Tulum
Posted on 04/11/2007 3:40:41 PM PDT by blam
Archaeologists find 3 prehistoric bodies in SE Mexico
www.chinaview.cn 2007-04-11 11:39:34
MEXICO CITY, April 10 (Xinhua) -- Mexican archaeologists found remains of two women and a man that can be traced to more than 10,000 years ago in the Mayan area of Tulum, Mexico's National Anthropology and History Institute said in a statement on Tuesday.
The remains were being examined by laboratories in Britain, the United States and Mexico, all of which had said the remains were people between 10,000 and 14,500 years ago, said Carmen Rojas, an archaeologist quoted in the statement.
"This makes southeastern Mexico one of the few areas with a proven prehistoric presence in America," said Rojas.
The remains were found in the Las Palmas, El Templo and Naharoncaves, in an area previously thought to be uninhabited. They are not Mayas because they do not have the classic Mayan skull deformation.
The woman found in Naharon cave, 368 meters from its entrance and 22.6 meters underground, was 1.41 meters' tall, weighed around 53 kg and was between 20 and 30 years old when she died. The woman found in Las Palmas cave was between 44 and 50 when she died.
The body found in El Templo cave was a man aged between 25 and 30. His body was the least well preserved because it had been eroded and most of its organic material was gone.
Archaeologists have worked since 2002 to exhume the bodies from underwater caverns, said the statement.
In the past the region was dry but the caves were flooded due in the last thaw of the Pleistocene ice age, it said.
Archaeological finds showed the region was probably used as a refuge and a graveyard, said the Institute. The archaeologists also found campfire remains.
Yes, the ruins overlooking the ocean are spectacular.
I wonder if they found the remains of the chicken dinner I had there....?
Tulum
Tulum
Damn Global warming...
If only Thag Bush had inscribed his name in the Kyoto Stones...
Drug runners probably got them. Those guys are always killing folks.
So did we, Coba was awesome. Of course is was 1986, don’t know what it is like now.
Thread hijack coming in 5, 4, 3...
We have enough additional evidence available now to ward off the "gotta' be Bering" people.
I was just there in January.
The first time I went to Coba was in about 1983. I stayed at the Club Med there for $6.00 (US) a day, lol. I had a room in Kozumel but stayed two days at Club Med in Coba which was practically deserted.
Makes doing genealogy fun sometimes.
Luzia (Second oldest human skeleton ever found in the Americas, Brazil)
Ethiopians?
...yeah, I'd hit that!
Hmmm. Your pic was taken from down toward the ‘hippie beach’ where they go nude. Were you a bad boy?
Maya who?
Why do you diminish a serious thread with such an inane comment?
Tulum ... Tulum .......... Tulum, Tulum, Tulum.
Sort of rhymes don't cha think?
That global warming white stuff is still falling here in Michigan. More is forecast for tomorrow.
See my profile page for a link to the USS Enterprise version.
But I wish there were more details, like the ages of the individual skeletons and how those ages were established. And maybe the names and affiliations of the archaeologists so we could search for additional information.
(Science writers should really study some science; and China?!? How did they get this article? Maybe that's why so many pertinent details are lacking!)
We'll get more details later.
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We stayed at the hotel in Coba there too. It was deserted. I think we were the only guests. I can’t remember the price but it was cheap. I can still remember the dust in the dining room on all the set up tables, complete with china. At the pond in front of the hotel we watched a spotted rail for a couple of hours. We watched for a long time because we wanted to be able to indentify him when we got home. About a month after we got home I saw a bird magazine that mentioned seeing the rare spotted rail in Coba, complete with photos. We also loved the other birds we saw there, especially a beautiful green motmot with a long tail, he landed in a tree just a few feet in front of us as we walked the trail and just sat there, completely unafraid.
Wow neat.
“They are not Mayas because they do not have the classic Mayan skull deformation.”
I’d interpret this sentence to mean that there is no evidence of Mayan culture. This doesn’t seem to say anything about whether these might be biological ancestors.
Did you see the large termite nests built up in the trees? I thought they were distinctive and unusual.
The oldest Mongoloid skeleton ever found is only 10k years old (Oppenheimer)...there couldn't have been Mayan yet, at this early date. I was thinking maybe these guys. (Whoever they are?)
"The oldest human remains found in the Americas were recently "discovered" in the storeroom of Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology. Found in central Mexico in 1959, the five skulls were radiocarbon dated by a team of researchers from the United Kingdom and Mexico and found to be 13,000 years old. They pre-date the Clovis culture by a couple thousand years, adding to the growing evidence against the Clovis-first model for the first peopling of the Americas."
"Of additional significance is the shape of the skulls, which are described as long and narrow, very unlike those of modern Native Americans.
Never noticed any, we were more interested in the birds, plants and pyramids.
I agree about Coba. When I 1st went 20+ years ago, it was nothing but trails through the jungle. The buildings, pyramids, stelae were all overgrown and unexcavated. You felt like Indiana Jones...........
I saw a lot of these. Many much larger.
Yup...that was my experience.
“the earliest known American skeleton had its closest similarities with early Australians, Zhoukoudian Upper Cave 103, and Taforalt 18. The results obtained clearly confirm the idea that the Americas were first colonized by a generalized Homo sapiens population which inhabited East Asia in the Late Pleistocene, before the definition of the classic Mongoloid morphology.”
That's Australia, China and North Africa The “Australian” morphology seems to have been widespread at the end of the Pleistocene.
I think its a mistake to assume that people should be physically similar to very distant ancestors
“Powell has already noted (Powell 1995; Powell and Neves n.d.; Steele and Powell 1992, 1994) that the geographic groupings or races seen among modern peoples are at best fuzzy and at worst non-existent when examining late Pleistocene and early Holocene populations world-wide. “
Morphology can change drastically in isolated popluations. This has been demonstrated many times with island species. I don’t see why people would be any different.
Because a sense of humor is a terrible thing to lose.
I almost said the same thing, that you felt like Indiana Jones. That’s funny! In 1986 the large pyramid was only half uncovered, the rest looked like a hill covered with vegetation. The trails could only be walked and it was like a Jones movie. There was one lone vendor at the entrance he was selling small clay pipes made to look like Mayan warriors. We bought 2 of them and after getting them home, realized they had only been dried not fired, they cracked in a couple of places and are still pretty fragile but still whistle.
Native Americans/American Indians have Sinodont (shovel) teeth (Turner) like most Northern Chinese. Kennewick Man, Spirit Cave man, etc have Sundadont teeth like most SE Asians.
Take this Journey Of Mankind based on the DNA studies of Professor Stephen Oppenheimer. Notice that the haplogroup X arrived early (25,000 ya) at Meadowcroft and became isolated there during the LGM (Last GlacialMaximum).
About 25% of the people in the Ojabiou(sp) tribe (Northern US) have haplogroup X genes, the highest in the Americas.
Here's the email he sent me:
"Why do you think that anyone one this forum cares about your personal life?"
Someone this sour must be depressed and ought to be on medication, IMO.
" Journey Of Mankind" is a nice website although it lacks detail. Unfortunately I can't get my pop-up blocker to quit so I didn't find the page where he connects Meadowcroft to Haplogroup X. Meadowcroft has no human remains so I don't see how that can be done.
Nevertheless, a distinct Haplogroup X found among modern Indians shows just how long their ancestors have been in the New World.
"These findings leave unanswered the question of the geographic source of Native American X2a in the Old World, although our analysis provides new clues about the time of the arrival of haplogroup X in the Americas. Indeed, if we assume that the two complete Native American X sequences (from one Navajo and one Ojibwa) began to diverge while their common ancestor was already in the Americas, we obtain a coalescence time of 18,000 ± 6,800 YBP, implying an arrival time not later than 11,000 YBP.
The results of this study point to the following conclusions. First, haplogroup X variation is completely captured by two ancient clades that display distinctive phylogeographic patterns—X1 is largely restricted to North and East Africa, whereas X2 is spread widely throughout West Eurasia.
Second, it is apparent that the Native American haplogroup X mtDNAs derive from X2 by a unique combination of five mutations.
Third, the few Altaian (Derenko et al. 2001) and Siberian haplogroup X lineages are not related to the Native American cluster, and they are more likely explained by recent gene flow from Europe or from West Asia.
Finally, phylogeography of the subclades of haplogroup X suggests that the Near East is the likely geographical source for the spread of subhaplogroup X2, and the associated population dispersal occurred around, or after, the LGM when the climate ameliorated. The presence of a daughter clade in northern Native Americans testifies to the range of this population expansion."link
"Handbook of Paleoanthropology
The Dentition of American Indians: Evolutionary Results and Demographic Implications Following Colonization from Siberia
Christy G. Turner II and G. Richard Scott
This chapter uses dental morphology to make inferences about how the New World was first colonized. The major emphasis is on the initial Macro-Indian migration based on dental traits observed in Paleo-Indian, Archaic, and more recent prehistoric crania. The major results are:
(1) Arctic and Subarctic native dentitions differ enough from those of Macro-Indians to indicate separate migrations.
(2) Clustered MMD values show three Macro-Indian branches of North Americans, South Americans, and mixed North and South.
(3) There is no marked branching depth for these three dental divisions, which fits the hypothesis of a single rapid Paleo-Indian colonization event.
(4) The minimally divergent North and South American dental divisions are most likely the microevolutionary result of dispersal-dependent population structure and lineage effects.
(5) No genetic bottlenecking can be identified at Panama.
(6) The small amount of New World internal dental divergence favors colonization of South America soon after the settlement of North America.
(7) There are no obvious clines, frequency trends, or geographic groupings for individual dental traits. This suggests little or no selection and that after leaving Siberia, population size increased sufficiently to limit genetic drift.
(8) There is no sign of any Old World or Oceanic dental pattern other than Northeast Asian Sinodonty. All things considered, including New World and Siberian linguistics, archeology, genetics, route considerations, and relevant natural history, dental analysis supports the Late Pleistocene Ice-free Corridor, Clovis or epi-Clovis settlement hypothesis, and the Greenberg Amerind or Macro-Indian language evolution model. link
Thanks.
You must really like the place!
I used to walk on the Florida beach at sunrise every day and dream about Tulum. I felt I lived there in ancient times, knew people there. Really odd, but a persistent story kept emerging in my mind’s eye. Like a movie.
Still haven’t been there as I’m adverse to tourista, which once held me in it’s grasp for three months. But I got as far as calling a travel agent about going for a weekend and eating nothing but saltines and gin. How do you survive Mexico?
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