Hard hat?
Maybe he forgot his hat and went back to fetch it.
Headless man found in lava’s embrace
Archaeologists have found a headless body in Pompeii and concluded that his skull was removed by a big rock pushed into his path by the pyroclastic flow that presaged the city’s doom. The Parco Archeologico di Pompei’s assessment of the find suggests “that the individual survived the first eruptive phase of the volcano, and …
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Wednesday 30th May 2018 11:48 GMT Fruit and Nutcase
Re: I've got the Looney Tunes theme stuck in my head now
Better than Yakety Sax
I beg to differ -
If he was following the Hills Angels, then he'd have been making much better progress.
If on the other hand he was being followed by the Hills Angels, then, they'd probably caught up with him and then carried him
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Wednesday 30th May 2018 08:17 GMT jake
Well ...
... there is a body, and there is a stone. Is it the same stone that caused the body? Given the lack of head to go with the body, and the fact that things were flying around rather precariously that day, I suspect that the rest orientation of the body has no bearing on the orientation at impact.
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Wednesday 30th May 2018 11:45 GMT Wellyboot
One does wonder
>>significant walking difficulties, enough to impede the man's escape at the first dramatic signs which preceded the eruption<<
What would the Romans consider a 'dramatic' sign? Big V may have been smoking & giving the odd wobble for years before going bang (several hundred MTs worth) and as most living people know, lava flows aren't that quick or widespread.
Knowledge of the physics of big pyroclastic eruptions is a recent thing - previously most witnesses were either toast or not believed.
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Wednesday 30th May 2018 12:29 GMT Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese
Re: One does wonder
Big V may have been smoking & giving the odd wobble for years before going bang
It most certainly had. The people who were killed following the last eruption were the generation who had pretty much rebuilt the city following a devastating eruption a number of years earlier.
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Wednesday 30th May 2018 12:49 GMT Loyal Commenter
Re: One does wonder
It most certainly had. The people who were killed following the last eruption were the generation who had pretty much rebuilt the city following a devastating eruption a number of years earlier.
IIRC, the people living there at the time didn't know that Vesuvius was a volcano. The previous eruption had been almost 2000 years earlier, and before the eruption in 79 AD, the mountain wasn't volcano-shaped as it is now with a big crater, but had a single peak some 4,500 metres high.
Pompeii had been rebuilt several times after earthquakes, but the Romans didn't link these to volcanic activity, thinking that either could happen at any point at the whim of the gods.
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Wednesday 30th May 2018 15:23 GMT strum
Re: One does wonder
>What would the Romans consider a 'dramatic' sign?
Vesuvius had been erupting for some time (24hrs or so) before the pyroclastic flow started. That's why Pompeii itself was largely deserted. Most of the populace had evacuated - some to Herculaneum, where the pyroclastic flow roasted them.
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Wednesday 30th May 2018 14:09 GMT Gordon Pryra
Probably for the best
There was nowhere for him to run to, so a quick death compared to the alternative.
That said, he could already have been on fire running from the mountain or if not on fire, the gasses and corrosive dust could have been eating into his flesh while he stumbled away.
So maybe the poor sod got the worst of both worlds.
Least Facebook cant hold a copy of his face on file and sell it to the highest bidder...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
