Word: chiribaya
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...genetic material comes from one of several hundred bodies, mummified by natural forces, that were unearthed in 1989 and 1990 by University of Chicago anthropologists from the cemeteries of Chiribaya, an agricultural community along the coast of what is now southern Peru. Pathologist Arthur Aufderheide of the University of Minnesota, who autopsied the mummies, was intrigued by one woman he judged to have been 40 to 45 years old, an advanced age for her society. But he expected to find little else remarkable because the body was so poorly preserved. To his surprise, when he opened the chest, he found...
...native Americans had so much TB in early colonial times," speculates Aufderheide, "because they were crowded into towns and had much poorer living conditions than before." TB spreads rapidly among people with immune systems weakened by malnutrition and poor sanitation. Among the mummies of rural Chiribaya, few showed any sign of TB infection, and the woman from whom TB DNA was isolated did not die of the disease...
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