When did humans start burying their dead? -- Secret History -- Sott net sott.net - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from sott.net Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
To tackle this, Burger led a team of US investigators in carrying out accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating of human remains from Machu Picchu.
They examined the remains of 26 individuals and the results, published in the peer-reviewed journal Antiquity, strongly suggested continuous use of the site from 1420 at the latest – and probably earlier – until 1530. The latter date would roughly coincide with the start of the Spanish conquest of the Inca empire.
“This is the first study based on scientific evidence to provide an estimate for the founding of Machu Picchu and the length of its occupation,” said Burger, adding that earlier such attempts did not produce sufficiently reliable results.
DNA study of 6,200-year-old massacre victims raises more questions than answers
Archaeologists assumed an extended family died in violence thouands of years ago, but the largest genetic study of a mass killing to date suggests otherwise.
Some victims of the Potocani massacre received multiple lethal blows to the skull.Photograph by M. Novak
Courtesy of the Institute for Anthropological Research
ByRobin George Andrews
Email
Around 6,200 years ago, a group of at least 41 men, women, and children were brutally murdered before being dumped in a mass grave in what is now eastern Croatia. Initially, the archaeologists who uncovered the grave in 2007 wondered if the victims were an entire inter-related community targeted for execution. But a new analysis reported in the journal
DNA study of 6,200-year-old massacre victims raises more questions than answers msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.