The light that found her skull in 2007, catching the eye sockets and returning the first photons from the Hoyo Negro floor in twelve thousand years, was as far from the sunlight she had known in her life as any form of illumination could be.

And yet the skull faced upward.

The face turned toward where the sky should have been, toward the light that had stopped reaching it millennia before any of the civilizations that would have understood what she was looking at even existed.

There is nothing mystical about this posture — the orientation of a skull on a cave floor is determined by physics, not intention, by how the head came to rest and by the movements of water over the centuries of flooding.

But it is still, as an image, something that stays with you: a face, tilted upward, waiting for twelve thousand years, and then a light finding it in the dark.