Discovery of perfectly preserved 13,000-year-old girl holds untold secrets of Americas

Scientific divers Alberto Nava Blank and Pedro Francisco Sanchez in 2014

Around 20,000 years ago, the first human began making their way into the Americas.

They travelled, it is believed, across an ancient region known as Beringia which no longer exists and is today covered in ocean.

Straddling the place known as the Bering Strait, it was a strip of land which, during the last Ice Age, drained of all its water and created a land corridor joining modern-day Russia and Alaska.

Ancient humans are believed to have made this arduous journey from Russia and Asia to the Americas, soon trickling through the northern continent and later making their way into central and southern America.

But the evidence is thin, and relics sparse, apart from one bombshell find that came from deep inside an underwater cavern in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula: the perfectly preserved remains of what is believed to be the first American.

The divers working

Nearly 13,000 years ago, Naia, as she is known today, likely fell to her death in a deep, dark pit.

Finding herself in a cavern, her remains stayed much as they had on the day of her death for the subsequent centuries, while civilisations sprouted across the globe.

She is, according to scientists, a beacon of light in the hunt for the genetic heritage of those who are believed to be the first people in the Americas.

Researchers discovered Naia’s remains in 2014 while carrying out underwater archaeological excavations, publishing their work in the journal Science.

She is one of the oldest humans ever found in the Americas, leading many to describe her as the continent’s “first American”, hailing from a group of ancient people anthropologists call Paleoamericans.

A diver seen with Naia’s skull

Genetic analysis of her remains suggests she is related to modern Native Americans, a vital clue in resolving the issue of whether the group called Native Americans are related to the first settlers of the land mass.

Dr James Chatters of Applied Paleoscience, the lead author of the study, wrote that the study promotes the view that “Native Americans and Paleoamericans share a homeland”.

Other genetic evidence from both modern Native Americans and ancient skeletons suggests that people from Siberia landed in eastern Beringia between 26,000 and 18,000 years ago, and they seemed to have moved south around 17,000 years ago, according to the team.

Researchers used mitochondrial DNA to reveal the girl’s identity, finding that she was around 12,000 to 13,000 years old and that her mitochondrial DNA belonged to Haplogroup D1.

Freezing Waters of Bering Sea Near Russia’s Chukotka Peninsula

It is a category only currently found in the Americas, but comes from Asian lineage, with some South American populations with this genetic signature today.

Around 29 percent of indigenous Chileans and Argentines have it, while 11 percent of Native Americans further north also have it.

According to Deborah Bolnick, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, Naia is related to modern Native Americans through her maternal line.