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If that's not something you want to hear about, this may be a good episode to skip. The animals are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so, the mysterious and unsolved. Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called morbid curiosity, and it has gripped millions of people throughout the ages. I am one of those people.
My name is Halle, and this is the morbid curiosity podcast. Have you ever wondered what happens to the human body after death? The body goes through decomposition, becoming a skeleton, and then eventually disappearing altogether. But how does that work?
What affects how fast the body decays? What if the body's outside, in a lake, or buried in a shallow grave? The answers to all of these questions are very important for forensic anthropologists, the researchers who work with crime scene investigators when human remains are found at a crime scene. Forensic anthropologists use their knowledge of taphonomy to analyze the remains and determine how the person died and how long ago they died.
This information is crucial to any criminal case and can make the difference between solving a murder and leaving an ongoing mystery for generations to come, such as the Jack of the Ripper case. During the Ripper murders, forensics was a new science. The very first crime scene photograph was taken during the investigation. At the time, the police didn't have the technology we have today, and they had little to no knowledge of taphonomy.
The science of the process by which a living thing dies breaks down and goes into the soil, or eventually becomes a fossil if conditions are right. Between death and skeletonization, decomposition occurs, and that process is only recently being understood through the study of taphonomy. Taphonomic processes can change the way a corpse decays in a large variety of ways, even obscuring or scattering the remains. Agents of taphonomy include everything from gravity to scavenging animals and soil chemical content.
It's very important for archaeologists and forensic anthropologists to take into account all sorts of information in and around human remains so they can understand what taphonomic agents have acted on it. Basically, when human remains are discovered, they look a certain way, and forensic anthropologists must measure and observe the state of the remains in order to determine what happened to them for them to look that way. There are a lot of variables to keep track of when it comes to taphonomy. I went over a lot of them in a recent Patrons-only episode on taphonomy, but I'll summarize it here in one sentence, everything in the environment around a corpse and the internal environment of the corpse itself can affect how the corpse decomposes.
That's a hell of a lot of variables, and forensic anthropologists have found a unique way to study as many of those variables as possible through the creation of body farms. A body farm, also sometimes called a human taphonomy facility or forensic anthropology facility, is an outdoor research area where decomposition is studied by letting nature take its course on human remains in a variety of settings and observing what occurs during the decomposition process. And as so many variables change how decomposition occurs, these facilities try to replicate as many situations in which human remains may be found as possible. The location of the facilities matter as well, as different locations have different weather, different scavengers and different insects, making the decomposition of human remains slightly different for every location.
First, how did body farms come into being? Analysis of bone from archaeological sites has been undertaken since at least the mid-19th century in Europe and the late 19th century in the United States. These early taphonomic investigations only observed dry archaeological human remains, but analyzed cut marks on bone, fragmentation patterns in human and animal skeletons, and brought about awareness of biases within the fossil record, such as smaller bones disintegrating faster than larger ones, making it seem like only larger creatures existed in the past. The 1980s were the era in which taphonomy became its own discipline, both in terms of archaeology and crime scene investigation.
William M. Bass, an American forensic anthropologist, was working at the University of Tennessee in 1977 as the head of the anthropology department when he was asked by police to examine the body of what appeared to be a recent murder victim found on top of a Civil War-era grave. The body was relatively intact, suggesting it was recent, but the clothing on the body was that of a Civil War soldier. The cast-iron coffin, an airtight container, had been broken open by grave robbers.
That coffin had kept insects and bacteria away from the courts for hundreds of years, leading to a state of preservation that was completely unexpected. Bass was intrigued. He suggested that more research was needed on the mechanisms of human decomposition in order to understand the process. The idea for the first human taphonomy facility was conceived by Bass in 1981 at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
The aim was to study the decomposition of human remains and learn what effects that process. By placing bodies outside to face the elements, researchers could study every step of the decomposition process from putrefaction to skeletonization. The information gathered from this research could then be used for medical, legal, and educational purposes. The University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility is located behind the University of Tennessee Medical Center.
It's a 2.5-acre or 10,000-meter square wooded plot surrounded by a razor-wire fence. At any one time, there are a number of bodies placed in different settings throughout the facility and left to decompose. The bodies are exposed in a number of ways in order to provide insight into decomposition under varying conditions, for example, locked in the trunk of a car or submerged under water. Observations and detailed records of the decomposition process are kept, including the sequence and speed of decomposition, what scavengers and what insects visit the body, and the effects they have on the corpse.
The bodies left on the surface are called surface depositions. There are also shallow graves, deep graves, graves with multiple bodies in them, and any scenario you can imagine. Researchers simulate as many conditions that a body might be found in as possible. Thanks to the research at the University of Tennessee, we now know that the human body decomposes in stages.
The first stage is self-digestion, also called putrefaction, in which the bacteria and enzymes from the gut begin to digest the internal organs. Next is bloat, in which the body fills with gases emitted by the bacteria causing the body to swell. In which three is active decay, in which the liquified organs and other tissues are released into the surrounding environment. The body begins to dry out during advanced decay, when only some skin, hair, and bone remains.
The final stage is skeletonization, in which only bones remain. Bones eventually also break down, but it takes years, and which bones disappear first depends not only on the bone, but also the soil and the flora and fauna that live in it. We also know that a number of factors affect each and every stage of the process, whether insects, scavengers, exposure level, body fat content, clothing, and more can change the way decomposition occurs. The size and health of each body also impacts how decay happens.
The time it takes for each body to decay differs massively based on the environment that the body is in. For example, in the sunlight, decomposition happens at a much faster rate than in the snow. This is why, having several body farms in different locations around the world aids taphonomic research. Again, for an extremely detailed version of this information, you can become an MCP patron to access our decomposition episode.
You may be wondering where the University of Tennessee acquires the bodies for their studies. Bodies are either donated to the facility by individuals or through the Tennessee Medical Examiner's Office. Over 100 bodies are donated to the facility every year. Upon arrival, each body is given a unique identification number to maintain confidentiality.
The bodies are then examined to record them in their original state. The bodies can then be placed in a variety of different locations and under different conditions. For example, indirect sunlight or shade, under a tarp, or in a very deep grave. Following placement, the bodies are allowed to decay under observation, and all findings are recorded.
Following the outdoor research, the skeletal remains are collected, cleaned, and curated in a permanent skeletal collection that's open for research. The Anthropological Research Facility is also used in the training of law enforcement officers in crime scene, evaluation, analysis, and techniques. For example, the FBI runs a Recovery of Human Remains course for its evidence recovery agents. During the five-day class, students learn and apply a rigid methodology for finding and recovering human remains from clandestine graves.
They learn to document everything, including clues and potential evidence that might be buried in the surrounding soil. The goal is to collect as complete a picture as possible of the deceased. This is more difficult out in the open, as the crime scene isn't contained like it would be if it were inside a house. What appears to be trash around the body may actually be evidence.
Students learn to rigorously document everything surrounding the scene. As technology continues to evolve, the researchers at the Anthropological Research Facility continue to identify new methods to calculate the postmortem interval or the length of time the individual has been dead. Determining the time of death in a homicide case can make the difference between bringing criminals to justice and a cold case. Therefore, finding accurate ways to determine this has been the main focus since the facility opened.
Calculating the postmortem interval is difficult because every minute that passes after death, the harder it gets to correctly estimate. The research at the Anthropological Research Facility over the past 36 years is directly responsible for broadening forensic anthropologists' ability to estimate the postmortem interval. When asked about the next steps for the facility, BAS has insinuated that the facility is too small, and more land that hasn't already been exposed to human decomposition is needed. The University of Tennessee recently granted the ARF an additional 12 acres or 49,000 meters squared, so BAS's wish for a larger facility will soon be realized.
While the University of Tennessee's ARF was the first of these facilities, many other forensic anthropology research facilities have been established in other locations. I'm going to talk about them and the information they've uncovered, but first, an ad must play. If these ads annoy you, you can get ad-free episodes by becoming an MCP patron on Patreon. This podcast is free to the over 20,000 people who listen to it every month.
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You'll have my eternal gratitude. To date, there are eight forensic anthropology facilities across the United States, one in Canada, one in Australia, and one in the Netherlands. The reason it's important to have so many facilities in different locations around the world is that the local environment plays a huge part in the stages of decay. A corpse in the Tennessee heat and humidity will decay differently to one in the Canadian cold.
In order to properly estimate the post-mortem interval, it's important to understand the local environmental effects on the decay process. At each one of these forensic anthropology facilities, each stage of death is analyzed independently to get a better understanding of the decomposition process and the environmental factors that affect it. Also, soil, plant life, and insect life around the corpse can give just as much information as the corpse itself. Products of the decomposed body eventually seep into the soil, leaving behind traces which can help researchers determine the length of time that the body has been in a particular area.
These decomposition islands, as they're called, can often remain in the soil for hundreds of years, being detectable in some archaeological contexts. The over 400 compounds that are released from corpses after burial are also studied at many of these facilities. The scent of these compounds is also studied as the odors are detectable by many different breeds of dogs who can then be trained to sniff out cadavers. Many dog breeds can detect these odors better than a mass spectrometer, a machine designed to identify the chemicals in odors.
Due to this discovery, researchers can recreate these smells and train dogs on what exactly to search for, making them incredibly effective in aiding with home side cases. Insects can be just as helpful. Forensic entomologists use body farms to investigate how insects behave and interact with the body during future factions. Flies in particular can detect corpse odors from great distances and have life cycles that are consistent enough to make estimates on how long the person has been dead.
Flies usually find a corpse within minutes of death and can quickly colonize the whole corpse in less than a week. The flies arrive to consume corpse fluids and then enter the body through any natural openings or wounds and lay their eggs, which then hatch into larvae known as maggots. Maggots have four life stages before they become pupae and then become adult flies. When the adult emerges, it continues to feed on body fluids until it's mature enough to mate and lay its own eggs on the corpse.
By tracking the life cycles of flies and maggots, an entomologist can determine how many generations of flies have access to the corpse, and from that, they can estimate how long the person has been dead. And we know all of this thanks to research undertaken at forensic anthropology facilities. Besides insects, there are other scavengers who may act on the corpse. Forensic anthropology facilities are quite variable and depend on the environment and the stage of decomposition.
Some animals prefer different stages of decomposition, and different scavengers have different patterns of activity. Rodent gnawing on bone looks quite different from the feeding habits of vultures or other carrion birds, and large opportunistic scavengers like bears or big cats can severely scatter and damage a corpse. Some forensic anthropology facilities allow animal scavenging, while others prevent it by placing wire cages over the bodies. The second forensic anthropology facility to be created was the Forensic Osteology Research Station, or Forest, at Western Carolina University in Coloween, North Carolina.
It was opened in 2007 and is run by WCU's Forensic Anthropology Program. The .08 acre or 324 meter square plot sits on the rural forested mountain campus in the Blue Ridge Physiographic Province at an altitude of 2,271 feet above sea level. It gets hot in the summer and stays mild in the winter. All cadavers, once skeletonized, become part of the John A.
Williams Human Skeletal Collection. Most of these facilities maintain skeletal collections of the bodies that have decomposed at the facility. These are usually used for other forensic or archaeological research. Forest has also been used for cadaver dog training, in which a variety of police dogs undergo 8-12 weeks of continuous training, learning to detect odors of decomposing and skeletal human remains across a range of environments designed to simulate real-life scenarios.
Upon completion of their training, the dogs are tested to earn their accreditation, with reaccreditation testing required annually, and regular training continuing throughout the year to ensure their skills are maintained and their detection abilities improved. The Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, or FARF, commissioned by the Texas State University San Marcos Department of Anthropology, opened in 2008 and is under the direction of Dr. Michelle Hamilton, a former student of William Bass. FARF is a 26-acre facility at Texas State's Freeman Ranch near San Marcos, and is spatially the largest facility of its kind in the world.
Freeman Ranch is a working ranch that serves as an educational model for ranch management. It's made up of both grassland and forested areas. The actual secure decomposition facility is around 7 acres. Since 2008, research has been conducted on approximately 650 donated bodies, with another 1,000 living people pre-registered as donors for future research.
Alongside decomposition research, FARF is also used to train forensic anthropology students, law enforcement, and medical legal personnel in methods for searching and recovering human remains. Another facility, the Southeast Texas Applied Forensic Facility, or staffs, exists through Sam Houston University. The study area is located within Piney Woods Environmental Research Laboratory, a 247-acre piece of land near Sam Houston National Forest, which is forested in Hilly and bisected by a creek. The soil in the area is sandy and acidic.
One acre of the area is dedicated to decomposition research, surrounded by a maximum security fence, with an additional 8 acres of minimum security research space for forensic recovery training. Webcams are utilized to provide a 24-7 documentation of the decomposition process. The Complex for Forensic Anthropology Research, or CFAR, opened in 2010 at Southern Illinois University. This facility is 0.33 acres and has acidic soils, lower temperatures, and poor soil drainage making the conditions unique compared to the previous facilities.
It also has a very heavy vulture presence, making it an excellent place to study feeding and scattering patterns by vultures. CFAR also works with local police and provides forensic training for all levels of law enforcement. One of the highest altitude facilities is FERS, the Forensic Investigation Research Station, in Grand Junction Colorado, run by Colorado Mesa University. Sitting at 4,750 feet, or 1,450 meters, and receiving only around 9 inches or 22 centimeters of rain a year, this facility is an excellent location to study decomposition in an arid, high-altitude environment, which is an environment that often causes desiccation of remains, or natural mummification.
The facility started out using pig remains to study decomposition, but began working with donated human remains in 2013. The University of South Florida's Institute of Forensic Anthropology and Applied Science opened their facility for outdoor research and training, or FORD, in 2016. The facility began as a 3.5-acre fenced-in field in Pasco County, but has since moved to a larger and more ecologically diverse area outside Gainesville in 2022 due to a loss of their lease. The environment of both locations is subtropical and swampy.
The facility specializes in training students and law enforcement in detecting clandestine burials, outdoor crime scene processing, and mass grave excavation. The Forensic Science Research and Training Lab opened in 2021 at George Mason University in Manassas, Virginia. The five-acre wooded facility specializes in examining environmental changes, soil composition, animal scavenging, and floral and insect diversity around decomposition sites. The area is home to hot humid summers and mild to cool winters.
The Australian Facility for Taffonomic Experimental Research, or after, was opened in 2016 by Australian forensic expert Sherry Forbes through the University of Technology, Sydney. Located near Yaramundi on the outskirts of Sydney, this was the first body farm outside the United States. The need for an Australian facility was dire, as many of the findings from the facilities in the United States aren't relevant in Australia due to the vastly different environment. The insects and scavengers as well as the weather is different.
Surprisingly, mummification is more likely in the areas around Sydney. Research at After has centered on using time-lapse imagery, the training of cadaver dogs, victim identification through DNA, isotopes, and fingerprinting, soil biomarkers that indicate the presence of a body, and tracking decomposition in mass graves. After has also been able to illustrate that post-mortem movement of the arms is greatest during the early stages of decomposition, whereas post-mortem movement of legs occurs more during advanced decomposition. At a nearby location, Dr.
Forbes and her team operate an animal body farm, observing how marsupials such as kangaroos, possums, and wombats decay, something never studied before. Kim Crabtree runs the facility, and along with her supervisor Dr. Gillian Garvey conducts experiments on pig carcasses. Because of legal and ethical restrictions on the use of human cadavers for certain experiments, pigs are often used as analogs as they have similar anatomy and lack fur.
These experiments involve burning and aid in training of cadaver dogs to smell accelerants and burned flesh. Dr. Forbes also founded the first Canadian Forensic Anthropology Facility at the University of Sydney, which opened in August of 2020. The facility, called the Secure Site for Research in Thanatology, or the Rest Facility, is on a small parcel of land on an industrial science park near Baykunkur.
This is the most northerly forensic anthropology facility and will greatly add to the knowledge of cold climate decomposition, which is currently lacking. In 2018, the Amsterdam University Medical Center's opened its first taphonomic research facility, called the Amsterdam Research Initiative for Subsurface Tophonomy and Anthropology, or ARASTA. This 500-square-meter facility studies subterranean or buried bodies only, as it's located in a densely populated area. They focus on using remote sensing tools such as ground penetrating radar to trace decomposition.
They also place temperature and humidity gauges in the graves and monitor surface insect activity. This is the very first European body farm. Forensic anthropology facilities have contributed a great deal to the field of forensics. However, most times, the initial reaction from local communities near these facilities are resistant, stating fears that the decomposing corpses will stink and attract insects and scavenging animals to the area.
After the opening of the University of Tennessee's body farm, there were a number of complaints about odor and many people claimed that they could see the decomposing bodies from their homes, though this was unproven. Many times, people initially think it's grotesque, barbaric, and it insults the deceased to let their bodies decompose out in the open, even for scientific reasons. Other concerns include that the bodies in the facilities are stolen or unclaimed homeless people taken from the coroner's office. Every one of these facilities were able to open and quickly overcome all concerns by working with the community to find security and privacy solutions.
Joining the public about the vast way these facilities assist in criminal cases usually brings people around. Also, assuring them that, while very early on, the bodies in these facilities were unclaimed remains, today 100% of the bodies are donated. There are enough people willing to assist with this important research that it's no longer necessary. TV shows like CSI Crime Scene Investigation, accompanied by scientific advances and public outreach, has helped the public come to terms with this research over the years.
I first learned of the body farm during an archaeological conference on the subject of death and burial, in which a representative from the University of Tennessee spoke about the research taking place there. I, like so many others, was immediately fascinated. Thanks to outreach like this, an increasing number of citizens are willing to donate their bodies to aid in this research, as it costs nothing to donate, many times families also donate their loved ones bodies, creating a lasting legacy for the person after death that also ensures that this research can continue. Body farms are very useful sources of forensic information, however, there are some issues with the data collected at these facilities.
Currently, the donated bodies that are observed in these facilities are overwhelmingly those of white men, meaning the breadth of the data collected is very slim. Further, many of the donated bodies are received from individuals who were ill for a long time before death, and this can affect the process of decay. Medications, overall health, and the age of the body all have an effect on the process of decay. With more donors and more facilities, there will be more information and less mystery surrounding death and decomposition.
In short, forensic anthropology facilities provide a unique source of information that can assist forensic anthropologists, crime scene investigators, entomologists, archaeologists, and many other specialists. They grant rare insight into the human decomposition process, a fascinating, disgusting, efficient and beautiful journey will all take, but never get to see. That's why Body Farms, Spark, our Curiosity. Pauline P, Nicole L, and Jora C all have my eternal gratitude for becoming patrons.
Thank you so much, and thank you to Andrew H, who upgraded his membership. Because of you, the listeners, our creepy community is growing strong. The MCP has joined the Straight Up Strange podcast network, which hosts true crime, paranormal, history, science, folklore, and other enigmatic podcasts. Nothing is off limits when you enter the world of Straight Up Strange.
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