Mysterious human brain discovered after thousands of years is confusing scientists

THERE’S still so much we don’t know about the human brain, including how some specimens are preserved for thousands of years.

More than 4,000 human brains have been studied as part of new research into a mystery that is baffling scientists.

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Some brains in the study date back as far as 12,000 years.

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The study highlights that brains do not always decompose quickly after death and that some brains are preserved even when no preservation techniques are used.

This research was led by Alexandra Morton-Hayward from the University of Oxford.

It involved a team searching through the archaeological data of human brains.

The findings have been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences log.

“Here we have collected an archive of more than 4,400 human brains preserved in the archaeological record over a period of approximately 12,000 years, of which more than 1,300 constitute the only soft tissue preserved among otherwise skeletal remains.

“We found that these types of brains persist on time scales greater than those preserved in other ways, suggesting that an unknown mechanism may be responsible for the preservation of the central nervous system specifically,” the researchers wrote.

One of the oldest brains in question was found in a severed skull.

The skull belonged to a Stone Age individual who had been beheaded and placed his head on a pike in Sweden sometime between 6350 and 5000 BC.

Another brain was found in a prehistoric cemetery in Upper Egypt, preserved in a shallow sand grave.

“The untapped archive of preserved ancient brains provides an opportunity for bioarchaeological studies of human evolution, health and disease,” the researchers continued.

Some of the preserved brains had reasonable explanations, such as being freeze-dried or volcanic preservation.

However, there were many that were the only soft tissue that survived on skeletons.

Scientists warned that preserved brains may look the same color as soil and that many of them may have been discarded during excavations.