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This [music] facility was built 10 years ago to house one of the greatest discoveries ever made in the Americas. A unique mummy from the past that left scientists stunned.
Discover the mystery of the perfectly preserved 500-year-old Inca maiden mummy found atop a remote volcano, revealing insights into ancient rituals.
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Key Takeaways
- The Inca maiden is the best preserved mummy in the world, frozen for over 500 years at high altitude.
- She was a teenage girl, about 14 years old, who likely died near the summit of Mount Yuyayako.
- Her burial was a significant ritual event, involving ceremonial garments and artifacts linked to Inca culture.
- Freezing temperatures and low oxygen levels at high altitude contributed to the exceptional preservation of her body.
- Scientific techniques like CT scans and chemical hair analysis provide insights into her life, death, and the Inca civilization.
What the video covers
- The video explores the discovery of a uniquely preserved Inca maiden mummy found in 1999 on Mount Yuyayako, the world's highest tomb at 22,000 ft.
- The maiden is a 14-year-old girl who lived over 500 years ago during the height of the Inca Empire, known for its mysterious culture and lack of written language.
- Her body and accompanying artifacts, including ceramics and textiles, are exceptionally well-preserved due to the freezing conditions and high altitude.
- Forensic analysis including CT scans revealed no trauma or fractures, suggesting she died near the burial site under natural conditions.
- The environment of the high-altitude volcano, with low oxygen and freezing temperatures, played a key role in preserving her body.
- The maiden was likely part of a ritual sacrifice, a common Inca practice, involving a long pilgrimage and ceremonial burial.
- Chemical analysis of her hair and artifacts provides clues about her diet, drugs, and cultural significance.
- The video discusses the emotional impact of the maiden on curators and visitors, highlighting the human connection to this ancient figure.
- Experts debate the cause of death and the significance of her burial position, concluding she died peacefully in the 'death zone' of the mountain.
- The maiden offers a rare glimpse into Inca civilization, their religious practices, and the harsh realities of life and death in the Andes.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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[music] A girl who appears to be asleep, but she has been like [music] this for centuries.
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Perfectly frozen [music] in time, [music] the mummy was uncovered in the Indian mountains of South America on the lonely snowcapped peak of the world's tallest active volcano, Mount Yuyayako.
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The year was 1999 [music] and a high altitude archaeological excavation was underway. Leading the team [music] was explorer and anthropologist Dr. Yan Reinhardt.
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All of a sudden, I heard this, uh, guy cry out "Mommy." They had discovered the highest tomb on Earth.
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Went, "Holy smoke." We're at 22,000 ft. When she first came out of the ground, she was completely wrapped up. We couldn't see any part of her body.
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But the textiles were just outstanding and they were so well preserved. But the biggest surprise came when they removed her wrappings, taking off the, uh, cloth from the girl.
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We had to talk. We had to communicate. Do this, do that. It was in hushed voices. Let's see. Man, it was as if we were afraid at some level that we might wake this mummy up because she seemed just so alive.
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But nothing had the impact of when we uncovered her hands. Probably one of the most powerful experiences [music] I've had in my life because those hands were perfect. We realized that this has got to be, if not the best preserved
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mummy in the world. We don't know of any other better. And preserved along with her [music] a spectacular collection of artifacts, ceramics, figurines, and textiles.
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[music] Everything seemed totally untouched. It was perfectly preserved. Nothing, not a feather that shrunk, not a color that faded. The archaeologist's dream.
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Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to bury this girl in an extraordinary place. Now, a team of [music] investigators will attempt to decipher these objects, examine her body, and unravel the mysteries of this mummy. The first question, when did she die? The
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items in her tomb reveal the remarkable truth. They may look brand new, but archaeologists date them to over 500 years ago. Remnants of a legendary civilization, the Inca. The statues that were with her, the ceramics that were with her,
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everything was from the Inca. This girl is a human link to the great empire that dominated South [music] America in the 15th century.
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Famous for building Machu Picchu, the Inca are cloaked in mystery. Wiped out by [music] Spanish conquest, they left no written language. So this girl is a rare and [music] valuable glimpse into a lost civilization.
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Today she is conserved under the watchful eye of Gabriella Recogno Browning. For me, the maiden is not only a scientific [music] object. She is a young woman that I love.
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I think that one of my missions in life is to take care of her. [music] Affectionately known as the maiden, this mummy [music] attracts visitors from all over the world. But some are not [music] prepared for what they see.
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When people here meet the maiden, sometimes they get very shocked. They cry or they get sad because it's difficult to understand the death of this maiden, of this girl.
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An Inca girl buried 500 years ago on top of a volcano. Her corpse is strange.
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Seated and slumped. She looks like she slept to her death. But in order to really understand what happened, investigators need to take a closer look at her body.
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Today we're going to take her out. We're going to see her face to face.
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Very rarely do curators open this cryopreservation capsule designed to keep her frozen at a constant -4° F.
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When she does come out, time is of the essence. They move fast. She is so delicate that an autopsy is out of the question.
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But a CT scan would provide a forensic look inside. She's [music] going out of the museum for the first time because we are doing a CT scan on her body. We really don't know what these images [music] are going
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to show us. She travels in a freezer at night when temperatures are lowest. And arriving at the local hospital, she becomes the oldest outpatient to pass through their CT scan.
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Using the images captured, forensic pathologist Dr. Richard Shepard can begin to uncover her secrets.
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One of the key questions that we have to answer is how old was the maiden? And one of the ways we can look at that is to look at her teeth. The third molars, the so-called wisdom teeth, are still
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present in her jaw. And that tells me that she must be a teenager. In fact, measurements of her long bones reveal she [music] is just 14 years old.
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As a pathologist, I do have to examine babies and children and teenagers. And it's quite hard to examine those groups [music] because these are people at the start of their life rather than the end of it. And the commonest [music] cause
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of death in a modern teenager is either trauma or drugs. Perhaps this ancient teenager suffered a traumatic accident on the mountain.
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Broken bones could provide a vital clue. Looking at the skeleton, I can see that there's no evidence of any fractures.
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Nothing [music] to suggest that she's suffered any significant trauma that could have caused her death. In mysterious cases like this, understanding how the body was found, where it was found are important bits of information that can give really
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valuable clues to understanding how someone died. [music] The mysterious case of the maiden began with a body in a desolate place, arid and inhospitable. Today, Mount Yu Yayyako is a 10-hour drive from the nearest town. It is so remote that
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modern man didn't even attempt to climb it until 60 years ago. But somehow, the maiden ended up here four centuries earlier. If we're talking about the [music] 1400s, we're talking about before Columbus reached America.
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These were times when trying to reach these altitudes of 22,000 ft was just beyond even the thought capacity of man.
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[music] Who was this girl and what was she doing here? The mountain itself may hold the key.
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[music] Frozen in time for 500 years, [music] this girl is the best preserved mummy in the world.
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The key to her preservation lies in where she was found. Buried in the [music] highest tomb on Earth, on the peak of a remote volcano.
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The process of freezing by itself is very, very good at preserving a body. But if a body is placed at high altitude where the oxygen levels are lower, [music] then that's going to add to that preservation of the body.
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But what was a teenage girl doing on top of a volcano? Modern-day forensic pathologist Dr. Richard Shepard has investigated hundreds of suspicious deaths. His first step is [music] determining how her body got there.
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I know from my [music] own experience that moving bodies is very difficult indeed. They're not simple things to manhandle.
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Figuring out if she walked up the mountain herself or if her body was carried up might hold the key to whether or not her death was an accident.
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I'm particularly interested in the position in which the maiden was found. Putting her into that position would have to be done in a short period after [music] death because of a change that naturally occurs called rigor mortis. The stiffening of the muscles [music] that
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happens after death. So logically, she has to have died very close to her burial site and been placed in the position that we see her now.
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The maiden died close to where she was buried. This means she may have been alive on the summit. And this could be the key to her demise.
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Because at over 22,000 ft, the summit of Yu Yayako is in what many people call the death zone.
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Up here, the air contains 50% less oxygen than at sea level. Dr. Marcelo Parata spends his life climbing mountains to rescue the dying and recover the dead.
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[music] We did recover bodies of mountaineers that just slept to their death. They were just kind of peaceful, [music] but they were frozen.
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The maiden isn't the only sleeping corpse to be pulled from a mountain. So, what is it about that environment that makes a person cu...
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If you've been there in this kind of environment, you feel awful. Even in our times with best equipment, this is a very difficult task and it's very demanding.
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Imagine climbing in that thin air. Uh this is amazing task to do for a 14year-old girl.
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But Marcelo doesn't believe the maiden died because of extreme altitude. He believes she may have fallen victim [music] to another killer on the mountain.
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It's going to be about 30° C below zero. That's very very cold and it's also most of the time very windy.
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You could get hypothermia very quickly. Modern clothing isn't enough to prevent hypothermia in that environment. Imagine clothing 500 [music] years ago.
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Hypothermia, also known as the sweet death, because of the expression it leaves on many of its victims frozen faces.
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Some people look peaceful when they die of hypothermia because it's it's like turning off slowly. It makes you just [music] go to sleep and you eventually freeze.
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Peaceful, sleeping, and frozen like the maiden. It looks like hypothermia could have been her killer. Dr. Shepard searches her CT scans for confirmation.
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Hypothermia affects the whole of the body, but the changes are best seen in the feet and in the stomach. And we can count all of the five bones of both feet, showing that there is no obvious evidence of frostbite now or in the
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past. If we look at the stomach, the changes that occur during hypothermia are very superficial ulcers on the lining of the stomach. [music] I can't see any in the maiden's case and so I have nothing to suggest to me that
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she died from hypothermia. But something else in [music] her stomach catches Dr. Sheepard's eye. I'm really rather surprised to see that there's actually some food in her stomach and there's fecal material in her bowels.
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So, she's been eating and drinking to [music] within 2 hours of her death. And that really does point towards a pretty sudden unnatural death rather than a prolonged process.
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Why would someone eat a meal on a mountain and then mysteriously drop dead [music] just hours later? With investigators baffled, a new expert is called in.
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He has an unusual way of extracting information from mummies. If you've got good preservation of the hair, you have information that's been frozen in time.
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Bioarchchaeologist Dr. Andrew Wilson [music] may be able to crack the case by analyzing chemicals in the maiden's hair.
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We can use those chemicals to establish essentially a timeline that takes us back through the final months and and years of their existence.
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He cuts a sample from her head for analysis. Studying the chemicals in her hair may provide [music] extraordinary details about the maiden's health, behavior, and even what she was eating. The results are in. Dr. Wilson identifies a significant shift in her diet just 3
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months before she died. She's consuming easily preserved foods like the the maze and freeze-dried llama meat.
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It's a [music] big clue. Her hair contains traces of two foods that were common staples for ancient Inca travelers.
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Archaeologists have found a vast network [music] of highways and trails throughout the Inca Empire. And dotted along them remains of way stations [music] once stocked with corn and jerky. Exactly what the maiden was consuming in her final [music] months.
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The chemical signatures in her hair effectively point to a journey. a journey to the mountains for those last few months.
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If Dr. Wilson [music] is right, the 14-year-old maiden made a mysteriously long journey before she died. But why would she travel for months to reach this remote peak? For anthropologist Yan Reinhardt, the answer lies in the special role mountains have always
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played in Andian culture. [music] Mountains are considered sacred in the Yandes because the rivers come down from [music] the mountains. The mountains seem to be controlling the weather because the clouds gather around them.
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Mountain worship is still extremely active today in traditional communities [music] throughout the Andes. We give gratitude to [music] Mother Earth because from her we receive so much.
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Puma is a modern-day shaman who has been climbing mountains to make [music] offerings since the age of six.
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So, he doesn't find it strange that an ancient Inca girl would be found in such a place.
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For thousands of years, people would give offerings in seeds, in cocoa [music] leaves. For the Inca, mountains were religious places where [music] they went to make offerings. And according to Yan, as the tallest volcano in the region, Yu Yayyako was special.
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Yayyako would have been in controller [music] of the fertility of the crops, the fertility of the livestock. And the Incas [music] wanted to get into the realm of the gods. So they did this incredible pilgrimage to Yuyayako.
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[music] It looks like the maiden was here for religious reasons. The volcanoes represent the womb of mother earth. The girls represent that feminine essence. So that's why they would go to the volcano.
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But if the maiden was on a sacred pilgrimage, [music] why didn't she come back down?
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With no signs of trauma or hypothermia, investigators are taking a closer look at her body for clues.
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I'm looking at some bulge on her cheek. It seems that she has something in her mouth.
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When we look at the internal scans and X-rays, we can see that there's actually something sat [music] between the teeth on the left side and her cheek.
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Could this be something that's been pushed [music] into her mouth and actually caused her death? And what is the material that this is made of? All of these things raise great suspicions now in my mind as to why the maiden died
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[music] 500 years ago. This girl made a long pilgrimage to a sacred volcano. Despite her young age, she climbed to a [music] colossal height. But upon reaching the summit, she appears to have curled up and died.
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At this point, the death of the maiden is still very much a mystery. And when we look at a death of a teenager, I've got no evidence of any natural disease.
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And there's no evidence that she suffered any form of trauma. At a [music] loss to explain her death, Dr. Shepherd looks beyond the autopsy table just like he would with the death of a modern teenager.
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The next thing I'm going to be thinking of is drugs. And so I would naturally send off samples for analysis [music] in the toxicology lab.
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It may seem odd to search for drugs in the body of an ancient girl, but Dr.
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Andrew Wilson is doing just that, and the [music] results are remarkable. We found the presence of cocaine, this chemical compound in her hair.
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Cocaine in the body of an ancient teenager. She's a relatively young girl and so body mass, her physiology [music] are are important considerations, but the levels that we're seeing are very high and an increase in concentration in the last 12 months of
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her life. On the surface, it's a startling discovery. But according to Andrew, this isn't a case of ancient narcotics.
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It's not cocaine as we know in [music] terms of the modern connotations. This the bad connotations. It's simply the the [music] chemical compounds that are derived directly from cocoa leaves.
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The drug we know today as cocaine didn't exist until 400 years after the maiden died.
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Its natural source is the cocoa leaf, a plant native to the Andes. Cultivated and consumed for ritual and medicinal purposes [music] for thousands of years. It is still used today.
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It's our meal, is our medicine, and is our oracle. Many chew it as a stimulant to help with long journeys and altitude sickness.
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And the telltale sign is a bulge in their cheek, just like the maiden. It looks like this is the mystery [music] object in her mouth.
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And if it is, according to Shaman Puma, this reveals something about who she was.
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In those [music] times, not everybody was allowed to chew cocalyps. They had to be part of a royalty or part of a spiritual circle.
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Puma suspects the maiden was no ordinary girl. She was someone important. And a closer look at the objects in her tomb suggest he may be right.
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This tunic was found with [music] the maiden. She had it on her right shoulder, but it's [music] a typical male garment. So maybe her [music] father offered this to the gods. Maybe he was there [music] when she was buried.
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These little [music] squares are a kind of symbolic code of the [music] brotherhood between two regions in the Inca state that could be indicating that he was a local Kuraka, a local governor or maybe related with the Inca Emperor.
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A tantalizing clue [music] connecting the maiden to Inca nobility, possibly even the emperor himself. and a sign [music] her father may have been with her on the journey and perhaps part of the final burial.
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Her story is slowly taking shape and her grave reveals more ceramics that point to where she came here from.
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This ceramic is very special. The decoration is typical from Kusco. This ceramic came with the maiden from Kusco.
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Today, Cusco is a bustling city, popular with tourists. But 500 years ago, it was the capital of the largest empire on earth, as big as Europe's greatest city at the time and home to the Inca Emperor.
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We can picture the Inca Empire being like a wheel with the roads being the spokes that lead out in all directions to different parts of the empire. The center, the axle is Cusco. That's where you have the focus of governmental
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power, but also religious power. Under this Spanish church are the ruins of the most sacred Inca sanctuary, the Cory Kanchcha, which means courtyard of gold.
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[music] [music] We can imagine what the corona must have looked like when the Spanish came because it was covered with these plates of gold.
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This gold when the sun hit it was glittering to such an extent that they say that some people were blinded.
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Gold, the color of the sun. The Inca worshiped the sun and their religion stretched beyond these walls.
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In fact, the Inca tried to get [music] as close as possible to the sun itself by climbing the highest peaks they could find.
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Like Mount Yu Yayyako where the [music] maiden was found. This may be the route that the maiden would have begun walking when she left Cusco. And in a thousand miles in that direction lies Mount Yuyako.
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[music] The Inca had no wheel or horse. They traveled on foot. The maiden's route took her through some extreme environments, including a desert so aid and devoid of life that parts of it have been compared to Mars and the moon.
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This is the world's driest desert. Even the Spanish were saying the only people you find traveling out in these deserts are outlaws or crazy people.
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This is a very long pilgrimage. And at the end of it, she then has to climb a peak whose altitude was not even reached until 400 years later by Europeans.
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It's a pretty phenomenal thing [music] for a 13, 14y old girl to to have done.
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A clearer picture of [music] this mummy is emerging. A 14-year-old girl with ties to the capital and maybe even the emperor himself.
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A girl who walked a great distance through perilous landscapes. But this journey ended in her death.
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So investigators are looking for new evidence to help understand what happened. Studies on the teeth of the maiden showed that they are very worn down.
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So that may be an indicator that she was very stressed and also tense in this pilgrimage from Cusco to Jako. And another disturbing clue, vomit on her lips.
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We know that the maiden vomit maybe just some minutes before she died. Some theories say that the vomit indicates stress or fear.
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Was the maiden afraid on the mountaintop? And if so, of what or whom? [music] Investigators are piecing together [music] the life of this 500year-old Inca mummy.
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Pottery links her to the empire's capital Cusco. A tunic suggests she was the daughter of a local chief.
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and cocoa leaves place her in [music] an important spiritual circle. But there's [music] one item that stands out above the rest.
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[music] A beautiful headdress, the finest ever found in an extraordinary state of preservation. This headdress is a kind of crown. It she's like [music] a princess.
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For Incas, feathers are more important than gold. For Gabriella, this headdress provides the final piece of the puzzle.
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This kind of headdress [music] were used only for special ceremonies and mainly for virgins of the sun.
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Virgins of the sun were [music] famous throughout the Inca Empire. Chronicles record that a special group were [music] chosen each year to serve the sun god.
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[music] Some could be of a fairly young age. They could be 6 to 8 years, some maybe 10 years. Their beauty was one of the [music] reasons for selecting them.
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And in some cases even their parents might have offered them to become part of the service of the Inca religion.
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[music] As a virgin of the sun, the maiden would have been separated from her family, never [music] to return home.
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Pottery from her tomb suggests she was brought to Cusco and Johan is here to pick up her trail.
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This is the place where the virgins of the sun were kept, the so-called auasi, considered incredibly sacred to the Incas. [music] If the maiden were in Cusco, she would have been kept behind these walls and seclusion where there were no windows.
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These buildings were especially designed to keep them apart [music] in order to keep them pure.
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The maiden lives a cloistered existence, part nun, part priestess, preparing sacred offerings for the sun god.
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Rarely is she allowed out. So why does she leave this place? To make a 1,000-mile pilgrimage to a [music] distant mountain.
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At a certain point, these virgins of the sun would be allocated their duties. In essence, their destinies.
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Some would be selected to be concubines of the Inca nobility. And a few, a very select few would be selected as offerings, as as human sacrifice.
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The maiden didn't go to Mount Yu Yayyako to make an offering. She was the offering.
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singled out by her own people [music] for human sacrifice. Different kind of qualities were taken into consideration as to which child would be selected. They had to have some kind of a charisma about them. They wouldn't have a a child who was easily
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frightened. For the Inca, being chosen for sacrifice was a great privilege. And in Cusco, the maiden would have been treated as a goddess.
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She would have gone through [music] very special ceremonies in the presence of the Inca emperor himself and [music] been very highly honored.
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She left Cusco in a blaze of glory and the [music] fame followed her all the way to the volcano. We think that she wore this headdress when she was walking to her final destiny. Maybe when she walked through different towns and she
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was wearing this beautiful headdress that indicates that she was the chosen one to be offered to the gods.
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[music] But under all the glory, there is a bitter truth. A 14-year-old girl walking 1,000 [music] miles knowing that she is going to die.
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It's very difficult for a woman to to understand this. Maybe her beliefs helped her to accept her destiny. But for me and I think for every woman now in this century it's very hard to imagine these situations in our Ketcha language. There is no
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[music] word sacrifice. The correct word is offering. So we don't have human sacrifices. We have human offerings.
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The principle [music] was this life this mother earth God created [music] all for you. So what can you give back in gratitude? You can only give your life.
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So how did she give her life? [music] Was it a violent ritual or a peaceful departure?
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No signs of violence have been found on the maiden's body. So in the search for answers, investigators will turn to other mummies, other human offerings found on mountains, some of whom met a terrible fate.
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500 years ago, this Inca girl's life ended [music] in a mysterious ritual. She was taken up a volcano and offered to the gods.
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And she wasn't the only one. Over the last century, more than 35 Inca [music] human offerings have been found on Andian peaks.
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Dr. Yan Reinhardt discovered [music] 18 of them and they were all children. I think one of the things that [music] is difficult for Westerners to understand is why children and from the Inca perspective it had to be children.
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Why? Because they are pure. Because of their purity, the deities accepted them. For the Incas, [music] this wasn't just death, a killing of a child. [music] This was in fact an immortalizing of a child.
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So, how were these immortalizing rituals carried out? Chronicers tell us [music] that it was very common to use violence in this kind of sacrifice.
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This young victim, just 7 years old, was found on a volcano south of Mount Yu Yayyako.
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Some people say that her expression is of pain. He has his mouth like open in a big uh shout.
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In the right part of her back, she has a clear wound, a clear injury that indicates how she died. She was stabbed with a spear.
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But CT [music] scans of the maiden reveal no violent injuries, and she died with a peaceful expression on her face.
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So, what happened to her on the mountain? Using the evidence in her tomb and [music] with the help of chronicles written after the fall of the empire, investigators pieced together her final moments.
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One good possibility is that they timed the sacrifice to take place the morning following the December solstice, December 21st with the first sunrise.
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[music] The priests themselves would have have been burning incense uh making offerings. [music] They say that [music] our soul before leaving the body and crossing the lake of life needs a lot of vitality. So we had ceremonies to
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restrengthen the soul with these sacred plants, with this cocoa leaves, with the [music] chicha.
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Chicha was a corn beer fed to victims before their death. A chicha cup survives intact in the maiden's grave.
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And Dr. Wilson finds [music] high levels of alcohol in her system, which combined with the cocoa leaves would have had mindaltering effects.
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For me, what I find so spine tingling is for sure there's a sedating effect from the alcohol that may also have been with the cocoa in her system hallucination as well. And these are effects that are brought about
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to effectively control um her and perhaps even her family. The male tunic suggests her father may have been with her on the mountain.
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Perhaps he watched her being prepared [music] for offering. Chronicles say that when the time came, it was a sin for families or victims to show remorse.
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Some say that these ceremonies must have been very happy events and it was an honor for the children, but I think that it must have been traumatic.
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All over her body are clues as to her final hours. On her cheeks, traces of red pigment, ritual paint. [music] Her braids are so tight that they must have been woven just hours before she died and on her lips
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vomit. Perhaps a sign of fear in her final moments. It's so difficult for [music] us to go back in time and imagine what it would have been like to be in her shoes or in her moccasins as [music] it were. Surely
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there's a lot of fear. There could have been a tremendous reaction to seeing the place that she was going to be interiored [music] in, you know, buried in.
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At [music] sunrise, her short life ended and she was offered to the gods. But the ritual doesn't seem to have left its mark. Pathologist Dr. Shephard has examined many young murder victims and is weighing up the evidence for the
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maiden using CT scans. The possibility of strangulation must exist in a situation like this with a young person dead in a strange environment. But there's no damage to the muscle of the neck and there's no damage to this
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complex group of leneal cartilagages that can be clearly seen at this point present in her neck uninjured. The maiden wasn't strangled. [music] Her death remains a mystery.
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But the investigation isn't over. Because according to Chronicles, there was another way children were sacrificed. Some were buried alive.
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Mountain Rescue Dr. Marcelo Parada has seen this sort of death before in the victims [music] of avalanches.
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They were buried for quite a long time, four or five hours, [music] and uh when we dug them out, they were dead, hypothermic, and they had vomit around her mouth.
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The maiden does have vomit on her lips. So, was this her terrible fate? Did priests bury her alive as an offering to the gods?
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When someone's buried alive, there's always that struggle to escape from the material that's pinning them down. So, there's evidence of movements of the hands. Sometimes there's damage to the nails and the fingertips.
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Look at the maiden, I don't see any evidence at all to suggest that she was buried alive. Johan Reinhardt was one of the first people to lay eyes on her tomb after it was sealed 500 years earlier.
Speaker A
There's no sense of struggle in the tomb itself. All the items that are around her look like they haven't been disturbed. She herself looks like she [music] hasn't been terribly disturbed.
Speaker A
Her hands one over the other. If somebody's struggling, would you have their hands like this?
Speaker A
Doesn't seem very likely. Looking back at his discovery now, Johan believes that the murder weapon may have been staring him in the face.
Speaker A
One of the first things he had to remove from her body was a thick woolen cloth pulled over her entire head and knotted tightly at the back.
Speaker A
Once you have cloth wrapped around your head in [music] your mouth at 22,000 ft, you're out of breath immediately, you know? I mean it just she could have asphixxiated if she was highly intoxicated with alcohol.
Speaker A
Marcelo agrees that it wouldn't have taken much to smother the maiden given her condition.
Speaker A
There is a point where intoxicated people their brain is so compromised [music] they wouldn't even struggle.
Speaker A
Perhaps the alcohol was administered to help ease her journey out of this world and into the next.
Speaker A
In a situation of low oxygen, when the person is at altitude incapacitated through drugs or [music] alcohol, it's likely they're going to succumb far more quickly than were they down at sea level. [music] Having weighed up all the evidence, Dr.
Speaker A
Shepard delivers his final verdict. Having considered [music] all of the facts, I think suffocation is a very likely cause of death for the maiden.
Speaker A
For 500 years, the Inca maiden has guarded the secrets [music] of how she died. Now, the truth is revealed.
Speaker A
a gentle suffocation to send her to the gods. [music] I I don't think she suffered. She wasn't aware [music] of that. That's what alcohol does. You're kind of isolated from the from [music] the environment.
Speaker A
We think that the maiden [music] died peacefully. In this case, there are no presence of violence.
Speaker A
You can see in her face that she rest in [music] peace. When the Inca offered this child to the gods, they believed she would live forever, eternally young, immortalized [music] in her glorious sacrifice.
Speaker A
That is what Gabriella wants to believe, too. I [music] prefer to think of her as a goddess and that she's happy in some way. Dramatic happiness, [music] but happiness at least.
Speaker A
The alternative is is too sad. [singing and music]
Topics:Inca maidenInca mummyMount Yuyayakohigh altitude burialarchaeologymummy preservationInca civilizationforensic analysisancient rituals500 years old
