A total of 13 mouse mummies have been recently discovered in the Andean mountains, at elevations once believed to be too high to host any mammal.
With freezing temperatures of down to minus 40 degrees Celsius and vegetation hundreds and sometimes thousands of meters below the mountain tops, the summits of the Andes mountains maintain an extremely harsh environment.
The researchers performed radiocarbon dating — a method that uses the amount of carbon from organism material to estimate its age — which indicated the oldest mummies to be no more than 350 years old, while some could have recently died, according to the study. Storz pointed to previous reports of the rodent, where archaeologists had thought the mice to be used as a part of Incan rituals. Since the samples are not as old as the Inca civilization , that theory has been ruled out.
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