Skulls from the Yucatn Peninsula a Clue to Early American Settlers

[Judi Lynn]

The crania of individuals who lived in the Yucatán Peninsula during the late Pleistocene show a high degree of anatomical diversity among them, and their skull shapes differ from that of other North American populations of the time.

Alejandra Manjarrez
Apr 7, 2020

Each year, more than 1 million people visit Xplor, a subaquatic theme park located a few kilometers south of Playa del Carmen, a popular tourist town on the Caribbean coast of southeast Mexico. Visitors swim in submerged caves, tear through the jungle in all-terrain vehicles, and zip line on hammocks—all of them likely oblivious to the human remains locked away in a laboratory on site and the scientists who are scrutinizing those remains for clues to the people and animals that lived in this very region around 10,000 years ago.

This field laboratory, associated with the Museo del Desierto in Coahuila, Mexico, is led by Jerónimo Avilés, an underwater speleologist and director of the Instituto de la Prehistoria de América AC. It’s the first place where items from underwater archaeological discoveries by his team are analyzed before they are sent to other laboratories in Mexico. In one room, for example, fossils go through a dehumidification process to prevent any fungal colonization, not uncommon in such a tropical climate.

The lab mostly houses 3-D printed replicas of skeletal remains found in the submerged caves in the state of Quintana Roo. Among them are copies of the skulls of humans who inhabited the Yucatán Peninsula during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, roughly 13,000–8,000 years ago.

Recent work has focused on describing the morphological diversity of those individuals. Avilés and team led by Mark Hubbe of the Ohio State University compared the anatomical landmarks of four of the Pleistocene-Holocene skulls with those of crania from modern populations across the globe. Their results, published January 29 in PLOS ONE, indicate that each ancient skull shared features with a different modern population, suggesting a high degree of morphological diversity among these individuals, and, potentially, among early North American settlers.

More:
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/skulls-from-the-yucatn-peninsula-a-clue-to-early-american-settlers-67389