The girl who died at the bottom of Hoyo Negro twelve thousand years ago had no way of knowing that the cave she was in — or had fallen into — would eventually flood and preserve her remains for twelve millennia.

She had no way of knowing that she would be found by divers from the future who would extract her DNA and use it to address scientific debates she could not have imagined.

She was simply a young woman, alone in the dark at the bottom of a deep pit, in a cave beneath the Yucatán Peninsula, thousands of years before any of the great cities of Mesoamerica existed.

What her life was like — what community she belonged to, what language she spoke, what she knew about the landscape she lived in, what led her to the cave — these things are not in the record.