C. L. Kieffer incorrectly identified a fused pair of cervical vertebrae in an article published online in May of 2015. This is a correction of the misidentification and a comment on the implications for the author's larger point that the individuals involved may have been physically handicapped and therefore selected by the ancient Maya as victims of human sacrifice.

The prurient element in the popular notion of the ancient Maya sacrifice of “beautiful virgins” during the first half of the 20th century appears to have made researchers wary of studying women in human sacrifice. Interest in human sacrifice arose in the 1990s along with the formulation of the warfare hypothesis for the collapse of Maya civilization so that models of human sacrifice often assumed that victims were largely male war captives. The present study reports on the detailed examination of all the pelvises in the Midnight Terror Cave skeletal assemblage, using osteological and paleogenomic techniques to shed light on the age and sex composition of sacrificed individuals. Our analysis demonstrates the presence of both males and females ranging from subadult to older adult ages. All four paleogenomic sex determinations on samples from subadults were determined female. Additionally, results indicate females fall into two age categories suggesting that sacrificed women may have served as deity impersonators in rituals dedicated to female deities.

Investigations of Midnight Terror Cave, Belize between 2008-2010 recovered a human osteological assemblage of over 10,000 bones, the largest reported for a cave in the southern Maya lowlands. Analysis indicates that approximately a quarter of the bones belong to subadults, which make up 43% of the minimum number of individuals (MNI). Determination of age at death produced a mortality curve that differs significantly from a normal curve with the numbers peaking between 5 -10 years of age, when mortality is generally low. These figures are similar to those produced from the Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichen Itza. The large percentage of subadults suggests that children were much more important in Maya human sacrificial practices than generally recognized.