A human skeleton in a cave system that was flooded thousands of years ago is in an area where the Mexican government plans to build a high-speed tourist train through the jungle, a cave-diving archeologist said.
Archeologist Octavio del Rio said that he and fellow diver Peter Broger saw the shattered skull and skeleton partly covered by sediment in a cave on Mexico’s Caribbean coast.
Given the distance from the cave entrance, the skeleton could not have gotten there without modern diving equipment, so it must be more than 8,000 years old, Del Rio said, referring to an era when rising sea levels were said to have flooded the caves.
“There it is. We don’t know if the body was deposited there or if that was where this person died,” Del Rio said.
He said that the skeleton was about 8m underwater, about 500m into the cave system.
Some of the oldest human remains in North America have been discovered in the sinkhole caves known as cenotes on the country’s Caribbean coast, and experts say some of those caves are threatened by the Mexican government’s Maya Train tourism project.
Del Rio, who has worked with the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History on projects, said he had notified the institute of the discovery.
The institute did not immediately respond to questions about whether it intended to explore the site.
However, Del Rio said that institute archeologist Carmen Rojas told him that the site was registered and would be investigated by the institute’s Quintana Roo State branch Holocene Archeology Project.
He said that the cave — whose location he did not reveal because of a fear the site could be looted or disturbed — was near where the government has cut down a swath of jungle to lay train tracks, and could be collapsed, contaminated or closed off by the building project and subsequent development.
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