Seven years ago, a human skeleton was discovered in an underwater Mexican cave. Radiocarbon analysis showed that the age of the find is about 12 thousand years, and DNA analysis confirmed that the skeleton belonged to a representative (or rather, the representative – the skeleton was female) of the people who first conquered both American continents.
The study of these remains, conducted by a group of anthropologists led by James Chatters (James Chatters), allowed to recreate the living conditions of the “first Americans”. This life was, apparently, extremely difficult, full of adversity and deprivation.
A girl, 12 millennia ago drowned in an underwater cave, anthropologists called Naya. At the time of her death, she was between 15 and 17 years old. Naya was very fragile: the forearm bone, for example, was as thick as the little finger of James Chatterers. Subtlety of bones could result from constant malnutrition or parasitic infections, but the condition of the teeth speaks in support of the hypothesis of frequent hunger strikes.
The condition of the pelvic bones suggests that in her young years Naya managed to give birth to at least one child. Part of the pelvis was damaged, probably during the fall and later lost, but the surviving remains have characteristic curvatures, characteristic for women with thin bones and young women in childbirth.
The muscles of the upper body of Naya were developed very poorly: this can be judged from the smoothness of those places where once the muscles were attached to the bones. In the opinion of anthropologists, this indicates that Naya did not engage in agricultural work – she did not loosen the land, she did not grind the grain, she did not scrape the skins and did not carry weights. But her legs were very muscular: probably, the girl had to walk or run a lot.
“We tend to idelize the conditions in which the” first Americans “lived. In fact, everything was not quite like that, “sums up Chatter’s research. His colleague Gary Haynes (Gary Haynes), an archaeologist at the University of Nevada, believes that the lack of resources that made Nye such a fragile could be the result of climate change.
On the results of the study, Chatterers and his colleagues reported on March 30 at a meeting of the Society of American Archeology in Vancouver, briefly about it tells the news department of the journal Nature.
