A baby born with ONE EYE — buried 1,600 years ago. 👁️
📅 11 November 2026
In a ceramic urn at Jauranga, in Peru's Palpa Valley — the desert of the Nazca Lines — archaeologists found two baby girls buried together. One of them had a tiny skull with a single eye socket in the centre of her face.
The study, published in the journal PNAS on 9 November, says she had cyclopia — a rare condition where the brain fails to divide into two halves. DNA showed she was a girl with trisomy 13, also called Patau syndrome. It is the first time cyclopia has ever been identified in an ancient burial.
The two babies had different mothers — yet they were buried together in one urn, around AD 325–440. And the evidence suggests she may have lived for weeks, even months, after birth.
What does a burial like this tell us about how the Nazca cared for a child like her? 👇