Alexandra Morton-Hayward, a 35-year-old mortician turned molecular palaeontologist, had been behind the wheel of her rented Vauxhall for 5 hours, motoring throughout three international locations, when a torrential storm broke unfastened on the plains of Belgium. Her wipers pulsed at full velocity because the inexperienced fields of Flanders turned a blurry gray. Behind her sat a small, black picnic cooler. Inside 24 hours, it will be filled with human brains – not trendy specimens, however brains that had contemplated this panorama way back to the center ages and had, miraculously, remained intact.
For hundreds of years, archaeologists have been perplexed by discoveries of historical skeletons devoid of all smooth tissue, besides what Morton-Hayward cheerfully described as “only a mind rattling round in a cranium”. At Oxford, the place she is a doctoral candidate, she has gathered the world’s largest assortment of historical brains, some as previous as 8,000 years. Moreover, after poring over centuries of scientific literature, she has tallied a staggering catalogue of circumstances – greater than 4,400 preserved brains as previous as 12,000 years. Utilizing superior applied sciences similar to mass spectrometry and particle accelerators, she is main a brand new effort to disclose the molecular secrets and techniques which have enabled some human brains to outlive longer than Stonehenge or the Nice Pyramid of Giza.
This analysis might unlock not simply the previous, however present-day mysteries, too. Morton-Hayward has prompt that the molecular processes that injury our brains in life might assist protect them after demise – a revelation that will reshape our understanding of ageing and neurodegenerative situations.
On that stormy day, Morton-Hayward had launched into an expedition to gather 37 brains not too long ago excavated from a medieval graveyard in Belgium. She radiated empathy and good humour as she chatted about slicing up cerebral matter. Gory physique elements don’t faze her. When she labored within the funeral commerce, she dealt with hundreds of corpses, hefting their organs and draining their fluids whereas speaking amiably, as if her purchasers had been nonetheless alive.
Because the rain intensified, Morton-Hayward slowed down. She felt a looming sense of dread, the strategy of the affliction she calls “the werewolf”. Flushing, she lifted a hand off the steering wheel and patted her cheek. “I can really feel my face getting sizzling,” she muttered. “I want some medicine.” One other storm was rising – this one inside her personal cranium. She suffers from nightly assaults of cluster complications, which have been likened to being bludgeoned and repeatedly stabbed within the eye with an icepick. The fatigue of a protracted drive via foul climate had triggered an sooner than regular recurrence of her signs.
“It’s probably the most painful situations recognized to mankind,” she mentioned. “It’s known as ‘suicide headache’, as a result of 40% of victims find yourself simply wanting it to cease. In that sense, I’m at all times conscious of my mind. Generally, it feels prefer it’s in worse form than those I’ve on the bench within the lab.”
Normally, the mind is our most fragile organ. Minutes after the lack of blood or oxygen provide, neurological injury begins, adopted by decomposition. Hours after demise, mind enzymes start to devour cells from inside, a course of known as autolysis. Inside days, mobile membranes rupture and the mind liquefies. Finally, the blood-brain barrier additionally fails and microbes invade to feast on the nutrient-rich soup – a foul-smelling course of often known as putrefaction or, in lay language, rotting. If the physique lies uncovered, maggots, bugs or rodents additionally might scavenge the stays. Quickly, solely a hollow-eyed cranium will stay. Decomposition happens extra slowly underneath water or underground (the deeper the burial, the slower), however most our bodies skeletonise inside 5 or 10 years.
For all these causes, scientists have been gradual to recognise that brains can generally stay intact for hundreds of years with none embalming, freezing or mineral fossilisation. Over generations, discoveries of historical brains had been typically dismissed as weird curiosities, forgotten or just discarded. Now, that’s begun to alter.
At her lab in Oxford, Morton-Hayward retains two fridges filled with brains, housed in takeaway containers and plastic baggage. Extra specimens sit in crates at room temperature. Above her desk, she retains mind samples in cookie tins, vials and on glass slides. So huge is her assortment that she has moved some specimens to off-site storage – sufficient to fill one other three fridges. Conscious of tragic losses elsewhere, she purchased a generator in case of an influence minimize. (In Florida, in 1986, one assortment of brains from an 8,000-year-old burial web site was destroyed when a freezer misplaced energy.)
Over the previous 5 years, Morton-Hayward has gathered greater than 600 brains from scientists around the globe. Her largest jackpot – 450 brains – got here from a cemetery in south-west England that buried the useless from a workhouse, asylum and prisoners of conflict through the 18th and nineteenth centuries. Dozens extra got here from a mass grave in Philadelphia believed to carry victims of a yellow fever epidemic. The oldest pattern of mind tissue comes from an unlucky Swede whose head was bashed in, minimize off and impaled on a pole 8,000 years in the past. “In my expertise, of us are tremendous pleased to only give it away,” she mentioned. “Some archaeologists are actually squeamish concerning the smooth tissues.”
Within the lab, she popped open a plastic container and gently coaxed out her “present canine”, which she has named Rusty: a reddish mind with deep crevices from the workhouse graveyard. “He’s my favorite,” she mentioned, nestling it in her gloves. “Apologies for the odor. It’s formaldehyde.”
One thing peculiar unites these brains: many come from individuals who ended their lives in distress. As Morton-Hayward defined, “Plenty of these websites the place we discover brains preserved are websites of struggling, fairly actually.”
Morton-Hayward traces her fascination with the mind to a really particular time – when her personal mind started to torture her. Whereas learning archaeology on the College of St Andrews, she started affected by crippling complications. Medical doctors might discover no trigger. Finally, an MRI scan revealed one thing uncommon: a part of her mind was collapsing into the outlet the place her spinal column enters the cranium, a uncommon abnormality often known as Chiari malformation.
In her last yr at St Andrews, Morton-Hayward underwent a fragile surgical procedure to alleviate the strain on her mind. However the assaults continued. “They have an effect on every little thing I do,” she mentioned. “Each waking second.” She dropped out of college and sank into despair. “I didn’t know why I used to be in a lot ache,” she mentioned. “I simply felt fully ineffective, like I had completely failed.”
Because it turned out, she additionally had a second mind situation: cluster complications, probably the most painful afflictions recognized to medication. Within the Journal of Neurology and Stroke, one affected person described a cluster headache as a “lightning storm” of ache that makes “your eye really feel prefer it actually will explode out of your head”. Normally recurring in spurts on the identical time every day, cluster complications go away sufferers in fixed dread and infrequently result in secondary afflictions similar to nervousness, despair or post-traumatic stress dysfunction. The suicide price for these affected by cluster complications is about 20 instances increased than common. (The exact relationship between Morton-Hayward’s two situations stays nebulous. “There’s so little we all know concerning the mind, it’s staggering,” she mentioned. “Generally I discover that terrifying, and generally I discover that actually comforting.”)
Over time, Morton-Hayward’s agony grew to become insufferable. She tried to kill herself and wakened in hospital. “I’ve at all times been a pragmatist,” she mentioned, quietly. “I used to be like: ‘That didn’t work, so let’s attempt one thing else. Let’s attempt residing.’”
After leaving college, she moved from job to job: trauma nurse, grief counsellor, dishwasher and marriage ceremony planner (which she discovered totally miserable, as a result of she mentioned {couples} fearful extra concerning the tablecloths than marrying the correct particular person). Determined for one thing new, she utilized for a gap at a undertakers in Rochester, Kent, run by a mortician who had labored within the trade for the reason that age of 15. The interview went properly, and the director confirmed her round. He took her to the chapel of relaxation, a quiet parlour with curtains and smooth music the place households bid farewell to their family members. To her shock, Morton-Hayward noticed an open casket containing the physique of an aged girl. “The director put his fingers on the aspect of the coffin and simply talked to me over this physique,” she mentioned. It was the primary time she had seen a useless particular person. “I wasn’t shocked, however I used to be like, that is bizarre. I used to be extra struck by how comfy he clearly was.” She got here to see the episode was a take a look at of whether or not she can be comfy working with the useless. The reply was sure. “It was probably the most enjoyable job I’ve ever had,” she mentioned.
Over the subsequent 5 years, Morton-Hayward would look after greater than 5,000 deceased individuals. She helped plan memorial companies, dressed the useless for open-casket funerals, sewed mouths shut to stop the grimace brought on by rigor mortis, positioned plastic caps beneath eyelids to make our bodies seem peacefully asleep, and discovered to embalm – making incisions within the femoral artery to empty the physique fluids earlier than pumping in preservatives. Her personal ordeals had acquainted her with struggling and demise, and he or she exuded a pure empathy for her purchasers. “When somebody passes away – it doesn’t matter how previous they had been or whether or not it was anticipated – it’s devastating,” she mentioned. “The funeral director can change into the main target of grief, anger and frustration, since you’re the one telling the household that they should let go of their cherished one and they should bury them. However that anger at all times turns into gratitude.”
She started pondering the mysteries of useless our bodies. “You realize their favorite reminiscence, their favorite color and these types of issues,” she mentioned. “Then you will have them on a mortuary desk and you’ve got that mind in your hand and also you surprise: the place is that reminiscence saved?” She discovered herself fascinated by demise and decomposition, and the way one would possibly examine it scientifically. “I by no means considered myself as a scientist, which is why I went again to highschool,” she mentioned.
Regardless of her fragile well being, in 2015 Morton-Hayward enrolled in on-line lessons via the Open College to complete her undergraduate diploma. As soon as haunted by the disgrace of dropping out, she started to redeem herself as a scholar, graduating with honours and profitable a prize for her undergraduate dissertation concerning the testimony of forensic consultants within the Srebrenica conflict crime trials at The Hague. She began to really feel that she wasn’t an educational failure. Perhaps she might even stability a scientific profession alongside her neurological issues? In 2018, she switched to working nights on the funeral administrators, and commenced a grasp’s in bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology at College Faculty London (UCL). “I obtained uninterested in placing individuals within the floor and determined I wished to start out digging them up,” she joked.
It was throughout her graduate research that Morton-Hayward got here throughout an oddity that may change the course of her life. Years earlier, archaeologists made a collection of discoveries that contradicted every little thing Morton-Hayward had come to anticipate from her years within the funeral enterprise. She grew to become intrigued by one other facet of demise.
In 1994, a plainspoken archaeologist named Sonia O’Connor was summoned to an excavation web site in Hull, the place about 250 graves from a medieval monastery had been being exhumed. The dig revealed many surprises: historical underwear, skeletons with proof of syphilis, an enormous coffin whose oak planks preserved the imprint of a chunky man described by the chief archaeologist as “the stereotype picture of Friar Tuck”. However nothing ready the excavators for the second when a cranium broke aside, revealing a grey-brown mass. When O’Connor got here to examine the weird specimen, she discovered a shrunken and discoloured organ with two cerebral hemispheres and telltale floor folds. “I believed, it is a mind!” she recalled. However that appeared past perception: the physique had been buried for greater than 400 years.
With the assistance of Don Brothwell, a forensic professional who additionally investigated mass graves within the Balkans, O’Connor discovered that one in each 10 skulls from the location held a preserved mind. Shrunken, spongy or crumbly to the contact, most had been brown or rust-coloured with patches of black. The most effective-preserved brains got here from the wettest elements of the location, and plenty of had been circled by mysterious orange deposits within the soil. These brains had not been preserved by recognized means similar to dehydration, mummification or pure tanning in acidic waters. No different smooth tissues remained besides the brains. “If you happen to discuss to pathologists, they’ll inform you it’s the primary organ within the physique to go to liquid,” O’Connor mentioned of the mind. “What we’re seeing is the other of that.”
Some consultants O’Connor consulted had been sceptical. One prompt her so-called brains could be simply fungus. However the extra she seemed into it, the extra sure O’Connor grew to become. In these days, the web was in its infancy and O’Connor might discover only some different stories of preserved brains. Within the late 18th century, French authorities discovered decades-old brains once they moved the most important graveyard in Paris, the foul-smelling Cimetière des Saints-Innocents. “In contemplating this singular potential to so strongly resist destruction, one can’t assist however be astonished,” the doctor Michel-Augustin Thouret wrote in 1791 after inspecting the our bodies. The skeletons had been transported to the underground quarries now often known as the Catacombs and the brains had been largely forgotten. In 1902, Grafton Elliot Smith, an Australian British anatomist, reported the excavation of a pre-dynastic cemetery in Egypt with practically 500 graves with preserved brains. “Anatomists and anthropologists appear to be not solely blind to this truth,” he lamented, “however even deny the potential of its incidence.”
Quickly, O’Connor discovered of extra preserved brains in Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands and the US. Someway these superb finds by no means obtained a lot consideration or had been merely thrown away, leaving future students to be stunned anew every time extra historical specimens appeared. Then got here probably the most well-known discovery of all. In the summertime of 2008, a crew of archaeologists with the York Archaeological Belief had been excavating a community of drainage channels from the iron age close to the village of Heslington, once they discovered a dark-stained cranium mendacity face-down within the clay. Whereas cleansing the cranium, a lab technician felt one thing thump contained in the cavity and noticed a yellow, spongy clump. Because it occurred, the lab employee had been one in every of O’Connor’s college students and remembered her lecture about preserved historical brains. She phoned her former teacher, who later confirmed that the Heslington discover was certainly a mind.
O’Connor assembled a multidisciplinary crew of scientists and step by step they pieced collectively a grisly story, which they revealed in a 2011 paper within the Journal of Archaeological Science. The cranium was about 2,500 years previous and belonged to an grownup male who had been hanged, decapitated and dropped right into a small pond. Aside from one small finger bone, there was no signal of the remainder of the physique. The one remaining smooth tissue was the mind – the oldest one ever discovered within the UK.
After the invention was reported within the information, O’Connor obtained a name from Axel Petzold, a neurologist at UCL who studied degenerative illnesses in residing sufferers. Many of those situations concerned protein pathologies and he puzzled if related aggregations of irregular proteins may need persevered within the Heslington mind, and even helped preserve it. He satisfied O’Connor to offer him a pattern, and over the subsequent decade the UCL crew recognized greater than 800 proteins within the historical mind – probably the most ever found in an archaeological specimen. Someway the proteins had shaped cussed aggregations that preserved the mind for greater than two millennia.
For Morton-Hayward, the research of the Heslington mind had been “mind-blowing”. The very thought of a 2,500-year-old mind defied every little thing she knew. Even in a relaxing mortuary, brains sometimes started to liquefy inside a number of days. How might an historical mind stay intact? She ended up doing her grasp’s dissertation on protein preservation in historical brains. Quickly, she started a collaboration with O’Connor. Morton-Hayward spent the pandemic instructing herself about proteomics (the examine of proteins) and commenced compiling stories of preserved brains relationship again to the seventeenth century. She had discovered a subject for her PhD: figuring out the mobile and molecular processes that permit neural tissues to withstand decay – in different phrases, discovering underlying causes of mind preservation.
However after beginning her doctoral research at Cambridge, Morton-Hayward had a falling out together with her adviser and needed to battle to switch her venture to Oxford. For a time, she feared her new profession would collapse. It was one other bleak time – made darker by nightly assaults of cluster complications. “Many college students wouldn’t be capable to deal with the illnesses and setbacks she has confronted,” mentioned Erin Saupe, an Oxford professor of palaeobiology and one in every of her present advisers. “She appears to get a number of pleasure out of the method of discovery, which should drive her ahead.”
To the bare eye, historical brains look very similar to regular brains, simply discoloured and shrunken. Seen underneath a microscope, nevertheless, one can see stays of neurofilaments – primarily, the wreckage of the structural framework of the mind. “It’s like a spider net,” Morton-Hayward mentioned. “There’s a number of empty area, which is actually unusual as a result of they appear so strong.”
Her work focuses on deciphering the molecular processes that happen after demise and protect mind tissue. She makes use of mass spectrometry to determine which amino acids and proteins persist within the historical tissues (the commonest is myelin primary protein, a part of the fatty insulation of the neural wiring). She additionally took mind tissues to the Diamond Mild Supply synchrotron at Harwell, the UK nationwide particle accelerator, and spent 19-hour shifts bombarding them with electrons travelling at virtually the velocity of sunshine to determine the metals, molecules and minerals related to the preserved brains.
She additionally has performed experiments to match mind decomposition in numerous burial environments. She put useless mice in jars of both water or quartz powder to analyze how the brains decayed over a six-month interval. Over time, she noticed a proportional enhance in myelin proteins – the identical ones she had present in abundance in historical brains. “We discover brains preferentially preserved in waterlogged, oxygen-poor environments within the mouse-decay experiment,” she mentioned. “That’s superior, as a result of these are the identical environments through which we discover human brains preserved.”
These analyses all level to 1 underlying trigger: a phenomenon known as molecular cross-linking. She posits that fragments of mind proteins and degraded lipids bind with metals to kind a spongy materials that resists decay. The cross-linking drives out water – explaining why preserved brains are sometimes shrunken – and varieties sturdy polymers that persist via time. As a result of the mind abounds with proteins and lipids, it presents what Morton-Hayward described as an “excellent combination” of elements for this odd pure preservation.
This course of could be catalysed by metals, significantly iron. Certainly, preserved brains grow to be loaded with iron – as much as 25% in some circumstances. It’s the minerals containing iron that make historical brains yellow, black, orange or purple, like Rusty.
In residing brains, iron helps important capabilities, similar to respiration and electron transport. However iron additionally could be harmful as a result of it accumulates with age and may promote a phenomenon often known as oxidative injury. Oxidative injury has been implicated in ageing, neurodegenerative situations similar to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s illnesses, and different mind pathologies. The truth is, Morton-Hayward’s work means that oxidative stress throughout life might jumpstart a course of that continues after demise, with better cross-linking in sure situations similar to low-oxygen, waterlogged burials. She is struck by the truth that many preserved brains come from individuals whose lives ended miserably – in mass graves, traumatic deaths, workhouses and asylums.
“Any form of physiological stress – like hunger, for instance – and you’ll age sooner and die youthful,” she mentioned. “Perhaps that’s why we’ve so many brains from websites the place there’s struggling and deprivation.” In different phrases, the processes that in life speed up ageing proceed after demise. The result’s a merciless irony – the very factor that may have pushed somebody to lose their thoughts in life would possibly protect some brains after demise.
In March 2024, Morton-Hayward revealed the preliminary outcomes of her analysis in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. After the paper’s publication, Morton-Hayward spent days doing back-to-back interviews with media from around the globe together with CNN, the BBC, the New Scientist and Science. “We’ve obtained it to the purpose the place it’s now a critical matter of examine and that’s great,” the now-retired O’Connor mentioned. She is delighted to see Morton-Hayward proceed the work. “{That a} PhD scholar is desirous to take this ahead is sensible – anyone who can perceive the chemistry, the physics, the genetics, all this stuff.” One in all Morton-Hayward’s advisers, Prof Greger Larson, talked about that one in every of her “superpowers” is her potential to “to succeed in out and befriend consultants in all kinds of various fields”. He added: “Lots of people are helping her, however she’s clearly the hub.”
But few know of the medical torments Morton-Hayward has endured to succeed in this level. The cluster headache assaults observe a predictable sample within the wee hours of the night time. Her eyes and nostril begin working, her cheeks flush sizzling and one aspect of her face droops as she feels a pounding agony. She can’t lie down: any strain on the again of her head turns into insufferable. Her fiance, Richard Thomas, a postdoctoral researcher in geosciences at Oxford, can solely watch helplessly. “It’s fairly horrible,” Thomas mentioned. “There’s nothing I can do in any respect.”
Each three months, Morton-Hayward receives injections of nerve blocks into the again of her head; the ache will get worse for per week earlier than it will get higher. She takes triptans, which dilate her blood vessels and scale back the ache. She takes steroids when her workload is excessive, however just for quick stretches because of the dangers of long-term use. At dwelling, she retains oxygen tanks and a vagus nerve stimulator. “It impacts your coronary heart due to the fixed stress of being in such ache,” she mentioned, “so now I’ve to take coronary heart medicine as properly.” Maybe her greatest defence is a follow of conscious detachment. “Nothing relieves it,” she mentioned. “The one choice is to not really feel it, to think about you aren’t in your personal physique. You place it exterior your self.”
As daybreak breaks, the werewolf retreats. “I’ve a form of amnesia,” she mentioned. “The one means you reside with it’s you neglect how dangerous the ache was. I feel it’s your physique’s discovered response. In any other case you wouldn’t be capable to keep it up. You’d by no means lie right down to sleep, realizing what was coming.”
“I attempt to inform her to relaxation, and he or she’s like: ‘No, I’ve a PhD to do!’” Thomas mentioned. “I positively would have given up by now.” He has assumed the position of caretaker, together with ensuring she eats correctly. “She is going to attempt to work all hours of the day, on a regular basis,” Thomas mentioned. “I feel she lived off toast earlier than I met her – toast and beer.”
The relentless tempo takes a toll. Final yr, Morton-Hayward skilled extreme belly pains, which she ignored. However it turned out to be an ovarian abscess, and the an infection unfold all through her physique, resulting in sepsis. She spent two weeks in hospital and underwent blood and iron transfusions. “On the third day, this massive crew got here speeding into the ward, tremendous panicked,” she recalled. “My haemoglobin numbers had been so low that they anticipated to see anyone in cardiac arrest.”
In April, shortly after the publication of her paper, Morton-Hayward travelled to a convention in New Orleans to offer a presentation and revel in a vacation with Thomas. By the top of the journey, she had developed a cough. Through the flight dwelling her respiration weakened. On touchdown, she headed straight to A&E, the place she found she had pneumonia. She went again into hospital. “I’m actually sick of being sick,” she mentioned.
At the same time as her mind and physique conspired in opposition to her, Morton-Hayward pushed ahead. No person higher understands the preciousness of time, the urgency, than somebody one with a grave sickness who has come near demise.
One morning a number of weeks after her bout with pneumonia, Morton-Hayward picked up her picnic cooler and set out in pursuit of extra specimens. She made the lengthy drive from Oxford to Belgium in stormy climate. As regular, her assaults got here in a single day, this time as she was staying in a resort on the outskirts of Ghent.
Over breakfast the subsequent day, she pulled out her cellphone and glanced at a ghoulish photograph of a mind from a medieval churchyard. Stowing the cooler at the back of the automobile, she drove via the Belgian countryside. Lengthy barges ploughed via canals and big freighters stacked with delivery containers loomed over the quays. Lowlands had been a increase not just for delivery: waterlogged soils additionally preserved brains and, right now, a cheerful reaper had come to reap them.
On these plains, one didn’t must dig deep to search out human stays. Lots of of hundreds died right here within the first world conflict, as immortalised in a well-known poem by John McCrae: “In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row.”
After a brief drive, Morton-Hayward arrived on the places of work of an archaeological agency, BAAC. Nandy Dolman, an archaeologist, led Morton-Hayward right into a cavernous warehouse of the useless. Tall cabinets had been stacked with cardboard packing containers containing hundreds of skeletons relationship again to the medieval interval.
Since 2020, the agency had been exhuming the cemetery of St Martin’s Church, a well-known landmark in Ypres relationship again to the thirteenth century. To make means for an city building venture, about 1,300 skeletons had been eliminated, together with scores with preserved cerebral matter. On a earlier go to Morton-Hayward had collected 55 brains, and had returned for the ultimate 37, packed in plastic baggage labelled Monster – which is Dutch for “pattern”.
In a convention room upstairs, Dolman gave an in depth presentation concerning the graves of Flemish individuals who may need lived through the period depicted by the painters Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his namesake son. She believes the preserved brains span a whole lot of years, way back to the twelfth century. Skeletons had been documented with geolocation, images and information together with intercourse, approximate age and whether or not the skulls contained brains. Dolman confirmed photographs of bones with the distinctive blue and purple stains – indications of iron, the metallic suspected of catalysing mind preservation. “The documentation, the metadata – that is tip-top,” Morton-Hayward mentioned.
Then Dolman revealed a shock: the newly discovered brains included these of 20 youngsters. Morton-Hayward opened her mouth and eyes huge in astonishment. Till then, she had solely a single juvenile in her assortment of 600 preserved brains. May youngsters too have suffered excessive neurological stress and accelerated mind ageing? Maybe throughout a famine? Or was one other mechanism at work? As numerous scientists have found, each advance solely generates extra questions. “I’ll write up these notes tomorrow and undergo my monsters,” she advised her colleague simply earlier than bidding farewell. She had a protracted journey forward throughout three international locations, hoping to reach dwelling earlier than the werewolf returned.
In Flanders fields, the grasses blew beside the parking zone as Morton-Hayward returned to the automobile carrying the stays of three dozen souls who, centuries earlier than, watched sunsets glow over these plains. Why had they persevered so lengthy? Had been eternal brains the rewards for his or her agonies? As soon as silent within the grave, now they’d converse once more, due to somebody who had additionally, in opposition to the percentages, endured.