by Scott Schrage | University Communication and Marketing
They were the summits of 20,000-foot volcanoes. Amid the driest desert on Earth. Where temperatures never breached freezing, where less than half of sea-level oxygen quenched lungs, where gale-force winds scoured the hardscrabble rocks littering the peaks.
So when archaeologists first reported stumbling across a few mouse cadavers during expeditions to several Andean peaks in the 1970s and ’80s, they figured, naturally, that the rodents must have hitched a ride with the Incas who once pilgrimaged a thousand-plus miles to what they considered sacred sites.
Those apexes served as altars for Capacocha, the ritual sacrifice of children to several Incan gods. Maybe, the thinking went, the mice had scurried into firewood or other supplies hauled up the slopes by the Incas. Or they were among the animal sacrifices that sometimes accompanied the human.
“You can’t fault the archaeologists for thinking this way, because what other explanation is there?” said Jay Storz, a Willa Cather Professor of biological sciences at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. “Nothing could be living up there, so they had to have been brought there.”
But Storz would inadvertently cast doubt on the hypothesis in early 2020. With the help of friend and fellow mountaineer Mario Pérez Mamani, he captured a live specimen of leaf-eared mouse atop the 22,000-foot peak of Llullaillaco (zhoo-zhuh-ZHEYE’-koh), a volcano straddling the Chile-Argentina border. No mammal had ever been found living at such extreme altitude.
Alongside the capture of more live specimens, Storz and his colleagues have now reported the discovery of 13 leaf-eared mouse cadavers across the summits of three neighboring volcanoes — Salín, Púlar and Copiapó — that each stretch nearly 4 miles above sea level.
“These are basically freeze-dried, mummified mice,” Storz said.
Read more:
https://news.unl.edu/newsrooms/today/article/mummified-mice-discovered-atop-sky-high-andean-volcanoes/