The archaeological sites of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Oplontis are well known as a kind of Roman time capsule, resulting from the pyroclastic events of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD. While researchers have found everything from carbonized bread to human skeletons to two-story buildings preserved for nearly two millennia, a newly published article claims to have analyzed the first evidence of preserved brain matter.
Writing today in the New England Journal of Medicine, Pier Paolo Petrone of the University of Naples Federico II and colleagues detail masses of glassy black material discovered on one human skeleton that was found in the College of the Augustales in Herculaneum. Interpretations of the skeleton, which was found in the 1960s and is not on public display, suggest the person may have been the building’s caretaker, unable to flee when Mt. Vesuvius erupted, and eventually perishing in bed.
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