Giving a voice to the dead

When Patrick Randolph-Quinney was five years old, his mum took him to see the Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum. It was then and there that he developed a fascination with the dead that would eventually lead to a career in research. A common thread throughout his professional life has always been human evolution.

“Those are just some old relatives,” says Patrick Randolph-Quinney with a bit of a chuckle when we visit his office at Campus Gotland.

He points to a bookshelf where replicas of skulls from human predecessors, some of them as much as 2.8 million years old, are lined up. They are not there just for decoration. They also form an important part of his research.

Human species discovered in 2013

Patrick Randolph-Quinney picks out two skulls of Homo naledi, a species discovered as recently as 2013 in the very narrow and inaccessible Rising Star cave system in South Africa. The species was still around when the first representatives of modern humans appeared.

So far, the complete skeletons of 23 Homo naledi individuals have been found. How and why they ended up in the cave system is still a mystery. But through his research, Patrick Randolph-Quinney believes he is getting closer to an answer. One conclusion the research team has drawn is that the individuals were put there deliberately.

“Essentially, what we’ve got then is effectively the earliest African burial. We have been able to see this through carefully excavation, 3D modelling of the deposits and body parts, and use of X-ray tomographic data,” he says.

So far, the scholarly journals that researchers publish their findings in have been very sceptical about the new data, making it a slow process to get the study accepted for publication. But just recently, the research team received a favourable response from the journal eLife, which will publish the findings.

“Basically it was a story people didn't want to hear,” says Patrick Randolph-Quinney.

Act of burial

The idea that a human species that lived over 200,000 years ago and had a much smaller brain than ours could have had rituals is controversial. But according to Patrick Randolph-Quinney, the results of their careful mapping cannot be interpreted in any other way than that the Homo naledi remains were deliberately placed in the cave system and that they had been manipulated.

“In addition to the act of burial, I will say that they are doing some interesting things with the bodies, but I can't tell you what because we haven't published that yet. But that's what I'm going over this summer. They're doing some very interesting things for quite a long time after death,” he says.

When Patrick Randolph-Quinney examines dead individuals, whether they are someone who died relatively recently or someone who has been dead for hundreds of thousands of years, he uses the same methods that forensic scientists use when examining victims in a criminal investigation. Using advanced X-ray equipment, modelling and other analytical methods, he finds out whether there are injuries to the bones, when and in what order they occurred, how the bones are positioned, and whether they bear traces of disease.

His field of research is called bioarchaeology or bioanthropology.

“When I first started, there weren't that many jobs for bioarchaeologists or bioanthropologists like there are today. I’d been working in commercial archaeology, excavating cemeteries and, analysing animal and human bone assemblages commercially,” he says.

Patrick Randolph-Quinney might have continued along this path had he not received an offer from the University of Dundee in Scotland to lead their forensic anthropology programme. This was despite the fact that he had never worked in forensics before.

His new duties included identifying murder victims, missing persons and human remains from serious fires. It could often be emotionally taxing to deal with difficult cases where someone died under horrible circumstances. But someone has to do it, he says.

“It’s tough, but it can be very rewarding. To actually be able to.help somebody who is a family member who is grieving for a loved one... to actually be able to give them back the remains of that individual and allow them to move on with their life is rewarding,” he says.

Evidence against Chad's toppled dictator

One of the most high-profile criminal cases he worked on was for the victims of Chad’s ousted dictator Hissène Habré. Patrick Randolph-Quinney was part of the team that gathered evidence to convict Habré in the Chambres Africaines Extraordinaires tribunal. A key element of that was identifying the victims in mass graves.

“He’d killed thousands of people during his reign of terror in the 1980s. These guys were all gunned down, shot in the back escaping. Terrible!” says Patrick Randolph-Quinney.

Hissène Habré was brought to justice. Thanks to a solid body of evidence, in May 2016 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity, sexual slavery and ordering the killing of 40,000 people. It was one of those rewarding moments in the service of forensics that Patrick Randolph-Quinney just spoke about.

For a long time, Patrick Randolph-Quinney has been interested in medieval battles. And that is actually what has now brought him to Uppsala University. He was drawn here by the very brutal battle that took place outside Visby’s ring wall in 1361, when Valdemar Atterdag invaded the city. Scores of fallen soldiers were thrown into mass graves, the most famous of which is at Korsbetningen.

“The interpretation of this... over the years has been that you had this plucky group of children and old men from Gotland who stood there and fought the Danes and died. They were massacred and wiped out. Whether that’s right or not is now being tested,” he explains.

Violent death

The individuals met a violent death. The damage to the bodies is horrific, caused by sword and axe blows, crossbows and maces.

“They’re about 1,500 individuals. When they were excavated, a lot of them were still wearing their armour, some of them wearing chainmail coifs and helmets. From a forensic standpoint, this is what we want. We want the whole bodies. We want to interpret how these people died and how they received the blows, whether they died directly in combats. Can we reconstruct the manner of how they died, and what does that tell us about... warfare effect?” says Patrick Randolph-Quinney.

The researchers also want to use genetic analyses to find out whether the victims were related to each other. The remains can also tell us about the lifestyle of the people, how old they were when they died, previous injuries and what diseases they had. Chemical analyses can help in the mapping process by providing information such as where the people grew up and what they ate.

And that is just the beginning. Over time, the plan is to look at health and disease in the Middle Ages.

“I think essentially I just try to work on stuff that’s fun,” says Patrick Randolph-Quinney.

Åsa Malmberg