Researchers who are focused solely on population-level questions — what ancestral populations contributed to this group — may not conduct the pairwise relatedness analyses that identify close kin and twins.

The 2024 study was explicitly designed to investigate kinship among the chultún assemblage, making it possible to identify not just distant ancestry but specific biological relationships.

These combined requirements explain why ancient twins, though presumably present in many archaeological assemblages around the world, are so rarely identified.

The Chichén Itzá case, with its large sample, single-feature context, excellent DNA preservation, and explicit kinship analysis focus, is unusually well-positioned to find them.

The Social World That Produced the Burial