‘Jelly in the skull’: Ancient brains are preserved more often than you think

In 1982, construction workers uncovered dozens of 8000-year-old human skeletons in a pond on the edge of Titusville, Florida. Archaeologists excavating the waterlogged site—now known as Windover Archeological Site—were shocked to discover intact brain tissue inside 91 of the skulls, with some brains intact enough to identify contours and extract ancient DNA. University of Oxford forensic anthropologist Alexandra Morton-Hayward was also surprised when, as a Ph.D. student, she read about Windover as she set out to study the decomposition of what she assumed was the body’s most ephemeral organ. As a former undertaker, Morton-Hayward knew the brain is perhaps the softest of the body’s soft tissues: It tends to decay quickly after death, liquefying and leaving only the skull behind. But as she began to comb the archaeological literature, she found thousands of cases in which human brains had been preserved for centuries, or even millennia. In a new paper published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B , she and her co-authors catalog more than 4400 known cases where brains were preserved long after death —including a 12,000-year-old brain found near mammoth teeth in modern-day Russia and a brain preserved in a severed skull on a Swedish lakeshore around 6000 B.C.E. Morton-Hayward says these ancient brains might be an untapped source of information about the past. Science talked with Morton-Hayward about her work. Th...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research