The More We Know | Mexican Cave Skeleton Reveals Secrets Of New World's First People @TheMoreWeKnow | Uploaded May 2014 | Updated October 2024, 27 minutes ago.
A horrible day for a teenage girl perhaps 13,000 years ago - death in a Mexican cave - has turned into a wonderful day for scientists who have managed to coax important secrets out of the oldest genetically intact human skeleton in the New World.
Scientists exploring deep beneath the jungles of Mexico's eastern Yucatan peninsula discovered the girl's remains underwater alongside bones of more than two dozen beasts including sabre-toothed tigers, cave bears, giant ground sloths and an elephant relative called a gomphothere.
The girl - with her intact cranium and preserved DNA - was entombed for eons in a deeply submerged cave chamber before being discovered in 2007. The petite, slightly built girl - about 1.47 metres (4 feet, 10 inches tall) - is thought to have been 15 or 16 years old when she died.
Experts told media in Mexico City on Thursday (May 15), the young girl's burial pit was dry when she fell but Ice Age glaciers melted about 10,000 years ago, inundating the caves with water. Tests determined she lived between 13,000 and 12,000 years ago.
"It is the oldest human remains found in America. Also, it's the most complete skeleton and genetically intact skeleton that has been found in our continent. The skeleton appears to be that of a young woman, between 15 and 16 years old who died in this cave that we have just referred to. Drowned after the last ice age, some 10,000 years ago, and the remains are the oldest of the New World," said General Director of the National Institute Of Anthropology And History (INAH), Maria Teresa Franco.
Experts from Mexico's' National Institute of Anthropology and History revealed that genetic tests on her superbly preserved remains found by cave divers near the resort area of Tulum, on Mexico's eastern Caribbean coast, have answered questions about the origins of the Western Hemisphere's first people and their relationship to today's Native American populations.
These findings determined that the Ice Age humans who first crossed into the Americas over a land bridge that formerly linked Siberia to Alaska did in fact give rise to modern Native American populations rather than hypothesised later entrants into the hemisphere.
"The first inhabitants of America, the Paleo-Indians, came from Siberia and crossed the Bering Strait stretch through Beringia and they adapted themselves to the continent," said INAH's Director for Sub-Aquatic Archaeology, Pilar Luna.
Experts believed the girl, named "Naia" after the water nymph from Green mythology, may have ventured into dark passages of a cave to find freshwater and fallen to her death.
Scientists long have debated the origins of the first people of the Americas. Many scientists think these hunter-gatherers crossed the former land bridge between 26,000 and 18,000 years ago and subsequently pushed into North and South America starting perhaps 17,000 years ago.
But the most ancient New World human remains have baffled scientists because, like Naia, they have narrower skulls and other features different from today's Native Americans.
theshortpenguin.com
A horrible day for a teenage girl perhaps 13,000 years ago - death in a Mexican cave - has turned into a wonderful day for scientists who have managed to coax important secrets out of the oldest genetically intact human skeleton in the New World.
Scientists exploring deep beneath the jungles of Mexico's eastern Yucatan peninsula discovered the girl's remains underwater alongside bones of more than two dozen beasts including sabre-toothed tigers, cave bears, giant ground sloths and an elephant relative called a gomphothere.
The girl - with her intact cranium and preserved DNA - was entombed for eons in a deeply submerged cave chamber before being discovered in 2007. The petite, slightly built girl - about 1.47 metres (4 feet, 10 inches tall) - is thought to have been 15 or 16 years old when she died.
Experts told media in Mexico City on Thursday (May 15), the young girl's burial pit was dry when she fell but Ice Age glaciers melted about 10,000 years ago, inundating the caves with water. Tests determined she lived between 13,000 and 12,000 years ago.
"It is the oldest human remains found in America. Also, it's the most complete skeleton and genetically intact skeleton that has been found in our continent. The skeleton appears to be that of a young woman, between 15 and 16 years old who died in this cave that we have just referred to. Drowned after the last ice age, some 10,000 years ago, and the remains are the oldest of the New World," said General Director of the National Institute Of Anthropology And History (INAH), Maria Teresa Franco.
Experts from Mexico's' National Institute of Anthropology and History revealed that genetic tests on her superbly preserved remains found by cave divers near the resort area of Tulum, on Mexico's eastern Caribbean coast, have answered questions about the origins of the Western Hemisphere's first people and their relationship to today's Native American populations.
These findings determined that the Ice Age humans who first crossed into the Americas over a land bridge that formerly linked Siberia to Alaska did in fact give rise to modern Native American populations rather than hypothesised later entrants into the hemisphere.
"The first inhabitants of America, the Paleo-Indians, came from Siberia and crossed the Bering Strait stretch through Beringia and they adapted themselves to the continent," said INAH's Director for Sub-Aquatic Archaeology, Pilar Luna.
Experts believed the girl, named "Naia" after the water nymph from Green mythology, may have ventured into dark passages of a cave to find freshwater and fallen to her death.
Scientists long have debated the origins of the first people of the Americas. Many scientists think these hunter-gatherers crossed the former land bridge between 26,000 and 18,000 years ago and subsequently pushed into North and South America starting perhaps 17,000 years ago.
But the most ancient New World human remains have baffled scientists because, like Naia, they have narrower skulls and other features different from today's Native Americans.
theshortpenguin.com
