Bones Found in Submerged Yucatan Cave May Be Earliest Native American Rossella Lorenzi - Discovery
go to original May 15, 2014

Divers Susan Bird and Alberto Nava transport the Hoyo Negro skull to an underwater turntable so that it can be photographed for 3d modeling. (Paul Nicklen/National Geographic)

Divers mapping the underwater caves within Mexico's Eastern Yucatan Peninsula came upon a surprising find - a superbly preserved skeleton dating close to the time when people first entered the New World.

"It was like a magnet and I remember swimming over to her remains and hovering in place about 12 inches from the skull, absolutely spellbound, for several moments," Susan Bird, a Bay Area Underwater Explorers diver, told Discovery News.

Subsequent underwater testing and analysis of this oldest, most complete skeleton found in the Americas has since provided evidence that modern Native Americans are directly related to the earliest inhabitants of the Americas, according to a study published today in the journal Science.

Dating close to the time when people first entered the New World, the early American, or Paleoamerican, skeleton features Native American DNA while showing a distinctly different skull shape. The research provides new clues to how the Americas were first populated.

It suggests the morphological differences between Paleoamericans, the first people to inhabit the Americas after the most recent ice age, and modern Native Americans are not the result of separate migrations from southeast Asia or even Europe. Rather, they belong to the same population that "evolved in place" in the Americas and Beringia, a now partially submerged landmass including parts of Siberia, Alaska and the Yukon.

Belonging to an adolescent girl, the skeleton was found in 2007 in a submerged chamber named Hoyo Negro (Spanish for Black Hole), deep inside a cave system on Mexico's Eastern Yucatán Peninsula, about 12 miles north of the city of Tulum.

Read the rest at Discovery

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