Nearly 2,000 years ago it's understood that a man's brain somehow turned into glass.
This bizarre incident has long troubled scientists looking for an answer, but a recent study might just have figured out how this phenomenal event occurred.
If there's something that's generally consistent about the artefacts found in Pompeii and Herculaneum following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius is that they're improbably well preserved.
Recent discoveries have uncovered pristinely maintained private bathhouses alongside ancient jewellery that looks like it was made recently, yet one of the strangest finds is the brain of a man that somehow turned into glass.
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Dying all the way back in 79 A.D., scientists found a black glass-like material in the skull of a man who perished following Vesuvius' devastation, leading all to remain puzzled as to how exactly this happened.
However, as reported by Live Science, a breakthrough has seemingly now been made as researchers appear to have pinpointed the chain of events that transformed the brain in question into the bizarre substance.
Published in the Scientific Reports academic journal, it's indicated that the process required to turn the man's brain into glass is "the only such occurrence on Earth" of its kind, indicating quite how rare and unique the circumstances were to achieve it.
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It was a mystery for so long because the typical pyroclastic flow from the volcano wouldn't have been hot enough or cooled down quick enough to turn muscle tissue into glass, as the study explains:
"Organic tissues are commonly preserved as glass by the processes of vitrification at very low temperatures, known as cryopreservation, and can return to their original soft state when heated back to ambient temperature.
"It would therefore be impossible to find organic glass embedded in volcanic deposits that have reached several hundred of Celsius degrees."
However, this new research proposes that a unique form of vitrification occurred at very high temperatures of around 510°C, indicating that "the body was exposed to the passage and vanishing of a short-lived, dilute and much hotter pyroclastic flow, explaining its early fast heating and the following very fast cooling."
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Expanding upon this, the study theorizes that the high temperatures were caused by a "very hot ash cloud" that was the first deadly event following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and the dissipation of this cloud within "minutes" allowed for such a dramatic shift in temperature compared to the cooler pyroclastic flow.
Previous studies published in 2020 pointed towards a similar hypothesis, but this is the first of its kind that have also proved that the glass-like material is indeed brain tissue, as pointed out through evidence of brain cells.
"This is the only way by which such a glass type can be preserved in the geological or archaeological record and explains why this is a unique occurrence and preserves the ultra-find neural structure of the brain," the study concludes.