Eve of Naharon is the skeleton of a 25- to 30-year-old human female found in the Naharon section of the underwater cave Sistema Naranjal in Mexico near the town of Tulum, around south west of Cancún. The Naranjal subsystem is a part of the larger Sistema Ox Bel Ha. The skeleton is carbon dated to 13,600 years ago, which makes it one of the oldest documented human finds in the Americas. Other skeletons found within the cave are said to be between 11,000 and 14,000 years old.
Discovery
During the archaeological explorations in Naharon cenote located southwest of Cancun, the remains of Eve of Naharon were discovered and reported to the National Institute of Anthropology and History by Octavio del Río in 2000, as part of a first archaeological catalog of cenotes and caves in Quintana Roo. Later, the project grows to an archeological atlas that includes the rest of the cenotes in the Yucatan Peninsula, a project that was co-directed by Arturo Gonzales, Carmen Rojas, and Octavio Del Río. González, director of the Desert Museum in Saltillo, Mexico said, "We don't know how arrived and whether they came from the Atlantic, the jungle, or inside the continent, but we believe these finds are the oldest yet to be found in the Americas and may influence our theories of how the first people arrived." González and his team spent a total of 4 years excavating the remains, and their discovery changed the mind of experts as to where the first Americans may have originated from.
Significance
According to Arturo González, the director of the Desert Museum in Saltillo, Mexico, and the lead archaeologist of this project, the bone structure of the skeleton is more consistent with that of people from Southern Asia than that of people from Northern Asia. This similarity with Southern Asian skeletal types has called into question the timeline and geographic origin in the current theory of New World settlement by peoples from Northern Asia. This implies that people may not have come to America from North Asia through a land-bridge which is now underwater as previously thought, as many scientists believe that the first peoples of America arrived by land and by sea in coast hugging canoes from Northern Asia across what is now the Bering Strait. The first peoples filtered into the Americas from Asia in Paleolithic times, possibly continuing to arrive until around 10,000 B.C.E, when melting glaciers submerged the land bridge and isolated the American contents from the rest of the world. According to some scholars, the salt water now covering this site may have had an effect on the accuracy of the carbon dating.
According to the Bering Strait theory, people from Northeast Asia crossed on a land or ice bridge and entered America through Alaska. This may have happened during the last Ice Age.
