Thanks to a new forensic technique, you will be able to identify corpses that cannot be recognized by other methods, such as genetics, dactyloscopy or dentistry. This new way would be thanks to photographs of the person on social networks, such as Instagram or Facebook, as long as they appear smiling in them.
The new way of forensic identification has been developed by members of the University of Granada (UGR), in collaboration with the Polish Academy of Sciences in Wroclaw (Poland). Apparently, as explained in the study published in the journal Forensic Science International, the key to recognizing the corpses could be in the profile of their teeth, which must be verified with the photographs.
The morphology of the teeth is different and particular in each person, therefore, these data could be used as a distinctive, taking into account characteristics such as size, whether or not there are diastemas -interdental spaces-, dental torsions, etc.
Useful technique but less reliable than international protocols
This new technique has the advantage of being able to access data before death, such as the photos that the deceased person posted on their social networks before dying and that are provided by relatives, although the researchers acknowledge that they offer less reliable results than those contained in the international protocols.
This social media photo identification technique may be useful when there are no fingerprints, genetic testing, or previous dental history
As has already been said, bodies are currently identified by fingerprints, teeth and genetic tests, but in many cases none of these techniques allows identification, for example, if the missing or deceased persons come from socio-cultural backgrounds and countries in those where there are no fingerprint databases, or no resources to obtain dental records or DNA profiles.
“Identifying is comparing, so antemortem (AM) and postmortem (PM) data are needed. In these contexts, alternative methods are being sought that make it possible to analyze resources that are easy to obtain by family members (AM) with those collected from the people or corpses of the deceased/disappeared (PM)”, the researchers explain.
This finding is important and opens up a new possibility of identifying corpses thanks to the age of communication in which we live and the usual uploading of photographs to social networks. A simple gesture like this, which is hardly even thought of, could go a long way.
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