“A provocative and entertaining magical mineral tour through the life span and afterlife of bone tissue.” —Wall Street Journal

Our bone fragments have many tales to tell, if you know how to listen.

Bone is a marvel, an adaptable and resilient building material developed over a lot more than four hundred mil years of evolutionary history. It gives your body its shape and the ability to move. It develops and changes with you, an undeniable record of who you are and how you lived. Arguably, no other part of the about Skeleton Keys: The Secret Life of Bone tissue human anatomy has such rich technological and social significance, both brimming with lifestyle and a potent symbol of death.

In this wonderful natural and social history of bone, Brian Switek points out where our skeletons originated from, what they do inside us, and what others can learn about us when these artifacts of mineral and protein are all we’ve left behind.

Bone is as embedded in our culture since it is inside our bodies. Our species provides made musical instruments and jewelry from bone, treated the inactive like enthusiasts’ items, put our beliefs in skull bumps as manuals to human behavior, and arranged skeletons into macabre tributes to the afterlife. Switek makes a powerful case so you can get better acquainted with our skeletons, in all their surprising roles. Bridging the worlds of paleontology, anthropology, medication, and forensics, Skeleton Secrets illuminates the complicated life of bones inside our systems and out.