Miss Truth

These bones mostly still had soft tissue attached, not merely bare, and thus they looked horrifying, especially the skulls, some of which still had hair and flesh that hadn’t fully fallen off, giving Wan Lu waves of nausea.

After a while, Wan Lu managed to steady her emotions and sneakily glanced at Inspector Liu. Seeing him standing in a corner with a frown and a look of disgust on his face, a surge of anger rose within her. She thought, "You find this disgusting too, yet you dragged our wife here to identify them!"

Though she was angry, she didn’t let her emotions get the best of her and lash out at Inspector Liu. She snatched a pair of gloves from the hands of a government official nearby, put them on nimbly, and squatted next to Ran Yan, "Wife, how do we identify this? Let me help divide it!"

Ran Yan was observing the degree of wear on the teeth of a skull. Hearing Wan Lu’s slightly irritated voice, she couldn’t help but turn her head, smile slightly, and turned the skull around, saying, "Before adulthood, there’s a piece of cartilage called the basilar suture between the body of the sphenoid and the base of the occipital bone. The closure of this gap occurs between 21 and 23 years of age. After the age of forty, this suture will completely disappear."

Ran Yan pointed out that seam to Wan Lu, "Look at this one, it’s closed well but not gone, indicating that at the very least, it’s above 21 years old and under forty. Then we deduce further from the degree of wear on the teeth."

Although she was explaining, Ran Yan didn’t actually let Wan Lu do the identification. She just felt that Wan Lu had courage and potential.

"Wear refers to the gradual erosion of the tips and biting surfaces of the teeth as they chew food during the growth period," Ran Yan said as she pushed away the lower jaw of the skull she was holding, allowing Wan Lu to clearly see the side profile of the teeth, "For instance, most of the cusps of the teeth on this skull are worn, the dentin is exposed in a dot-like manner, meaning you can see a dot on the side profile of the tooth where the outer layer has been worn away, exposing the underlying dentin. We can determine that the age of this skull is approximately 36 to 45 years old."

Wan Lu asked, "Then this skull is also between 36 and 40 years old?"

"Correct," Ran Yan nodded in satisfaction and continued to inspect other parts of the skull for healing, "Once we find the other bones, we can narrow the range of age error to within two years."