, from all the missing heat.

Just goes to prove the current generation is way smarter than those that preceded it. Myself, my parents and my grandparents all thought the government couldn’t tax the air we breathe. Gen X Y and Z posivitly insist on it.