The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
No two people have ever been found to share me, identical twins included.
I am finished before you are born, at around six months.
Koalas have me too, and forensic scientists have noted theirs could be mistaken for a human's.
I am the reason certain professions wear gloves.
The ridges on the tips of your fingers.
Fingerprints
Koala prints are so close to ours that specialists have remarked they could genuinely confuse a crime scene — a coincidence of evolution, with no relation behind it.
The ridges form in the womb by about the sixth month, shaped partly by genetics and partly by how the fetus happens to touch the amniotic sac, which is why identical twins have different prints. Their working purpose is probably grip and touch sensitivity rather than identification. Police use began in Argentina in 1892 and spread quickly, though the claim of absolute uniqueness has never been proved so much as never disproved. Koalas evolved a nearly identical pattern independently, and forensic scientists have noted, with some amusement, that a koala could in principle contaminate a crime scene.
Reading five clues at once is not the game. In the real thing they arrive one at a time and every wrong guess costs an hour. Play mystery #39 · today's mystery · the vault
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