Scientists found the cranium in a muddy pit when they were excavating a site before a new campus was to be built at the University of York. When a researcher reached inside the skull, she was stunned to discover the soft tissue of the 2,500-year-old brain still preserved.
Fractures and marks on the bones suggest the man, who was aged between 26 and 45, died most probably from hanging, after which he was carefully decapitated and his head was then buried on its own.
The survival of brain remains where no other soft tissues are preserved is extremely rare,’ said Sonia O’Connor, research fellow in archaeological sciences at the University of Bradford.
‘This brain is particularly exciting because it is very well preserved, even though it is the oldest recorded find of this type in the UK, and one of the earliest worldwide.’
Philip Duffey, a neurologist at York Hospital who scanned the skull, said: ‘I’m amazed and excited that scanning has shown structures which appear to be unequivocally of brain origin.’
‘I think that it will be very important to establish how these structures have survived, whether there are traces of biological material within them and, if not, what is their composition.’
Experts from York Archaeological Trust were commissioned by the university to carry out the exploratory dig last year before building work on the £750million campus expansion started.
They discovered the solitary skull face-down in the pit in dark brown organic rich, soft sandy clay.
The university put together a team of scientists, archaeologists, chemists, bio-archaeologists and neurologists, to establish how the man’s brain, could have survived when all the other soft tissue had decayed leaving only the bone.
The team is also investigating details of the man’s death and burial that may have contributed to the survival of what is normally highly vulnerable soft tissue."It jogged my memory of a university lecture on the rare survival of ancient brain tissue," Cubitt said in 2008. "We gave the skull special conservation treatment as a result, and sought expert medical opinion."
Now, three years later, researchers from the university have found out how this Iron Age man kicked the bucket, and have unearthed some clues as to how his grey matter stayed intact -- if a little shrivelled -- more than two thousand years later.
Using carbon dating, the archaeologists pegged his date of death from 673BC to 482BC. At this time, farming settlements with networks of fields were beginning to crop up and the skill of making tools with iron was becoming widespread around the country. He could have been anywhere between 26 and 45 years old when he died.
Like an episode of CSI Iron Age York, scientists at the university found fractures and marks on his neck bones which suggest the man was most likely killed by hanging and was then decapitated. In some gruesome, possibly-ritualistic event, his head was buried on its own.
Its discovery has also given archaeologists, who are not used to finding soft tissue and fragile organs intact after thousands of years, new insight into the preservation process.
"This is the most thorough investigation ever undertaken of a brain found in a buried skeleton," said Sonia O'Connor, a research fellow in Archaeological Sciences at the University of Bradford. "It has allowed us to begin to really understand why brain can survive thousands of years after all the other soft tissues have decayed."
In a research paper, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, the team of archaeologists, chemists, bio-archaeologists and neurologists say there was no evidence of Iron Age preservation techniques -- like embalming or smoking.
They concluded that the the wet, hydrated state of the brain and the lack of putrefaction means the brain was probably buried very rapidly after death. Combine this fact with the fine-grained, anoxic sediments of the pit, and you're left with a pretty reliable explanation for this brain's remarkable, natural preservation.
It's the oldest known brain in Britian, but tests carried out on a skull found in Florida in 1984 revealed it contained grey matter dating from around 6,000 BC.
