Employees building a small aircraft behind Chichén Itzá, the ancient Maya city in Mexico, encountered a problem in the spring of 1967: Their digging had discovered animal remains in the path of the proposed airport. The aircraft was set to provide V. I. P. s who wanted to visit Chichén Itzá. The job had to be stopped until the bones may be examined because the remains were so close to a significant historic site.
Any hope of a fast resolution vanished when archaeologists who were on the scene discovered a chultin, an underground rainwater storage container that, according to Maya mythology, served as a gateway to the dead’s subterranean realm. A cave surrounded by more than 100 sets of human remains, nearly all of which were children, was connected to the tank. Experts were given just two months to unearth and unearth the cache of bones in an effort to complete the airport.
Almost 60 years later, the old Genome extracted from 64 of the children offers new insights into the spiritual practices of the ancient Maya and their relations to contemporary generations. An international group of researchers revealed in a report published on Wednesday in the journal Nature that the children were all nearby Maya males who may have been chosen to get killed in sibling sets. The children were ritual victims killed between 500 and 900 A.D.
” These are the first ancient Maya genomes to be published”, said Johannes Krause, an archaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The DNA analysis revealed the children’s names that had never been known before. ” One feels really moved by quite a finding”, Dr. Krause said, noting that he himself has a younger child.
The investigation into the Maya kids ‘ chromosome did not begin as a test of the traditional Maya customs. Rodrigo Barquera, a presently immunogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute, was attempting to discover the genetic basis for Mesoamerica’s most deadly pandemic in the middle of 2000.
An outbreak of Salmonella enterica in 1545 spread like wildfire throughout what is now Mexico. Over the next decade, the disorder killed up to 90 percent of the Aboriginal people. Epidemics like these frequently leave their mark on the defensive systems of the surviving. Dr. Barquera and his team needed to assess the DNA from the ancestral remains to those from those who were born after the earthquake in order to discover this genetic reputation.
One of the pre-Columbian groups that was found in the chult is certain to have not encountered the crisis while still alive. The team was given authority to destroy a small portion of their bones in 2015 to sequence DNA.
In a regular scanning procedure, the team initially used DNA to find the children’s sex. This aspect of the children was a mystery because the skeletons of people under a certain age do n’t provide much information about biological sex.
It took a month for those initial results to come in, and when they did:” Wow”, Dr. Barquera said.
All 64 of the bones belonged to kids. ” We kept rerunning the tests because we could n’t believe that all of them were male”, he said. ” It was just so amazing”.
First archaeologists studying the Maya believed that the society was obsessed with sacrificing young mother women. The discovery that the majority of the sacrifices in the spiritual crypt — a normal sinkhole at Chichén Itzá — were children has raised questions about this concept in recent years.
The claim that it was mostly young lady women being thrown into the cenote was “obviously thrown in the face,” said scientist Jamie Awe, who was not associated with the study. According to him, the fascination with ladies in archaeology most likely resulted from a combination of imperial concepts and limited data.
Then, DNA confirms that the kids from the chultún were all female, he said, adding:” We would not have known who they were had the DNA research certainly been conducted”.
Additionally, genetic screening later revealed that many of the lads were related to one another, and that there were two sets of identical twins among them. Why these guys were chosen for compromise is unknown, Dr. Barquera said. However, it is possible that the siblings or close family were chosen to represent the struggles of the Hero Twins, important figures in Maya science who went through periods of devotion and rebirth.
” Festivals from ancient times tend to be specific”, Dr. Awe said. This study suggests that only male children were chosen for compromise during some spiritual ceremonies.
The kids are now giving back to current Maya who live around Chichén Itzá, Dr. Barquera and his associates found. The group compared the boys ‘ DNA with that of Maya living in Tixcacaltuyub, a community around an hour’s drive from Chichén Itzá, and found strong biological consistency between the two parties. The 1545 pandemic did leave a lasting impression on the Maya, leaving Tixcacaltuyub residents with at least one genetic variant linked to salmonella immunity, as Dr. Barquera had predicted.
Dr. Barquera and a few other researchers traveled to Tixcacaltuyub to present their findings to local schoolchildren and study participants. Additionally, they discussed previous genetic analysis conducted by other organizations that suggested Maya ancestors first settled the area about 9, 000 years ago. Together, the genetic research suggests that the peninsula’s large population has n’t experienced much migration or genetic exchange since the Maya’s earliest ancestors first moved in.
According to Dr. Dr., DNA provides” clear proof that these people are descendants of the people who created one of the most accomplished civilizations in the world.” Awe said.
Dr. Barquera added that the study participants were delighted to learn that they had been found to be genetically related to the Chichén Itzá creators.
People who reside close to these archaeological sites “questions, Why do you have such high regard for the people who built these sites, and then treat the Indigenous people who live there like inferiors”? he said.
With these DNA results, he added, they can now say:” Look, we’re related to the ones who made these pyramids. So perhaps stop being racist toward us.
The New York Times first published a story about ancient genocturnals that revealed the children the Maya had chosen for sacrifice.
