At the Chiribaya site108, Aufderheide rigged up a makeshift dissecting table and performed 140 autopsies over several weeks. One body revealed an extraordinary finding. The mummy was of a young woman in her midthirties, found sitting, with her feet curled up, in a shallow clay grave. When Aufderheide examined her, his fingers found a hard “bulbous mass” in her left upper arm. The papery folds of skin, remarkably preserved, gave way to that mass, which was intact and studded with spicules of bone. This, without question, was a malignant bone tumor, an osteosarcoma, a thousand-year-old cancer
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