In the year 79, the people living near Mount Vesuvius were witness to the fiery guts of the earth. The heat and pyroclastic material entombed the dead for eternity and left their remnants as shapes in hot lava. Anything living would die by blood steaming in the veins, skin, and bone burnt and in ashes, but one death is the most spectacular.
The heat from the lava must have been great, one victim flesh exploded and glassed the organic brain matter. As this rather grisly discovery from the carnage of Herculaneum on that day Vesuvius took their lives.
During the conduction of digs by archaeologists, it normal to find the usual bones and artifacts with everything else. But finding human brains means there was a lot of heat to do such a thing. One description of the archaic remains is the texture of the soap and very smooth to the hands. It happens by saponification, with the triglycerides in fatty tissue found in the brain, that turns into a soap-like substance over time.
Finding the glassed remains of a man in one of their diggings, among all who perished in Herculaneum his brains were glassed from the heat. It happened as hot pyroclastic covered his body, scientists found his brains fused to the skull. Reports of this were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
It was found by Dr. Pier Paolo Petrone, who specializes in human osteology and forensic anthropology at the Federico II University Hospital. Before this, he and his fellows looked at the preserved skeletons of 300 individuals who perished in the town of Herculaneum. This grisly event happened when they blasted and cooked to cinders by the fury of Vesuvius.
An ill-fated Herculaneum is about 20 kilometers from Pompeii, another town burnt to cinders by Vesuvius. But, Pompeii is got the full brunt of the volcano's activity, and Herculaneum would perish just like it. Heat makes the blood boil, and the gasifying action inside the victim's skull creates pressure in the eyes and soft tissue.
The point of interest is a victim who met his demise, on a wooden bed inside a building called the Collegium Augustalium. They examined this corpse, discovered in the 1960s in volcanic ash that did cook him and made the skull burst. The skull nearly obliterated, with a few fragments that had the glassed brain matter.
Remains of the skull fragments were recovered, the glassed shards were examined to see what happened to the proteins on the fragments. The analysis revealed bits of the cerebral cortex, amygdala, and the nigra was attached to the skull bits. Some fatty acids in hair grease with triglycerides
The estimated temperature of the heat was guessed, from the wood near the corpse. The heat would be in the range of 968 degrees Fahrenheit (520 degrees Celsius). Such heat will obliterate the body and burn body fat to the last bit. After the heat of Mt. Vesuvius did its job, the cooling will leave the glassed brain matter on the body researchers found.
