A team of Italian and German scientists recently determined how the brains of a victim of the 79 CE outburst of Mount Vesuvius managed to be kept by its conversion to organic glass. Considered as the first and only known organic glass monster that contains human brain material, the shiny black material was recovered from within the skull of an approximately 20-year-old man from Herculaneum, a smaller city northwest of Pompeii that was also destroyed by the volcano.
The researchers published the results of a first sample research in the New England Journal of Medicine In 2020, identifying different proteins and fatty acids that occur in cerebral tissue and human hair fat. This was followed by one Secondary report explaining the remarkable preservation of the central nervous system of the individual.
“Just like with the discovery of the clayed brain, this finding was something that had never before been seen at such a level of details,” said Pier Paolo Petrone, a forensic biologist and archaeologist at the University of Naples Federico II and contributing researcher, said Hyperallergic In an e -mail.
It is rare for archaeologists to find such a well-preserved neural matter because of the molecular makeup, but the question of how the brains of the Herculaneum man were kept the only known example by Vitrification was unanswered to the Researchers have published their latest report on February 27.
Petrone and his team decided that the 20-year-old man, who died on his wooden bed in a building that is known as the Collegium Augustalium in Herculaneum, was exposed to an extremely hot and fast-moving pyroclastic current that swept through the city, because the vitrification process quickly followed by exceptionally fast koering. The report implies that the brains of the individual were protected against complete thermal decomposition and then confused because of the thicker bones of the skull, which offered protection against the hot ash cloud.
According to the report, the brain was varied at temperatures above 950 ° F (510 ° C), so that an initial ash cloud of high temperature enveloped the man and his brain closed as a deposit within a few minutes, so that the temperature was returned to the environmental conditions almost immediately. With just a few centimeters axle that settled from the first cloud, the bodies of the individual and hundreds of others remained in the open air to be buried slowly in ash with low temperature and pumice deposits in the city, so that the fluid of the man cools quickly and the transition to glass to glass can complete.
“Since the material is totally rare and is not available in any other way, the selected samples remain available for further studies, because only a small part of what can be investigated has been done, pending further and deeper analysis,” Petrone explained Hyperallergic With regard to the unique monster. “It is the very first time in the world of such an exceptional and unique discovery.”
Petrone noted that although the varied brain material will remain in scientific hands for the time being, the discovery location of the carbonized person from which the monster was recovered is accessible to visitors in the near future.
