Neurologist Axel Petzold was listening to the radio, nursing a hangover from the previous night’s lab party, when he first heard about the Yorkshire man.
It was December 2008 and, according to a news report, archaeologists had discovered the 2600-year-old skull of a decapitated Iron Age man buried in a wet pit at an excavation on the University of York campus in the UK.
Inside it was something quite unexpected: his shrivelled, but very much intact brain.
With Petzold’s help, over the next decade, the team began unravelling the beheaded man’s story via the proteins in his shrunken brain.
To do it, they used biochemical techniques once more familiar to molecular biologists, but that are now part of the toolkit of those involved in ‘palaeoproteomics’ – the study of ancient proteins.
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It’s the software side of things that Petzold says he needs to get a handle on if they’re ever going to truly solve the case of the beheaded Yorkshire man.
Did some sort of neurodegenerative disorder influence the protein aggregation in his brain? Could the effects of this disease have led to the proteins and tissue being preserved for 2600 years?
Only more time – and, likely, some more spectacular mass spec results – will tell.
