Ancient genomics is a powerful tool, but it is important to be clear about what it cannot tell us.

It cannot tell us the specific ritual circumstances under which the children died.

The cause of death for the individuals in the chultún is not established by the genetic data.

Whether they were killed by specific ritual methods, whether they died of disease or accident or other causes and were then deposited in the chultún, or whether the precise circumstances varied across the centuries of the feature’s use: none of these questions is answered by the genome-wide data.

It cannot tell us what the children or their families understood about the ritual in which they participated.