Ancient genomes reveal insights into ritual life at Chichen Itza

This 2024 Nature paper reports genome-wide data from sixty-four subadult individuals recovered from a subterranean mass burial near the Sacred Cenote at Chichen Itza, a peer-reviewed ancient-DNA study whose authority rests on the empirical strength of genomic sequencing and statistical analysis rather than on textual or ethnographic interpretation. Its central findings, that all analyzed individuals were male and that the burial included two pairs of monozygotic twins, are genetic facts established with high confidence by the paper's own method. What the paper cannot establish with the same certainty is the full cultural meaning of the burial, and the authors themselves connect the twin finding cautiously to the prominence of twins in Mayan mythology rather than claiming to have proven a specific ritual narrative. Cite it firmly for the genetic findings, and treat any ritual interpretation as the authors' reasoned but necessarily more speculative extension of that data.