- 24/07/2025
Documentary, NOVA First Face of America
Category
đ
LearningTranscript
00:00Deep underground, in a flooded Mexican cave system, divers make an amazing discovery.
00:12The feeling is like those outer space black holes that suck all your life.
00:18I see no reflection of my life. The heart starts to be very hot.
00:25At the bottom of a vast sunken pit, a forest of prehistoric bones.
00:34In their midst, the skull of a girl.
00:40It's just incredible to see another human in this environment. It's amazing.
00:45He said, you just can't tell anyone because we've never really seen anything quite like this before.
00:52Who was she? How did she die?
00:57It's kind of a missing link, right? And suddenly you are sitting with that.
01:03The mystery of the girl in the cave leads scientists on a journey into the world of the very first humans to arrive in the Americas.
01:14Who were they? How did they get here? Finally, there are answers.
01:20It's the most remarkable project that I'll probably ever work on.
01:24They discovered the way of life of an ice age people.
01:27Rapidly moving big game hunters.
01:30But it all begins with the story of a girl who lived 13,000 years ago.
01:37Between 15 and 16 years of age.
01:44We know a lot more about the early lives of the Americans than we would have ever known without her.
01:49And what happened on the day she died?
01:53Fracture at death.
01:55Fracture at death.
02:04Astonishing new finds and a glimpse of the first face of America.
02:12Right now on NOVA.
02:25In a dark cave deep underwater.
02:29A cache of prehistoric bones.
02:32Ice age animals that walked the earth thousands of years ago.
02:37Among the ancient bones.
02:40The skeleton of a girl.
02:43One of the very first Americans.
02:46Her skeleton is so complete.
02:50It will allow scientists to reconstruct her life and death in amazing detail.
02:56Providing answers to questions that have long puzzled them about the peopling of the Americas.
03:03In her death, she left us this incredible record of the life of these earliest people.
03:1013,000 years after she died, a young girl launches an exciting archeological adventure.
03:19Finally unlocking a great mystery.
03:22How and when did humans first enter the new world?
03:27In the remote jungles of Yucatan and Mexico, a team of cave divers intrigued by reports of prehistoric bones is on its way to explore a system of underground cenotes.
03:52It's a dangerous undertaking.
04:02Beneath the surface of the Yucatan Peninsula, the cenotes are a vast network of underground caves and tunnels.
04:11They stretch for hundreds of miles through the limestone bedrock of the peninsula.
04:17They were once dry.
04:20But flooded at the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago.
04:27Only a fraction of the network has been explored.
04:34The possibilities of getting trapped, lost or running out of air are ever present.
04:44Over the years, dozens of experienced divers have drowned in these flooded sinkholes.
04:51The
05:02The
05:06The
05:11Because they don't know how big the cenote system is, they prepared carefully.
05:16Their tanks have a special mix of oxygen, nitrogen and helium that will allow them to dive deep.
05:25They also have re-breathers that recycle their air, extending their dive time.
05:33Propelled by underwater scooters, they travel along submerged tunnels for almost an hour.
05:39In the first passages of the cenote, they noticed that guide wires have been laid.
05:46A sign that someone has explored these tunnels before them.
05:51But before long, the lines end.
05:58They are now in a part of the cenote system that is completely unknown.
06:13With no idea of what lies ahead, they press on.
06:20Suddenly, the floor and walls of the tunnel drop away.
06:28At the end of this tunnel, we can see darkness, and then everything was black.
06:35I was in front, and when I see no reflection of my life, the heart starts to beat very hard.
06:49They find themselves suspended in a vast, watery pit.
06:59The feeling is like we were faced with one of those outer space black holes that suck all your light.
07:06Then I'm floating in the dark.
07:10You can't even see the floor.
07:12You can't even see the next wall.
07:16The black hole, Ollo Negro, is so big, the beams of their flashlights cannot find its floor.
07:29Breathless with excitement, they begin their descent.
07:33Finally, at a depth of over a hundred feet, their flashlights detect the bottom.
07:51And reveal a treasure trove of ancient bones beyond their wildest dreams.
07:58All the southern linguists are finding bones.
08:02We see this huge pelvis.
08:04And there was a beautiful broken femur on top of a rock.
08:08Big bones, we knew, could be something similar to an elephant.
08:15Here is the massive thigh bone of an extinct elephant.
08:20The skull of a cave bear.
08:24A giant sloth.
08:26The floor of the Ollo is littered with over 20 skeletons of long extinct Ice Age species.
08:39The most amazing find comes last.
08:41Just as we thought we couldn't get any better, all of a sudden we go a little bit up.
08:46There is this human skull.
08:53It's amazing.
08:54I mean, this is a discovery of our life's time.
08:55It's not going to get any better than this.
08:56The rest of the skeleton is not far away.
08:57A whole human skeleton surrounded by the bones of Ice Age megafauna has never been found before.
09:09Who is it?
09:10How did this person get here?
09:11And when?
09:15For many months the divers explore the Ollo, taking bone samples and photos.
09:16Finally, they decide to study it somewhere.
09:17They've found somewhere, the Ollo is filtered, and by the bones of Ice Age megafauna has never been
09:19found before.
09:22Who is it?
09:23How did this person get here?
09:24And when?
09:25For many months the divers explore the Ollo, taking bone samples and photos.
09:43Finally, they decide to send them to the Director of Subaquatic Archaeology
09:47at Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History, Pilar Luna.
09:57In 2009, Alejandro Ălvarez got in touch with me
10:01about an extremely important finding a place called Ollo Negro.
10:06The news was very exciting because I had always believed
10:10that there is much to be discovered in this area of the Yucatan Peninsula
10:15about the best and the first people to populate the Americas.
10:23Pilar decided to send a CD of the divers' photos
10:27to the scientist who has studied more ancient human remains
10:30from the Americas than any other.
10:34Jim Chatters.
10:36I said, I've been looking at your CD. Do you want to know what you have?
10:39She said, yes, no one's been able to tell us.
10:44And I said, well, you have an adolescent female.
10:49And she said, would you like to take over the study of the human skeleton
10:54to work with ancient humans and extinct animals at the same time?
11:00Nobody's been able to do that before.
11:01Knowing that the skeleton they have found is a young girl,
11:07the divers give her the name of a mythological water nymph, Naya.
11:13You get a connection and you get some more respect if we have a name.
11:18The Naya was a kind of water nymph.
11:21It's a little bit related to the spirit of the cave.
11:24Jim must wait to examine Naya's skeleton until the divers retrieve her.
11:32But from a few bone and tooth fragments they bring him,
11:35he can at least try to find out how long ago she lived.
11:40He hopes a radiocarbon dating lab will give him the dates he needs.
11:45It proves to be difficult.
11:50To get radiocarbon dates, it's necessary to extract proteins such as collagen,
11:56which contain carbon.
11:59But her long sojourn underwater has destroyed all the collagen in Naya's bones.
12:06The problem we have is in tropical environments,
12:08bone does not produce good radiocarbon dates.
12:11The protein part of the bone is dissolved away by bacteria in warm weather.
12:15And so what we're trying is sort of second best, which is the tooth enamel.
12:19And tooth enamel as being a very tight crystalline matrix
12:22has the best chance of having a non-contaminated material that we can work with.
12:28The key is to find the radioactive isotope carbon-14,
12:34present along with other elements in the cells of all living things.
12:41The molecules of this form of carbon are unstable.
12:45slowly losing protons to become nitrogen.
12:50They do this at a steady rate, measured as a half-life,
12:55the time it takes half the carbon-14 to decay.
12:58Once an organism dies, the carbon-14 in its tissues stops being replaced.
13:10So its density in the tooth, relative to other more stable isotopes,
13:14will give Jim a reading on Naya's age.
13:17First of all, they dissolve the tooth fragment.
13:22Then heat the solution until it becomes gaseous carbon dioxide.
13:30Once frozen and purified, the solution becomes a fine carbon-graphite powder.
13:37A mass spectrometer will then be able to measure the amount of carbon-14 in the powder,
13:48if it's there in the first place.
13:50At the end of the process, the mass spectrometer gets a carbon-14 reading
14:00and compares it to a stable form of carbon in the tooth.
14:04That will give its age.
14:11Okay, so it's nearly stabilizing now.
14:14It's about two half-life.
14:16Yeah.
14:17At the end of the analysis, the tooth proves to be almost 13,000 years old.
14:24It's really exciting.
14:28It makes you're one of the oldest human skeletons yet found in the Americas.
14:31So I couldn't be happier about that result.
14:34The radiocarbon date tells Jim he is dealing with a sensational find.
14:47Naya lived at the dawn of human life in the Americas.
14:5113,000 years ago, the Americas were the only habitable continents
14:57that had not been settled by our species.
15:04Since leaving Africa some 80,000 years ago,
15:08Homo sapiens had spread through the Middle East, Europe, Australia, and Asia,
15:15but had not yet reached the New World.
15:18When sea levels fell, during the last ice age,
15:24to create a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska,
15:28they could finally enter the Americas.
15:38Who were those first humans to arrive in North America?
15:42For a long time, scientists believed that it was the Clovis people.
15:50Known principally by the distinctive stone spear points they left behind,
15:54the Clovis people have long been a mystery.
15:59Who were they?
16:01Were they the ancestors of modern-day Native Americans?
16:04Speculation about the Clovis people began in the 1930s,
16:13when archaeologists first discovered their stone tools near Clovis in New Mexico,
16:19a site dating to around 13,000 years ago.
16:27At that time, the Bering land bridge still connected Siberia and Alaska.
16:32When Clovis points started showing up at sites all over North and Central America,
16:42archaeologists decided the people who made them must have been the first Americans,
16:48who used them to hunt bison and ice age animals like woolly mammoths.
16:55Because Clovis points were widely distributed in most of un-glaciated North America
17:04on down into Central and parts of South America,
17:07the notion appeared that the makers of those points were the very first people in the New World.
17:12The Clovis people left their stone tools in many sites,
17:17but only a handful of bones.
17:19So in 1968, when workers started turning up Clovis points at a site in Montana,
17:29followed by the bones of a 13,000-year-old child,
17:34it was extremely exciting.
17:38Called Anzik Child,
17:40the one-year-old boy had been buried with a huge cache of Clovis blades
17:45and provided enough DNA to be sequenced.
17:49Here, for the first time,
17:51was a link between the Clovis technology and an actual person.
18:03Would Naya also be revealed as one of the Clovis people,
18:08as her age would seem to suggest?
18:11Naya and five other mostly partial skeletons
18:16are the only ones we know of that are older than 12,000 years.
18:21It's an extremely small club.
18:24They are our window into who those early people were.
18:29Naya's skeleton promises to be a treasure trove of information
18:33about those first Americans.
18:35Jim wastes no time in going to Mexico
18:40and organizing a dive to bring her up.
18:44But it won't be easy.
18:55He knows that the bones will be extremely fragile.
18:59Susan Bird is the diver tasked with picking up Naya's skull
19:05and bringing her to the surface.
19:09So what I've got them set up is,
19:11this is the best orientation toward you.
19:13They're designed that way to have more room at this end
19:15for your arms to come in.
19:18Jim is nervous,
19:20as he and Susan rehearse with plaster casts of the bones.
19:24And so you'll slide your hand under
19:26and support it that way.
19:28All right.
19:29Your strongest part is here.
19:30Mm-hmm.
19:31Your weakest points are here and here,
19:33so we want to protect them.
19:34And just gently chin first.
19:38Release.
19:39On the day of the dive, there was so much tension.
19:42So many people on the verge of freaking out.
19:45The stress level, the tension was palpable.
19:48Your game's playing.
19:49The entire operation will be carefully documented,
20:00photographed, and filmed.
20:05Underwater lights have been set in the Oyo
20:08and almost half a mile of cabling to power them.
20:12People don't see it.
20:13If you go there, it's pitch black.
20:15That's what it's called a negro.
20:17It's a 200-feet dome, and it's totally dark.
20:21But with all this technology that we're bringing,
20:23now we can finally see it.
20:24It's amazing.
20:33Okay, Dominique, tell me how much slack you want.
20:39Leader of the underwater camera crew, Mike Madden,
20:42rehearses the divers and photographers one last time.
20:47You pick up the skull, you come around here,
20:50and you try to stay at, try to be at the level of the table.
20:54You just set it in there.
20:55Okay?
20:56Once you put her in the box, she's in the box.
20:59You do whatever you got to do.
21:01You put the top on the box.
21:03Finally, the moment arrives.
21:05All right.
21:07Rock and roll, man.
21:09Let's do it.
21:19F-55 coming down.
21:21Come on.
21:52As the divers set off, carrying the box for Naya's skull, Jim is left to anxiously wait.
22:01He feels a heavy burden of responsibility.
22:05Naya has lain for 13,000 years at the bottom of Ollo Negro.
22:10In a few hours, he'll know if she makes it back out safely.
22:21Deep in the cenote system, the divers are moving through a world they have only dimly seen before.
22:47The huge underwater lights reveal the full dimensions of the Ollo.
22:57As Susan approaches Naya's skull, with Beto and Alex behind her, she too is nervous.
23:24After 13,000 years in the water, the bone is brittle.
23:31It would be so easy to let Naya's skull slip.
23:39Finally, she has the skull safely in her hands.
23:59Naya is ready for her return to the surface.
24:03It will take time.
24:16The divers must make at least three decompression stops to avoid the bends.
24:21Finally, for the first time in 13,000 years, Naya emerges from the water and into the light of day.
24:38Gingerly, she is carried away from the cenote.
25:02A four-by-four is waiting to take her across the province, to the labs of the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Campeche, Mexico.
25:15With conservator Diana Arano, Jim lifts Naya's skull onto the bed of a CT scanner.
25:22It will give him basic information about the state of her bones.
25:30Oh, wow.
25:34Her skull is in very good condition.
25:36She's fossilized to a degree, which greatly strengthens the bone.
25:41So it's what I was thinking I might see, and it's even better than I expected it to be.
25:46So, yeah, it's fantastic.
25:47So, yeah, it's fantastic.
26:17Finally, in Mexico City, at the National Museum of Anthropology, Naya's skeleton is assembled.
26:47Jim and his colleague Vera Teessler examine it for clues to her life.
27:02We have a set of attributes in her skeleton that tell her that she was between 15 and 16 years of age.
27:13Let's talk about the teeth, for example.
27:15The lower jaw, basically her permanent dentition has erupted, except for the third molars, which are about to erupt.
27:24She is past her growth spurt, but she's still in puberty.
27:27She's still adolescence.
27:29The third molars, which haven't erupted yet, are Naya's wisdom teeth.
27:34So that's consistent with an age of about 16.
27:38Let's talk a little bit about what's going on with her pelvis here.
27:41Well, if we take a look at the sacrum, these segments are not fused yet, and some of them are lacerated.
27:50They're open.
27:51There's a lot of indication for trauma.
27:53She must have had a childbirth, a pregnancy, at an age when her pelvis was not prepared to hold or, well, produce a child.
28:05As more details of her life emerge, they start to provide clues to what happened on that day that Naya entered the cave.
28:22What was she looking for?
28:2713,000 years ago, the cenotes were dry.
28:30It was the last ice age, so much of the world's water was locked up in glaciers.
28:38Sea levels were lower.
28:41So the system where she was found was a vast cave.
28:45But in the recesses of that cave, there was water.
28:53The environment of the Yucatan at the time of Naya's life appears to have been very dry, particularly seasonally dry.
29:00The only way you're going to get at water is to find it inside the caves during the dry season.
29:09So she entered the cave almost certainly looking for water.
29:17Even if she knew the cave well, she would have been wary.
29:21She would have known that humans were not the only things that look for water in caves.
29:29I think it's common knowledge when you're a human on the landscape and you have predators.
29:40That they use caves for denning.
29:48Large scavengers will use caves for denning.
29:51Cats use them.
29:53All across the world.
29:57And so entering a cave is a dangerous thing to do.
30:01Naya would have had that on her mind going into the cave, I'm sure.
30:09But Naya was tough.
30:12That she was used to extreme physical activity is clear from the muscle attachments on her bones.
30:18We're learning from the muscle developments in her arms and legs that she was constantly on the move.
30:26Running, walking.
30:27She has leg muscle development more like a 35-year-old man than she has like a 16-year-old girl.
30:35Naya's physique seems consistent with the nomadic life of a people always on the move, in search of food.
30:42She was also no stranger to violence.
30:49She's been through a rough life.
30:52She's got a fractured left forearm.
30:54This bone is definitely not the right shape.
30:56It's got a number of jogs to it.
30:58It's spiral fractured.
30:59It's consistent with being forcibly twisted by another individual.
31:03That's when these, when these, yeah, twisted and pulled.
31:06Yeah.
31:06Which is what most often causes these in modern individuals.
31:10So, it's a, sort of a, what we might refer to as an abuse fracture.
31:29Naya's abuse fracture is no surprise to Jim.
31:34He has studied around two dozen of the oldest skeletons found in the Americas.
31:40Many of them bear the signs of interpersonal violence.
31:45Like a 9,000-year-old skeleton called Kennewick Man, with trauma likely from fighting.
31:52There are a lot of head injuries in the front of the head.
32:01We have individuals with spear wounds.
32:02Kennewick Man, for example, had a big spear point healed in his pelvis.
32:05Jim is convinced that extreme male aggression was common in these ancient hunter-gatherer populations.
32:24As recent arrivals in an unknown continent, theirs was a dangerous and precarious life.
32:36Women died young, often in childbirth.
32:40And this may have intensified male rivalry.
32:44Females are dying in their early 20s.
32:46Males are dying in their mid to late 30s.
32:49And that's increasing the competition for females among the males.
32:54Because the males are living a lot longer, there are more of them proportionate to the females.
32:5720 years ago, when Jim started reconstructing the physical features of these very earliest Americans,
33:06he noticed something perplexing.
33:10Their facial structure was different from modern Native Americans.
33:16Scientists have long assumed that these earliest people must be the ancestors of today's Native Americans.
33:24So he was surprised.
33:27If we compare them to modern Native Americans, they look quite different.
33:32And it's been a major question that I've been struggling with for 20 years.
33:37Why do they look different from each other?
33:40Jim's first exposure to this difference was when he worked on the 9,000-year-old skeleton called Kennewick Man.
33:48When he reconstructed the face, it was clear Kennewick Man looked very different from a modern Native American.
33:59And he was not the only one.
34:01Here's Kennewick Washington, he's 9,500 years.
34:08Spirit Cave from Nevada, he's about 10,500.
34:12A Horned Shelter male from Texas, or close to 12,000 years old.
34:15And here's Naya from Mexico at 13,000.
34:18And what's distinctive about these early individuals, they're much more ruggedly built than modern people.
34:25Heavy brows, big muscle attachments, just generally much more massive and much more projecting in their form.
34:32By contrast, modern Native American males all have much smaller heads and finer features.
34:39You can see the much smaller head, the roundness of the back of the skull, less prominent muscle development in the face.
34:48He's also got a longer face, and if you hold him in a similar position, his face is tucked in.
34:53It's not projecting anymore.
34:58What did Naya look like?
35:00As Jim and sculptor Tom McClellan set out to anatomically reconstruct her face, the mystery of these very first Americans deepens.
35:14Were these people ancestral to today's Native Americans?
35:19If so, how can these differences be explained?
35:23Some folks have suggested that they're different because they come from different parts of the world.
35:31Perhaps some come from Europe, perhaps some come from Asia, earlier than the arrivals that later became Native Americans.
35:38So that's been a question that needed to be answered.
35:43Finally, answers are emerging in the place where those early humans entered the Western Hemisphere for the first time.
35:53In the Tanana Valley of Central Alaska, archaeologist Ben Potter and his team are discovering campsites made by those early nomads as they crossed over from Siberia.
36:15This is the heart of the land bridge that once connected Asia and North America.
36:25People think of the Bering Land Bridge as a bridge that you might fall off of, when in reality it's a landmass that's stretching a thousand miles or more north and south that's connecting Asia and North America.
36:36It persisted for a long time.
36:38This lost continent that for at least 20,000 years connected what is now Siberia and Alaska has been given a name.
36:50Beringia.
36:52It was cut off from the rest of the Americas by the ice sheets covering northern Canada.
36:57A vast territory of tundra, mountains, and grasslands.
37:06For thousands of years, this was the first home of those very early immigrants from Asia.
37:13At campsites in the Tanana Valley some 14,000 years ago, they hunted, fished, and collected roots and berries before moving on, following the herds that wandered Beringia.
37:32We have evidence that they're hunting mammoth, possibly horse, and later on they're definitely subsisting on bison.
37:43Theirs was a way of life that left few traces, but they did leave some of their stone tools.
37:51These have given Ben important clues to who they were.
37:56The tools are stored at the Museum of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.
38:02What we see going back at least 20,000 years ago in parts of northern China, Mongolia, southern Siberia,
38:14is the emergence of very sophisticated stone tool technology that we think partly allowed them to expand northward.
38:22And we see some of that same material here in Beringia in some of the very earliest sites.
38:26Their stone blades and spear points tell the story of an immigrant population that had changed very little since arriving from Siberia.
38:40What we have here is a representative collection of some of the Beringian material that we have.
38:45Some of the earliest people coming across into this region are making material that are quite similar to what we find in Asia.
38:51So microblade cores like this, microblade technology, quite distinctive.
38:55So we connect them really well with the Asian antecessors.
38:57But their tools are completely different from the distinctive spear points found in North America south of the ice sheets,
39:07the hallmark of the Clovis culture.
39:10If you compare this Clovis point to some of the points that are being made up here, they're quite distinct.
39:15So this has been one of the problems that we're trying to grapple with,
39:18is how do we derive Clovis from some of this Beringian material which looks quite Asian.
39:24What is the relation between these Beringian Asians and the Clovis people?
39:30And where do Naya and modern Native Americans fit in?
39:34The answer would come from Ben's most remarkable discovery.
39:40On the banks of Alaska's Upward Sun River, the grave of two infants.
39:48Clearly loved, these children had been carefully buried, with symbolic artifacts and red ochre.
40:03Dating revealed that they were over 11,000 years old,
40:07making this one of the oldest ceremonial burials ever discovered in the Americas.
40:14Here, at last, was a window on the belief system of those first humans in the New World.
40:26Even more important for the archaeologists, the children provided enough bone to retrieve their DNA.
40:33Would their genes allow scientists to untangle the connections between those first immigrants to Beringia,
40:44the Clovis people, Naya, and today's Native Americans?
40:50Ben sent samples to Copenhagen, to the Danish geneticist who is one of the leaders of the ancient genomics revolution, Eske Willislev.
41:05His research is providing remarkable insights into the early peopling of the Americas.
41:11Ancient genomics have completely transformed our ability to reconstruct the biological history of human beings,
41:21including the biological history of early peopling of the Americas.
41:26At his lab in the Museum of Natural History, Eske and his team extracted DNA from the bones of one of the Upward Sun children.
41:38Then, using massive computer power to piece together the DNA data,
41:45the team was able to painstakingly reconstruct the entire genome.
41:57The results revealed distinctive patterns of DNA's chemical bases, known as A, C, T, and G.
42:05These so-called markers can link a particular individual to both ancestors and living descendants.
42:16Now, Eske's team compared the genome of the Upward Sun child with other DNA results.
42:24From the ANSIC child, the only human remains definitively identified as Clovis.
42:30From Naya's DNA, studied by Jim and his team, and from modern Native Americans, the results were momentous.
42:42They showed that the Upward Sun people, known as ancient Beringians, provide links to the ancestors of all Native Americans.
42:53The Upward Sun sample is extremely important in the sense that it's the oldest skeleton found in Alaska.
43:02And when we did the genome of Upward Sun, it became even more interesting,
43:07because it turns out to be basal to all Native Americans.
43:13The genomic analyses indicated the existence of a single population of ancient Asian hunters in Beringia some 25,000 years ago,
43:26who were the ancestors of all Native Americans, ancient and modern.
43:32Educator Shane Doyle views these results from his perspective as a member of the Crow tribe.
43:41What happened was, the ancestors of tribal people all were able to come to a confluence at the Beringia,
43:51about 25,000 years or more ago.
43:54And all these people brought their own genetic profiles with them.
43:58They all had their own skin color, their own eye color, their own size.
44:03They have all their own phenotypes.
44:05And after they had children together, these ancient peoples, they produced a new group of people.
44:11And that is who American Indian people are.
44:16For many years, Shane has worked to bridge the gap between scientists and Native American spiritual leaders.
44:27He was instrumental in bringing them together for the reburial of the Ansic child in 2012.
44:34S.K.'s discoveries are important to him because they establish a clear Native American identity.
44:44There's not Native American DNA on the other side of the Bering Strait.
44:48Nowhere else in the world is there Native American DNA except for the Americas.
44:53And so that was one of the most profound things that came from the study.
45:06So at last, the story is clear.
45:10Arriving in Beringia from different parts of Asia,
45:13about 15,000 years ago, groups of those very first Native Americans left and began the long trek south,
45:24exploring a land that no human had ever seen before.
45:37Once south of the ice sheets,
45:39these same people developed a new way of making stone tools and weapons.
45:46The distinctive Clovis culture.
45:50Their descendants are today's Native Americans.
45:58Naya's people were part of that great southward migration.
46:01When Naya lived, Jim believes her people were recent arrivals in Yucatan.
46:12A micro-CT scan of her jaw and her teeth reveals evidence that they were not familiar with their environment.
46:23We're setting up a micro-CT scan of Naya's mandible, her lower jaw.
46:27And the focus is on the teeth.
46:31We want to look at density variations in the teeth to look at growth patterns.
46:36Density variations are clues to periods of malnourishment.
46:41They soon become obvious in both Naya's teeth and jawbone.
46:45From the growth patterns in her bones, there is periodic growth interruption.
46:56That is one season every year she doesn't get enough protein to eat.
47:00If her people were well adapted to the place they live, they'd been there a long time,
47:04they would have known how to feed themselves protein year-round.
47:06They don't. They're new.
47:14Naya has already told scientists so much about her people.
47:19Her skeleton has one last piece of information for them.
47:23It's about the day she died.
47:25This is the most indicative.
47:30See? The fracture of the bone and the jagged character of that fracture.
47:35Jagged edge breaks occur in relatively fresh bone, if not fresh bone.
47:40So that jagged fracture is consistent with fracture at death.
47:46Jim has thought a lot about that day.
47:48The day she walked into the cave 13,000 years ago.
47:54The last day of her life.
47:57It's hard when you know someone this well.
48:00You learn their life so much not to become attached to them and have a sense of them.
48:06That's why it's hard to tell her story.
48:10What happened on that fateful day?
48:12At some point she must have gone deeper into the cave in search of water.
48:21The pit where she was found is a long way from the nearest entrance to the cenote system.
48:32Deep in the system's recesses, the oil was dry with a shallow pool of water at its base.
48:40I think like the animals she got lost.
48:46How did she get lost?
48:48Jim can only speculate.
48:50She probably had a torch to go in with in order to see her way around in the cave.
48:56If she lost control of the fire, lost her light.
48:59Lost her light.
49:08Unlike the animals, she can't scent orient to find her way out.
49:12She might have wandered for hours.
49:26Perhaps even days.
49:32She's wandering in this cave for quite a while.
49:34And at some point she simply takes a fatal step.
49:41And the bottom is no longer there.
49:43She's kamper.
49:44And they're stuck.
49:45The animal is no longer there.
49:46And they're like, where are we going?
49:47A little more than the Simona?
49:48And it was a little more than the other one.
49:49But she didn't leave the eye out.
49:50She's still holding her there.
49:51Her pelvis was almost certainly broken by the fall.
50:16She fell 100 feet, and there's a good chance she struck something.
50:23I don't think death took long if it were not immediate.
50:29Over the centuries and millennia, other animals fell into the pit, just like Naya did.
50:3710,000 years ago, the cave system flooded as sea levels rose, preserving them all in the anoxic environment at the bottom of the oil.
50:52And there they lay, until divers discovered the cenote, a time capsule preserving a unique record of Ice Age life on this continent.
51:07Scientists will be studying this treasure trove of material for many years to come.
51:14But it is Naya who has opened a window on the world of a mysterious people.
51:26Naya lived a very difficult life, but in her death she left us this incredible record of the life of these earliest people.
51:37Carefully reconstructed, Naya has revealed to us the first face of America.
52:07This NOVA program is available on DVD. To order, visit shoppbs.org or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.
52:26NOVA is also available for download on iTunes.
52:37To order, visit shoppbs.org or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.
52:44To order, visit shoppbs.org.
Recommended
15:00
|
Up next
54:26
2:06
41:48
44:00
51:16
43:17
1:27:04
59:13
1:06:44
59:03
44:35
43:17