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One of the oldest skeletons ever seen in the Americas was found in a flooded cave - and it could reshape our understanding of human history

Feb 10, 2018, 00:06 IST

Naia's skullPBS

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Deep within a flooded cave in the remote Mexican jungle, archaeologists came across a stunning find: An almost completely intact skeleton of a teenage girl.

A new documentary from PBS's NOVA, "The First Face of America," investigates the bones, and what they reveal could be a critical piece of evidence for the decades-long effort to understand the origins of Native Americans.

The skeleton was first discovered by a team of underwater divers in 2007. Snce then, the skeleton has been excavated and analyzed by archaeologists and forensic anthropologists to paint a complete picture of how it lived and died.

After the bones were extracted from the cave and brought to a lab in Mexico City, the researchers were astonished to learn that the items were over 13,000 years old - and could be one of the oldest examples of human remains ever found in North America.

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Researchers think the find, which has been linked through DNA analysis to similar finds in Alaska and present-day Native American groups, is proof that all Native Americans descended from a single population of intrepid hunter-gatherers who crossed a land bridge from Siberia 15,000 years ago.

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