For the first time, scientists filmed with a camera the decomposition of a corpse lasting a year and a half. What they saw may shock the sensitive: all the time the corpse was in motion.
The usual human reaction to a dead body is intense disgust. As cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer confirms in his book Explaining Religion, all known cultures are characterized by ideas about the polluting and desecrating influence of corpses. We want to get rid of this horrible object as quickly as possible by throwing it into the ground, fire or sea.
Perhaps this explains why the process of decomposing a body for 17 months was only documented in detail for the first time in the 21st century.
The research was conducted at the Australian Center for Experimental Taphonomy Research. The first letters of its name are linked by the revealing acronym AFTER. It is the only research center in the Southern Hemisphere studying human decomposition in vivo.
Scientists have installed an automated camera to record this sad spectacle every half hour during the day. As Science Alert explains, the footage was shot over 17 months.
The scientists who studied the footage did not expect the body to be so mobile. In particular, they had no intention of tracking its activity. Their goal was to verify the model published by their predecessors, which describes the decomposition process in several stages.
