Fourth blog post: Picture content human remains

Hello all,

This is my fourth update for project, and it turns out I am not as good as I thought I would be at keeping my promises of two posts a month. However, I do hope that you still feel you get the information you need from it and I do not think I am missing anything out, so far.

Since last post, we have moved on to even more exciting updates. We ended the last post with adding the ribs to acid to soften them up. They had to stay like that for 2 to 2 ½ weeks. When they were soft and I was able to almost bend them, they were rinsed and had a PH solution added to them before being put into the oven at 75 degrees for 48 hours. That is to extract the collagen out of the bone itself and to mix into the solution in the tube. When we removed them from the oven we used an Ezee filter to extract the collagen solution into a separate tube (I regret I forgot to film this process as it was extremely satisfying).

When it had been moved over to the transportation tube, it was added to a freezer for a few hours until frozen, THEN, it was added to the freeze drier (another very satisfying part of the process). After 4 days on the freeze drier it came out with COLLAGEN! Lots of it! So I am very happy to report; we have enough collagen from all 60 rib samples. Happy news and happy days. This should mean we will get information about diet from these 60 individuals, hopefully.

My plan is to give you a list of all the individuals, age and sex, if possible, from the people we have taken samples from. This will be added, when I have completed the enamel prep and extraction.

I have one more sitting to finish the enamel drilling, but the half I have done have given me lots of enamel powder. So we are hopeful. As I am doing this I will also start the process of weighing the collagen from the ribs to get them ready for the gas bench. There will be a video next time showing the meticulous process of weighing.

Thank you for reading

Tanja