13,000-year-old teenager was early American
By Elizabeth Landau, CNN
updated 6:32 PM EDT, Fri May 16, 2014
CNN) -- A teenage girl may have gotten lost in a cave looking for water, nearly 13,000 years ago. Naia, as she's known today, likely fell to her death in a deep, dark pit.
Now, her remains are shining a light on the genetic heritage of what we believe are the first people in the Americas.
Researchers have discovered Naia's bones in a pit in an underwater cave system in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Her skeleton, described in the journal Science this week, is one of the oldest of any humans found in the Americas. She comes from a group of ancient people anthropologists call Paleoamericans.
Genetic analysis of her remains suggests that Naia is related to modern Native Americans. It's a clue to resolving the issue of whether the group we call Native Americans are indeed related to the first settlers of this land mass.
This study promotes the view that "Native Americans and Paleoamericans share a homeland," said James Chatters of Applied Paleoscience, who was the lead author of the study.
That homeland is called Beringia, also called the Bering Land Bridge, that connected what is now Siberia and Alaska. The new research goes against the idea that the first Americans may have come over in separate migrations from Europe and Asia.
Other genetic evidence from both modern Native Americans and ancient skeletons indicates that people of Siberia landed in eastern Beringia between 26,000 and 18,000 years ago, the study said. They seem to have moved south after 17,000 years ago.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/16/world/americas/skeleton-mexico-americans/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
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