The heat caused by the explosion of Mount Vesuvius, almost two thousand years ago, was so intense that it transformed the brain of one of the victims into glass and killed everyone within a radius of 20 kilometers.
Experts have discovered shiny pieces of solid black material inside the head of a victim of the explosion of Mount Vesuvius, in Italy, in the year 79 AD.
Scientists believe that the remains of human gray matter glazed by heat. It is said to be a remarkable discovery, since brain tissue is rarely preserved and when it resists decomposition it is usually found in the form of a kind of soap.
In an article published in the “New England Journal of Medecine”, Italian forensic anthropologist Pier Paolo Petrone, co-author of the study, reveals that the glazed pieces of brain were found in the skull of a 25-year-old man found in 1960 at the College Augustino, a building linked to the cult of Emperor Augustus, in the city of Herculaneum.
“This material was preserved exclusively inside the victim’s skull, so it should be petrified remains of the brain,” said Petrone. “But that had to be proved beyond any doubt,” added the expert, in statements reproduced by the British newspaper “The Guardian”.
“The detection of vitreous material inside the victim’s head, human brain proteins and human hair fatty acids affects the glazed preservation of brain tissue,” writes Petrone’s team. The researchers admit that some of these substances can be found in some animals or plants, but they analyzed the ash and carbonized materials on the site and did not detect any of those elements.
In addition, analysis of burnt wood in the small room where the victim was found, lying on a charred bed, reveals that the site reached temperatures of around 520 degrees during the catastrophe.
Petrone estimates that the victim died instantly when streams of super-hot gas, ash and rock fragments, the so-called pyroclastic flow, swept the city.
For the investigators, there is other evidence to support this thesis: some of the victim’s bones exploded and turned into coal, while other bones, as well as fragments of carbonized wood, also showed signs of vitrification.
These revelations are the latest in a long line of extraordinary discoveries about what happened nearly two thousand years ago. Studies suggest that the only way to escape the eruption, whose pyroclastic cloud stretched for a radius of about 20 kilometers, was to escape as quickly as possible.
Taking refuge inside the house, under the bed or other sheltered places was a death sentence, since the rain of stones, the heat wave and clouds of toxic dust killed everything in the passage. A warning for the nearly three million people who live in the Naples metropolitan area, at the foot of Vesuvius.
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