Spider monkeys don’t reside anyplace close to the central Mexican highlands, together with the world round what’s now Mexico Metropolis, as soon as the house of Teotihuacan. So when College of California, Riverside, archaeologist Nawa Sugiyama and her colleagues discovered the 1,700-year-old skeleton of 1 buried alongside different choices in a pyramid within the metropolis’s ceremonial heart, they knew it will need to have come from far afield—equivalent to someplace within the territory of what was then a neighboring political energy, the Maya. And the little primate hints at a beforehand unsuspected historical past of diplomatic hyperlinks between Teotihuacan’s rulers and Maya kingdoms additional south.

A diplomatic present

Sugiyama and her colleagues discovered the skeleton interred as a part of a ritual providing deep inside one of many three pyramids that make up the Plaza of the Columns advanced within the ceremonial district of historical Teotihuacan. It was discovered alongside a trove of jade collectible figurines that had been traced by their chemical make-up to the Motagua Valley in what’s now central Guatemala. There have been additionally finely labored obsidian blades and shell ornaments, together with the stays of different animal sacrifices, together with an eagle, a puma, and several other rattlesnakes.

No primates (apart from people) reside within the area round what’s now Mexico Metropolis, and a spider monkey would have been “an unique curiosity, alien to the excessive elevations of Teotihuacan,” as Sugiyama and her colleagues describe it of their paper.

Sugiyama and her colleagues say the ill-fated monkey was most likely a part of a present to the Teotihuacan’s rulers from a neighboring Maya kingdom. And though the monkey was captured and delivered to Teotihuacan as a sacrifice, proof in its bones and tooth means that it spent a minimum of a few years within the metropolis first. Sugiyama and her colleagues recommend it was seemingly on public show—permitting Teotihuacan’s rulers to point out off how their status and energy had introduced town such a uncommon present.

It was, roughly, the traditional model of China’s present of two pandas, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, to the US in 1972, say Sugiyama and her colleagues.

“As hundreds of thousands of vacationers celebrated the lifetime of Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing on the Nationwide Zoo, the present of the spider monkey who seemingly resided, and thus was noticed by the general public, on the Plaza of the Columns advanced held essential sociopolitical implications,” they wrote. In fact, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing didn’t get buried alive in a pyramid on the finish of their tenure on the Nationwide Zoo—however, nicely, cultural variations.

Bones from the monkey and the opposite sacrifices radiocarbon dated to between 250 and 300 CE. That makes the spider monkey the oldest proof of diplomatic ties between the Teotihuacan and the Maya, and it may upend what historians find out about relations between the 2 powers.