Mxico City: Mexican researchers plan to extract the more than 12 000-year-old skeleton of a teenage girl whose discovery has given clues about the origins of the first Native Americans.
Archaeologists have removed a molar and fragment of a rib of the girl dubbed “Naia”, believed to have been 15 or 16 years old when she fell in a hole 12 000 to 13 000 years ago.
Naia’s remains were found in 2007, submerged in an underwater cave with the bones of saber tooth tigers, giant sloths and cave bears, some 41m below sea level.
Pilar Luna, the co-ordinator of the project, said yesterday that Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History may extract the rest of the skeleton as early as this year.
Naia may have descended from people who migrated from Asia across the Bering Strait, over a land mass that was known as Beringia.
Sapa-AFP