A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Thursday, July 13, 2017
Dozens of naturally preserved brains found in Spanish Civil War-era mass grave
Fernando
Serrulla, a forensic anthropologist of the Aranzadi Science Society,
shows one of the 45 brains saponified of those killed by forces of the
dictator Francisco Franco which were found in 2010 in a mass grave
around the area known as La Pedraja, at a laboratory in Verin, Spain,
June 9, 2017. Picture taken June 9, 2017.
MADRID (Reuters) - Archaeologists excavating a mass grave from Spain's
1936 to 1939 Civil War have found the naturally preserved brains of 45
people eight decades after they were shot and buried on a hillside in
the northern province of Burgos.
Spain has hundreds of mass graves from the war and from ensuing decades
of dictatorship under General Francisco Franco. Very few have been dug
up due to a lack of funding and Spain's "pact of forgetting" on its
return to democracy in the 1970s.
The brains from some of the bodies in the La Pedraja grave were
preserved by very specific environmental conditions after heavy rains
seeped into bullet holes in their skulls. This "saponification" process
turned them into a soap-like substance.
A preserved heart has also been unearthed, an unprecedented finding,
says forensic scientist Fernando Serrulla who worked on the dig and has
published a study with details of the discovery.
Juan Medina
"Naturally preserved brains are very rare," Serrulla said. "There are only around 100 documented cases in the world."
The brains are being kept in a laboratory in Galicia, northwestern Spain, where Serrulla works.
Shrivelled, brown and with the ridges still showing, they form the
largest collection of naturally preserved human brains in the world, he
says.
None of the preserved organs and only 16 of the 104 bodies dug up from the grave have been identified.
Rafael Martinez, the president of a socialist association killed by
Franco's supporters in 1936, was recently identified as one of the
bodies in La Pedraja.
Reporting by Alba Asenjo; Editing by Sonya Dowsett and Louise Ireland