As if being a human sacrifice weren’t bad enough, a teenager may have been fighting off tuberculosis before being killed on top of a South American volcano 500 years ago.
As she climbed to her death, the immune system of a 15-year-old Incan girl known as the Maiden was combating a bacterial infection caused by a type of Mycobacterium, an analysis indicates. Angelique Corthals, a forensic anthropologist at the City University of New York, and colleagues report the findings online July 25 in PLoS One.
La Doncella, as the Maiden is called in Spanish, was one of three children whose mummified remains were found near the summit of Llullaillaco volcano in Argentina in 1999. She, a younger girl and young boy were probably sacrificed in a ritual called Capacocha. But the exact cause of the children’s deaths has remained a mystery; their perfectly preserved mummies show no signs of violent trauma.