Police found 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It seems the victims, largely girls, have been ritually decapitated over 1,000 years in the past.

When Mexican police found a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave close to the Guatemalan border, they thought they had been a criminal offense scene, and took the bones to the state capital.

It seems it was a really cold case.

It took a decade of assessments and analysis to find out the skulls had been from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the Nationwide Institute of Anthropology and Historical past said Wednesday.

"Believing they have been looking at a criminal offense scene, investigators collected the bones and started analyzing them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, referred to as INAH, said in a statement.

The police in 2012 weren't being silly; the border space across the town of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has long been plagued by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico usually present a hole bashed by both sides of each cranium, and had been normally present in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

However specialists mentioned Wednesday the victims within the cave had most likely been ritually decapitated and the skulls placed on show on a kind of trophy rack often called a "tzompantli." Spanish conquistadores wrote about seeing such racks within the 1520s, and a few Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

While normally strung on wooden poles using holes bashed by them - the widespread apply among the many Aztecs and different cultures - experts say the cave skulls may have rested atop poles, rather than being strung on them.

Curiously, there have been extra females than males among the victims, and none of them had any teeth.

In light of the cave experience, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz mentioned individuals ought to probably call archaeologists, not police.

"When folks discover one thing that may very well be in an archaeological context, don't contact it and notify local authorities or instantly the INAH," he stated.

In 2015, archaeologists found the primary trophy rack of sacrificed human skulls at Mexico Metropolis's Templo Mayor Aztec smash site.

That very same year, artifacts found on the Zultepec-Tecoaque smash web site revealed evidence from when lots of of individuals in a Spanish-led convoy have been captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 study discovered that in societies the place social hierarchies have been taking shape, ritual human sacrifices focused poor individuals, helping the powerful control the lower lessons and hold them in their place.

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