ORONO, Maine — Marcella Sorg opened drawer after drawer in her teaching lab at the University of Maine on a recent morning, pawing through assorted bones before she found the artifact she was looking for.
“This is a bear,” she said, holding up a thick femur for inspection. Then she held up a nearly identical femur beside it. “And this is a human.”
To the layperson, the bones looked remarkably similar. But to Sorg, who for the past 40 years has been a forensic anthropologist often assisting law enforcement agencies throughout the northeast, the difference was clear.
In the lab, each drawer holds another batch of animal bones.
“We’ve got fish, mammals, birds,” Sorg said, sliding the drawers open. “Porcupine, marmot, beavers.”
When hunters or recreationists stumble upon what they think are human remains deep in the Maine woods, Sorg is the person who usually gets the call from law enforcement officers. “What is this?” she is asked. “Was there a crime committed?”
How often is she stumped?
“Not often. Virtually never,” she says with a smile. “It isn’t so much that I can identify all of the animals. It’s that I know what human looks like and what it doesn’t look like.”
In her line of work, this is a pretty good skill to have.
Not a full-time job
Sorg, who was a registered nurse for three years at the beginning of her career before heading back to graduate school, is quick to point out that while she is a forensic anthropologist, she spends most of her time doing other work.
She is affiliated with three departments at UMaine: anthropology, the Climate Change Institute and the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center. She’s also a full-time research professor. One of her specialties, she directs the Chase Center’s Rural Drug and Alcohol Research Program, which monitors epidemiological indicators of substance abuse, particularly drug-related deaths, according to the center’s website.
“So when you see [reports on] how many drug-related deaths there have been this year, that’s coming from me,” she said.
But since 1977, she has also been available to do forensic work.
“I was basically needed,” Sorg explained. “Dr. [Henry] Ryan, [then the state medical examiner] needed somebody to do the bones. It’s not a lot of cases. But you’ve got to be ready to go when the need comes. These things are not scheduled. [The work] started gradually, and it increased. [Now] I do several states.”
Sorg is the only forensic anthropologist with her post-graduate qualifications in northern New England and typically works in Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. She sometimes also does work for Vermont and other states.
Back in May, Sorg was cited in a New York Times story about two bodies that floated to the surface of Central Park ponds.
But much of her work in forensics revolves around the study of bones.
“I provide information about the identity of the remains — who it is — and if it’s unknown, what does it look like? Age, sex, ancestry, stature — that sort of thing,” she said. “And medical history. If I see evidence of a previous broken bone here, or that sort of thing.”
With just a human skull to work with, Sorg can often ascertain plenty of information about the deceased. But she cautioned that the science is not exact.
“It’s not a slam dunk, and it’s not always correct,” she said.
But often, even despite evidence to the contrary, her findings do pan out.
“I had a case in Delaware that I identified the skull as Native American, and the police said, ‘Well, we think it belongs to this guy, and this guy is black,’” Sorg said. “I said, ‘Talk to the family.’”
It turned out Sorg and the police were correct.
“He had two grandparents who were Native Americans,” she said.
During the interview, Sorg took time out to answer a phone call from state police about a potential case. She didn’t have to head into the woods after the call, but sometimes she does.
“There are things that people find, that they think are suspicious,” Sorg said. “Mother Nature does such a good job of recycling, when we walk through the woods we don’t see a lot of bones, compared to the number of animals that die on a daily basis out in the woods. … So people are not used to seeing bones when they go out of doors.”
And when they do, she’s likely to get the call. Or, as is becoming more often in recent years, she’s likely to receive a photo.
“These days, one of the things that’s changed my practice a lot has been digital photography,” she said. “They can send me a picture. They don’t have to bring [a bone] to Augusta, and it saves a lot of everybody’s time. It’s been wonderful.”
Her experience in the Maine woods has taught her an important lesson: Even the most remote human remains often turn up eventually.
“People think they can hide a body, but despite the high percentage of land that’s forested in Maine, bodies do get found,” Sorg said. “We don’t have too many that are still missing.”
TV forensics
When Sorg meets someone at a dinner party, she says she’s likely to avoid fully describing her occupation. But thanks to TV shows like “Bones,” which features a forensic anthropologist as the main character, people do have some idea of what her job entails — even if their ideas are misguided.
“They kind of know what it means, but I usually say I do research,” Sorg said. “Because that’s what I do most of the time. The forensics is really after hours — not literally but figuratively.”
And as for TV shows like “Bones,” where the characters tie up cases into neat packages in just 60 minutes?
“It’s entertaining,” Sorg said. “It’s science fiction [with] the specificity that they’re doing in the plots. The technology and the specificity is not real.”
Another reality gap: Real forensic anthropologists like Sorg aren’t in the middle of the action like the TV stars are.
“The anthropologist is not out there investigating the murder [in real life]. The police do that,” Sorg said. “So the anthropologist doesn’t get into harm’s way, for instance. He or she doesn’t interview the suspect.”
But Sorg said she thinks she understands why such shows are so popular.
“I think in our culture we do a lot to set ourselves apart from death, to keep ourselves from thinking about it, to keep from thinking about our mortality,” she said. “And in a strange, paradoxical way, all these TV programs about death serve that end as well, because they objectify it. They separate it from reality. And they solve the problem. I think it is almost a comfort to look at some of these programs and see that death is segregated from me, and they solve it.”
Sorg said that in her career, the advancements in DNA technology have been the biggest game-changer. And though she has been in the field for 40 years, don’t expect her to step aside any time soon.
“[The work] is very interesting. It’s intellectually stimulating,” Sorg said. “Also, I’ve been doing it for awhile. I feel that I have something to contribute. … When you’ve been doing something for 40 years, it’s gratifying to be able to make a contribution.”
