A new tool to human provenancing? Neodymium in a forensic and archaeological context.

The addition of another isotope system to the human provenance repertoire can potentially provide us with more specific information on the region of origin of a person, as well as address some of the limitations that are currently still related to the now commonly used isotopic techniques: oxygen (O), hydrogen (H), strontium (Sr) and lead (Pb). This study reports on the viability of using neodymium isotopes (143Nd/144Nd) as a possible tool to track the origins of humans. Nd is a light rare earth element (REE), which is, in contrast to what the name suggests, widely distributed in the Earth’s crust. Due to the isotopic variations in the crust Nd isotopes have previously been successfully applied to identify the production centres of glass archaeological artefacts (Ganio et al. 2013). The tendency of the human body to filter out non-essential elements means that REE concentrations are very low in human teeth (Nd