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Mexican Zapotec Native American Indian history - page 1 of 7

Scientists in Britain have identified the oldest skeleton ever found on the American continent in a discovery that raises fresh questions about the accepted theory of how the first people arrived in the New World. The skeleton's perfectly preserved skull belonged to a 26-year-old woman who died during the last ice age on the edge of a giant prehistoric lake which once formed around an area now occupied by the sprawling suburbs of Mexico City.

Scientists from Liverpool's John Moores University and Oxford's Research Laboratory of Archaeology have dated the skull to about 13,000 years old, making it 2,000 years older than the previous record for the continent's oldest human remains. The most intriguing aspect of the skull is that it is long and narrow and typically Caucasian in appearance, like the heads of white, western Europeans today. Modern-day Native Americans have short, wide skulls, typical of their Mongoloid ancestors, who are known to have crossed into America from Asia on an ice-age land bridge that had formed across the Bering Strait.

The extreme age of Peñon woman has introduced two scenarios. Possibly there was a much earlier migration of Caucasian-like people with long, narrow skulls across the Bering Strait and these people were later replaced by a subsequent migration of Mongoloid people; or alternatively, and more controversially, a group of Stone Age people from Europe made the perilous sea journey across the Atlantic Ocean many thousands of years before Columbus or the Vikings. The first Americans may have actually been Europeans. They were definitely not Mongoloid in appearance.

The skull and the almost-complete skeleton of Peñon woman were originally unearthed in 1959 and were thought to be no older than about 5,000 years. Peñon woman formed part of a collection of 27 early humans in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, that had not been accurately dated using the most modern techniques. In 2002, at the insistence of geologist Silvia Gonzalez, who had a hunch the bones were older than previously thought; the remains were taken to Oxford University to be carbon-dated. Small bone samples from five skeletons were analyzed using the latest carbon techniques, and dated the skull to about 13,000 years old. The study was peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in the journal Human Evolution.

At 13,000 years old, Peñon woman would have lived at a time when there was a vast, shallow lake in the Basin of Mexico, a naturally enclosed high plain around today's Mexico City, which would have been cooler and much wetter than it is today. Huge mammals would have roamed the region's grasslands, such as the world's largest mammoths with 12-foot tusks, bear-sized giant sloths, armadillos as big as a car and fearsome carnivores such as the saber-toothed tiger and great black bear. The bones of Peñon woman, named after the "little heel" of land that would have jutted into the ancient lake, were well developed and healthy, showing no signs of malnutrition. The two oldest skulls analyzed were both dolichocephalic, meaning that they were long and narrow-headed. The younger ones were short and broad, brachycephalic, which are typical of today's Native Americans and their Mongoloid ancestors from Asia.

The findings have a resonance with the skull and skeleton of Kennewick man, who was unearthed in 1996 in the Columbia River at the town of Kennewick in Washington state. The skull, estimated to be 8,400 years old, is also long and narrow and typically Caucasian.

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Mexican Zapotec Native American Indian history - Penon woman - page 2

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