Assuntos
Olho/patologia , Múmias/patologia , Preservação de Órgãos , Adulto , Pré-Escolar , Chile , Dessecação , Feminino , Humanos , MasculinoRESUMO
Carbon-14 (14C) dating from mummies of the Alto Ramirez culture confirms that coca leaf chewing was an incipient practice among members of a population that peopled the valleys and coastal areas of Northern Chile by 3,000 years before the present (yr.B.P.). Out of eleven bodies from the burial site of Pisagua-7 (PSG-7, S 19 degrees 35', W 70 degrees 13') that were analyzed, two samples tested positive. Mummy 725-A C2 (dated 3,090 to 2,850 two sigma calibrated 14C years before the present) was shown to have a cocaine value of 13.3 nanograms/10 milligrams of sample (ng/10mg), and mummy 741 (2,890 to 2,760 two sigma cal yr B.P.), a 5.6 ng/10mg value.
Assuntos
Coca/química , Cocaína/análise , Paleodontologia , Folhas de Planta/química , Isótopos de Carbono , Chile , Cromatografia Líquida de Alta Pressão/métodos , Feminino , História Antiga , Humanos , Masculino , Mastigação , Múmias/história , Radioimunoensaio/métodosRESUMO
Tissue specimens from 283 principally spontaneously (naturally) desiccated human mummies from coastal and low valley sites in northern Chile and southern Peru were tested with a DNA probe directed at a kinetoplast DNA segment of Trypanosoma cruzi. The time interval spanned by the eleven major cultural groups represented in the sample ranged from approximately 9,000 years B.P. (7050 B.C.) to approximately the time of the Spanish conquest, approximately 450 B.P. ( approximately 1500 A.D.). Forty-one percent of the tissue extracts, amplified by the PCR reacted positively (i.e., hybridized) with the probe. Prevalence patterns demonstrated no statistically significant differences among the individual cultural groups, nor among subgroups compared on the basis of age, sex, or weight of specimen tested. These results suggest that the sylvatic (animal-infected) cycle of Chagas' disease was probably well established at the time that the earliest humans (members of the Chinchorro culture) first peopled this segment of the Andean coast and inadvertently joined the many other mammal species acting as hosts for this parasite.
Assuntos
Doença de Chagas/epidemiologia , Doença de Chagas/história , Múmias/parasitologia , Trypanosoma cruzi/isolamento & purificação , Adulto , Fatores Etários , Animais , Doença de Chagas/parasitologia , Doença de Chagas/transmissão , Chile/epidemiologia , Etnicidade , Feminino , História Antiga , Humanos , Masculino , Músculos/parasitologia , Tamanho do Órgão , Especificidade de Órgãos , Prevalência , Projetos de Pesquisa , Fatores Sexuais , Fatores de Tempo , Trypanosoma cruzi/genéticaRESUMO
Human Chagas disease is a purely accidental occurrence. As humans came into contact with the natural foci of infection might then have become infected as a single addition to the already extensive host range of Trypanosoma cruzi that includes other primates. Thus began a process of adaptation and domiciliation to human habitations through which the vectors had direct access to abundant food as well as protection from climatic changes and predators. Our work deals with the extraction and specific amplification by polymerase chain reaction of T. cruzi DNA obtained from mummified human tissues and the positive diagnosis of Chagas disease in a series of 4,000-year-old Pre-Hispanic human mummies from the northern coast of Chile. The area has been inhabited at least for 7,000 years, first by hunters, fishers and gatherers, and then gradually by more permanent settlements. The studied specimens belonged to the Chinchorro culture, a people inhabiting the area now occupied by the modern city of Arica. These were essentially fishers with a complex religious ideology, which accounts for the preservation of their dead in the way of mummified bodies, further enhanced by the extremely dry conditions of the desert. Chinchorro mummies are, perhaps, the oldest preserved bodies known to date.