The study was authored by Alexandra Morton-Hayward, Sarah Flannery, Peter Berry, Iolanda Vendrell, Anders Johansen, Martin Hansen, and Roman Fischer. With abundant oxygen, radical reactions in brain proteins escalate into a chain reaction that degrades the entire protein structure. More than 1,300 cases fell outside that pattern: waterlogged, oxygen-poor graves in which the brain alone survived. Whether preserved brains could eventually help researchers study how those processes unfold is an open question the authors raise rather than answer. The archaeological brains themselves were not experimentally manipulated, so the link between the mouse chemistry and the ancient specimens remains inferential.