Say Hello To Naia: The Earliest American Skeleton

Featured Image Credit: Daniel Riordan Araujo

A long time ago in a land… not so far away, and hundreds of feet below modern sea-level, there lived a teenage girl, now referred to as “Naia.” Named after a Greek mythological water nymph, Naia is the name for the remains of a North American female dated to be around 13,000 years old.

Naia was found in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, in a void-like cave deemed “Hoyo Negro”, which true to it’s nature, translates to Black Hole.

Image Credit: National Geographic

The explorers behind the find were only there for a “routine dive”, as underwater explorer Alberto Nava described. “Expecting to find more tunnels and more tunnels,” while mapping almost 19 miles of the Peninsula’s waters, they wound up swimming into the 200-foot wide cave, inside of which they weren’t expecting to find anything unusual.

That’s before they took a look around.

All it took was a sweep of a flashlight around the floor of the cave to kick off their extraordinary finds. The team first found remains of up to 9 different species of the Late Pleistocene era (12,000+ years ago), such as giant ground sloths, gomphotheres (an extinct elephant-like species related to mastodons), saber-toothed cats, and others… which is already an exciting day for the explorers.

Then, it became even more eventful when they turned to see an intact human skull lying upside down among the other bones, “and all of a sudden, we discover the most complete, and the oldest human remains, ever found in the Americas,” Nava said.

Image Credit: Paul Nicklen via National Geographic

The initial exploration took place in 2007, funded by National Geographic, and after the finds expanded to a collaboration with the Mexican Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (National Institute of Anthropology and History or INAH) to recover and preserve Naia’s skeleton as well as other remains found in the cave.

Watch what Alberto described as “the discovery of our lifetime,” below.