Bone licking is not required for doing the science. They do it for pleasure.

One of my favorite archaeology stories comes from a Reddit AMA waaay back over a decade ago, there was this girl who was on an archaeological expedition somewhere in the Middle East and they had unearthed a bunch of ancient honey jars. Honey, famously, never goes bad, and their professor said that if anyone wanted to try some, they could. Most didn't, but she did- lo and behold, tasted very much like normal honey.

Months later when they were back in the states they had performed some tests on the honey and realized that these jars had originally contained stillborn fetuses, a now known practice, which had dissolved into the honey over the millennia. So she had eaten human fetus honey.

I know it sounds made up but she was a legit archaeologist and could back it up with names and dates and shit, though I'm hazy on the details.

Did anyone else sing the poem? Good flow.

You can also tell a claystone from a siltstone by rubbing it against your teeth! If it rubs smoothly without friction then it's a claystone. If it feels abrasive then it's a siltstone.

Always great to see scientists with a sense of humor.

Not just archies, like another commentator points out, but Geo's and pedologists too

In soil science we sometimes put soil in our mouth to determine between silt and clay or silt and fine sand

Conceivably you could do this with any similar skin type to a tongue so wet nipples and genitals would also stick to bone. Boners are the unlikely but accurate technical term for the application.

There's no other way to test to see if it's bone?