How science is helping us understand human sacrifice

livemint.com:

Death by strangulation, decapitation, exsanguination. Buried alive, burned on pyres, crushed by stones, thrown off cliffs. Homo sapiens in nearly every part of the world has practiced human sacrifice at some point over at least five millennia, often killing females in fertility rites or for burial alongside powerful males.

But new research enabled by DNA analysis and other scientific advances has challenged assumptions about the identity of sacrificial victims, at least among the Maya of Central America. Between 900 and 1,400 years ago, the Maya regularly sacrificed boys—particularly twins or close male relatives—according to a study published in June in the journal Nature. The findings are based on the ancient DNA of 64 children who had been deposited in an underground cistern at the site of Chichén Itzá, a city built on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.

For the ancient Maya, being sacrificed was considered a privilege, so these boys—most of whom were between the ages of 3 and 6—were likely given up willingly by their families, according to Rodrigo Barquera, an immunogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and co-author of the recent study. A possible explanation for the sacrifices lies in Maya lore. According to the culture’s written traditions, “Hero Twins"—both male—traveled to the underworld to avenge their father, a twin himself, who was killed by the lords of the underworld.

Sacrifices of two male children were likely part of a ritual that helped the Maya honor this part of their mythology and belief system. At the distance of millennia, these and other ritual killings appear barbaric. But to the cultures that carried them out, human sacrifices served myriad purposes, including