Undertakers know the brain goes first. It liquefies within days, which is why archaeologists digging up a skull expect to find nothing inside it but dirt.
Except they keep finding brains. More than 4,400 of them were pulled from peat bogs, Andean mountain summits, an Iranian salt mine, shipwrecks, and the shores of a Stone Age Swedish lakebed. In roughly one-third of those cases, the brain is the only soft tissue left in an otherwise skeletonized body. That combination should not happen. A study published June 19 in the Journal of Proteome Research now offers a mechanism, and it is stranger than a preservative: under the right conditions, the chemistry of rotting turns into the chemistry of preservation.
