Douglas Stenton, the lead researcher on the Fitzjames identification, was careful in public statements about what the cut marks establish. Stenton noted that neither rank nor status was the governing principle in the expedition’s final days — meaning that the evidence shows officers’ remains were subject to the same treatment as those of ordinary sailors. This observation addresses a specific historical question: whether the expedition’s social hierarchy had been maintained in extremis or whether the final crisis had broken down those distinctions.
What the cut marks do not establish is who made them or in what specific circumstances. The marks are consistent with a person or persons removing flesh from the jaw of Fitzjames’s body after his death. They do not establish who performed this action, when in the sequence of deaths at the site it occurred, or the specific motivation of whoever made the marks. The researchers’ interpretation is that the marks are consistent with cannibalism — consistent with the broader pattern at the site and with the Inuit testimony gathered from the nineteenth century onward.
This is an important interpretive distinction. The marks on the bone are observable physical facts. Their interpretation as evidence of cannibalism rests on their location, character, and consistency with the broader pattern at the site. That interpretation is supported by the totality of the evidence at NgLj-2 and by the Inuit oral accounts. It is not established with absolute certainty from the marks on a single specimen in isolation.
The article does not speculate further about who made the marks or the specific sequence of events at the site, because that is not what the published research establishes.