Incan Kids Fattened Before Sacrifice

Incan Kids Fattened Before Sacrifice

Incan children as young as 6 were “fattened up” prior to their sacrificial deaths, a new study shows.

Researchers made the startling discovery by sampling the hair of frozen child mummies found high in the Andes mountains, near the summit of Mount Llullaillaco—a 22,100-foot (6,739-meter) active volcano on the border of Argentina and Chile.

"By examining hair samples from these unfortunate children, a chilling story has started to emerge of how the children were 'fattened up' for sacrifice," says Andrew Wilson, an archaeologist at the University of Bradford in the U.K.

Wilson and his colleagues analyzed hair samples from four child mummies, including a 15-year-old girl known as the "Llullaillaco Maiden" and 7-year-old known as the "Llullaillaco Boy."

Based on measuring natural radioactive isotopes in the hair samples, the archaeologists found that the kids were normally fed diets of "common" vegetables such as potatoes, suggesting that they came from a peasant background. A year before their intentional demise, however, the isotopes showed that their diets were enriched with "elite" food like maize and dried llama meat.

"Given the surprising change in their diets, and the symbolic cutting of their hair, it appears that various events were staged in which the status of the children was raised," Wilson said. "In effect, their countdown to sacrifice had begun some considerable time prior to death."

How the children perished remains a mystery, but Wilson and his team think they were led into the mountains about three to four months before dying. During this time, the researchers found maize beer and coca leaf molecules in the mummies' hair samples. 

"It looks to us as though the children were led up to the summit shrine in the culmination of a year-long rite, drugged and then left to succumb to exposure," said Timothy Taylor, also an archaeologist at the University of Bradford. He noted that while the deaths may seem grim, they occurred more than 500 years ago when Incan rulers controlled small mountain communities.

The Llullaillaco Boy, however, probably met the most terrifying end: His clothes were covered in diarrhea and vomit, in which archeologists found traces of a hallucinogenic drug called achiote. But he probably didn't perish from the drug—he was bound in a cloth wrapping drawn so tight that his ribs were crushed and his pelvis dislocated, indicating he may have suffocated to death. 

Don't Forget: Drink a Beer—Or Two—Daily!

Don't Forget: Drink a Beer—Or Two—Daily!

Study in rats suggests long-term, moderate consumption of alcohol improves recall of both visual and emotional stimuli 

	CHEERS TO REMEMBERING!:  A new study in rats shows that moderate alcohol consumption (no more than two or three beers a day, folks) can improve memory.

You may be hard-pressed to recall events after a night of binge drinking, but a new report suggests that low to moderate alcohol consumption may actually enhance memory.

"There are human epidemiological data of others indicating that mild [to] moderate drinking may paradoxically improve cognition in people compared to abstention," says Maggie Kalev, a research fellow in molecular medicine and pathology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and a co-author of an article in The Journal of Neuroscience describing results of a study she and other researchers performed on rats. "This is similar to a glass of wine protecting against heart disease, however the mechanism is different."  Kalev and Matthew During, a professor of molecular virology, immunology and medical genetics at  he Ohio State University College of Medicine and a principal investigator of gene therapy at Auckland, initially set out to study the role of N-methyl-D-aspartic acid (NMDA) receptors in the neuronal processes of normal and diseased animals. (NMDA receptors are critical to memory, because they regulate the strength of synapses (spaces) between nerve cells through which the cells communicate.) But during their research, they discovered that memory was enhanced when one of its subunits, known as NR1, was strengthened in the hippocampus (a central brain region implicated in episodic memory). They then reviewed previous experiments, which had turned up a link between alcohol consumption and NR1 activity.

"We decided to study if beneficial effects of low-dose alcohol drinking already shown by others," Kalev says, "could be mediated through the mechanism of increasing NR1 expression. We thought it was worth pursuing, since ethanol drinking is such a common pattern of human behavior."

The researchers created two strains of transgenic rats, one that had an abundance of NR1 subunits in their hippocampi and one in which it was suppressed. A group of normal rats and those with the suppressed NR1 action were fed a diet consisting of 0, 2.5 or 5 percent ethanol.

According to Kalev, it is hard to relate the alcohol the rats consumed to human quantities, but "based on their blood alcohol levels, the 2.5 percent ethanol diet was equivalent to a level of consumption that does not exceed [the] legal driving limit. This may be approximately one to two drinks per day for some people or two to three for others, depending upon their size, metabolism or genetic background."

The rats stayed on these diets for eight weeks; behavioral testing to assess cognitive function began after four weeks. One test involved novel object recognition, where rats were placed in a cage with two small objects inside multiple times over a two-day period. Then, one object was swapped for a new toy and rats were scored based on how quickly they explored the unfamiliar piece. In a second paradigm, rats were trained to expect a shock when they crossed from a white compartment to a black one inside a cage; a day after training, the rats were put back in the cage to see if they remembered that the black side was dangerous.

Among the normal rats, the animals that consumed moderate amounts of alcohol fared better on both tests compared with the teetotalers. Rats on a heavy alcohol diet did not do well on object recognition (and, in fact, showed signs of neurotoxicity), but they performed better than their normal brethren on the emotional memory task.

"People often drink to 'drown sorrows,'" Kalev says. "Our results suggest that this could actually paradoxically promote traumatic memories and lead to further drinking, contributing to the development of alcoholism." 

Overstimulating the NR1 subunits of the NMDA receptor showed effects similar to those from moderate drinking, whereas suppressing the NR1 subunits canceled out the effect of low, but steady consumption. These findings indicate that the NMDA receptor must be intact for the positive effects of alcohol to manifest, Kalev says. They speculate that the NMDA receptor is initially blocked by alcohol, causing the activity of the NR1 subunit to elevate as a compensatory response (thereby conferring heightened cognition).

Meir Stampfer, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, says that the new work provides a stronger biological basis for studies that he and others have undertaken linking improved memory to moderate alcohol intake. "[This study] provides interesting evidence for a mechanism that may be operating at the NMDA receptor," he says, but quickly cautions: "It's better not to drink at all than to drink too much," as is also demonstrated by this study.