For more than 12,000 years, the adolescent girl’s bones lay deep in a Mexican cave. Now analysis of her skeleton is revealing details of her harsh existence in the early Americas — which probably included pregnancy and childbirth before death at a young age.
The bones show that the girl, whom researchers nicknamed Naia, is likely to have travelled long distances on foot, but didn’t carry much on her journeys. The skeleton also reveals that Naia experienced severe and repeated nutritional stress that scarred her bones and teeth, according to results presented on 30 March at a meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Vancouver, Canada.
For that work, divers examined Naia in the water-filled cavern in the Yucatán Peninsula where she was discovered in 2007. But intruders subsequently tampered with her remains. To prevent further meddling, the bones were gently carried out of the cave in 2014 and 2016 — which also gave scientists easier access to the specimens.
From Western Digs:
On a ranch near the Santa Maria River in northern Chihuahua, researchers have unearthed more than 18,000 artifacts, including thousands of stone flakes, cores, and hammers, along with 370 projectile points, and a dozen stone ovens.
But the most surprising find has been the grave of a teenage girl, who was interred among the rocks, alone and unadorned, some 3,200 years ago.
Her remains, researchers say, may help unlock the history of the people who brought agriculture to this arid region, and who were the first known farmers of corn in the Chihuahuan Desert.
