A teenage girl perhaps 13,000 years old has been found in a Mexican cave
Scientists said on Thursday genetic tests on her superbly preserved remains found by cave divers have answered questions about the origins of the Western Hemisphere’s first people and their relationship to today’s Native American populations.
Scientists exploring deep beneath the jungles of Mexico’s eastern Yucatán peninsula discovered the girl’s remains underwater alongside bones of more than two dozen beasts including saber-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 thousands upon thousands of years in a deeply submerged cave chamber before being discovered in 2007. The petite, slightly built girl – about 4 feet, 10 inches tall (1.47 meters) – is thought to have been 15 or 16 years old when she died.
She may have ventured into dark passages of a cave to find freshwater and fallen to her death into what archeologist James Chatters of the firm of Applied Paleoscience, one of the leaders of the study, called an “inescapable trap” 100 feet (30 meters) deep – a bell-shaped pit dubbed Hoyo Negro, “black hole” in Spanish.
Scientists said the chamber – more than 135 feet (40 meters) below sea level – was “a time capsule of the environment and human life” at the end of the Ice Age.
