You may have the impression from TV programmes like Waking the Dead, Silent Witness, CSI (Crime Scene Investigation), and other such detective stories, that forensic science can unlock the story behind every crime. “Just the facts”, the policeman may ask. Facts are what science is all about. Isn’t it?

Actually the phrase ‘forensic science’ has become confused for many. Forensic science is really just science used in court. But for many this term has become a shorthand for a whole host of tools and techniques; usually used to mean analytic or careful. Forensic science is both of those, but it is much more; and other sciences are also analytic and careful!

Semantics aside, this science can offer a fascinating way of examining the past. I frequently comment that forensic science is just recent archaeology. Many of the techniques used by scientists to unravel crimes today can be used to unravel stories of the past, even though no crime is involved.

Today and in the past, the first priority has been to establish whether there has been a crime at all. In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s book ‘The Hound of The Baskervilles’, Sherlock Holmes remarks “There are two questions waiting for us at the outset. The one is whether any crime has been committed at all; the second is, what is the crime and how was it committed?”

A great example of this kind of investigation is the death of Otzi; ‘The Ice Man’. Otzi is the name given to the body of a man believed to have died over 5,000 years ago. He was discovered high in the Otzal Alps in 1991 in an area that had been frozen for centuries. Of course no-one is out to jail Otzi’s killer, if indeed he was killed, but the findings on and around his body have created intense speculation about how he died. Scientists are of course curious creatures and here is a curiosity.

Not only is Otzi’s death the subject of investigation, but some people think that there is a curse that has killed some of the investigators. Science is a very powerful method for sorting out such tangles. Many of them have been applied to the case of Otzi.

Palynology is the study of pollen. Not immediately obvious as a forensic science, but some plants live in very limited geographical areas, or produce pollen at very specific times. Palynologists reckon that the pollen of the hop hornbeam tree found in Otzi’s stomach means that he died in early spring or summer, and was probably at low altitude at most a day before he died.

Like all crime scenes, the scientist here is faced with trying to discover how the scene came to be the way it was discovered. This is the evidence and you must use that evidence to create a story; not the other way around. In modern crime terms; you don’t find a suspect and then try to fit the evidence around that suspect. A scientist tries to find evidence against any story, and the more that they look and find that the story stands up, the more they are inclined to believe it. But the evidence can fit many stories. The job of the scientist is to devise tests that can disprove or prove some of these stories.

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