Brain of young man killed erupting in Herculaneus, Italy
Last the sea October 7, 2020 21. 14 BST
Brain cells have been discovered in a form unusually preserved in the remains of a young man killed in the eruption of Vesuvius about 2,000 years ago, an Italian revealed.
Neural structures preserved in a vitrified or frozen form were discovered at the archaeological site of Herculaneum, an ancient Roman city engulfed in a rain of volcanic ash after the eruption of nearby Vesuvius in 79 AD.
“The examination of vitrified tissues, such as the one we discovered in Herculaneum . . . can save lives in the future,” Pier Paolo Petrone, a forensic anthropologist at the Federico II University of Naples, told the news agency AFP.
“Experimentation continues in several research spaces, and the knowledge and data we download will allow us to explain other, newer facets of what happened 2000 years ago, the ultimate eruption of Vesuvius,” Petrone said.
The victim whose samples were analyzed, a twentysomething guy whose remains were discovered in the 1960s, caught fire in a wooden bed.
The excessive heat from the eruption and immediate cooling that necessarily followed reshaped the brain into a glass matrix that froze neural structures and left them intact, Petrone said in the study, published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed US clinical journal PLOS One.
“Evidence of an immediate drop in temperature, as evidenced through vitrified brain tissue, is an exclusive feature of volcanic processes that occur during the eruption, as it can provide applicable data for interventions imaginable through the government of civilian coverage in the early stages of a future, eruption,” according to Petrone.
The eruption of Vesuvius covered Herculaneum with a poisonous layer several meters thick of volcanic ash, fuels and lava flows that later became stone, enveloping the city, allowing an ordinary degree of frozen conservation over time of both the city’s structures and the incapable citizens. to run away.
By reading the biological matter discovered through the study, researchers were able to download unprecedented high-resolution symbols using scanning electron microscopy and complex symbol processing tools.
With the blocking of post-eruption preservation in the cell design of the victim’s central nervous system, the researchers took the opportunity to “study the most productive known example in extremely well-preserved human neural tissue archaeology of the brain and spinal cord. “PLOS One scored.