Dr. James Fitzsimmons

It's going to be on the wind.

And then, you know, things are going to eat this.

Why sacrifice the child?

I can't get inside the mind.

I don't know why they did that in Midnight Terror Cave, but what I would say is that these are probably offerings to specific gods.

They're situational offerings for specific gods.

How do we know they were sacrificed, not just kids that died that they threw into this cave?

So that's a really good question.

So figuring out... Yeah, I know.

Pretty creepy looking cave.

Figuring out sacrifice is really difficult.

There's a woman named Vera Tiesler, a wonderful archaeologist based out of Yucatan in Mexico, University of Yucatan, who has spent a good chunk of her career actually figuring this out.

She looks at knife marks on bodies and things and be like, okay, what is associated with what kind of sacrifice?

Decapitation, what have you, right?

And what she's found is that like...

The knives in this period, in this period, I'm getting into really sort of the weeds here, aren't really sharp enough or strong enough to actually go through, like punch through a rib cage.

So you typically have to go under the rib cage if you're going to take out a heart.

You can't, like you can't just punch through, right?

You have to go under the rib cage.

And so she spent a lot of time like figuring out, okay, well, what happens when you do that with a knife?