MEXICO CITY, Mexico (AP) -- Divers making dangerous probes through underwater caves near the Caribbean coast have discovered what appears to be one of
oldest human skeletons in the Americas, archaeologists announced at a seminar that was ending on Friday.
The report by a team from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History exploits a new way of investigating the past. Most coastal
settlements by early Americans now lie deep beneath the sea, which during the Ice Age was hundreds of feet lower than now.
Researchers at the international "Early Man in America" seminar here also reported other ancient finds -- including a California bone that is a
rival for the title of the oldest in the Americas.
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Arturo Gonzalez said his team discovered at least three skeletons in caves along the Caribbean coast of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula in 2001 and 2002.
Photos showed two remarkably well preserved.
Gonzalez said the bones must date from before the time that waters gradually seeped through the caves 8,000 to 9,000 years ago as Ice Age glaciers
melted and sea level rose by about 400 feet worldwide.
Tests on charcoal found beside one female skeleton would place it at least 10,000 years ago. An expert at the University of California, Riverside,
dated it as 11,670 radiocarbon years old -- which would translate to well over 13,000 calendar years.
If confirmed, "that would be the oldest" radio carbon date in the Americas obtained from a human bone, said archaeology textbook author Stuart
Fiedel.
Until now, the Americas have produced only 25 bones or skeletons dated as more than 8,000 years old, said Silvia Gonzalez of John Moores University in
Liverpool, England. But she told the conference that she would soon publish a paper establishing that humans occupied a site near Puebla east of
Mexico City 21,000 to 28,000 years ago