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“In Peru, we are familiar with human bones, but in this particular case there were so many skeletons and they were all children,” he said. “It was astonishing.”
The sacrificial victims who were between the ages of five and 14 appear to have been ritually sacrificed on a single-day-ceremony about 550 years ago.
The mummified bodies were discovered in a carefully arranged and unified manner, with their heads facing the oceans and their feet facing the mountains.
The children all appear to have suffered the same death: a single horizontal slice across the sternum. Researchers acknowledged that many of the children's rib cages were pried apart, suggesting their hearts were removed after death.
“We can’t prove it, but certainly in the Mayan world they described the importance of taking out a heart that was still beating,” said John Verano, an anthropologist at Tulane University in New Orleans and one of the leaders of the research, published Wednesday in PLOS One.
Despite being impossible to conclude a definitive justification for the sacrifice, Verano and Pietro suggest the act was done out of desperation in response to El Niño in a new study.
“What we seem to have at Huanchaquito-Las Llamas is a sacrifice to stop torrential rains, flooding and mudflows…”
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