Alexandra Morton-Hayward, a 35-year-old mortician turned molecular palaeontologist, had been behind the wheel of her rented Vauxhall for five hours, motoring across three countries, when a torrential storm broke loose on the plains of Belgium. Her wipers pulsed at full speed as the green fields of Flanders turned a blurry grey. Behind her sat a small, black picnic cooler. Within 24 hours, it would be full of human brains – not modern specimens, but brains that had contemplated this landscape as far back as the middle ages and had, miraculously, remained intact.
For centuries, archaeologists have been perplexed by discoveries of ancient skeletons devoid of all soft tissue, except what Morton-Hayward cheerfully described as “just a brain rattling around in a skull”. At Oxford, where she is a doctoral candidate, she has gathered the world’s largest collection of ancient brains, some as old as 8,000 years. Additionally, after poring over centuries of scientific literature, she has tallied a staggering catalogue of cases – more than 4,400 preserved brains as old as 12,000 years. Using advanced technologies such as mass spectrometry and particle accelerators, she is leading a new effort to reveal the molecular secrets that have enabled some human brains to survive longer than Stonehenge or the Great Pyramid of Giza.
This research may unlock not just the past, but present-day mysteries, too. Morton-Hayward has suggested that the molecular processes that damage our brains in life could help preserve them after death – a revelation that may reshape our understanding of ageing and neurodegenerative conditions.
On that stormy day, Morton-Hayward had embarked on an expedition to collect 37 brains recently excavated from a medieval graveyard in Belgium. She radiated empathy and good humour as she chatted about slicing up cerebral matter. Gory body parts do not faze her. When she worked in the funeral trade, she handled thousands of corpses, hefting their organs and draining their fluids while talking amiably, as if her clients were still alive.
As the rain intensified, Morton-Hayward slowed down. She felt a looming sense of dread, the approach of the affliction she calls “the werewolf”. Flushing, she lifted a hand off the steering wheel and patted her cheek. “I can feel my face getting hot,” she muttered. “I need some medication.” Another storm was rising – this one inside her own skull. She suffers from nightly attacks of cluster headaches, which have been likened to being bludgeoned and repeatedly stabbed in the eye with an icepick. The fatigue of a long drive through foul weather had triggered an earlier than normal recurrence of her symptoms.
“It’s one of the most painful conditions known to mankind,” she said. “It’s called ‘suicide headache’, because 40% of sufferers end up just wanting it to stop. In that sense, I’m always aware of my brain. Sometimes, it feels like it’s in worse shape than the ones I have on the bench in the lab.”
* * *
Normally, the brain is our most fragile organ. Minutes after the loss of blood or oxygen supply, neurological damage begins, followed by decomposition. Hours after death, brain enzymes begin to consume cells from within, a process called autolysis. Within days, cellular membranes rupture and the brain liquefies. Eventually, the blood-brain barrier also fails and microbes invade to feast on the nutrient-rich soup – a foul-smelling process known as putrefaction or, in lay language, rotting. If the body lies exposed, maggots, insects or rodents also may scavenge the remains. Soon, only a hollow-eyed skull will remain. Decomposition occurs more slowly under water or underground (the deeper the burial, the slower), but most bodies skeletonise within five or 10 years.
For all these reasons, scientists have been slow to recognise that brains can sometimes remain intact for thousands of years without any embalming, freezing or mineral fossilisation. Over generations, discoveries of ancient brains were often dismissed as bizarre curiosities, forgotten or simply discarded. Now, that’s begun to change.
At her lab in Oxford, Morton-Hayward keeps two refrigerators full of brains, housed in takeaway containers and plastic bags. More specimens sit in crates at room temperature. Above her desk, she keeps brain samples in cookie tins, vials and on glass slides. So vast is her collection that she has moved some specimens to off-site storage – enough to fill another three refrigerators. Mindful of tragic losses elsewhere, she bought a generator in case of a power cut. (In Florida, in 1986, one collection of brains from an 8,000-year-old burial site was destroyed when a freezer lost power.)
Over the past five years, Morton-Hayward has gathered more than 600 brains from scientists around the world. Her biggest jackpot – 450 brains – came from a cemetery in south-west England that buried the dead from a workhouse, asylum and prisoners of war during the 18th and 19th centuries. Dozens more came from a mass grave in Philadelphia believed to hold victims of a yellow fever epidemic. The oldest sample of brain tissue comes from an unfortunate Swede whose head was bashed in, cut off and impaled on a pole 8,000 years ago. “In my experience, folks are super happy to just give it away,” she said. “Some archaeologists are really squeamish about the soft tissues.”
In the lab, she popped open a plastic container and gently coaxed out her “show dog”, which she has named Rusty: a reddish brain with deep crevices from the workhouse graveyard. “He is my favourite,” she said, nestling it in her gloves. “Apologies for the smell. It’s formaldehyde.”
Something peculiar unites these brains: many come from people who ended their lives in misery. As Morton-Hayward explained, “A lot of these sites where we find brains preserved are sites of suffering, quite honestly.”
* * *
Morton-Hayward traces her fascination with the brain to a very specific time – when her own brain began to torture her. While studying archaeology at the University of St Andrews, she began suffering from crippling headaches. Doctors could find no cause. Eventually, an MRI scan revealed something unusual: part of her brain was collapsing into the hole where her spinal column enters the skull, a rare abnormality known as Chiari malformation.
In her final year at St Andrews, Morton-Hayward underwent a delicate surgery to relieve the pressure on her brain. But the attacks continued. “They affect everything I do,” she said. “Every waking moment.” She dropped out of university and sank into depression. “I didn’t know why I was in so much pain,” she said. “I just felt completely useless, like I had totally failed.”
As it turned out, she also had a second brain condition: cluster headaches, one of the most painful afflictions known to medicine. In the Journal of Neurology and Stroke, one patient described a cluster headache as a “lightning storm” of pain that makes “your eye feel like it literally will explode out of your head”. Usually recurring in spurts at the same time each day, cluster headaches leave patients in constant dread and often lead to secondary afflictions such as anxiety, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. The suicide rate for those suffering from cluster headaches is about 20 times higher than average. (The precise relationship between Morton-Hayward’s two conditions remains nebulous. “There’s so little we know about the brain, it’s staggering,” she said. “Sometimes I find that terrifying, and sometimes I find that really comforting.”)
Over time, Morton-Hayward’s agony became unbearable. She tried to kill herself and woke up in hospital. “I’ve always been a pragmatist,” she said, quietly. “I was like: ‘That didn’t work, so let’s try something else. Let’s try living.’”
After leaving university, she moved from job to job: trauma nurse, grief counsellor, dishwasher and wedding planner (which she found utterly depressing, because she said couples worried more about the tablecloths than marrying the right person). Desperate for something new, she applied for an opening at a undertakers in Rochester, Kent, run by a mortician who had worked in the industry since the age of 15. The interview went well, and the director showed her around. He took her to the chapel of rest, a quiet parlour with curtains and soft music where families bid farewell to their loved ones. To her surprise, Morton-Hayward saw an open casket containing the body of an elderly woman. “The director put his hands on the side of the coffin and just talked to me over this body,” she said. It was the first time she had seen a dead person. “I wasn’t shocked, but I was like, this is weird. I was more struck by how comfortable he clearly was.” She came to see the episode was a test of whether she would be comfortable working with the dead. The answer was yes. “It was the most fun job I’ve ever had,” she said.
Over the next five years, Morton-Hayward would care for more than 5,000 deceased people. She helped plan memorial services, dressed the dead for open-casket funerals, sewed mouths shut to prevent the grimace caused by rigor mortis, placed plastic caps beneath eyelids to make bodies appear peacefully asleep, and learned to embalm – making incisions in the femoral artery to drain the body fluids before pumping in preservatives. Her own ordeals had acquainted her with suffering and death, and she exuded a natural empathy for her clients. “When someone passes away – it doesn’t matter how old they were or whether it was expected – it’s devastating,” she said. “The funeral director can become the focus of grief, anger and frustration, because you’re the one telling the family that they need to let go of their loved one and they need to bury them. But that anger always turns into gratitude.”
She began pondering the mysteries of dead bodies. “You know their favourite memory, their favourite colour and these sorts of things,” she said. “Then you have them on a mortuary table and you have that brain in your hand and you wonder: where is that memory stored?” She found herself fascinated by death and decomposition, and how one might study it scientifically. “I never thought of myself as a scientist, which is why I went back to school,” she said.
Despite her fragile health, in 2015 Morton-Hayward enrolled in online classes through the Open University to finish her undergraduate degree. Once haunted by the shame of dropping out, she began to redeem herself as a student, graduating with honours and winning a prize for her undergraduate dissertation about the testimony of forensic experts in the Srebrenica war crime trials at The Hague. She started to feel that she wasn’t an academic failure. Maybe she could even balance a scientific career alongside her neurological disorders? In 2018, she switched to working nights at the funeral directors, and began a master’s in bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology at University College London (UCL). “I got tired of putting people in the ground and decided I wanted to start digging them up,” she joked.
It was during her graduate studies that Morton-Hayward came across an oddity that would change the course of her life. Years earlier, archaeologists made a series of discoveries that contradicted everything Morton-Hayward had come to expect from her years in the funeral business. She became intrigued by another aspect of death.
* * *
In 1994, a plainspoken archaeologist named Sonia O’Connor was summoned to an excavation site in Hull, where about 250 graves from a medieval monastery were being exhumed. The dig revealed many surprises: ancient underwear, skeletons with evidence of syphilis, a massive coffin whose oak planks preserved the imprint of a corpulent man described by the chief archaeologist as “the stereotype image of Friar Tuck”. But nothing prepared the excavators for the moment when a skull broke apart, revealing a grey-brown mass. When O’Connor came to inspect the unusual specimen, she found a shrunken and discoloured organ with two cerebral hemispheres and telltale surface folds. “I thought, this is a brain!” she recalled. But that seemed beyond belief: the body had been buried for more than 400 years.
With the help of Don Brothwell, a forensic expert who also investigated mass graves in the Balkans, O’Connor found that one in every 10 skulls from the site held a preserved brain. Shrunken, spongy or crumbly to the touch, most were brown or rust-coloured with patches of black. The best-preserved brains came from the wettest parts of the site, and many were circled by mysterious orange deposits in the soil. These brains had not been preserved by known means such as dehydration, mummification or natural tanning in acidic waters. No other soft tissues remained except the brains. “If you talk to pathologists, they’ll tell you it’s the first organ in the body to go to liquid,” O’Connor said of the brain. “What we are seeing is the opposite of that.”
Some experts O’Connor consulted were sceptical. One suggested her so-called brains might be just fungus. But the more she looked into it, the more certain O’Connor became. In those days, the internet was in its infancy and O’Connor could find only a few other reports of preserved brains. In the late 18th century, French authorities found decades-old brains when they moved the largest graveyard in Paris, the foul-smelling Cimetière des Saints-Innocents. “In considering this singular ability to so strongly resist destruction, one cannot help but be astonished,” the physician Michel-Augustin Thouret wrote in 1791 after inspecting the bodies. The skeletons were transported to the underground quarries now known as the Catacombs and the brains were largely forgotten. In 1902, Grafton Elliot Smith, an Australian British anatomist, reported the excavation of a pre-dynastic cemetery in Egypt with nearly 500 graves with preserved brains. “Anatomists and anthropologists seem to be not only ignorant of this fact,” he lamented, “but even deny the possibility of its occurrence.”
Soon, O’Connor learned of more preserved brains in Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands and the US. Somehow these amazing finds never got much attention or were simply thrown away, leaving future scholars to be surprised anew each time more ancient specimens appeared. Then came the most famous discovery of all. In the summer of 2008, a team of archaeologists with the York Archaeological Trust were excavating a network of drainage channels from the iron age near the village of Heslington, when they found a dark-stained skull lying face-down in the clay. While cleaning the skull, a lab technician felt something thump inside the cavity and spotted a yellow, spongy clump. As it happened, the lab worker had been one of O’Connor’s students and remembered her lecture about preserved ancient brains. She phoned her former instructor, who later confirmed that the Heslington find was indeed a brain.
O’Connor assembled a multidisciplinary team of scientists and gradually they pieced together a grisly story, which they published in a 2011 paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science. The skull was about 2,500 years old and belonged to an adult male who had been hanged, decapitated and dropped into a small pond. Other than one small finger bone, there was no sign of the rest of the body. The only remaining soft tissue was the brain – the oldest one ever found in the UK.
After the discovery was reported in the news, O’Connor got a call from Axel Petzold, a neurologist at UCL who studied degenerative diseases in living patients. Many of these conditions involved protein pathologies and he wondered if similar aggregations of abnormal proteins might have persisted in the Heslington brain, or even helped conserve it. He convinced O’Connor to give him a sample, and over the next decade the UCL team identified more than 800 proteins in the ancient brain – the most ever discovered in an archaeological specimen. Somehow the proteins had formed stubborn aggregations that preserved the brain for more than two millennia.
For Morton-Hayward, the studies of the Heslington brain were “mind-blowing”. The very idea of a 2,500-year-old brain defied everything she knew. Even in a chilled mortuary, brains typically began to liquefy within a few days. How could an ancient brain remain intact? She ended up doing her master’s dissertation on protein preservation in ancient brains. Soon, she began a collaboration with O’Connor. Morton-Hayward spent the pandemic teaching herself about proteomics (the study of proteins) and began compiling reports of preserved brains dating back to the 17th century. She had found a topic for her PhD: identifying the cellular and molecular processes that allow neural tissues to resist decay – in other words, discovering underlying causes of brain preservation.
But after starting her doctoral studies at Cambridge, Morton-Hayward had a falling out with her adviser and had to fight to transfer her project to Oxford. For a time, she feared her new career would collapse. It was another bleak time – made darker by nightly attacks of cluster headaches. “Many students would not be able to cope with the ailments and setbacks she has faced,” said Erin Saupe, an Oxford professor of palaeobiology and one of her current advisers. “She seems to get a lot of joy out of the process of discovery, which must drive her forward.”
* * *
To the naked eye, ancient brains look much like normal brains, just discoloured and shrunken. Viewed under a microscope, however, one can see remains of neurofilaments – essentially, the wreckage of the structural framework of the brain. “It’s like a spider web,” Morton-Hayward said. “There’s a lot of empty space, which is really strange because they look so solid.”
Her work focuses on deciphering the molecular processes that occur after death and preserve brain tissue. She uses mass spectrometry to identify which amino acids and proteins persist in the ancient tissues (the most common is myelin basic protein, part of the fatty insulation of the neural wiring). She also took brain tissues to the Diamond Light Source synchrotron at Harwell, the UK national particle accelerator, and spent 19-hour shifts bombarding them with electrons travelling at almost the speed of light to identify the metals, molecules and minerals associated with the preserved brains.
She also has conducted experiments to compare brain decomposition in different burial environments. She put dead mice in jars of either water or quartz powder to investigate how the brains decayed over a six-month period. Over time, she observed a proportional increase in myelin proteins – the same ones she had found in abundance in ancient brains. “We find brains preferentially preserved in waterlogged, oxygen-poor environments in the mouse-decay experiment,” she said. “That’s awesome, because these are the same environments in which we find human brains preserved.”
These analyses all point to one underlying cause: a phenomenon called molecular cross-linking. She posits that fragments of brain proteins and degraded lipids bind with metals to form a spongy material that resists decay. The cross-linking drives out water – explaining why preserved brains are typically shrunken – and forms durable polymers that persist through time. Because the brain abounds with proteins and lipids, it offers what Morton-Hayward described as an “ideal mixture” of ingredients for this odd natural preservation.
This process can be catalysed by metals, particularly iron. Indeed, preserved brains turn out to be loaded with iron – up to 25% in some cases. It is the minerals containing iron that make ancient brains yellow, black, orange or red, like Rusty.
In living brains, iron supports essential functions, such as respiration and electron transport. But iron also can be dangerous because it accumulates with age and can promote a phenomenon known as oxidative damage. Oxidative damage has been implicated in ageing, neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, and other brain pathologies. In fact, Morton-Hayward’s work suggests that oxidative stress during life may jumpstart a process that continues after death, with greater cross-linking in certain conditions such as low-oxygen, waterlogged burials. She is struck by the fact that many preserved brains come from people whose lives ended miserably – in mass graves, traumatic deaths, workhouses and asylums.
“Any kind of physiological stress – like starvation, for example – and you will age faster and die younger,” she said. “Maybe that’s why we have so many brains from sites where there is suffering and deprivation.” In other words, the processes that in life accelerate ageing continue after death. The result is a cruel irony – the very thing that might have driven someone to lose their mind in life might preserve some brains after death.
In March 2024, Morton-Hayward published the initial results of her research in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. After the paper’s publication, Morton-Hayward spent days doing back-to-back interviews with media from around the world including CNN, the BBC, the New Scientist and Science. “We’ve got it to the point where it is now a serious topic of study and that is wonderful,” the now-retired O’Connor said. She is delighted to see Morton-Hayward continue the work. “That a PhD student is wanting to take this forward is brilliant – somebody who can understand the chemistry, the physics, the genetics, all these things.” One of Morton-Hayward’s advisers, Prof Greger Larson, mentioned that one of her “superpowers” is her ability to “to reach out and befriend experts in a wide variety of different fields”. He added: “A lot of people are assisting her, but she’s clearly the hub.”
Yet few know of the medical torments Morton-Hayward has endured to reach this point. The cluster headache attacks follow a predictable pattern in the wee hours of the night. Her eyes and nose start running, her cheeks flush hot and one side of her face droops as she feels a pounding agony. She cannot lie down: any pressure on the back of her head becomes unbearable. Her fiance, Richard Thomas, a postdoctoral researcher in geosciences at Oxford, can only watch helplessly. “It’s quite horrible,” Thomas said. “There’s nothing I can do at all.”
Every three months, Morton-Hayward receives injections of nerve blocks into the back of her head; the pain gets worse for a week before it gets better. She takes triptans, which dilate her blood vessels and reduce the pain. She takes steroids when her workload is high, but only for short stretches due to the risks of long-term use. At home, she keeps oxygen tanks and a vagus nerve stimulator. “It affects your heart because of the constant stress of being in such pain,” she said, “so now I have to take heart medication as well.” Perhaps her best defence is a practice of mindful detachment. “Nothing relieves it,” she said. “The only option is to not feel it, to imagine you are not in your own body. You put it outside yourself.”
As dawn breaks, the werewolf retreats. “I have a sort of amnesia,” she said. “The only way you live with it is you forget how bad the pain was. I think it’s your body’s learned response. Otherwise you would not be able to carry on. You would never lie down to sleep, knowing what was coming.”
“I try to tell her to rest, and she’s like: ‘No, I have a PhD to do!’” Thomas said. “I definitely would have given up by now.” He has assumed the role of caretaker, including making sure she eats properly. “She will try to work all hours of the day, all the time,” Thomas said. “I think she lived off toast before I met her – toast and beer.”
The relentless pace takes a toll. Last year, Morton-Hayward experienced severe abdominal pains, which she ignored. But it turned out to be an ovarian abscess, and the infection spread throughout her body, leading to sepsis. She spent two weeks in hospital and underwent blood and iron transfusions. “On the third day, this big team came rushing into the ward, super panicked,” she recalled. “My haemoglobin numbers were so low that they expected to see somebody in cardiac arrest.”
In April, shortly after the publication of her paper, Morton-Hayward travelled to a conference in New Orleans to give a presentation and enjoy a holiday with Thomas. By the end of the trip, she had developed a cough. During the flight home her breathing weakened. On landing, she headed straight to A&E, where she discovered she had pneumonia. She went back into hospital. “I’m really sick of being sick,” she said.
Even as her brain and body conspired against her, Morton-Hayward pushed forward. Nobody better understands the preciousness of time, the urgency, than someone one with a grave illness who has come close to death.
* * *
One morning a few weeks after her bout with pneumonia, Morton-Hayward picked up her picnic cooler and set out in pursuit of more specimens. She made the long drive from Oxford to Belgium in stormy weather. As usual, her attacks came overnight, this time as she was staying in a hotel on the outskirts of Ghent.
Over breakfast the next day, she pulled out her phone and glanced at a ghoulish photo of a brain from a medieval churchyard. Stowing the cooler in the back of the car, she drove through the Belgian countryside. Long barges ploughed through canals and giant freighters stacked with shipping containers loomed over the quays. Lowlands were a boom not only for shipping: waterlogged soils also preserved brains and, today, a cheerful reaper had come to harvest them.
On these plains, one did not have to dig deep to find human remains. Hundreds of thousands died here in the first world war, as immortalised in a famous poem by John McCrae: “In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row.”
After a short drive, Morton-Hayward arrived at the offices of an archaeological firm, BAAC. Nandy Dolman, an archaeologist, led Morton-Hayward into a cavernous warehouse of the dead. Tall shelves were stacked with cardboard boxes containing thousands of skeletons dating back to the medieval period.
Since 2020, the firm had been exhuming the cemetery of St Martin’s Church, a famous landmark in Ypres dating back to the 13th century. To make way for an urban construction project, about 1,300 skeletons had been removed, including scores with preserved cerebral matter. On a previous visit Morton-Hayward had collected 55 brains, and had returned for the final 37, packed in plastic bags labelled Monster – which is Dutch for “sample”.
In a conference room upstairs, Dolman gave a detailed presentation about the graves of Flemish people who might have lived during the era depicted by the painters Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his namesake son. She believes the preserved brains span hundreds of years, as far back as the 12th century. Skeletons had been documented with geolocation, photographs and data including sex, approximate age and whether the skulls contained brains. Dolman showed photos of bones with the distinctive blue and red stains – indications of iron, the metal suspected of catalysing brain preservation. “The documentation, the metadata – this is tip-top,” Morton-Hayward said.
Then Dolman revealed a surprise: the newly found brains included those of 20 children. Morton-Hayward opened her mouth and eyes wide in astonishment. Until then, she had only a single juvenile in her collection of 600 preserved brains. Could children too have suffered extreme neurological stress and accelerated brain ageing? Perhaps during a famine? Or was another mechanism at work? As countless scientists have discovered, every advance only generates more questions. “I’ll write up these notes tomorrow and go through my monsters,” she told her colleague just before bidding farewell. She had a long journey ahead across three countries, hoping to arrive home before the werewolf returned.
In Flanders fields, the grasses blew beside the parking lot as Morton-Hayward returned to the car carrying the remains of three dozen souls who, centuries before, watched sunsets glow over these plains. Why had they persisted so long? Were everlasting brains the rewards for their agonies? Once silent in the grave, now they would speak again, thanks to someone who had also, against the odds, endured.
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