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Hoyo Negro, Quintana Roo, skull - Likely to Predate End of the Last Ice Age

Submitted by bat400 on Sunday, 27 February 2011  Page Views: 4901

Pre-Columbianlex Alvarez, Franco Attolini, and Alberto (Beto) Nava have surveyed tens of thousands of feet of mazelike cave passages in the state of Quintana Roo. The team's relatively recent explorations of a large pit named Hoyo Negro (Black Hole, in Spanish), deep within a flooded cave, resulted in their breathtaking and once-in-a-lifetime discovery of the remains of an Ice Age mastodon and a human skull.

Hoyo Negro was reached by the PET (Projecto Espeleológico de Tulum) team after the divers traveled more than 4,000 feet [1,200 meters] through underwater passages using underwater propulsion vehicles, or scooters, which enabled them to cover long distances in the flooded cave system. The pit is approximately 200 feet [60 meters] deep and 120 feet [36 meters] in diameter and is located inside the Aktun-Hu cave system in the state of Quintana Roo, Mexico.

Approximately 12,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, the melting of the ice caps caused a dramatic rise in global sea levels, which flooded low lying coastal landscapes and cave systems. Many of the subterranean spaces that once provided people and animals with water and shelter became inundated and lost until the advent of cave diving.

Radiometric dating of the human bones from Hoyo Negro will have to wait for now, but its location within the cave, and its position relative to the mastodon remains, are suggestive of its antiquity.

Waitt Institute archaeologist and New World cave expert, Dominique Rissolo, offers a compelling argument for the importance of this site and similar discoveries. "The cenotes of Quintana Roo, Mexico, have emerged as one of the most promising frontiers for Paleoindian studies in the Americas.

"Recent discoveries of human remains deep within the region's flooded caverns, as well the bones of mastodons and other extinct species of Pleistocene megafauna, offer an extraordinarily rare glimpse into a period that witnessed the peopling of the New World.

"During the Late Pleistocene, these caves were dry. The first people to occupy what is now the Caribbean coast of Mexico wandered into these caves, where some ultimately met their demise.

"As the last glacial maximum came to end, the melting of the polar ice caps and continental ice sheets raised sea levels worldwide. The caves of the Yucatan Peninsula filled with water and the First Americans were hidden for millennia.

"It is within these dark reaches that cave explorers are discovering and documenting the oldest human skeletons yet found in the Western Hemisphere," Rissolo said.

For photos and much more of this story, see blogs.nationalgeographic.com.

Note: Ice Age mastodon and a human skull at the very bottom of the black abyss.

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