Crystal clear: Vibrational spectroscopy reveals intrabone, intraskeleton, and interskeleton variation in human bones.

The relatively large heterogeneity, especially at the intrabone level, is possibly the consequence of microstructural bone differences. The dissimilarities observed between our investigation and other published studies are probably due to the fact that the samples used here came from human rather than faunal bones. Also, our samples were buried previously to the experimental burning so this may also partly explain our contrasting results, since previous research was mostly performed on fresh bone. Future inferences based on vibrational spectroscopy analyses should take into account the possible effect of all these sources.