Priests 'sacrificed Inca child'
/Screen capture from Twitter
The mummy of an Inca child has been discovered on Aconcagua Mountain in Argentina, the British Daily Mail reports.
Forensic geneticists and archaeologists found the frozen body half-covered in soil.
They believe Inca priests sacrificed the child, aged about seven, 500 years ago for a religious ritual known as capacocha.
The healthiest and most attractive children were drugged and then left in the mountains to freeze to death.
The extreme cold and dry conditions mummified the bodies.
“The mummy was found at the southernmost edge of the territories occupied by the Incas,” said Dr Alberto Gomez-Carballa, a forensic geneticist at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.
“It is known that the Incas organized pilgrimages of more than 1,300 kilometers for sacrifice rituals.”
The researchers acquired some of the child’s mitochondrial DNA by using a tiny fragment of lung.
The DNA revealed that the child belonged to a rare genetic sub-group of Palaeo-Indians, about whom little is known.