Hear
MADRID.- In 1967, workers building a landing strip near the mythical Mayan city of Chichén Itzá, in Yucatán (Mexico) discovered an underground cavity full of human bones. The remains were collected, the cave was destroyed, and since then the discovery constituted one of the greatest enigmas about the Mayan culture. The young age of the more than 100 dead made it impossible to know whether they were boys or girls, to the frustration of researchers who were trying to understand why this town carried out frequent human sacrifices. Now, DNA analysis of 64 of those victims has made it possible to clarify who they were and speculate why they were killed.
Chichén Itzá, with its pyramid of Kukulkan, the mythological feathered serpent, its ball game, its astronomical observatory, and its 50,000 inhabitants, was the epicenter of the Mayan civilization, which expanded throughout the Yucatan Peninsula, Belize and Guatemala for centuries, before collapsing around the year 1000 AD.
Within the religious complex there is also the Sacred Cenote, a large hole in the ground filled with fresh water that the Mayans considered the entrance to the underworld. Many human remains have been found at its bottom. The cavity discovered in 1967, known as chultun, it was very close. It probably served as a fresh water cistern and later as an improvised tomb for the sacrificed.
Rodrigo Barquera, a Mexican paleogeneticist who works at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Germany, has been one of the leaders of an investigation that began in 2014 to send the remains of 64 corpses to Leipzig, extract a few milligrams of the petrosal bone of the skull — one of the densest in the body—and recover its DNA. The results show that all children were boys between three and six years of age. They were murdered over five centuries, from the 6th to the 10th, although the sacrifices intensified in the period of maximum splendor and subsequent collapse of the Mayan capital, between 800 and 1000, according to the study, published this Wednesday in Naturea reference for the best world science.
The most surprising discovery has been that among the dead there are two pairs of twin brothers who were probably sacrificed together. Among the rest of the victims there are also close ties of kinship, some were brothers, others cousins, so there was probably a clear physical resemblance between them.
The Mayan civilization had a special obsession with twins. His holy book, Popol Vuh, which dates back to colonial times, but theoretically dates back to the dawn of this culture, tells the myth of two twins who go down to the underworld and are sacrificed by the gods after a ball game. The head of one of them impregnates a virgin, who gives birth to two other identical brothers who return to the underworld in search of revenge, in a continuous cycle of sacrifices. The researchers believe that All the children were killed in pairs and at the same time in a kind of tribute to the “hero twins.”
Oana del Castillo, bioarchaeologist at the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico and co-author of the study, delves into this interpretation. According to the myth, “this pair of twins faces death and darkness to guarantee the continuity of cosmic cycles, and with it, life on the surface of the Earth,” she explains by email.
Until now it was thought that all those sacrificed were girls or adolescents. One of the first to propose this was Edward Herbert Thompson—Don Eduardo—, architect of the plundering of this “American Egypt,” as they called Chichén Itzá after its rediscovery in the 19th century. At the beginning of the last century, Thompson was appointed United States consul in Yucatán. In just a few years he dredged the Sacred Cenote with cranes and removed hundreds of bones and gold and jade objects that were sent to the Peabody Museum at the prestigious Harvard University, where many of them remain. In his novel The city of the sacred well, Don Eduardo speculates that those sacrificed were Mayan princesses who were thrown alive into the deep waters of the cenote to satisfy the gods.
The bodies analyzed have no physical traces of violence. There are no marks of decapitation or extraction of the heart, rituals that were more typical of the Aztecs, and which in this case are much better documented by the testimonies of the Spanish conquistadors who arrived in Tenochtitlán, in present-day Mexico City. Despite this, Rodrigo Barquera explains that sacrifice is the most plausible option. “At that time, children who died from diseases usually died in the first two years of age. It is rare to find so many dead people between three and six years old. Furthermore, if it were a burial, we would see a mix of sexes, but here there is a clear preselection of males. Many of them were related. And we have also found two sets of twins. The possibility that it is a product of chance is practically zero,” he details.
Another factor that supports The theory of ritual sacrifice is diet. Researchers have analyzed the different types of hydrogen atoms (isotopes) found in the bones, as well as carbon 14, which allows them to refine their dating. This part of the work has been carried out by the Spanish researcher Patxi Pérez-Ramallo, who works at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. “It was a huge challenge,” he explains on the phone. “It took me a long time to understand the diet from isotopes. Then we saw that there are three large groups, some that came from the coast and ate more fish protein, others from the interior that consumed more meat and others that have a more humble diet, which indicates that they were from the lower class,” he details. he. The most relevant thing is that the diet between each pair of sacrificed children is practically identical, which supports that they received the same care and food in the months or years prior to sacrifice. The majority of deaths are concentrated in the 8th and 9th centuries, approximately every 50 years, which can coincide with periods of special food shortages and, consequently, political and social instability.
Rodrigo Barquera compares what happened in the ceremonial complex of Chichén Itzá with what can be seen in any church or synagogue. “In these temples we see different rooms dedicated to each rite,” he explains. “In the Mayan city the chultun for sacrifices in homage to the twin heroes. However, in the Sacred Cenote we know that those sacrificed were thrown alive when it was completely dry, as a request for the rain to come,” he adds.
For Pérez-Ramallo, there is nothing comparable to the volume and cultural complexity of these human sacrifices of the Mayans, sustained for centuries. The closest, he believes, are the sacrifices of young women and their children by the Incas, whose exceptionally preserved mummies have been found on some of the highest peaks in the Andes. In these cases it has also been shown that they came from remote places and ate the same diet, but these are two or three cases, not dozens or even hundreds.
Those responsible for the work warn that it is not advisable to interpret what happened in the Mayan city with a current vision. “When I analyze things like this I try to be a mere witness and not judge with the eyes of the present,” explains Pérez-Ramallo. No matter how different the Mayan world is from the European Middle Ages, of which he is a specialist, there are always connections. “When the Romans arrived in Lusitania [la actual Portugal, Extremadura y Salamanca], witness human sacrifices by the local population. “They are anthropological behaviors that explain a society, rather than barbarism,” he adds.
His colleague Barquera adds: “In those times, in Mesoamerica, death in sacrifice was an honor. In the ball game the aim was to win and the prize was to be sacrificed. Giving your children as a sacrifice was probably also a great honor. From our perspective it seems barbaric, but that is how the world was explained a little over a thousand years ago. It is something different that we cannot qualify with today’s morality.”
The team has also analyzed the DNA of 68 current inhabitants of Tixcacaltuyub, a town near the ruins of Chichén Itzá. The results show that the descendants of the Mayan people retain genetic marks from the epidemics that decimated the American population after the arrival of the conquerors in the 16th century, especially genes for resistance to the bacteria. Salmonella enterica, which in 1545 caused the terrible epidemic of the so-called cocoliztli.
Iñigo Olalde, a geneticist at the University of the Basque Country, believes that this is a “unique” study. “It is exceptional to be able to recover DNA from so many individuals in a warm area. And thanks to genetic extraction it has been possible to determine sex, since no physical feature in the bones of young children allows them to be differentiated. Thanks to this we know who they were killing for ritual,” he highlights.
By Nuño Domínguez
©EL PAÍS, SL
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