His name is Lidow Man and he is the protagonist of a horror story set in the 1980s. There is a 2,000-year-old body that hasn't decomposed.
It's a story with decidedly horror tones that begins in the 1980s in Wilmslow, Cheshire, England. Here a man began to find pieces of a corpse at the edge of the inhabited area. He became very frightened, in fact arms, legs and whatever else seemed to be rather recent remains. Yet there was no reason for such alarm: in fact, despite the state of decomposition far from advanced, the bodies belonged to men and women who died more than a thousand or two thousand years ago.
Who and when he discovered the famous corpse of Lidow Man
The man of the discovery is called Andy Mold, his work consisted, at the time of the facts, in collecting peat from the Lindow Moss swamp. On May 13, 1983, digging in the earth, he found a human head, which at first he mistook for a soccer ball.
Specifically, it was the remains of a woman killed by her husband. At first, the police believed that the corpse was not more than 20 years old. Closer analysis revealed that the killer, and his victim, had lived 1,600 years before the discovery. The following year, the disturbing discovery occurred again: this time, a human foot emerged among the peat, belonging to a male who had lived 2,000 years ago.
How is it possible for bodies to turn into zombies that don't decompose
How is it possible for a body to preserve itself so well for hundreds of years? The average decomposition time of a corpse is in fact 100 years, after which nothing remains of the person who lived. The solution to the puzzle lies in peat, which in turn contains the remains of decomposed organic matter, such as, for example, moss. The layers of peat create acids that are incredibly helpful in preserving bodies.
The man found by Andy Mold went down in history as Lidow Man and later became the subject of a Ted Talk hosted by Carolyn Marshall. "Plants acidify the soil by also releasing a compound that binds to nitrogen, depriving the area of nutrients," the popularizer explained. "In addition to the cold temperatures in northern Europe, these conditions make it impossible for most microbes" to play their role in decomposition. "Whatever organic matter ends up in a peat bog stays there." Just like Lidow Man.
There'd be enough to write a new season of The Walking Dead, but it's not uncommon for certain environmental conditions to immensely prolong preservation or survival-it happens with viruses, too.
Giuseppe Giordano