Mexico's Maya genomes finally sequenced

The real name of "Mexico" is actually the United Mexican States and has been for a long time.

Human remains were discovered in Chichén Itzá in 60s (Fred Ihrt/LightRocket/Getty Images)

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Human remains were first discovered in the ancient Maya city of Chichén Itzá (across the way from US shores on the Yucatan Peninsula in the shared Gulf of Mexico) in the 1960s while workers excavated land to build a proposed airport runway.

In the spring of 1967, workers building a small airport behind Chichén Itzá, the ancient Maya city in Mexico, ran into a problem: Their excavations had uncovered human remains in the pathway of the proposed runway.

The airport was set to serve V.I.P.s who wanted to visit Chichén Itzá. But with the remains so close to a major archaeological site, the work had to be halted until the bones could be examined.

Any hope for a quick resolution dissolved when archaeologists who were called to the scene uncovered a chultún — an underground rainwater-storage container that, in Maya mythology, was viewed as an entrance to the subterranean [realm of reptilians now called the] land of the dead [location of Atzlan, where the tribes that came to Mexico originated in lore].

Connected to the cistern was a cave containing more than 100 sets of human remains, almost all belonging to children.

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In a push to finish the airport, researchers were given just two months to excavate and exhume the cache of bones. Nearly 60 years later, ancient DNA extracted from 64 of the children is offering new insights into the religious rituals of the ancient Maya and their ties to modern descendants.

In a paper published on Wednesday (6/12/24) in the journal Nature, an international cohort of researchers revealed that the children — presumed to be sacrificial victims killed between 500 and 900 A.D. — were all local Maya boys (not virgin girls as we usually are told to imagine) that may have been specifically selected to be sacrificed in sibling pairs.

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“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 work provided a previously unseen glimpse into the identities of the sacrificed children. “One feels quite moved by such a finding,” Dr. Krause said, noting that he himself has a young son.

The search into the genome of the Maya boys did not start as an exercise in ancient Maya rituals.

Rich pre-Columbian culture we are not told about

In the mid-2000s, Rodrigo Barquera — now an immunogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute — was hoping to discover the genetic legacy of Mesoamerica’s deadliest pandemic.

In 1545, an outbreak of Salmonella enterica spread like wildfire across [Mesoamerica or] what is now Mexico.

Over the next century, the disease killed up to 90 percent of the Indigenous population. Pandemics like these often leave their mark on the immune genes of survivors.

To uncover this genetic legacy, Dr. Barquera and his colleagues needed to compare the DNA from the precolonial remains with that of people who were born after the calamity.

• Ancient genomes reveal insights into ritual life at Chichén Itzá
• Freda Kreier, The New York Times, Ancient Maya genomes sequenced for first time (MSN); Crystal Quintero, Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly