Punta Arenas, Chile. For more than a hundred years, fishermen on Capitán Aracena, an island in Chile’s southernmost territory, have told a local legend about one of the island’s caves. Anybody who sailed too close, they said, would be cursed by the mummy buried inside.
A naturally mummified body of a woman was indeed located in a cave on the island in the early 2000s, thanks to information locals provided to scientists. She had lived 100 to 150 years earlier, according to a 2008 study, and her DNA matched that of the ancestral original peoples in the Chilean Patagonia and the Kawésqar community, who still live here today.
Chilean authorities decided the woman’s body should stay in the cave due to the costs and difficulties involved in replicating the environmental conditions needed to preserve it. But the respect and fear traditionally associated with the legend is fading, says Leticia Caro, a 50-year-old leader of a nomadic Kawésqar community.
