Skeletons Revealed

Come along--let's take a voyage through the boneyard.

As the daughter of a drug-addicted mother and a child-molesting father, author Augusta Rain had the odds stacked against her from the beginning. In Skeletons Revealed, she narrates the story of her rocky upbringing and shares events she has kept secret for many years. In this memoir, Rain confronts the skeletons of her pasta young girls cry for help as she releases her secrets one by one in an effort to stop the cycle of abuse. The youngest of six, she tells how she kept the secrets to protect her family at all costs. Skeletons Revealed tells how Rain and her siblings often lived with no food, electricity, or water, and how they endured being battered, drugged, and raped. The true story of a survivor, Skeletons Revealed encourages others to gain the courage, break the silence, and speak out and act against abuse. It communicates that there comes a time to take a stand and control your own destiny. You cant control your future unless you make peace with your past.

“A provocative and entertaining magical mineral tour through the life and afterlife of bone.” —Wall Street Journal Our bones have many stories to tell, if you know how to listen. Bone is a marvel, an adaptable and resilient building material developed over more than four hundred million years of evolutionary history. It gives your body its shape and the ability to move. It grows and changes with you, an undeniable document of who you are and how you lived. Arguably, no other part of the human anatomy has such rich scientific and cultural significance, both brimming with life and a potent symbol of death. In this delightful natural and cultural history of bone, Brian Switek explains where our skeletons came from, what they do inside us, and what others can learn about us when these artifacts of mineral and protein are all we've left behind. Bone is as embedded in our culture as it is in our bodies. Our species has made instruments and jewelry from bone, treated the dead like collectors' items, put our faith in skull bumps as guides to human behavior, and arranged skeletons into macabre tributes to the afterlife. Switek makes a compelling case for getting better acquainted with our skeletons, in all their surprising roles. Bridging the worlds of paleontology, anthropology, medicine, and forensics, Skeleton Keys illuminates the complex life of bones inside our bodies and out.

Ten gripping tales of murder and missing persons show how skulls and skeletons reveal their secrets to forensic investigators. A skull is found on a scree slope high above the mirror-calm waters of Spray Lakes. Bones rumoured for years to be buried in a Medicine Hat backyard are finally dug up. The trussed and tortured skeletal remains of an unknown man are found in a septic tank near Tofield. These baffling Alberta cases show how dogged, old-fashioned detective work combines with modern forensic techniques in the search for the truth.

Australian researcher Mutton gives us the rundown on various hominids, skeletons, anomalous skulls and other “things” from our family tree, including hobbits, pygmies, giants and horned people. Chapters include: Human Origin Theories; Dating Techniques; Mechanisms of Darwinian Evolution; What Creationists Believe about Human Origins; Evolution Fakes and Mistakes; Creationist Hoaxes and Mistakes; The Tangled Tree of Evolution; The Australopithecine Debate; Homo Hablilis; Homo Erectus; Anatomically Modern Humans in Ancient Strata?; Ancient Races of the Americas; Robust Australian Prehistoric Races; Pre Maori Races of New Zealand; The Taklamakan Mummies-Caucasians in Prehistoric China; Strange Skulls; Dolichocephaloids (Coneheads); Pumpkin Head, M Head, Horned Skulls; The Adena Skull; The Boskop Skulls; ‘Starchild’; Pygmies of Ancient America; Pedro the Mountain Mummy; Hobbits-Homo Florensiensis; Palau Pygmies; Giants; Goliath; Holocaust of American Giants?; Giants from Around the World; more. Heavily illustrated.

Skeletons in the Closet consists of ten essays about unresolved or unresolvable family conflicts. The contributors start from the assumption that families-whether legal-marriage families, common-law marriage families, single-parent families, multiple-generation families, same-sex partnerships, or adoptive families-are cradles of intense emotion. That intensity, they argue, may translate into conflict, competition, domination, abuse, exploitation, or even hate. This book explores those areas most likely to grip family members in unresolved interpersonal strife, as well as the strategies people use to solve the issues and the shame and isolation that conflict brings in societies that normatively expect family life to be one of joy, mutual sharing, and caring. --

The dead tell no tales. Or do they? In this fascinating book, Clark Spencer Larsen shows that the dead can speak to us--about their lives, and ours--through the remarkable insights of bioarchaeology, which reconstructs the lives and lifestyles of past peoples based on the study of skeletal remains. The human skeleton is an amazing storehouse of information. It records the circumstances of our growth and development as reflected in factors such as disease, stress, diet, nutrition, climate, activity, and injury. Bioarchaeologists, by combining the methods of forensic science and archaeology, along with the resources of many other disciplines (including chemistry, geology, physics, and biology), "read" the information stored in bones to understand what life was really like for our human ancestors. They are unearthing some surprises. For instance, the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago has commonly been seen as a major advancement in the course of human evolution. However, as Larsen provocatively shows, this change may not have been so positive. Compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors, many early farmers suffered more disease, had to work harder, and endured a poorer quality of life due to poorer diets and more marginal living conditions. Moreover, the past 10,000 years have seen dramatic changes in the human physiognomy as a result of alterations in our diet and lifestyle. Some modern health problems, including obesity and chronic disease, may also have their roots in these earlier changes. Drawing on vivid accounts from his own experiences as a bioarchaeologist, Larsen guides us through some of the key developments in recent human evolution, including the adoption of agriculture, the arrival of Europeans in the Americas and the biological consequences of this contact, and the settlement of the American West in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Written in a lively and engaging manner, this book is for anyone interested in what the dead have to tell us about the living.

On July 28, 1996, two young men stumbled upon human bones in the shallow water along the shore of the Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington. Was this an unsolved murder? The remnants of some settler's or Native American's unmarked grave? What was the story behind this skeleton? Within weeks, scientific testing yielded astonishing news: the bones were more than 9,000 years old! The skeleton instantly escalated from interesting to extraordinary. He was an individual who could provide firsthand evidence about the arrival of humans in North America. The bones found scattered in the mud acquired a name: Kennewick Man. Authors Sally M. Walker and Douglas W. Owsley take you through the painstaking process of how scientists determined who Kennewick Man was and what his life was like. New research, never-before-seen photos of Kennewick Man's remains, and a lifelike facial reconstruction will introduce you to one of North America's earliest residents. But the story doesn't end there. Walker and Owsley also introduce you to a handful of other Paleoamerican skeletons, exploring their commonalities with Kennewick Man. Together, their voices form a chorus to tell the complex tale of how humans came to North America—if we will only listen.