WORLD
MEXICAN ARCHAEOLOGISTS EXTRACT 10,000 YEAR-OLD SKELETON FROM FLOODED CAVE
Baku, August 25 (AZERTAC). One of the earliest human skeletons of America, which belonged to a person that lived more than 10,000 years ago, in the Ice Age, was recovered by Mexican specialists from a flooded cave in Quintana Roo. The information it has lodged for centuries will reveal new data regarding the settlement of the Americas.
The Young Man of Chan Hol, as the skeleton is known among the scientific community, due to the slight tooth wear it presents, which indicates an early age, is the fourth of our earliest ancestors found in the American Continent, and has been studied as part of a National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) project. After 3 years of studies conducted In Situ to prevent information loss, the Chan Hol skeleton was subtracted from the water by a team of specialists. The Young Man of Chan Hol, named after the cenote it was found in, was recovered in a 542 meters long and 8.3 deep cave where stalagmites abound, and is reached after going through flooded, dark and difficult labyrinths. UNAM (National University of Mexico) physical anthropologists that studied the remains think they were placed in the cave after a funerary ceremony that took place by the end of Pleistocene, when the sea level was 150 meters lower, before the caves, probably walked by this person, got flooded.
Sixty per cent of the skeleton was collected: representative bones of 4 extremities, vertebrae, ribs and the skull, as well as several teeth. Physical anthropologists find this “great,” since in cases of 10,000 years old samples usually only the skull or jawbone is found, and sometimes, 20 or 30 percent of the skeleton. The skeleton of the Young Man of Chan Hol must stay as they are for several months until their consolidation, before undergoing morphoscopical studies (of the skull and bones) to verify if it shares morphological and physical features with the other 3 skeletons found in the caves; gender, age, cause of death and age at the time of death will be confirmed too. Carbon 14 Dating will be conducted as well as Computed Axial Tomography (CAT) studies to determine composition, density and interior form of the bones.
