Nazca infant had rare, fatal birth defect that left her with one central eye 1,600 years ago
Archaeologists in Peru have discovered the skeleton of an infant with a rare birth defect that left only one central eye socket in the child's skull.
Key points
- But "the burial of this infant suggests that the Nasca treated this individual in death like most other infants." The skeleton of this female infant was discovered alongside a second one inside a ceramic urn at the archaeological site of Jauranga in Peru's Palpa Valley, where numerous geoglyphs known as the Nazca Lines have been found.
- A burial of two infants in one urn is unusual for this culture, the researchers said, but there is not enough archaeological evidence to conclude that the infant with cyclopia was given a different type of burial.
- (DNA suggested the infant carried two X chromosomes, typical of a female.) The team detected an extra copy of chromosome 13, meaning the infant had a genetic condition called trisomy 13, or Patau syndrome.
DNA analysis of the remains confirmed a chromosomal abnormality caused the deadly condition in the infant over 1,600 years ago, according to a new study.
The infant had a very small skull and a single eye socket in the middle of her face, along with other developmental issues of the cranial bones.
Additional details
- "The fact that the individual was buried with a 'healthy' individual in a regular cemetery, without any special grave goods, suggests that, to some extent, the individual was not treated differently in death, even though it had such a rare condition,"….
- 325 to 440) at the site, but one of the co-buried infants had an extremely rare condition, researchers wrote in a study published Monday (Nov.
- These traits match modern clinical descriptions of cyclopia, a lethal condition that occurs when the front part of a fetus's brain fails to divide into left and right hemispheres.
- The researchers' estimate of the infant's age at death suggests she may have survived for several weeks or months after birth, Halcrow pointed out.
- "This condition has been documented in historic and modern anatomical collections, but to my knowledge this is the first archaeological example of this developmental abnormality," Siân Halcrow, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.
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