It has told the world things that could not have been known any other way: that all 64 were male, that a quarter of them had close relatives in the same burial, that two pairs of identical twins lay together in that underground space for centuries.

The twins, whoever they were, arrived in that underground space together.

Whether they were brought there at the same time, in the same ceremony, or whether they were interred separately across the years while the other’s bones already lay in the darkness: this is not known.

What is known is that they were there, and that they were twins in a culture that held twinhood to be extraordinary.

The genetic data reads their relatedness from fragments of degraded DNA extracted from the densest bone in the human skull.