2,500-Year-Old Preserved Human Brain Discovered

A piece of the preserved Heslington brain after it was removed from the skull in which it was found.

2500-year-old human skull found in England was a surprise less than what it was: the brain. The discovery of yellowish, wrinkled, shriveled brain questions about how fragile life could survive for so long and how often this is a strange kind of stability occurs.

Except for the brain, the soft tissue around the skull, the skull was missing when he was taken from an Iron Age mud pit at the University of York planned to expand its campus Heslington East. [The oldest in Britain who are brain]

"It's amazing to think that the brain of someone who died so many thousands of years, may persist along the wet," said Sonia O'Connor, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bradford. O'Connor, led a research team that evaluated the state of the brain after being found in 2008 and looked likely modes of preservation. [Image of the brain preserved]

"It is particularly surprising, because if you talk to physicians dealing with fresh corpses, they say he is the first organ to really deteriorate and that, basically, going to the brain is liquid because of its fat content" says O'Connor.

Once found, the skull - which was probably a man between 26 and 45 years - were involved in the jaw and the two vertebrae in the neck, which hangs on the screen and then beheaded. Cut marks on the inside of the neck indicates that the head was severed when he was still flesh on the bones, O'Connor said. However, it is an indication of why he was hanged, and the rest of his body has not yet been found.



More than ten years ago, O'Connor was involved in was discovered in 1925 kept the brain in the Middle Ages, the remains of Kingston-upon-Hull, England. In addition to the brain, only the bones remained, and all other soft tissue was gone.

In this sense, the brain called Heslington mummies and medieval remains are very different bodies frozen, canned or intentionally, because in these cases, other soft tissues - the muscles of the skin, and so on - is well preserved. None of the newly discovered remains showed signs that were preserved intentionally.

The rest of Heslington, with other O'Connor found, appear to have been buried quickly after death in humid environments, where the absence of oxygen prevents the brain tissue of putrefaction. But at the same time protecting the environment without oxygen seems key, you can not exclude other factors, such as certain diseases or physiological changes, such as accompanying famine, which could predispose the brain to be preserved Thus, according to O'Connor.

Once deposited in water well recorded, Heslington brain began to change chemically, to develop a resistant material shrinks, and a quarter of its size. chemical data of the new material is still under investigation, he said.

In a study of the next issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, O'Connor's team has compiled a list of other well-preserved, can be found in the brain since 1960. Reports such as these tend to fly under the radar and do not appear in the archaeological mainstream scientific publications, and when the archaeologists do not find the preserved brain, they tend to think it is the first such find, "he said.

"I think part of the problem is archaeologists are happy to deal with human skeletal" remains, but when there is a hint of soft tissues, it is psychologically very, very different. You are no longer a skeleton is the remains of a corpse, of course, a corpse is a dead person, "he said.

The skull has been dated to somewhere between 673 and 482 BC, the Romans, meanwhile, arrived in the region in the year 71, according to Richard Hall, Director of Archaeology at York Archaeological Trust University hired to evaluate the site and the excavation process in Heslington. This seems to have been a permanent solution with dikes that divided the area of ​​fields and walk through walls which cattle could be driven, Hall LiveScience.

Archaeologists have also found the site to create circular features were probably thatched houses and a pond-like feature probably used to store water, "he said.

At this stage, the objective of wells, like the one in which the skull was found is unclear, he said. No other human remains were found on the site.