Crime Lab and anthropology

Yesterday we visited the peoria crime lab and one thing i noticed in particular is that everything needs to be very carefully recoreded in either photo or video as to not destroy any evidence. I thought anthropology would be very rarely used, but two times it was mentioned yesterday! The first time was the story of the serial killer who ground up the bones and the second was on the prime time crime story on abc. Anthropology is the study of human bones, usually on a skeleton that hasn't yet been identified, to find out things like the age, sex, height, and weight to find out who the skeleton belonged to. It also looks for things like the manner of death, and if it was a homicide then who was the murderer. Lots of math is used in this field especially to find out the height and weight. Methods of Forensic Anthropology are skeletal examination, dental analysis, facial reconstruction, bone scatter, and mitochondrial dna. Teeth are usually used to find out the age, and bone scatter is typically use to find time since the death. The other two are basically used to find out identity. These skeletons need to be identified to find out if there was a murder and if so who was the murderer. Due to tom's change in topic i think i might take up either trace evidence or impression evidence (whichever one has blood spatter), because we already have one doing pathology and one doing entomology, don't want the presentation to be too focused on death.