Ancient brains are preserved more often than you think and up to 12,000 years

Amazing stuff!

"In 1982, construction workers uncovered dozens of 8000-year-old human skeletons in a pond on the edge of Titusville, Florida. Archaeologists excavating the waterlogged site—now known as Windover Archeological Site—were shocked to discover intact brain tissue inside 91 of the skulls, with some brains intact enough to identify contours and extract ancient DNA. ...
to study the decomposition of what she assumed was the body’s most ephemeral organ. ...

But as she began to comb the archaeological literature, she found thousands of cases in which human brains had been preserved for centuries, or even millennia. In a new paper published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, she and her co-authors catalog more than 4400 known cases where brains were preserved long after death—including a 12,000-year-old brain found near mammoth teeth in modern-day Russia and a brain preserved in a severed skull on a Swedish lakeshore around 6000 B.C.E. ..."

From the abstract:

"The brain is thought to be among the first human organs to decompose after death. The discovery of brains preserved in the archaeological record is therefore regarded as unusual. Although mechanisms such as dehydration, freezing, saponification, and tanning are known to allow for the preservation of the brain on short time scales in association with other soft tissues (≲4000 years), discoveries of older brains, especially in the absence of other soft tissues, are rare. Here, we collated an archive of more than 4400 human brains preserved in the archaeological record across approximately 12 000 years, more than 1300 of which constitute the only soft tissue preserved amongst otherwise skeletonized remains. We found that brains of this type persist on time scales exceeding those preserved by other means, which suggests an unknown mechanism may be responsible for preservation particular to the central nervous system. The untapped archive of preserved ancient brains represents an opportunity for bioarchaeological studies of human evolution, health and disease."

‘Jelly in the skull’: Ancient brains are preserved more often than you think | Science | AAAS A former undertaker says some thousands-year-old brains could be a valuable scientific resource—and perhaps reveal clues to our past

Human brains preserve in diverse environments for at least 12 000 years (open access)

With a smile on her face would you not like your brain to be preserved like this for posterity? 😊

Alexandra Morton-Hayward is a forensic anthropologist at the University of Oxford studying the way brains preserve in the archaeological record.

Figure 1. Distribution and frequency of preserved human brains by type, compared with soft tissues in the IsoArcH repository.

Figure 2. Morphological and biochemical features of five mechanisms of brain preservation. Images adapted from source material for saponified [8], frozen [9], tanned [10], dehydrated [6] and unknown [11] brains.