Young man of Chan Hol.

• Author: Hardman, Chris
• Position: !Ojo!

The desire to know who the first Americans were and where they came from has fueled vigorous academic debates and led to complicated expeditions into remote jungles. In recent years, scientists have been looking below ground to the mysterious world of underground caves for answers to those questions. The Yucatán peninsula in Mexico, with its underground system of flooded limestone caves, has been particularly fruitful for archaeologists. A recent discovery from the Chan Hol cave in Quintana Roo has yielded a skeleton that is more than 10,000 years old, making it one of the earliest human skeletons found in the Americas.

With 60 percent of the skeleton intact, the Chan Hol skeleton is extremely valuable to archaeologists. Typically with a sample that old, only the skull or jawbone is found. The Chan Hol skeleton still has extremities, vertebrae, ribs, the skull, and teeth. Using those remains, physical anthropologists Alejandro Terrazas and Martha Benavente, both from the National Autonomous University of MeNeo (UNAM), estimated that the skeleton was from a young person, almost certainly a male. As a result, scientists have named him "Young Man of Chan Hol." Curiously the bones were placed with the legs bent to the left and the arms extended to both sides of the body. Scientists are unsure what this unusual position means because no other skeleton has been found in that way.

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Anthropologists suggest that the bones were placed in the cave after a funeral ceremony. At that time, the sea level was 500 feet lower and people could walk in the 1,780 feet long and 27 feet deep cave. Today the cave can only be reached by skilled speleodivers making their way...