"We cannot really say how long this individual survived," study co-author Lars Fehren-Schmitz, an anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Live Science in an email. But "the burial of this infant suggests that the Nasca treated this individual in death like most other infants."
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. 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.
A medical illustration from 1891 of two infants with cyclopia. (Image credit: Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain)
"The cause of the malformation was present at fertilization, but manifestation occurs around the fourth to fifth week in utero [in the womb], when the frontal lobe of the brain has to divide," study first author Elsa Tomasto-Cagigao, an archaeologist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, told Live Science in an email.
The team detected an extra copy of chromosome 13, meaning the infant had a genetic condition called trisomy 13, or Patau syndrome. It's known to be a major chromosomal cause of cyclopia; that said, only a small percentage of trisomy 13 cases involve cyclopia.
"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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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.
In ancient Andean societies, some people with disabilities took on special societal roles, such as ones associated with religious practices. "If that reflects Nasca society as a whole, we can't say based on one case," Fehren-Schmitz said, "but it does reflect the community this infant was part of, even if only briefly."
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