© C. BarbieriThe distinctive sarcophagi of the Chachapoya people.
A team led by Chiara Barbieri from the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany set out to interrogate some unusual results turned up in a linguistic survey of native-speakers in the Chachapoyas region of northern Peru.
The participants, all elderly, spoke a variant of a tongue called Quechua - a family of pre-Columbian languages that across the Amazon and Andes regions has millions of speakers. The version used in Chachapoyas was assumed to be closely related to one used in parts of Ecuador.
However, detailed analysis showed that wasn't the case - the Chachapoyas version was linguistically distinct. A follow-up DNA study revealed that the people in the region were to a large extent genetically distinct as well - leading to a major rethink of the accepted Inca Empire narrative.
At its height, the Inca Empire was the largest in the world. It began in the Peruvian highlands in the early Thirteenth Century and continued until being finally destroyed by invading Spaniards in 1572.
Comment: Russia's mistake was in actually believing the U.S. would stand by its word. The suffering of the 90s brought on by the West's pillaging of the country taught them otherwise. They have taken the lesson to heart