Ixchel was 30 years old when she died. She was tall compared to most of her contemporaries (1.64 meters), a great walker, and had survived three severe blows to the skull. Perhaps one of them caused a severe bacterial infection in the accidental perforation, or perhaps someone had inflicted it in an attempt to cure it. She was also missing several teeth, due to cavities caused by her fondness for eating tubers and sweet fruits, prickly pears, or honey.
One day, feeling very ill or mortally wounded, Ixchel decided to go to the Chan Hol cave. Or perhaps someone took her there and laid her on a smooth rock where she died. Then, something happened in her world that wiped out several species of animals in the area, and the cave flooded.
More than 10,000 years later, when it was thought that the oldest humans had arrived on the Yucatán Peninsula a few millennia ago, a group of researchers dived to the bottom of one of the hundreds of caves in the 32-kilometer-long Toh Ha system, in what is now Tulum, Quintana Roo, and found the remains of the woman they named Ixchel.
The paleoanthropologists announced the discovery in a comprehensive scientific article published in the journal Plos One in February 2020. The study was signed by Wolfgang Stinnesbeck , Samuel R. Rennie, Jerónimo Avilés Olguín, Sarah R. Stinnesbeck, Silvia González, Norbert Frank, Sophie Warken, Nils Schorndorf, Thomas Krengel, Adriana Velázquez Morlet and Arturo González González.
