Oldest Human Remains Uncovered in Yucatan Cenote National Geographic | |
go to original August 29, 2017 |
While Hoyo Negro, or Black Hole, was an amazing finding on its own, it's home to an even more exceptional discovery, many millennia in the making. While exploring the cave, Alvarez found a skull, "and all of a sudden," as Nava recounts, "we discover the most complete, and the oldest human remains ever found in the Americas."
Led by Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History and supported by the National Geographic Society, Alberto Nava and an international group of scientists have spent years working to protect, recover, and study the skeleton. "We have an intact cranium. We have all her teeth. We have most of her vertebra, most of her ribs, all her limbs. We have the pelvis, and we have the pubic bone. It's just amazing," Nava says in wonderment.
"I feel proud of the discovery and we're all happy that we did it, but at the same time it's become this responsibility of seeing the site protected, seeing the research and the science done so that we can actually unravel all the secrets of Hoyo Negro," Nava says. "We're the first ones to interact with whatever is left of this human that lived during the last ice age."
That human was a teenage girl who lived about 13,000 years ago, before the cave was underwater. The Hoyo Negro team has affectionately dubbed her "Naia," after the water nymphs in ancient Greek mythology. "One of the researchers said, 'Okay, we got to give it a name,'" Nava remembers. "Because it becomes a different relationship. Now you're not talking about an 'it,' you're not talking about bone, you're talking about a person." And Nava thinks about the human element of the discovery frequently.
"The discoveries that we're making inside the cave in the Yucatán Peninsula give us a view of how life used to be and it gives you a sense of how small our existence is compared to what the planet has gone through, to what humans have gone through," says Nava. "For me, Hoyo Negro and Naia are the stars of this project, and we all work to bring their stories light so we understand a little bit better about where do we come from."
Related: Human Settlement in the Americas May Have Occurred in the Late Pleistocene (PLOS)
Related: Skeleton Stolen from Underwater Cave in Mexico Was One of Americas’ Oldest (Smithsonian)
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