Archaeologists unearthed the charred remains of the victim in the 1960s. They found the victim’s skull in the coastal town of Herculaneum. In 2018, an anthropologist noticed something shiny inside a man’s skull. The victim’s brain had turned black and had glass-like pieces, which is extremely rare. Researchers think the person’s brain may have vitrified because of a short but highly hot ash cloud at the time. Some scientists, however, remain doubtful since soft tissue must be exposed to extremely particular circumstances before it can become glass. The discovery has the potential to change quite a few theories about the impact and sequence of events during the Mount Vesuvius eruption, said Guido Giordano, a volcanologist at Roma Tre University in Rome. The young man’s spine and skull likely prevented the heat from destroying his brain entirely, allowing some of it to change into a unique substance that looked like glass. He was around 20 years old during the eruption in 79 AD.
