David (BABY MELANCHREAM ARC) retweetledi
He wasn't masturbating. What actually happened to his body is significantly worse than any joke.
When the fourth pyroclastic surge hit Pompeii, it arrived at 300°C. That's 572°F. The thermal human survival threshold is 200°C. This man died in a fraction of a second. His brain stopped before a single pain signal completed its circuit.
What you're looking at is cadaveric spasm. It's a rare form of instant muscular stiffening that only occurs during sudden violent death by extreme heat. The 300°C surge cooked the proteins in his muscle fibers so fast that his body locked into whatever position it was in at the exact moment of impact. Arms, legs, fingers, toes all contracted simultaneously. 73% of Pompeii's victims were found frozen in "life-like" stances mid-action. Running. Crawling. Shielding children. This man was probably just lying down.
The flexed limb position you're laughing at appears in nearly every Pompeii body. It's called the pugilistic attitude. Heat shrinks tendons faster than bone, curling arms and legs inward. Boxers after a fire look the same way. The position has zero connection to what the person was doing. Pure thermodynamics.
For centuries, archaeologists assumed these people suffocated on ash. A 2010 study proved they were wrong. Researchers heated modern human bone samples to various temperatures, compared them to Pompeii victims, and found the color and cracking patterns matched exposure to 250-300°C. Death was instantaneous. There was "no time to suffocate."
This isn't even his body. It's a plaster cast of the void he left behind. His flesh decomposed inside the hardened volcanic ash. In 1863, Giuseppe Fiorelli poured liquid plaster into the hollow cavity. What you see is the shape of absence.
9.4 million people looked at a man who was incinerated alive in a quarter-second and the main reaction was a punchline. The science of how he actually died is one of the most disturbing findings in modern archaeology.
En Júpiter@En_jupiter_
El masturbador de Pompeya, 79 d.c. La erupción del volcán Vesubio lo halló desprevenido, permaneciendo en ésta postura por la eternidad. Manera de morir 557: "La paja mortal".
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