Author Archives: annabones

Stripped, Part III – ‘Back’

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[click to read Part I, and Part II of my 'Stripped' series]



“Gosto das suas costas” – anonymous

I stepped out onto the street, still in a daze with those dreamy Portuguese words dancing in my head. A keychain dangled around my neck, the glittery ‘A’ bouncing off my stomach in a steady rhythm. A Sainsbury’s trolley full of bones dragged behind me as I marched towards the British Museum. Latte in hand and a smile on my face, I said: “I’m here. Where do I set up?”

It was London Anthropology Day. This was my first workshop.

I felt the blood rush towards my head. Everything was upside down. I adjusted my hands according to yoga instructions I had been given many years ago – “you have a very long back” I had been told. I tilted my head to the side to meet 50 pairs of very confused eyes staring intently at me… I was, after all, doing downward dog in a Paleoanthropology workshop.

“So you see, you really get the sense of how much longer our legs are in relation to our arms when you get on all fours. Apes on all fours don’t look this silly. And all of this because we are bipedal.” I said.

A human in downward dog and chimpanzee on all fours

I stacked my body back onto my legs, turning the room right side up again. My heels landed at the bottom of their multicoloured boots, in a painful reminder of the missing left insole, and as the weight of my torso came bearing down on my feet, my spine adjusted sorely over my uneven legs. With a supernumerary lumbar vertebra that gives my back its extra length, and a left leg 9 mm shorter than the right that gives my spine a slight sideways bend, my backbone is both a beauty and a torment. Concealing the discomfort from my audience, I secretly cursed this human condition as my lower back begged for downward dog again.

Like 24 little doughnuts piled one on top of the other, the human vertebral column, the hallmark of our species, remains among the most problematic structure of the human body. The lower back, in particular, which plays a key role in keeping the trunk erect and in equilibrium with minimal force, has both been described as an ‘evolutionary failure’ and as a ‘highly sophisticated gear system’. Stacked into a solid but bendable formation like a sturdy flower stem, the five lumbar vertebrae (or six…) are wedged into a lordotic curve that allow for both stability and flexibility in withstanding the forces generated by the weight of a heavy head and large torso over two stilt-like legs – a compromise achieved by a mechanism of interlocking facets, that just like a jointed toy snake, allow movement between the vertebrae in some directions while preventing it from moving in others.

The human S-shape vertebral column has two main curvatures, the thoracic kyphosis and the lumbar lordosis

But our locomotor repertoire of choice means we subject our lower backs to a great deal of bending stress throughout life – the most dangerous kind of stress for bony tissue – and because we can’t spend our lives in downward dog… we must pay the price in pain.

In fact, low back pain, or lumbago, is the most common type of back pain. It affects 80% of people at some point in their lives and accounts for more sick leave and disability than any other medical condition. In the U.S., lower back pain competes with the common cold as the leading reason why people see a physician; it is the number one cause of disability in workers under age 45 and is responsible for an estimated $20 to $50 billion annual expenditure in medical treatments and disability payments. Yet, in the UK,  19 in 20 cases of low back pain are classed as ‘non-specific’, because it is usually not clear what is actually causing the pain, and only about 1% are ever found to have severe causes.

The human lower back anatomy allows for a great deal of flexibility

A pain that has no cause, no cure, is not due to any physical abnormality yet plagues the whole of humanity? It is no surprise that lower back pain is described by the more spiritual as a part of our trial on earth, a burden we must endure in this physical life, only to be alleviated in the next celestial one.

But relief would have to wait for now. At least until I could locate my left insole.

“Was he bipedal?” asked a student while holding up an Australopithecus africanus skull. The room was now hot like an overcrowded yoga studio. I readjusted my back, and as I took the skull in my hands I wondered if ‘he’ had ever felt this way too…

And as it appears, he may very well have. It is likely that early hominids evolved a human-like lumbar lordosis around 3 million years ago, and they are even regularly quoted as having had six lumbar vertebrae – it was looking like, as far as my backbone was concerned, I had more in common with the africanus in my hand, than with the undergraduate opposite me.

However, individuals with six lumbar segments have only been observed in some gibbons and modern humans where they occur with a frequency of 2-8% in different populations, whereas great apes have only four or even three segments. The hominid axial skeleton shows many derived adaptations for bipedalism including an elongated lower back, both in number of vertebrae and in length; this stabilizes the upper body over the lower limbs by positioning the trunk’s centre of mass above the hip. In this case, the long lumbar spine of early hominids would have to be explained by the incorporation of a sixth vertebra during evolution, whereas the primitive condition of the common ancestor of great apes and humans is thought to be either five or four. However, this explanation requires us to accept the appearance and subsequent disappearance of lumbar vertebrae during our evolution – an unsavory explanation as far as the rules of evolution and parsimony go.

So much for my connection with africanus, my sixth vertebra was sounding more like a ‘fail’ than a ‘sophistication’… But at least there was yoga, and a very helpful 9mm thick insole to level me back.

I stepped back onto the streets, energized from the excitement of the workshop. The steady sound of the trolley wheels behind me, eating their way through the London pavement. As I moved away from the museum gates, the cheerful clinking of the shiny keychain ricochetted against my belly, to the pace of my slightly lopsided gait.

“Gosto das suas costas” I heard again.

I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, and its meaning was lost to me, but I smiled anyway. I slipped into a daze, under the welcoming July sunlight. The trolley’s wheels grew silent behind me as did the clinking of the keychain. I felt my feet float away from the ground and the weight of the world being lifted from my every vertebrae, until my back no longer hurt. I heard it again, this time in English, the same exact blurred sentence playing in a loop: “I like your back.” My whole body drifted away from the concrete floor as the city noises grew distant beneath my multicoloured boots. I closed my eyes and let myself go. My head was spinning under the spell of those hazy words that now multiplied below me: “I like your back. I like your back.” From one came many, faster and faster, louder and louder, like the beating of a drum, thumping away until I could not longer ignore them. My body suspended over the cityscape, I finally opened my eyes to meet the voices now shouting at me…

Underneath me there was London, a warm and sunny London, spreading like an enormous worn straw mat, and on that straw mat there were people, a crowd, no, many crowds, countless crowds expanding as far as the eye could see, all coming together into a friendly cohort of toy soldiers calling my name and chanting in unison…

“Welcome back! Welcome back!”

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Author’s note: scientific facts aside, much of the account has been heavily fictionalised.

Eccentricity

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Harlequin boots from Williamsburg, rhombus tights, beige balloon skirt, multicoloured belt from Camden Market, striped long-sleeved shirt and black nails.

“You look like a minstrel today” – university lecturer

Eccentricity: ec·cen·tric·i·ty (ksn-trs-t) : defines the shape of the Earth’s trajectory around the sun. The eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit is currently 0.0167, meaning that the Earth’s orbit is nearly circular. Over thousands of years, the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit varies from nearly 0.0034 to almost 0.058 as a result of gravitational attractions among the planets.

*****

Eccentricity is unlikely to change during our lifetime, and thus at precise intervals of time, we will find ourselves floating in the exact same place in space.

Ten revolutions ago, I was 18, starting my academic pursuit and my life as an adult. I found myself behind desks, pen in hand, ready to learn about my species, about myself, where I came from, where I was going. Amid Malinowski, Franz Boas, and Freud, I found life-changing friendships, and played new games, some of which I excelled at, but many of which I wasn’t ready for yet. In February of 2002, I finally found myself between an ashtray and untidy bedsheets, between a starved stomach and a broken heart. Lost beyond recognition to myself and those who surrounded me, I decided my next ten revolutions would be spent splashing in cosmic light. So the planet turned, and I with it. I was determined I would find myself around the next bend and wave goodbye forever to this place on the arc away from the sun.

*****

My lecturer handed me a green pen and a red eraser, which I placed on the pile I had prepared for my tutorial. I made copies of the hominin phylogeny, spanning its 7 million years, all the way from Chad (Sahelanthropus tchadensis) to the world (Homo sapiens), along with a diagram of a cladogram. My articles were printed and a handwritten sign-in sheet was ready to be filled. It was February 2010 and I was five minutes away from my first teaching experience. Feeling more nervous than overjoyed, I checked my notes once more, took the pile under one arm, and carried the green pen and red eraser in the opposite hand as I made my way to room 128 of the UCL Anthropology department.

“Why is this all in pink?” asked one of the students as he signed next to his name. I glanced at the blindingly girlish sign-in sheet, and glanced over my own notes and articles, a pink-ridden mess. I gave off a nervous laugh: “Yes, I seem to have a slight problem with bright colours”.

My relationship with colours had often caused confusion during my first year as an undergraduate in 2000. I was once even labelled ‘politically ignorant’ after wearing a pink top with a picture of an orange at the centre: in Portugal, pink is the colour of the socialist party, you see, while orange is the colour of its opposition, the social-democratic party (I am still convinced that I was in fact the most politically illuminated of all…)

Stepping into my new shoes at the front of the class, I felt lonely and vulnerable. There were twelve inattentive and uninterested heads staring my way, and my task of delivering information for 50 minutes seemed daunting. I realized I had spent so long studying and being interested in this subject of human origins, that its meaning and significance had creeped under my skin and were ingrained in my body, lost beyond words in the depths of my gray matter, to the point where I wasn’t able to formulate in full sentences why I believed this was the most fascinating topic of all. I was not going to teach them any skills, none of my knowledge had real-life applications, I was not about to give them privileged information or any insight of significance, and nothing of financial relevance would be gained from the next hour. It became clear that what was so obvious to me, was not obvious to this adolescent audience and my biggest task ahead would be to give them a glimpse of all the wonder I felt when studying these matters – in essence, to open myself up and show them my world.  Looking around upon a classroom filling with teenage girls bobbing their long luscious hair, boys in tight jeans all typing on their cellphones, I slowly resigned myself to the fact that I was never going to be able to express to them my profound excitement for these bones of mine.

*****

My grandfather was a philosophy teacher whose colour blindness endowed him with a knack for particularly eccentric fashion statements. When his students asked him what his teachings were all for, he learned to simply reply: “Well, nothing of course! Absolutely nothing!”

Grandfather Pepe, after whom I was named (Anna Pepe Barros). He was a true Spaniard, a story-teller, a bon vivant. He is not looking particularly eccentric in these pictures (click here for a few more photos)

I started somewhere. I wrote my name and email on the board and pointed out that I was Canadian after hearing whispers about it being “all Americans teaching this year”. They laughed, apologised and congratulated me on my country’s epic Hockey victory.

“The Austrap… Austropi… Australip… ” staggered one student. “Austra-lo-pi-the-cus. Or simply put: the southern ape… like ‘Austra’ in Australia”, I helped. Behind me on the whiteboard there was a phylogeny of human pubic lice; there was also a drawing of Africa, with a line across the Rift; there were arrows depicting human migrations through the landscape, and a crooked drawing of a female pelvis. My legs were crossed as I listened to the students’ accounts of what they read, and felt excited by their questions, which I answered with much gesturing. It dawned on me. I had come around the bend, ten revolutions later, I was back in this place, and I was looking at myself from the other side of the mirror, except I was standing tall in my harlequin boots and on my own, nothing seemed lonely or scary anymore, and I knew how to pronounce Australopithecus and all of its different species backwards and in my sleep. A new confidence blossomed inside me and I spoke about the things that excited me the most. I found myself with a handful of gleaming gazes resting upon me, captured momentarily by the images I was painting with my words.

*****

Facebook status: “I am convinced there is no greater pleasure in life than teaching and being taught.” 7 likes. 3 comments.

*****

“Did it help or was I confusing?” I asked. “No, you made it clearer actually” replied a girl. As they left the classroom, I placed my keys around my neck and started erasing the green mess I had made on the whiteboard. Memories came to mind that I had kept at bay during the last hour as my keys clattered against the New York license plate key chain which read ‘PEPE’, my middle name. There were no ashtrays or messy bed sheets this time, although that familiar starving stomach growled and the heart was starving too. I felt tired and the world closed in on me as the whiteboard became white and empty again. I was truly back here, standing at the exact same distance from the sun, at the exact same place on the circumference of the Earth’s orbit. I turned back around to escape my thoughts and found a few students still there, teasing a classmate about how old he’d become: “Oh my God! You’re going to be twenty years old! We can’t hang out with you anymore, you’re so old!”. I felt so little and young, still trying to fight back those childish tears and the urge to scream for mommy. “See you next week” I said while walking out, and I glanced at them once more, wondering which one of them I would have been back then.

“Hey, there’s a girl in the lab, she’s finishing up, can you go check on her?” asked a colleague who leads the lab sessions with me. Behind the bend around the other side of the room from where our desks sit, beyond the two human skeletons, was a girl in tears hovering over her blue lab book, panting in despair. She told me she wasn’t able to do the exercise because she was anxious and that she now couldn’t focus behind the water forming in her eyes. She begged me to finish next week and wondered how this would affect her marks. She was worried about having made a mistake and now that she couldn’t think, she felt lost and wanted help. I thought: there I am.

In my minstrel-like outfit, I sat down next to her and took a breath. I placed my hand on her shoulder and said: “relax, this doesn’t matter.  You need to breathe and have some perspective over this. This counts for nothing for your mark. This doesn’t count for anything for your academic record. But mostly, it doesn’t say anything about you and it doesn’t count for anything important for your life. You can finish this some other time. Just breathe.” She wiped her tears and became calm. Between apologies and thank you’s, she handed me her half empty lab book to be filled at some other time in the future. I wasn’t sure who I had just spoken to: to a young undergraduate student, to myself at 18, to myself now. But mostly, I had no idea what it was I thought didn’t matter so much: the unfinished exercises, others’ mistakes, my mistakes, people, or the heavy key chain around my neck.

I took the key chain from around me and started breathing again, despite not having realized I had ever stopped. Feet cushioned in my harlequin boots clutching pink-ridden notes filled with cladograms and bone diagrams between my black nail-polish, tall, alone, grown-up and with passion in my heart, I realized I was never lost, that I was finally home, that I had been headed towards this all along, and will keep heading back for as long as every spiral, every circumference, every revolution of the earth keeps coming full circle.

And so I found my cosmic order in an eccentricity that keeps calling me back, yelling from the beyond with voracious force and overwhelming liberation: “absolutely nothing matters of course!”, and pulling me in all my shades of colour, my unconfused and unashamed colours, round the next orbital bend to the next revolution, a personal revolution, a revolution from within.

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Author’s note: scientific facts aside, most of the stories and dialogues in this post have been modified to cater to the narrative; many did not occur in the stated order.

The Ape That Wouldn’t Grow Up

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“It takes people years to see that there is something un-childish about the condition of childhood, that it is not merely a temporary state of innocence but a zone of pure philosophy”

- Andrew O’Hagan, in ‘Leave the kids at home and go see where the wild things are’

“Mommy, where are we?” I asked during a transatlantic flight from Montreal to Lisbon. “We’re still flying over the ocean” answered my mother. Baffled and looking into the darkness that extended beyond my oval window, I replied: “Yes I know! but on which planet? Portugal or Canada?” You see, in my six year-old head lay an intricately woven cosmos of fantastical concepts to which my parents were oblivious. As I understood it, each country was a planet, each with its own oceans, and aircrafts were inter-galactic flying devices transporting passengers to their interplanetary destinations.

I also believed that cats and dogs were different sexes of a same species (cats were females, of course), cars had faces and emotions (our red chevy was a temperamental old man), bad people were hired to get killed for real in movies, and about half the world was made up of Benjamin Buttons (I constantly tried to guess if a person was growing older or younger).

… And little else do I remember of this lost land. Puberty, like a bad night out, has virtually erased all that is left of that mystical universe I inhabited in my head. By the time adolescence showed me the door, I knew I would spend a good part of my twenties nursing the hangover from my teenage years. At 27 (ahem, 28) childhood is nothing but a distant memory of that time when shit hadn’t hit the fan yet.

But while shit does hit the fan eventually for all mammals – and by this I mean sexual maturity, the proverbial ‘coming of age’ and all the reality checks that come with it - humans are the only species lucky enough to be graced with four years of pure radiant bliss, a time of suspended growth. That bracket of infinite magic, childhood.

True, childhood is tainted with all that is dark and evil in human nature – I will not soon forget my ‘Lord of the Flies’ moments – but from the perspective of our evolutionary journey, of our own coming of age as a species, childhood might just have been the most perfect invention of all. It is the cushiest season, the most carefree and glorious of times. And it may very well be the reason for our overwhelming success.

The evolution of childhood (in red), unique to Homo species which has been increasing for the past two million years

We might like to think of the four seasons of life, but we do in fact have five: infancy, childhood, juvenile, adolescence (right after puberty), and adulthood. Most mammals progress from infancy to adulthood almost seamlessly, without the growth-spurts, the growing pains, the voice changes and acne-ridden faces. Highly social mammals, like wolves, wild dogs, lions, elephants and primates, postpone puberty by inserting a period of juvenile growth between infancy and adulthood. Puberty, marking the onset of sexual maturity, is delayed to allow for larger brains and the acquisition of proper life-skills. But only in the human species do we find a 5th season: childhood – a well defined step both physiologically and behaviourally, spanning roughly from three to seven years of age.

Relative to our body size, the human brain is bigger than that of any other animal, but our human bodies constrain the size of our heads at birth. In fact, during the last part of the 3rd trimester of pregnancy, the human fetus is so large that it presses against internal organs and constricts blood vessels. We have no choice but to slow down our growth and then rebound after birth to catch up to the size we would have had if growth had been continuous.

Our journey to adulthood is in fact rather counter-intuitive from an economic and even logical point of view. Its sinuous course, more akin to the stop-and-go motion of a highway traffic jam, leads us first into a period of rapid growth immediately after birth, then a period of rapid decrease in growth rate until the age of four, followed by a period of almost arrested growth that lasts until our juvenile years, at which point we hit puberty and grow up to 7-9 cm per year! (that’s about three inches per year).

Children at the AADHU/CYCA Centre for Orphaned Children in Kenya, Africa. I am particularly fond of this project because it is not affiliated with any religious organizations


Children at Kibera, Kenya

Childhood is defined by the period after weaning, which in nonhuman primates marks the beginning of independence since individuals can now walk and fetch food on their own. But not so for humans. There is no society on earth in which children deprived of care by older individuals, survive.

Due to the nature of our growth pattern, which is not equal for all body parts, our brains achieve adult size when our body growth is only at 40% complete. This leaves us with small bodies, small digestive systems with immature dentition, and big heads that require high-quality foods (low in volume, high in nutrients) that we cannot get hold of on our own. It isn’t until the age of seven when significant milestones of dental and brain maturation are reached that we are able to adopt an adult diet and shift to a new plateau of cognitive functions (and realize countries are not planets…).

The head, limbs, and body grow at different rates, resulting in a human adult with proportions completely different from those of the newborn baby. Growing in this way allows us to keep our ‘cute’, infantile looks for longer than in any other species of mammals

… But why take this four-year detour if all paths lead to Rome (or adulthood)?

One favorite explanation is our dependence on culture and on learning for survival. For all intents and purposes, childhood can be viewed as en extended coffee break, where the day’s activities are arrested so that we can catch up with the the New York Times, the latest celebrity gossip and finish that Sudoku puzzle. It allows for an extra period for brain growth and time for acquisition of technical skills, time for socializing, playing, and the development of social roles and cultural behaviours. It is effectively a pit-stop, a period of waiting, an oasis of protection, a state of lower nutritional requirements and of low mortality.

Age (in years)

Probability of death by age of rural Gambians. Note how low this is for children

Some researchers even view childhood as a sort of parasitic stage, a way to selfishly elicit parental care after infancy because we maintain a ‘cute’, infantile appearance for longer than any other mammal species.

From the mother’s perspective, having offspring that pass through childhood reduces the interval time between births. Weaning time is what sets the pace between births – if you are done breastfeeding, your are ready to go – and in preindustrialized societies this averages at three years, which coincides with the onset of childhood – a stage when we are so ‘cute’ that just about any grown-up (especially grandpa and grandma) will offer to take care of us. So while the average birth interval for chimpanzees is about five years (age at which chimps become independent), in humans this interval averages at about 3.6 years… now consider the much lower weaning average for industrialized societies (six months to a year) and our overcrowded planet will start to make sense.

But if you’ve cringed at the thought of lending your breast to your offspring for more than six months, you’re not alone. In the United States, for example, women receive conflicting advice about when to wean their children from breastfeeding. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends one year, while WHO and UNICEF recommend at least two years and many physicians consider six months to be extended breastfeeding, while some health professionals question the motives of women who nurse for more than a year. Women have even been known to hide the fact that they are still nursing an older child from disapproving health care professionals or family members. But the reality is that in many non-Western cultures children are routinely nursed for three to four years, which is likely the more ‘natural’ state of affairs.

Childhood is then the perfect ‘parking space’ for offspring and avoids us having to choose between producing few expensive, large brained babies, or many smaller-brained offspring. It lasts about four years, just enough time for your first-born to hit childhood so that a second one can be on its way. Because weaning and childhood go hand in hand, it sets the pace at which a mother is ready to bear another child so that she is not overwhlemed with a Lilliputian army of defenseless babies, but rather is able take care of one baby at a time, unless you have octuplets… nature errs too (in which case, good luck to you).

Me, an ape refusing to grow up

At seven years of age, our 1st permanent molars come in. In primates, this marks the onset of independence but for humans this is just the beginning of our long, arduous march to adulthood. While chimpanzees are ready to be be competent parents at about 10 to 11 years of age, humans remain largely dependent on theirs for a staggering 20 years!

(Unless you complete half a university degree, move countries twice, take four years to complete a second degree, take 2 gap years, a Masters and now a PhD, in which case you are still, at least partially, in a state of dependency at 27. Ahem, 28).

But whichever the case, as a species we seem to have evolved into the eternal pupil. Instead of striving to be adults, our journey has been about prolonging and inserting evermore states of dependency, forever extending the umbilical chord uniting us to our parents, stretching it until we must grow our own with our very own offspring. Of all our closest relatives we are the ones with the most childish appearance, the ones who grow the slowest, who play and learn for the longest. We are the forever young apes. The apes that refused to grow up.

While I now know that cats and dogs belong to different species, there is still much I don’t know about my own species, and so I find refuge in the safety of school where I get to look up to taller, bigger people to teach me wondrous things. And as London spreads before me from my 13th floor student residence window on the eve of my 28th birthday, I’m thinking… “Who will come out and play?”.

The Inner War Zone

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landing_at_war_03

“Ceci est le combat du jour et de la nuit.” – Victor Hugo’s dying words, France, May 22 1885.


Catia is a molecular cell biologist and lives in world of pipettes, centrifuges, Bunsen beaks and flammable chemicals; under no circumstances would a room with a couch, National Geographic posters and a few cabinets with monkey bones constitute a ‘lab’, but such are the paleoanthropology digs at UCL where I invited her for coffee.

“One of them is real and one is fake right? The colour is different” she said pointing at two articulated human skeletons at the center of the room. “Yup, the one with the hat is real” I said pointing at the yellower one of the two standing erect below the Vietnamese straw hat. She took a sip of coffee and approached the bony mannequin, “so… that used to be a person… I mean, that used to be someone” she said, while staring into a pair of empty eye-sockets. I stared at my friend as if she had spoken a great truth priorly unknown to me.

When you’re around death for too long, you forget about life.

In my field, bones come from one of two places: the ground or a museum drawer; they are either dead or fossilized, they are always disarticulated, and most of the time the heads and the bodies kept in separate places. Sticky bones are unpleasant, coloured or stained bones are neat, and broken ones… well, those can be exciting too. But whichever the case, in my field, bones are always dead, static and mostly inorganic.

We forget, however, that by the time we hold them in our hands, a lifetime of existence has passed through them. Life having been drained from them by the time we come along, bones are but an abandoned battlefield balanced between our calipers. But while we measure and quantify all the geometry and science out of the bone, we often forget about the animated forces that gave them their shape, that made them someone.

When we are being made, our skeleton is one continuous gelatinous frame. Tiny and persistent muscular forces in the womb carve this frame into its proper shape. After birth, gravity and our daily activities in life continue to shape us into adults, into the skeletal form that is so familiar to us from textbooks, labs and nowadays printed t-shirts and hoodies.  The weight of our bodies, the amount of strain we put on them, our postures and bipedal stances are what form our curved spines, the angle at our knees and the shape of our hip bones among many other forms. While some of these forces common to us all will make us the same, variations in our individual paths and pursuits will make each frame unique.

1152065_Endosteal-Osteoblast_620

arnett_osteoclast

Osteoblasts (above) and osteoclast (below)

And this all happens due two opposing forces, through the combination of cells that battle each other invisibly and constantly on the surface of our bones. Like outer space creatures, they crawl and dance on the moon-like surface of our bony substrate building and destroying its matrix. Like diligent builders, osteoblasts asphalt the bony highways while osteoclasts, like giant extraterrestrial tentacled jelly fish, dissolve and melt bone with their toxic acid-releasing arms, leaving porous trenches behind them. Both are sensitive to changes from the outside world, reacting to the forces from our bodies, either adding or removing. Both armies work together, infinitely trying to keep pace, searching for an equilibrium, working together to hold us in place and keep us standing tall.

And through these antagonistic forces, going head to head and hand in hand in the most inner depths of our living selves, we find our strength: being hard and adaptable all at once, resisting the forces of the world and carrying our weight through it. In this battle of the day and night, of light and darkness, of construction and destruction our frames grow and exist, our skeletons constantly reinventing themselves under the input of the world and what we do within it, and carve us into a reflection of who we are and what we do.

“Yes, it used to be someone” I finally said to her. “And so were all the other ape bones in the room next door”.

It is here indeed where the battle of day and night begins.

Anna-tomized

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Anna-tomized

The blue coated man looked up with an air of  faked surprise: “oh, what do we have here? .. it’s a hole… !” His index and middle finger disappeared underneath a fleshy gap, “… and you can put your fingers inside it too…” he said with suspicious excitement while looking at a startled white-coated female standing across from him. The meat shifted under the pressure of his wiggling  fingers from inside. She reluctantly but diligently slid her digits in the beefy gap as he pulled his out.

“Now repeat after me” he said, “superiorly, I can feel the subscapularis ” he dictated, “… the …sub …scapularis” she repeated hesitantly, “… and inferiorly I can feel the teres major”  he continued mechanically, “…the …the teres major” she echoed, and quickly retracted her two fingers from the meaty hollow.

Her latex glove was covered in juices; it smelled like formaldehyde and death. At least now she knew the quandrangular space was in the arm-pit.

Welcome to Anatomy 1003.

Two white-coated teenagers dashed by and swung the door open. An intense blast of sweet, alcoholic odor hit my nostrils. I followed the boys inside to find a large brightly illuminated room abuzz with white and blue-coated bodies hurrying to collect scalpels and gloves, scrubbing hands and signing-in. There were unbuttoned lab coats with mini-skirts and high-heeled boots, more disciplined ironed coats clutching post-it ridden anatomy atlases, and then everything in between. I stood still and purposeless amongst the doctors-to-be. Around me, a frantic automated march of humans took place: the living seeking the dead. Against my hesitant and alarmed self, everyone else seemed so removed and casual in comparison, like lobotomized hens trailing in the formalin scent. Once they found a suitable corpse, the waltz came to halt, and the coats formed a small island around the dissection table.

My stomach growled. I felt dizzy and misplaced in my oversized lab coat.

“Yeah, uhm, I don’t really know what I’m doing myself” said the brunette in the blue coat “but like, you can follow me and join one of the groups. We, like … hey girl! How was your summer? … uhm … yeah so we, like, share corpses so the morning group gets one half and we get the other half… hey John!” She motioned for him to phone her.

I’d been a bone lady until then, but the time had come for me to face the meat of the matter. As a PhD student from the Anthropology department I was granted permission to attend a second year anatomy class. I was going to dissect a Homo sapiens.

There was no time for cold feet or a quick philosophizing about the human soul, death, and our purpose on earth. By the time my own light-blue latex gloves snapped over my wrists, the plastic tarp had been peeled back to uncover the assigned defunct and I found myself stomach level with very old and very dead lady.

“Testing…1, 2… hello? Ok, everyone…” announced the professor from the front of the room, “for those of you with female corpses, you should examine the breast area if you can. There’s not much there, but feel free to poke around. As clinicians you’ll end up spending most of your time inspecting the female breast more than any other part of the body, so get used to it”.

The skin looked like something between leather and plastic. The face was covered in white linen underneath a plastic bag, from which contour I could see a mouth agape. A scalpel slid awkwardly through the skin, upper chest and breast came folding across the shoulder. There was no fat to work through, and a quick glance in either direction made me realize that this was a good thing. Two thick yellowish bacon-like flaps hung heavily from either side of the corpse behind me. The students busied themselves scooping the thick fatty ooze that still adhered to the body’s muscles into a human waste disposal bucket beneath the table. I discretely fought an urge to regurgitate.

Over at my table, two females with scissors pecked their way through the fascia. A blue-coated man came over to inspect our progress. Under the judging gaze of the more senior anatomist the student’s hand slid and his scalpel sliced through an artery. He gazed up to meet the blue coat’s disapproving words: “you just killed your patient,” he said, as he took the scalpel away from the white-coated student. “You don’t need a scalpel for this” he continued, and he plunged both his hands into the cadaveric lump. Juices flew, bits of flesh were ripped, specs of white gunk came flying in every direction and a wire saw was ordered. “We need to cut through the clavicle“.

“Do you know who invented this instrument!” exclaimed the second blue-coated gentlemen who with Machiavellian airs tested the tautness of the wire saw string he was holding face-level, between his two extended hands, “Mister Leonardo Gigli! And do you know what he invented it for?” he continued, “for slicing between a woman’s pubic bones for birthing!” he answered. “He was inspired by the sight of a jagged knife during a country banquet.” He tugged at the wire once again and handed the saw to a student before wandering away.

gigliWire saw

After the sawing of the clavicle, the first blue-coated man ripped aside a flap of leather-like skin which was obstructing the view, he pulled the rest of the semi sawed-off clavicle that was still dangling from near the shoulder blade and then hooked his index around a few bluish string-like filaments floating about the innards; he then tugged on them until they teared apart: “Don’t do this during surgery. Your patient will bleed to death. Dead people don’t need veins though.”

Once they’d cut through the muscle and exposed the inside of the shoulder in all its glory, eight undergraduate latexed hands glided through the ribs and dug into the remaining flesh in search of the axillary artery - a large elastic-like tubular structure running from the ribcage to the arm-pit. I was asked if I wanted to touch it by one of the students, and like conspiring hyenas, the other students turned their heads towards me to cheer me on.

Up to that point their perfunctory attitude had made feel quite disturbed, but I was determined from the beginning to allow myself to slip into the Kafkaesque mood of the 2-to-4pm dissecting room sessions for the purpose of learning. I had not, however, envisaged metamorphosing into a cold-blooded butcher myself.

It was bad enough that the latissimus dorsi was worryingly reminiscent of a decent sized slice of Brazilian picanha, that the biceps brachii reminded me of chicken pot roast, and that my thoughts incessantly oscillated between “what’s for dinner?” “Ew, this is a dead body” and “Omg, does this make me a cannibal?” now I also felt the strange urge to touch, dig into, rip and saw open a shoulder out of sheer curiosity about the contents of the human arm-pit.

Around me, the room looked like a giant Mongolian sky burial site, where white-coated students scouted for morsels of decaying meat like vultures with scalpel blades for claws. Before me a macabre flock of scavenger birds taking turns to cut while the other salivating butchers awaited their turn with the carcass.

When the slow-motion vision returned to its normal speed, I took two glances to each side and plopped my light-blue hand onto the desecrated chest, ran my fingers through the clavicle and picked at the bits of pectoralis muscle that were still floating about in the cavity. It felt moist and gummy through the latex. But mostly it felt good.

I retrieved my hand from the corpse and slurped the saliva away from the corners of my mouth to let a student armed with a scalpel clean up the section.

The organ orgy continued below my nose, under the command of our blue-coated Edward Scissor-Hands’ dancing fingers. Like a skilled puppeteer he manipulated the brachial plexus area into a recognizable anatomical landscape. What before had looked like a nonsensical visceral potpourri, was now textbook neat.

“See this?” his right palm slid along the side of the rib-cage, “this is the serratus anterior muscle. It keeps our shoulder in place,” he continued. “What happens when this muscle is severed?” he asked his ignorant audience who simultaneously lifted their shoulders up to their ears in surrender. “Precisely. It’s called a ‘winged scapula’ … careless surgeons used to slice this muscle from the ribs during radical mastectomies.” he concluded while shaking his head disapprovingly.

The rustling of plastic started to be heard. The semi-eviscerated corpses were sprayed with formalin, covered up and laid to rest from the day’s explorations. I parted with my damp latex gloves and still oversized but slightly less pristine white lab coat. The pack of students scurried away as quickly and unorderly as they came in and as the door swayed back in forth under the current of marching bodies, I could feel London’s dampness reclaiming my nostrils.

“ … Yeah, I’m starving, let’s get something to eat!” exclaimed a student ahead of me. “I know right? That stuff really works. I heard it’s supposed to make you hungry … Don’t they use formalin to treat anorexia? Is that true?” replied a second student.

My stomach growled again. I caught bits of disconnected conversations on my way out, but even the aromatherapy torture exchange seemed less bizarre after the carnival of the grotesque I seemed to be just awaking from.

In the span of two hours I had gone from a flesh-avoiding anthropologist, to a bloodthirsty argonaut. A corpse was no longer a person; it was a big pile of meaty territory begging to be explored, and I couldn’t wait for prying open another one of its fleshy chunks.

I looked back at the room as the doors swung shut and grinned.

I had been fully Anna-tomized.