A 12,000-year-old tragedy has led to the incredible scientific discovery of the oldest and most complete human skeleton found in the New World, according to a new study.
The remains of a teenage girl who fell 100 feet down in a deep hole in a Mexican cave thousands of years ago, likely to instant death, have given scientists new clues to Native American ancestry, The Associated Press reported.
She was likely around age 15 or 16 and could have been looking for water when she tumbled into the cave, said lead study author James Chatters of Applied Paleoscience, a consulting firm in Bothell, Wash., as reported by the AP.
Unearthed in 2007 by divers who found it by chance, the nearly complete skeleton has been named "Naia" after the Greek myth of water nymphs. Researchers say the girl looked "about the opposite" of modern Native Americans and had a narrow face "with wide-set eyes and a low, prominent forehead; a low, flat nose; and outward-projecting teeth," according to National Geographic.
The new findings, which have been published in the journal Science, include a revealing analysis of Naia's mitochondrial DNA. The researchers managed to extract DNA from a molar, finding a distinctive genetic marker that makes Naia a likely ancestor of today's native peoples.
"We were able to identify her genetic lineage with high certainty," said Ripan Malhi, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois whose lab was one of three that analyzed Naia's mtDNA, as quoted by Smithsonian.com. "This shows that living Native Americans and these ancient remains of the girl we analyzed all came from the same source population during the initial peopling of the Americas."
The discovery is an important one for scientists who have long been working to figure out why Native Americans don't resemble the first humans discovered in the New World.
"This is the first time that we have genetic data from a skeleton that exhibits these distinctive skull and facial features," said Deborah Bolnick, study co-author and an anthropological geneticist at the University of Texas at Austin, as quoted by National Geographic.
See Now: OnePlus 6: How Different Will It Be From OnePlus 5?
