“It is an extraordinary finding,” says Matteo Borrini, a forensic anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University in the United Kingdom, who did not participate in the investigation. “He tells us how [brain] Preservation can work … extreme conditions can produce extreme results. ”
Bright remains
The Roman city of Herculano has been covered with ashes for many hundred years. Excavations in recent centuries have revealed surprising discoveries of preserved bodies, buildings, furniture, works of art and even food. They have helped archaeologists to build an image of what life was like for people living in ancient Rome. But they are still giving surprises.
About five years ago, Pier Paolo Petrone, a forensic archaeologist at the University of Naples Federico II, was studying remains for the first time excavated in the 1960s of what is believed to be a 20 -year -old man. The man was found inside a building that was believed to be a place of worship. Archaeologists believe they could have been watching the building. He was found lying face down on a wooden bed.
Guido Giordano et al./scientific reports
Petrone was documenting man’s carbonized bones under a lamp when he noticed something unusual. “Suddenly I saw small bright glass remains in the volcanic ash that filled the skull,” he tells him MIT technology review by email. “It had a black appearance and bright surfaces quite similar to the obsidian.” But, he adds: “Unlike the obsidian, the glassy remains were extremely fragile and easy to crumble.”
A Protein analysis in the sample He suggested that the glassy remains preserved brain tissue. And when Petrone and his colleagues studied fragments of the material with microscopes, They could even see neurons. “YO [was] very excited because I understood that [the preserved brain] It was something very unique, never seen before in any other archaeological or forensic context, ”he says.
The next question was how the brain of man became glass first, says Guido Giordano, a volcanologist from Roma Tre University in Rome, who also participated in the investigation. To find out, he and his colleagues submitted small pieces of the glass brain fragments, which measured millimeters wide, at extreme temperatures in the laboratory. The objective was to identify its “glass transition state”, the temperature at which the material changed from fragile to soft.
Guido Giordano et al./scientific reports
These experiments suggest that the material is a glass, and that it was formed when the temperature fell more than 510 ° C at room temperature, says Giordano. “The heating stage would not have been long. Otherwise, the material would have been … cooked and missing, “he says. This, he adds, is probably what happened with the brains of other people whose remains were found in Herculano, which were not preserved.
The short periods of extremely high temperature could have resulted from supercanic volcanic gases and a few centimeters of ashes, which wrapped the city shortly after the eruption and settled. The densest pyroclastic flows of the volcano would have reached the building hours later, possibly after the brain had the opportunity to cool quickly.
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