This episode contains detailed discussions of the decomposition of human corpses.

If that's not something you want to hear about, this may be a good episode to skip.

Humans are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so the mysterious and unsolved. Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called morbid curiosity, and it has gripped millions of people throughout the ages.

I am one of those people.

My name is Hallie, and this is the Morbid Curiosity podcast. Have you ever wondered what happens to the human body after death?

The body goes through decomposition, becoming a skeleton, and then eventually disappearing altogether.

But how does that work?

What affects how fast the body decays? What if the body's outside,

in a lake, or buried in a shallow grave? The answers to all of these questions are very important

for forensic anthropologists, the researchers who work with crime scene investigators when human remains

are found at a crime scene.

Forensic anthropologists use their knowledge of to phonomy to analyze the remains and determine how the person died and how long ago they died.

This information is crucial to any criminal case and can make the difference between solving a murder and leaving

an ongoing mystery for generations to come, such as the Jack the Ripper case. During the Ripper murders,

forensics was a new science. The very first crime scene photograph was taken during the investigation.

At the time, the police didn't have the technology we have today,

and they had little to no knowledge of taphonomy. The science of the process by which a living

thing dies, breaks down and goes into the soil, or eventually becomes a fossil if conditions are right.

Between death and skeletonization,

decomposition occurs, and that process is only recently being understood

through the study of tephanomy.

Taffanomic processes can change the way a corpse decays

...