37: Professor Dame Sue Black: Forensic Anthropologist

Today’s guest is quite possibly the most bad-ass, to borrow an American expression and pronunciation, person I’ve had on the podcast. Professor Sue Black is a distinguished forensic anthropologist and dame from Inverness, Scotland. She’ll explain exactly what that is, but she is the President of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, and a leading professor at Lancaster University. As an expert in human anatomy, she took two tours of Iraq, worked on the Thai Tsunami Victim Identification of bodies operation, and speaks of how she waded through piles of melted dead corpses in Kosovo. Anecdote after anecdote, she had me absolutely floored, and appreciative that there are people like her doing the work they do, because I sure as hell couldn’t, and we couldn’t function as a society with them. Sue Links: Twitter: https://twitter.com/profsueblack Written in Bone book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Written-Bone-hidden-stories-behind-ebook/dp/B084KJBPZB Andrew Links: Twitter: http://twitter.com/andrewgold_ok Instagram: http://instagram.com/andrewgold_ok Video clips: http://youtube.com/andrewgold1 Join my Patreon: http://patreon.com/andrewgold Later, she became known for her vein pattern analysis, where she found that no two hands appear to have the same pattern of veins, as well as marks, wrinkles and folds. This helped her prove the identity of a father whose hands were caught on film as he molested his daughter. The research has continued and helped to catch many other child sex offenders. I was fascinated to get inside the mind – briefly, at least – with a person who is regularly confronted with the horrors of child sex abuse material and mutilated bodies from murders and wars. I wanted to know how such images change a person and their outlook on life and death, their relationship with their daughter, their views on humanity. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Om Podcasten

What makes you a heretic? Journalist Andrew Gold believes that, in an age of group-think and tribes, we need heretics - those who use unconventional wisdom to speak out against their own groups, from cancelled comedians and radical feminists to cult defectors and vigilantes hunting deviants. Learn from my guests how to rebel, think differently and resist social contagion. From Triggernometry's Francis Foster and the world's most cancelled man Graham Linehan to ex-Hasidic Jew Julia Haart and gender critical atheist Richard Dawkins. These are the people living with the weight of their own community's disappointment on their shoulders.