DNA from skull links Ice Age girl to Native Americans alive today

The divers called her Naia, for water nymph, because they discovered her teenage remains in a dark, underwater cave in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.

She had been hidden there for more than 12,000 years along with the bones of dozens of extinct Ice Age beasts and divers quickly spotted her skull as they swept the chamber with flashlights.

It was a small cranium laying upside-down with a perfect set of teeth and dark eye sockets looking back at us, recalled diver Alberto Nava of Bay Area Underwater Explorers, a nonprofit conservation organization based in Berkeley.

On Thursday, researchers published a formal analysis of Naia's skeletal remains in the journal Science, calling it the oldest, most complete specimen ever discovered in the Americas.

The study authors say the buck-toothed 15- or 16-year-old girl did not resemble todays Native Americans her cheeks were narrow and her forehead very high but that her mitochondrial DNA reveals she is related to 11% of living American Indians, and links them genetically to a population of early humans who inhabited a land now submerged beneath the Bering Sea.

The researchers say the girl was probably very slight and stood just 4 feet, 10 inches tall. Her eyes were wide-set and low, and her nose was broad.

Carbon-dating of her teeth and isotope data from crystals that formed on her bones helped study authors determine that the girl lived 12,000 to 13,000 years ago in what would have been a very parched environment. They believe she was probably searching for water when she entered a dark, underground cave and then plummeted 100 feet into the massive chamber now called Hoyo Negro, or black hole.

Unable to escape her hip bone shattered from the fall she died amid a menagerie of similarly doomed megafauna, including saber-toothed cats, elephant-like gomphotheres and giant sloths. As the Ice Age ended and glaciers melted, sea levels rose and slowly filled the chamber with water, sealing it off from humanity.

Or at least it did until 2007, when scuba divers first explored the natural ossuary and discovered a time capsule of Central American life at the end of the Ice Age, according to study leader James Chatters, a paleoarchaeologist at Applied Paleoscience, a private research company in Bothell, Wash.

Its in many ways like a mini La Brea Tar Pits, but without the tar and considerably better preservation, Chatters said of the Hoyo Negro site.

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DNA from skull links Ice Age girl to Native Americans alive today