Having crossed the Bering Strait, people first came to the American continent about 15 thousand years ago. Judging by the results of a new study by American and Mexican anthropologists, a very difficult life awaited them in America.
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, a representative - the skeleton turned out to be female) of the people, who first conquered both American continents.
A study of these remains by a team of anthropologists led by James Chatters has recreated the living conditions of the "first Americans." This life was, apparently, extremely difficult, full of hardships and hardships.
The girl who drowned in an underwater cave 12 millennia ago was named Naya by anthropologists. 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 James Chatters' little finger. The thinness of the bones could be the result of chronic malnutrition or parasitic infections, but the condition of the teeth supports 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 a fall and later lost, but the surviving remains have characteristic curvatures characteristic of women with thin bones and young women in labor.
The muscles of Naya's upper body were very poorly developed: this can be judged by the smoothness of those places where muscle fibers were once attached to the bones. According to anthropologists, this suggests that Naya was not engaged in agricultural work - she did not loosen the earth, did not grind grain, did not scrape the skins and did not carry heavy loads. But her legs were very muscular: probably, the girl had to walk or run a lot.
“We tend to idolize the conditions in which the“early Americans”lived. In fact, it was not quite so, - sums up the study Chatters. His colleague Gary Haynes, an archaeologist at the University of Nevada, believes that the lack of resources that made Naya so fragile could be due to climate change.
Chatters and his colleagues spoke about the results of the study on March 30 at a meeting of the Society of American Archeology in Vancouver, briefly about it in the news section of the journal Nature.
Promotional video:
