I see in a lot of Jane/John Doe cases where isotope testing tells the detectives where the person is from or grew up. How does this work? Do you have to live somewhere for a minimum amount of time to have the isotopes appear? If you move from one coast to the other do your early age isotopes disappear? Are there geographical areas with overlapping isotope data that muddies the return? Thanks in advance.
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A lot of the food you are eating comes from farms aroud your local area. Especially milk is full of minerals and hard to transport long distances. But in general food is fairly local, although it is becoming more and more global. So the minerals in your body is mostly made up of the local minerals in the ground around where you live. And the isotope composition varies around the world. So by analyzing the isotope composition of your bones it is possible to get a rough idea of where you have lived the last few years.
This used to be more accurate. Firstly food used to be a lot more local. But we have huge global trade routes giving access to any type of food all year around irregardless of season. And things like the iron curtain also prevented food trading in large parts of the world. Another important factor was that the Chernobyl disaster spread different isotopes of minerals to different parts of the world which were tracable.
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