Was Naia the first American?

One of the world’s oldest complete human skeletons has been found in a cave in Mexico - and sheds new light on who the first Americans were.Named ‘Naia’, the remains belong to a 15-16 girl who went underground to seek water 13,000 years ago during the last ice age.She plunged to her death in a large pit known as ‘Hoyo Negro’, Spanish for ‘black hole’, in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.She roamed Earth up to 13,000 years ago when the now flooded cave systems in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula were much the same, apart from the water level being much lower than it is now.Her almost complete remains, including an intact skull and preserved DNA, were lying 130 feet below sea level near a variety of extinct animals, such as an elephant like creature called a gomphothere.These helped scientists establish the age of the bones as between 12,000 and 13,000 years old.Her pristine preservation enabled the researchers to extract enough DNA to establish the prehistoric girl was an ancestor of the earliest Americans, who arrived from north east Asia between 15,000 and 20,000 years ago, and modern Native Americans.The ancestry of the earliest Americans is still debated because the facial features of the oldest American skeletons don't look much like those of modern Native Americans.'Modern Native Americans closely resemble people of China, Korea, and Japan,' James Chatters, lead author on the study, said, 'but the oldest American skeletons do not.'They have longer, narrower crania than later Native Americans, and smaller, shorter faces, too - more closely resembling modern peoples of Africa, Australia, and the Southern Pacific Rim.'This has led to speculation that perhaps the first Americans and Native Americans came from different homelands,' Chatters continued, 'or migrated from Asia at different stages in their evolution.'The new find suggests that America was not colonized by separate migration events from different parts of Eurasia. Rather, the earliest Americans represent an early population expansion out of Beringia.On the basis of genetics, modern Native Americans are thought to descend from Siberians who moved into eastern Beringia (the landmass connecting Asia and North America) between 26,000 and 18,000 years ago.(dailymail.co.uk) Bakudaily.az