November
17
/ 2015
In 1985, a frozen and half buried mummy of a young boy was recovered from the mountain of Aconcagua in Argentina. Now, a team of scientists have managed to extract and sequence his mitochondrial DNA from a biopsy of the mummy’s lungs. The results are astonishing and indicate that the child belonged to a genetic population whose lineage has not previously been identified in modern Native Americans. When the mummy was first discovered by a group of mountaineers in 1985 it was found half buried at the base of the Pirámide mountain near Aconcagua, in Argentina's province of Mendoza. The mummy was identified as a boy who would have been around 7 years old at the time of his death
