The prince of el Plomo: new studies 50 years after its discovery

Abstract

Within the past 50 years, several mummies have been found in the Andean region of South America at altitudes between 5.200 and 6.700 meters above sea level.All of these human remains belong to the Inca civilization and date from approximately 1.475 A.D. to 1.540 A.D. (Horne, 1996). In 1954 the first of these corpses, a well preserved freeze dried body of an eight-to-nine-year-old Inca prince (Fig. 1),was discovered at 5.400 meters on Cerro El Plomo, a mountain peak some 45 km. east of Santiago, and described the presence of Papilloma virus in two verrucae on one of the child’s hand (Horne & Quevedo, 1984). In this paper we present the results of recent radiological (computerized imaging), molecular and chemical investigations.