Police discovered 150 skulls at a “crime scene” in Mexico. It turns out the victims, mostly ladies, have been ritually decapitated over 1,000 years ago.

When Mexican police discovered a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave near 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 chilly case.

It took a decade of tests and evaluation to find out the skulls were from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the Nationwide Institute of Anthropology and History stated Wednesday.

"Believing they have been a criminal offense scene, investigators collected the bones and started analyzing them in Tuxtla Gutierrez," the state capital, the institute, often known as INAH, said in an announcement.

The police in 2012 weren't being stupid; the border area around the city of Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has lengthy been suffering from violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic cranium piles in Mexico often show a gap bashed via each side of each skull, and had been often found in ceremonial plazas, not caves.

But specialists mentioned Wednesday the victims within the cave had probably been ritually decapitated and the skulls put on show on a form of trophy rack referred to as a "tzompantli." Spanish conquistadores wrote about seeing such racks within the 1520s, and some Spaniards' heads even wound up on them.

While usually strung on wood poles utilizing holes bashed by way of them - the widespread follow among the many Aztecs and other cultures - consultants say the cave skulls could have rested atop poles, rather than being strung on them.

Curiously, there were extra females than males among the victims, and none of them had any enamel.

In light of the cave experience, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz stated people ought to most likely call archaeologists, not police.

"When individuals discover something that could be in an archaeological context, do not touch it and notify local authorities or instantly the INAH," he said.

In 2015, archaeologists discovered the principle trophy rack of sacrificed human skulls at Mexico City's Templo Mayor Aztec smash site.

That same yr, artifacts found on the Zultepec-Tecoaque wreck site revealed evidence from when hundreds of individuals in a Spanish-led convoy have been captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten.

A 2016 research found that in societies where social hierarchies had been taking form, ritual human sacrifices targeted poor individuals, serving to the highly effective control the decrease courses and keep them in their place.

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