Aconcagua mummy facts for kids
The Aconcagua mummy is an Incan capacocha mummy of a seven-year-old boy, dated to around 1500 AD. The mummy is well-preserved, due to the extreme cold and dry conditions of its high altitude burial location. The frozen mummy was discovered by hikers in 1985 at 5,300 m (17,400 ft) on Aconcagua in Mendoza, Argentina.
Discovery
In 1985, the body of the Aconcagua mummy was located by mountaineers at the bottom of Pirámide Mountain, the southwestern portion of the Aconcagua Mountain. Upon its discovery, the hikers contacted local authorities, allowing professionals to excavate the mummy.
Capacocha
The Capacocha was the ritual sacrifices of youngs boys and girls in the Inca Empire. Those chosen to be sacrificed were seen as the most serene children in the Empire, making them worthy of sacrifice. For a year before the sacrifice, the children were fed the most prestigious diets. The diets revolved solely around maize and charqui, meat from a llama. Many parents felt sorrow when forced to give up their children to the sacrifice, but were forbidden to show grief during the event. Others felt the sacrifice was a great honor and even offered their children to the gods. Each child was often buried with a variety of grave goods, as an offering to the gods. The funerary goods buried along the children depended on the importance of the shrine and sometimes even contained animals buried alongside the children.
Archaeogenetics
In 2015, DNA was extracted from a 350 mg (5.4 gr) sample from one of his lungs. His mtDNA lineage belongs to a subgroup of Haplogroup C1b, the previously unidentified C1bi (i for Inca). His mtDNA lineage contains 10 distinct mutations from C1b. The researchers determined that Haplogroup C1bi likely arose around 14,300 years ago. An individual from the Wari Empire was found to be a match for this previously unidentified haplogroup. In 2018, researchers sequenced the genome of the Aconcagua mummy from a 100 mg (1.5 gr) sample from one of his lungs. His Y-DNA lineage belongs to Haplogroup Q-M3. His specific Y-DNA haplogroup is closest matched by the Choppca people from Huancavelica, a Quechua speaking population, and clusters closer to modern Quechua speaking peoples than Aymara speaking peoples. Overall, the genome of the Aconcagua mummy clusters with modern Andean populations.
