By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – In 1967, an underground reservoir known as a chultun was discovered near a sacred water body at Chichen Itza, an important ancient Mayan city on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Skeletal remains of more than 100 children were found inside.
Now DNA obtained from 64 of them offers insight into child sacrifice at Chichen Itza in the centuries before Europeans reached the New World. The graves were all boys – some of them brothers, including identical twins – killed during religious rituals, scientists said on Wednesday. Most were between 3 and 6 years old.
Most were buried in the mass grave during the height of Chichen Itza’s political and cultural influence, from about 800 AD to 1000 AD, although some were buried in the centuries before and after, over a period of 500 years ending around 1100 .
Twins figure prominently in ancient Mayan religion and art, and twin sacrifice is described in sacred writings, including a book called the Popol Vuh. The Mayan hero twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, underwent cycles of sacrifice and resurrection as they confronted the gods of the underworld. Subterranean structures such as the chultun were considered entrances to the underworld, central to Mayan cosmogony.
“Ritual sacrifices were a common practice among ancient Mesoamerican populations. However, the biological relationships between the sacrificed individuals had not previously been described,” says archaeogeneticist Rodrigo Barquera of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Germany, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature.
“We think that the people of Chichen Itza were trying to symbolically recreate the Mayan mythological stories and the representation of the twin heroes in this ritual burial,” Barquera added. “For Mayan and Mesoamerican cultures in general, death is the ultimate sacrifice, and as such sacrifices are of great importance to their belief system.”
Chichen Itza is known for its stunning architecture, including an impressive pyramid structure now called El Castillo. Nearby is a sacred, water-filled sinkhole called a cenote, where the bodies of more than 200 people were found. And nearby is the chultun where the boys were buried.
“The original purpose of chultuns was to store fresh water, this had been converted into a burial chamber adjacent to a small natural cave, both the chultun and the cave were filled with human remains,” Barquera said.
DNA was extracted from the petrous portion of the temporal bone, which contains the inner ear. This small bone has proven to be optimal in preserving ancient DNA.
“We sampled only the left portion as that would ensure we sampled each individual only once. It was not kept for each individual in the chultun, so we sampled only a subset,” says MPI-EVA archaeogeneticist and co -author of the study Kathrin Nägele. .
“We can calculate the degree of genetic relatedness from the genetic similarities of two individuals. In this case, we found two pairs who were so similar they could only be identical twins, and at least three more who were full siblings. They were also twins, but fraternal twins, from two different eggs,” said Nägele. “This is the first time we can confidently identify identical twins in the archaeological record.”
The research contradicted the idea popularized in the 20th century that the ancient Mayans preferred female sacrifices.
The researchers also compared the boys’ genomes with those of current Mayan communities, including people from the village of Tixcacaltuyub near the ruins of Chichen Itza. They identified genetic traits in the modern Maya that likely arise from immune system adaptations by their ancestors to an epidemic bacterial infection during Spanish colonization.
It is still unclear how the boys died.
“There are no cuts or evidence of trauma, which tells us how they didn’t die. But we haven’t found a cause of death for them yet,” Barquera said.
“During the Spanish colonial period, thousands of Mayan books and texts were systematically burned, and there were concerted efforts to eradicate Mayan religious beliefs and activities and replace them with Christianity,” says biomolecular archaeologist and co-author of the Christina Warinner study from Harvard University.
“As a result, there are many gaps in our knowledge about the specific ritual practices performed by the ancient Maya – and especially their meaning,” Warinner added. “Of these, human sacrifice remains one of the most misunderstood ritual acts.”
(Reporting by Will Dunham, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
