She might have been exploring the cave system deliberately, following the sounds of water or looking for resources.

She might have been seeking shelter.

She might have been conducting some activity in or near the cave system that we cannot reconstruct from the evidence.

What we can say is that she was there, approximately 12,000 to 13,000 years before the present, in a cave system that was then dry, in what is now Mexico, at a time when the landscape of the Yucatán looked quite different from the way it looks today.

The peninsula’s ecology during this period was not the tropical forest of the modern Yucatán but a more open, possibly somewhat drier environment — the specific ecology of the Yucatán at the end of the Ice Age is itself an active area of research, using the animal bones from Hoyo Negro and other cave sites as evidence.