Arch_and_Science_Qilakitsoq2

__Cause Of Death __
Only the children and one woman's, out of a total of seven bodies, cause of death is known. The woman had a cancerous tumor found at the base of the skull which was scientists say was most likely to have caused her death.

The four year old child had a disease called Calve-Perthes, which was an affliction of the hip joint. Scientists had concluded that this disease had caused the child to be more vulnerable to other diseases which had imminently caused its death.

The youngest of the mummies, a 6 month old baby, has been found to have been buried alive. According to the Inuit customs at the time, a baby and its mother were to travel to the land of the dead together. So if the mother had died, the father would have had to strangle or bury the child alive if there was no mother to nurse it. So we understand that the mother of the baby is probably one of the women found in the grave and therefore the father had left the small baby with the mother to be buried alive.

Scientists still seem to be baffled as to what had happened to the rest of the women found in the two graves. It had puzzled researchers as to why there were only women found in the graves, as they knew that men and women were never buried separately. They had thought that the women and children had perhaps been in a boat that had capsized causing their deaths, but there was no evidence to support this claim.

The cause of death for many of the women are still not known, however, we hope that scientists will find out in the near future.

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