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

PBS

The remarkably intact skeleton can help researchers shine a light on how the earliest Americans lived.

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.

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.