Dr. James Fitzsimmons

And she asked me, she's like a child sacrifice.

Um, it does exist.

Um,

So there's a cave called Midnight Terror Cave, really evocative name.

I think it's in Belize, where it kind of looks like there were some kids that were trafficked there from far away.

They did sort of isotopes on the bones and determined that they actually weren't local children that were being killed.

And they were basically thrown in this cave.

So it does happen.

Do we know why?

It seems to be part of, again, part of this whole offering thing.

One of the things that we know about sort of ancient Maya death and Mesoamerican death more generally is that the main food that gods eat is usually people.

It's usually people or people substitutes.

You know, one of the reasons my latest book was called Blood on the Wind was because the thing that sort of attracted gods to sort of eat people.

And in many ways, it was a substitute for human blood.

It was actually copal.

It was a kind of incense.

And you'd burn this so that the gods would kind of be attracted to it and they would eat it.

And it was kind of a substitute for actually killing people, right?

It's like, okay, well, here's some blood and we're going to burn this.

And it's like blood.