The Associated Press reports that the mass of gray matter is the oldest ever found in Great Britain, which one expert called "a real freak of preservation." The skull, which was found in a muddy pit during a dig at the University of York in northern England, had no body attached to it. It is thought the individual died sometime before the Roman invasion of Britain. It was when archaeologist Rachel Cubbitt was cleaning the skull and felt something move inside the cranium that she realized it might contain a brain. So she peered through the skull's base and saw an unusual yellow substance inside, which was later confirmed by scans at York Hospital to be brain tissue.
Richard Hall, a director of York Archaeological Trust, told AP it is not yet known how much of the brain has survived, since some of the tissue has contracted over the centuries. The real mystery is how the body was separated from the head. Hall suspects human sacrifice and ritual burial. However, the existence of a brain where no other soft tissues have survived is extremely rare, Sonia O'Connor, an archaeological researcher at the University of Bradford in northern England who helped authenticate the discovery, told AP. "This brain is particularly exciting because it is very well preserved, even though it is the oldest recorded find of this type in the U.K. and one of the earliest worldwide," she explained to AP.
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While this is the oldest brain to be found in Britain, far older brains were found in 1986 in Windover Farms in Melbourne, Florida. Dozens of intact human skulls were uncovered in a peat bog there that experts date to 8,000 years old.
