Notice: This is the official website of the All Empires History Community (Reg. 10 Feb 2002)

  FAQ FAQ  Forum Search   Register Register  Login Login

Divers Find Ancient Skeleton in Mexico

 Post Reply Post Reply
Author
Jalisco Lancer View Drop Down
Sultan
Sultan

Retired AE Moderator

Joined: 07-Aug-2004
Location: Mexico
Online Status: Offline
Posts: 2112
  Quote Jalisco Lancer Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: Divers Find Ancient Skeleton in Mexico
    Posted: 09-Sep-2004 at 23:28

 

AP
Divers Find Ancient Skeleton in Mexico

Thu Sep 9, 5:47 PM ET
Add Science - AP to My Yahoo!

By JOHN RICE, Associated Press Writer

MEXICO CITY - Divers making dangerous probes through underwater caves near the Caribbean coast have discovered what appears to be one of oldest human skeletons in the Americas, archaeologists announced at a seminar that was ending on Friday.

Photo
AP Photo


Missed Tech Tuesday?
We rank the best PDAs, share some synching tips, and show how PDAs will only get better
.

 

The report by a team from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History exploits a new way of investigating the past. Most coastal settlements by early Americans now lie deep beneath the sea, which during the Ice Age was hundreds of feet lower than now.

Researchers at the international "Early Man in America" seminar here also reported other ancient finds including a California bone that is a rival for the title of the oldest in the Americas.

The discoveries fall close to the start of the time that traditional theories say a so-called Clovis culture could have moved from Asia to Alaska over a temporary land corridor that began to open about 13,500 years ago.

Many academics argue that new discoveries, especially in South America, prove the Clovis people found existing inhabitants, who may have arrived by hopscotching past the northern ice fields in small boats.

Arturo Gonzalez said his team discovered at least three skeletons in caves along the Caribbean coast of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula in 2001 and 2002. Photos showed two remarkably well preserved.

"It's something that I had been dreaming of for many years," said Gonzalez, 39, who has combined diving and research since he was a teenager. "To find a person who had walked those caves was like a treasure."

Gonzalez said the bones must date from before the time that waters gradually seeped through the caves 8,000 to 9,000 years ago as Ice Age glaciers melted and sea level rose by about 400 feet worldwide.

Tests on charcoal found beside one female skeleton would place it at least 10,000 years ago. An expert at the University of California, Riverside, dated it as 11,670 radiocarbon years old which would translate to well over 13,000 calendar years.

If confirmed, "that would be the oldest" radio carbon date in the Americas obtained from a human bone, said archaeology textbook author Stuart Fiedel.

Fiedel, a defender of the "Clovis first" school, said the oldest estimate for the cave find still fits the Clovis time frame, though narrowly.

Larry Murphy, chief of the Submerged Resources Center for the U.S. National Park Service, said in a telephone interview that the Mexican exploration was "one of the first systematic studies of human materials associated with a submarine cave."

The discovery helps prove that humans inhabited the Yucatan at least 5,000 years before the famed Maya culture began building monuments at sites such as nearby Tulum.

Gonzalez said the skeleton did not appear to be Mayan, but with no tools yet found, almost nothing is known of those first inhabitants.

Gonzalez said cave divers had sometimes mentioned seeing skeletons and he convinced skeptical officials to finance a survey of the water holes that dot the Yucatan, a limestone shelf.

Extensive, flooded caves wind off from some of those holes. Many were above ground during the Ice Age and Gonzalez speculated people may have used them as paths down to fresh water.

Gonzalez said the oldest find was made 404 yards into a cave, more than 65 feet below sea level, during expeditions that can be extremely dangerous.

 

It took repeated trips to record the sites and excavate the bones, which then required two years of preservation.

Team co-director Carmen Rojas said the divers had 40 minutes to wind their way through the cave to the site, 20 minutes to work there and 40 minutes to swim back, followed by 20 to 60 minutes of decompression time.

"You train five years for those 20 minutes," she said.

Meanwhile, John Johnson of the University of California, Santa Barbara, said an elaborate restudy of a woman's femur found on Santa Rosa Island in California's Channel Islands established a calendar-year age of 13,200 to 13,500 years. It had been calculated at about 1,000 years less when found in 1959.

Both discoveries would be significantly older than the skeleton known Kennewick Man 9,300-year-old paleoindian remains found by teenagers along a Washington state riverbank in 1996.

Until now, the Americas have produced only 25 bones or skeletons dated as more than 8,000 years old, said Silvia Gonzalez of John Moores University in Liverpool, England. But she told the conference that she would soon publish a paper establishing that humans occupied a site near Puebla east of Mexico City 21,000 to 28,000 years ago.

Back to Top
cattus View Drop Down
Arch Duke
Arch Duke
Avatar
Retired AE Moderator

Joined: 02-Aug-2004
Online Status: Offline
Posts: 1803
  Quote cattus Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 10-Sep-2004 at 12:58

the article i posted earlier doesnt mention the Santa Rosan femur.

http://www.allempires.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=514& PN=1

the Kennewick Man mentioned in your article was very controversial here in my state. He pre-dates other native americans and has no mongoloid features. He is evidently a caucasian.

He actually kind of looks like Jean-Leauc Picard.

Back to Top
Cywr View Drop Down
King
King
Avatar
Retired AE Moderator

Joined: 03-Aug-2004
Online Status: Offline
Posts: 6003
  Quote Cywr Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 10-Sep-2004 at 13:24
He actually kind of looks like Jean-Leauc Picard.


Maybe he fell though a hole in the space-time continuim, damn Geordie couldn't fix the sub-space frequencies in time

But yeah, the old theory of the 12,000 year ago migration being the only one is taking a battering, looks like there were multiple from a lot of places.
Arrrgh!!"
Back to Top
cattus View Drop Down
Arch Duke
Arch Duke
Avatar
Retired AE Moderator

Joined: 02-Aug-2004
Online Status: Offline
Posts: 1803
  Quote cattus Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 10-Sep-2004 at 13:41

 yes, if they find a banana clip in the area, then i will be suspicious

your right about the old theory taking a battering, current native americans are starting buzz like bees.

Back to Top
Guests View Drop Down
Guest
Guest
  Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-Sep-2004 at 18:00

>the Kennewick Man mentioned in your article was very controversial here in my >state. He pre-dates other native americans

Nope.  There are at least two PaleoIndians older than him (Buhl Woman & Wizard's Beach Man, probably the Marmes Burials as well) that closely match modern Native Americans.

For that matter, Penon III (AKA "Penon Woman") from Mexico was ALSO initially claimed to look White, but craniometric studies on her (by Pucciarelli, & by Gonzalez-Jose) have revealed that she closely matches modern Aztec from the same region (to a lesser but still significant degree, she also matched a scattering of North & South American Indians including the Pericu from Baja California, & Brazilian PaleoIndians from Lagoa Santa).

In general (see Powell & Neves' "Craniofacial Morphology of the First Americans" in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology), PaleoIndians fall into 3 rough clusters, most closely matching Australasians, Polynesians, SE Asians, NE Asians, and Native Americans.

>and has no mongoloid features.

Nope, read the scientific study on him at http://www.cr.nps.gov/aad/kennewick/powell_rose.htm

His features were a mix of what you'll find in Native Americans & Asians & Europeans (he's what is called proto-Mongoloid or sometimes proto-Caucasoid, although proto-Mongoloid is more accurate since the features first showed up in Asia.  People with his general type of features later evolved into "Mongoloids" in Asia, into "Caucasians" in Europe, and into "Native Americans" in the Americas.)

> He is evidently a caucasian.

Not even close.  Caucasians were the second LEAST similar racial population to him... only Africans were more distant.

He most closely matches various Asian, Pacific, and Native American peoples.

When reading the report, pay special attention to the data tables.  Of the two cranial databases used for comparison, the Howells database had only 3 Native American samples (despite the Americas making up 43% of the planet's habitable surface) & so is virtually worthless in determining affinity to Native Americans.  Not surprisingly, analyses using just it resulted in very low probabilities for ANY world population.  Native Americans showed up here, but marginally less so than Polynesians & Japanese aborigines, both of whom have genetic & craniometric affinities to modern Native Americans as well.

The Hanihara database had something like 3 times as many Native American samples (still underrepresented, but it's a start).  Using it, or a combination of it and the Howells, Beringian & Native American groups pop up as the closest matches.  More significantly, FINALLY the analyses start giving probabilities of a match higher than a few percent.  See http://www.cr.nps.gov/aad/kennewick/p_rtable12.htm and http://www.cr.nps.gov/aad/kennewick/p_rtable13.htm for matches as close at 90% or more.  (BTW, Chukchi are from Siberia right next to the Bering Strait, and have intermarried with Siberian Eskimos quite a bit).

The Chatters reconstruction below is totally invalid.  Chatters made it with the help of a local junior college art teacher, NEITHER of them had ever made a reconstruction.  Despite the total lack of Caucasian affinities revealed in the study, they averaged Japanese & AMERICAN WHITE data for skin/tissue thickness, which biased the results in the direction of looking more Caucasian than it was.  Worse, the method they used relies heavily on artistic license.... and Chatters specifically went looking for White people who he thought might match the skeleton.  He's admitted in interviews that he "knew" what the reconstruction would look like MONTHS before it was finished, after seeing actor Patrick Stewart on a late night rerun of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" & "deciding" that Kennewick looked like him.

>He actually kind of looks like Jean-Leauc Picard.

See commentary above.

And go to

http://www.alias.com/eng/community/customer_stories/kennewic k_man.jhtml

 for details on a SCIENTIFIC reconstruction that was made (Smithsonian scientist Doug Owsley, who helped make it, is one of the plaintiffs in the Kennewick Man lawsuit.  So if anything, he's biased in favor of Kennewick NOT looking Asian/Native American.)

See the scientific reconstruction itself at

http://www.alias.com/eng/community/galleries/image_gallery/k ennewick_man/index.jhtml;$sessionid$EDRTDFCIGUBG1QCLCWSCFEWA JMK0KIV0

Note that the beard is unlikely, they put it in since Ainu have heavy beards (as do some Asians).  But on the other hand, many full blooded Native Americans CAN grow sparse beards (traditionally, like in much of Asia, most tribes plucked or shaved their facial hair).

Kenuchelover.

Back to Top
cattus View Drop Down
Arch Duke
Arch Duke
Avatar
Retired AE Moderator

Joined: 02-Aug-2004
Online Status: Offline
Posts: 1803
  Quote cattus Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-Sep-2004 at 18:19
what has since happened to his remains?Were they given back to a local tribe for proper burial.
Back to Top
Tobodai View Drop Down
Tsar
Tsar
Avatar
Retired AE Moderator

Joined: 03-Aug-2004
Location: Antarctica
Online Status: Offline
Posts: 4310
  Quote Tobodai Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-Sep-2004 at 20:56
there were definatley people in the Americas before the Bering Straight migrations, but we dont know yet who they were.
"the people are nothing but a great beast...
I have learned to hold popular opinion of no value."
-Alexander Hamilton
Back to Top
Cywr View Drop Down
King
King
Avatar
Retired AE Moderator

Joined: 03-Aug-2004
Online Status: Offline
Posts: 6003
  Quote Cywr Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-Sep-2004 at 21:30
IIRC, the Neolithic Picard guy was classified as vaugely 'caucasoid' which doesn't necessarily mean 'European'.

what has since happened to his remains?Were they given back to a local tribe for proper burial.


Handed over and buried IIRC.


Edited by Cywr
Arrrgh!!"
Back to Top
 Post Reply Post Reply

Forum Jump Forum Permissions View Drop Down

Bulletin Board Software by Web Wiz Forums® version 9.56a [Free Express Edition]
Copyright ©2001-2009 Web Wiz

This page was generated in 0.109 seconds.