A new study has unveiled the grisly details of the Mayan empire sacrifices and it’s not for the fainthearted.
The mystery around the Mayan civilization is one that has sparked interest in researchers for years as they have tried to understand their culture, practices and hieroglyphic writing.
Notably, their ancient calendar predicted an apocalypse in 2012 and now new DNA analysis is helping us to learn more about one of their more macabre traditions - human sacrifice.
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Researchers and paleogeneticists have uncovered victims who had been sacrificed in the ancient city of Chichén Itzá and were buried at the site in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula.
New DNA analysis reveals that the empire would offer up young boys as human sacrifices, especially twins, which scientists believe was because of ancient Mayan mythology.
The victims found were either closely related or young boys between the ages of three and six, while four of the victims found were two sets of identical twins.
The study was published in the scientific journal Nature, where researchers talked about the sacred Mayan text, the Popol Vuh, which details the significance of twins.
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Researchers said: “[One of the brothers’ own twin sons] known as the Hero Twins, then go on to avenge their father and uncle by undergoing repeated cycles of sacrifice and resurrection to outwit the gods of the underworld.”
New findings have unveiled that the rituals are more complex than just offering things to the gods.
Researchers studied the remains of children at a mass burial ground near Sacred Cenote, where over 100 remains were found in a cistern.
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One theory is that this is a location that Mayans believed to be an entrance to the underworld.
It seems that children were sacrificed for a period of over 500 years and, alongside identical twins, a quarter of the remains analyzed had a close relative in the cistern.
This means that it’s likely kids were given as offerings to the gods in sibling groups.
The mystery around the Mayan civilization deepens as scientists work to understand them better, with the real reason why they disappeared still unclear.
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It was previously proposed by NASA that the fall of the Maya city-states occurred as a result of prolonged periods of drought.
In science author and historian Jared Diamond's book Collapse, he mentioned that the drought was just the tip of the iceberg.
The actual cause of the Mayan vanishing was a result of their own environmental mess up after cutting down hundreds to thousands of trees to build their monuments.
But Mayan culture remains in the Mexican cities of Yucatan, Campeche, Chiapas, Quintana Roo and Tabasco.