More than 500 years ago, three children climbed the Llullaillaco volcano in Argentina and never returned, the probable victims of human sacrifice. Their bodies — naturally mummified in the cold, dry mountain air — have been studied by scientists since they were discovered, sitting in shrines, in 1999.
Now new evidence shows that coca and alcohol might have played a more than ceremonial role in their deaths.
The children — a boy and girl about 4 or 5 years old and a girl whom archaeologists call the Llullaillaco Maiden, who was about 13 — were part of an Incan ritual known as "capacocha," in which children were killed or left to die of exposure.