"To find a brain inside a skull with no other non-skeletal remains is extremely rare"

Of course if archaeologists were in the habit of purloining all the brains they unearth, for later consumption (along with Analeptic Alzabo) as part of their secretive, unspeakable ritual feasts, that's exactly what they would say. Only occasionally does a brain slip through their fingers as it were -- slippery little buggers! -- when a novice archaeologist, not yet inducted into the Mysteries and the Initiation which Cannot be Renounced, makes the discovery and the announcement is too hard to suppress.

the skull — which belonged to a man probably between 26 and 45 years old — was accompanied by a jaw and two neck vertebrae, bearing evidence of hanging and then decapitation. Cut marks on the inside of the neck indicate that the head was severed while there was still flesh on the bones, O’Connor said. There is, however, no indication of why he was hanged, and the rest of his remains have yet to be found.

This will come as a disappointment to people who have watched too many episodes of CSI: Iron Age Europe and think that a few high-tech tests will reveal whodunnit.


Sometimes the brains are not fit for consumption because the conditions of burial have turned them into the kind of ceramic you could use as space-shuttle heat shield:

Details here and here. But let the popular press have the last word:

4,000-year-old preserved brains that were boiled in their own juice

I would not go back to that restaurant.