Tumblr thread, one user says that archeologists identify human remains by taste. A second user points out that this is not true, bone is identified as not a normal rock by touching it to your tongue and seeing if it sticks. If it does then bone.

Third user shares a poem they wrote:
mai nam is jane
and wen i dig
i fynde some roks
both smol and big
i put my tung
upon the stone
for science yes
i lik the bone

4th user is an archeologist and is crying laughing with a bunch of other archeologists and they're going to have shirts made with the poem.

You can also tell a claystone from a siltstone by rubbing it against your teeth! If it rubs smoothly without friction then it's a claystone. If it feels abrasive then it's a siltstone.

Always great to see scientists with a sense of humor.

Better don't tell your dentist

This was a lot of my degree.
We licked everything.
Still do.

Mouthfeel is an incredible sense. Babies learn what the world is by pushing handfuls of it into their mouths. Texture, taste, angularity, porosity, density, degree of lithificaton.... instantly.

*edit: we did not all lick things. There are two distinct schools of thought, and not a lot of fence sitters.

Pretty sure that's most of them

There's no other way to test to see if it's bone?

If you have two you can try to see if they’ll rattle

You can also differentiate between halite and sylvite using your tongue! Sylvite has a more tingly, "spicier" feeling and taste, whereas halite is simply salt.

I would absolutely be on the lick things team. I use my mouth as a tool all the time.

This post sounds incredibly weird.

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Conceivably you could do this with any similar skin type to a tongue so wet nipples and genitals would also stick to bone. Boners are the unlikely but accurate technical term for the application.

Not just archies, like another commentator points out, but Geo's and pedologists too

In soil science we sometimes put soil in our mouth to determine between silt and clay or silt and fine sand

I find a stone
But is it clay?
Or is it silt?
I cannot say.
I'll rub a bit
Just on my tooth,
If tooth falls out
I'll know the truth.

Maybe you think
My methods strange,
Maybe you think
They cause me pain.
But I'll keep rocks
All in my fist:
Not odd to me;
I'm geologist.

Rattle 'em, boys!

So you want me to put dicks in my mouth? Alright, you have me convinced. Science needs me!

Isn't that a health risk?

They ate a lot of dirt as kids, built up their immune system

......I feel quite hungry.....

Thank Mr Skeltal

One of my favorite archaeology stories comes from a Reddit AMA waaay back over a decade ago, there was this girl who was on an archaeological expedition somewhere in the Middle East and they had unearthed a bunch of ancient honey jars. Honey, famously, never goes bad, and their professor said that if anyone wanted to try some, they could. Most didn't, but she did- lo and behold, tasted very much like normal honey.

Months later when they were back in the states they had performed some tests on the honey and realized that these jars had originally contained stillborn fetuses, a now known practice, which had dissolved into the honey over the millennia. So she had eaten human fetus honey.

I know it sounds made up but she was a legit archaeologist and could back it up with names and dates and shit, though I'm hazy on the details.

Holy shit, I didn't know about that one... And holy shit, I wish I could un-know it now.

And that is how I found my exe's account on Lemmy...

I suppose, but I also smell subsoil for the presence of hydrocarbons, soo...

Oh hell yes ヾ(⌐■_■)ノ♪

I kinda wanna try it now

Did anyone else sing the poem? Good flow.

When I say peat you say peat

peat

...

fuck

There's a lot of overlap between archeologists and babies.

Not really, dirt is one of the least harmful non food items. In small amounts anyway

No there's a lot of boring phds you never hear about that don't. More on the hard engineers side especially.

I remember as a child when I was digging in the sandbox I dug up a hole lot of cat poop and "wet" sand. Since I'm still alive today it probably wasn't too bad but it doesn't really feel like a good idea.

bone is less heavy than stone, also you can see bone has different surface structure.

Source: asked an archaeologist who thinks that although some people she knows do lik the bone, it's not necessary.

Bone licking is not required for doing the science. They do it for pleasure.