Yucatan, Mexico - December 14, 2023 Nearly 60 years ago, archaeologists discovered a cache of human bones in an underground cistern at Chichen Itza, one of the most powerful cities of the ancient Maya. The cistern was connected to a cave located only a few hundred metres from the Sacred Cenote, a water-filled sinkhole with the remains of hundreds of human sacrifices. When the cistern, or chultun, was discovered on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula in 1967, archaeologists determined that young adults and children had been deposited there over eight centuries and assumed that most of them were young women; at the time it was thought that the Maya preferred female victims for ritual sacrifice. But now, a new DNA study has turned that assumption on its head, revealing that all 64 sets of human remains sampled in the cave are from male victims, many of them brothers and cousins between the ages of three and six, and an unlikely number of identical twins. "We didn't expect this to be the case," says archaeogeneticist Rodrigo Barquera of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, lead author of a new study describing the analysis just published in the journal Nature."Traditionally, such burials are associated in Mesoamerican archaeology with fertility offerings, and fertility offerings tend to be made only by women," he says. In recent years, Barquera and his co-authors have reanalysed bones recovered from the chultun and cave in 1967, which are now stored nearby. Their new analysis suggests that the site was used for more than 100 burials between AD 500 and 1300. Most people were buried there before the ninth century, around the time Chichen Itza was the dominant city of the northern Maya lowlands, which encompassed what is now Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, northern Guatemala and Belize. Previous anthropological studies had revealed that the victims were mostly infants and young children, but this is the first time their DNA has been analysed, says Barquera. In addition to finding that only boys were buried in the cave, researchers were surprised to discover that many were closely related: at least a quarter were brothers or cousins of another child buried in the same cave, and among the burials were two sets of identical twins. Identical twins occur in only 0.4% of births, so finding two sets of identical twins in 64 burials is much more than would be expected by chance, says Barquera. It is unclear to what extent human sacrifice was widespread among the Maya, although there are many Spanish reports of its practice after their arrival in Maya territories in the early 16th century. It now appears that the Maya practised human sacrifice mainly in the later stages of their civilisation, to seek the favour of their gods for the fertility of their crops, for rain or for victory in war. Twins figure prominently in Mesoamerican mythology and are a central theme in the Popul Vuh, a sacred narrative of the Maya K?iche? people believed to date from the earliest stages of Maya civilisation. According to the Popul Vuh, twins named Hun-Hunahpu and Vucub-Hanahpu descended to the underworld to play a ball game, but, after winning, were sacrificed by the gods. Despite their death, the head of one of the twins impregnated a maiden with the "hero twins" Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who went on to avenge their father through repeated cycles of sacrifice and resurrection. Barquera notes that underground structures, such as the cave where children were buried, were considered entrances to the underworld; and it could be that sacrifices of male twins and close relatives (perhaps when true twins were not available) were part of rituals involving the Hero Twins that were intended to ensure abundant maize harvests. With images in association with Todo el Panorama. SHOTLIST: 1. Various from the Sacred Cenote where the bodies were found in close proximity (Dec 14, 2023); 2. Various from Chichen Itza.