Web edition: July 26, 2012 Print edition: September 8, 2012;
Vol.182 #5 (p. 9) 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. Corthals wanted to know whether the
childre