Frank lay on the table in front of us. We’d delicately unfolded the tissue paper wound around his pieces, softly placing him on the foam mats, careful with his twig-like radius and rib bones. We always had trouble with his vertebral column. Each vertebra spun on the string keeping them connected – it took us a while to stack vertebral bodies evenly. Finally, they came together in a curve, the way a human spine should.

Frank and I and the rest of my group got pretty close during that semester we learned from him. He came to lay before us through the same medical school channels that provide future doctors with their cadavers. Frank was just less fleshy.

Frank wasn’t his real name. At least, probably not, since he was Indian. He was in his early 30s and in poor health when he died. We read these facts in his bones.

Bones support our bodies. They are the framework without which we would collapse. Without bones acting as levers, the most movement we would muster as fleshy worm blobs would be a faint shimmy through our muscles, if even that. Without bone marrow factories pumping out new blood cells, we would shrivel up. Without bone as a storage place for calcium we wouldn’t be able to clot fresh wounds.

But bones do something else amazing. They are the record keepers, the story-tellers, the historians of our lives. When flesh is dead and gone, a veil is lifted, revealing a biography in the bones, a zoomed-out view of how we went about the Earth.

As students learning human osteology, we were only able to discern the basic elements constituting Frank’s time here, but we felt we got to know him intimately.

He was male—that was the first thing we learned. On the side of each hip bone sits an indent where the sciatic nerve nestles in. In females, this angle yawns wide. Frank’s was so narrow his bone almost folded back on itself. He was definitively male.

Age was more difficult. We carefully examined each of Frank’s bones, the plates of his skull, the teeth set firmly in his jaw, and compared what we saw against charts and tables. His adult teeth were all in; he had lived for more than 21 years. His collarbone, one of the last bones to completely form in men, was fully fused. He was older than 30.

We closely examined the bumpy peapod shapes at the meeting place of his two hip bones on the front of his body. These bumps start wearing down as the bones grind against each other during the daily wear and tear of life. The ridges left on this part of Frank’s bone were starting to file down, congruent with those of someone in his early thirties.

Frank was not all that healthy at his death. His skull and joints were dimpled, evidence of weak bones from anemia. His fingers and elbows were arthritic, the joints thick with too much bone. He had experienced a hard life.

He was a soft featured man. His eyebrows didn’t protrude very far, and his chin wasn’t too defined. Those features of the skull that indicate male or female were smack in the middle of our chart. If it wasn’t for the hip bone, we would have had difficulty gauging his sex. For some reason, I imagined him with kind eyes.

Frank was an excellent lab subject. We were able to exercise the same techniques used by professionals to reconstruct histories of people centuries-gone, or more recently deceased.

In 1991, workers excavating ground for a planned federal office building in New York City uncovered the burial sites of more than 400 people. Forensic anthropologists associated with the U.S. General Services Administration identified the finding as the final resting place for African men, women, and children. Analyses indicated it was a burial ground for freed and still enslaved Africans throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries stretching over almost seven acres of what would eventually be dubbed lower Manhattan.

Closer examination of the remains yielded remarkable individual tales. One man’s story was particularly striking. He worked, day after day, in the field, fist likely clenched around some sort of heavy scythe, swinging his arm back and forth, back and forth, deltoid muscle tugging and yanking where it attached to his upper arm bone. It pulled so hard, the bone began to grow. The rough patch where the muscle was glued to the bone grew so large the man probably could no longer move his arm, could no longer perform the duty that kept him alive.

My professor focused her research on pre-historic remains of people who scoured fields and forests for food. She shared with us the story of a woman thousands of years old who lived her life in the hills of Italy. Like the deltoid attachment of the African man, her quadriceps attachments were huge from her stepping, stepping, stepping, living her life always moving up.

Our bones are shaped by the way we live. Our inner scaffolding is affected by something as simple as walking an untrained dog on a short leash. The stress of the repeated jerking motion that shows up in the bone is actually called “Dog Walker’s Elbow.”

These markers are so broad there is an atlas summarizing all the ways our bones can be altered by our lives. Examining them gives us insight into a lifestyle. Going for a jog once every six months or so, as I am wont to do, won’t show up in my bone record. The femur of someone who has done the step and push and step and push of running consistently throughout her life, muscles playing tug of war with her bone, will be molded into a teardrop oblong shape recognizable when all the layers of flesh and muscle and tendon have gone.

These stories are incomplete, I know. Much is lost, along with the wrappings of tissues and muscles—the swirls of a fingerprint, freckles dusting a shoulder, the nuances of a face. In life, we recognize these as defining features of individuality. DNA unique to each of us tells what we’ll look like, how our senses will interpret the world. But strands of DNA tens or hundreds or thousands of years old can only inform us so much. DNA can’t allow us to look back and interpret the story of a life. Bones can.

We won’t ever know the loves and losses of the injured African, or the mountain-climbing Italian. We won’t know the motivations behind the runner or the dog walker. But we have their bones, we’ve studied their features. We know they existed.

Most of us won’t be disinterred and inspected. We will lie peacefully for eternity, our stories hidden away. But in case we are happened upon, we will be seen as much more than featureless, faceless layers upon layers of ossification. And that’s a little piece of immortality.

I’ve broken my left-foot pinky toe so many times it is permanently puffy and bends at weird angles. My tibial tuberosity, the knobbed part of my upper shin just below my kneecap, is a spiderweb of stress fractures and bone growths from the sports-induced Osgood Schlatters I had when I was a young teen. Maybe if I start taking yoga more seriously, that will show as well. Perhaps even the way I hold my pen will appear on my phalanges to a well-trained eye.

Minerals and nutrients soaked up by my bones will suggest I spent most of my life in Massachusetts. They’ll be able to guess I was white, based on the morphology of my face. They may even be able to put a decently accurate facial reconstruction together using those same markers. My height and weight will both be easily approximated by the length of my leg bones and the wear on my joints.

Death is a part of life. We see it every year as the fall crumples up and disintegrates into winter. We see it with the passing of family and friends. But it is comforting to know that my biography, or at least part of it, might still be told long after my fleshy bits are dust.

This piece first appeared on MIT Scope in April 2011