In Peru, on the Nazca plateau, archaeologists first found the burial of a baby with cyclopia

Peruvian, American and German archaeologists and paleogeneticists discovered on the Nazca Plateau a child burial with the remains of a child suffering from cyclopia, a rare malformation. Usually carriers of such anomaly die in the first days of life, reports sb.by.

According to TASS, the study was published in the journal PNAS. A team led by University of California Santa Cruz professor Lars Feren-Schmitz has unearthed three dozen Nazca burial sites in the Palpa Valley in southern Peru. The Indians left them in the IV-V centuries AD.

In one burial urn, archaeologists found the remains of two infants who presumably died in the first months of life. One of them had cyclopia: no nose, and the eyeballs fuse and are located on the middle line of the face. Because of this, such babies look like cyclops from ancient Greek myths. It occurs in one case per 100,000 births.

Scientists extracted DNA from the remains of both children and deciphered its fragments. It turned out that both were girls and came from different mothers. In the genome of a girl with cyclopia was an extra 13th chromosome. Its appearance is one of the most common causes of the development of this anomaly. This confirms that the unusual anatomy of the skull is due to genetics, not ritual practices or other factors.

- Our archaeological and paleogenetic data indicate that this child died after birth, but the exact timing of his life is not yet known. Interestingly, he was buried in the same urn as another child without malformations. This suggests that the extremely unusual appearance of this infant did not cause the Indians to change established funerary practices, the researchers wrote. In the Netherlands, scientists have discovered a rare fossil of a crustacean aged 66 million years