The people who built these pyramids are not fully gone.

Their descendants are alive, and in a biologically meaningful sense, the ancient city belongs to them as much as it belongs to any other interpretation of its significance.

The Final Accounting: What the DNA Found

The 2024 Nature study set out to investigate the human remains from a subterranean chultún near the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá using ancient genomic methods.

It succeeded in generating genome-wide data from 64 subadult individuals — a high success rate for a tropical preservation context — and the findings transformed the understanding of who those individuals were.