In 2014 the discovery of Naia, the oldest skeleton in America found so far, it shook the world. The woman was found in the paradisiacal submerged cave of Black hole, in the state of Quintana Roo, Yucatan peninsula, in the heart of the Mexican Caribbean.
Then, three cave divers “entered a tunnel full of water, swam 10 meters deep and 200 meters away, and then fell into this tunnel. totally black well“, where they found Naia’s human remains. They also discovered fossils of 26 mammals corresponding to 11 species from the Late Pleistocene, such as a guphoteric, saber-toothed tiger, Shasta-type ground sloths, giant tapirs, bush pigs, bears, pumas, lynxes, coyotes, coatis and fruit bats.
Since then, archaeologists have continued to study that region of caves where water preserved the first inhabitants of the American continent. 12,800 years ago.
Scientists found tools and utensils with which the ancient inhabitants of America went down to the depths to extract the ocher with which they used to paint at their funerals and religious acts.
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Until last year, the reasons that led these people to risk their lives exploring this dark world was a mysteryAlthough it was proposed that more prosaic motives, such as seeking refuge or access to fresh water, be mixed with more spiritual ones, such as the ritual burial of relatives. Some, perhaps, as necessary to humans as the others.
That is why the news known at the beginning of July 2020 took on a significant value. It was when scientists from institutions in Mexico, the United States and Canada claimed to have found what they would be the oldest mines in America and in them the real reason why the ancient inhabitants went into those passageways without light, in the old times when the water had not yet covered them.
The treasure of red ocher in Hoyo Negro
Those mines had a hidden treasure: it was the red ocher, an earthy mineral that forms the pigment that humans have used in regions around the planet for tens of thousands of years to paint objects or in funeral practices and that is considered a key tool in the development of symbolic thinking.
Some stones piled up more than 12,000 years ago mark the way in a cave system that today is submerged but that in ancient times was exploited by the first inhabitants of Yucatán (Mexico) to extract ocher.
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Red ocher is found everywhere among the remains of the first inhabitants of the American continent, but never until that moment in 2020 had a deposit been found with evidence of extraction of the material. In “La Mina” and two more caves The sources of ocher and the remains of the improvised tools that the Paleolithic miners used to remove them were found, like stalactites or stalagmites that were pulled out to make spikes.
They also found remains of resinous woods that could be used as torches to work in the dark and markers to indicate the direction of the ocher deposits.
A diver takes charcoal samples at the site of the oldest ocher mine in America.
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Brandi MacDonald, a researcher at the University of Missouri (USA) and co-author of the research (at the time it was published in the prestigious Science Advances), indicated: “The mining activity in La Mina was kept for at least 2,000 years and we can assume that it was an intergenerational activity, with a transmission of knowledge between the groups that entered and left the region during all those years ”.
And he added that since they had found evidence of prospecting for ocher in at least three caves, they could affirm that it was not an isolated activity but rather a regional custom, he continues. “Too we can infer that there was some cooperation to coordinate the extraction. It would be very difficult for a single person to do the activity that we have seen effectively and safely, ”said MacDonald.
The skull of Naia, the young woman in her 20s who was found in 2014 in a flooded cave in Hoyo Negro, in the Yucatan Peninsula.
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Red ocher was used in funerals or in paintings such as those in the Altamira Cave. “But it could also serve as sunscreen or insecticide“, say the makers of the study of Hoyo Negro. Its use is cross-cultural; there are very different societies in very distant times that used it. Some studies estimate that Neanderthals already used it 250,000 years ago, although its uses were more rudimentary than those of sapiens in more recent times.
They believe that Naia went into the Black Hole cave with other people to extract red ocher. The woman would have lived almost 13,000 years ago.
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Samuel Meacham, founder of the Quintana Roo AC Aquifer System Research Center (CINDAQ), has been one of the leaders of the team of divers in this study. And it was very graphic: “In each dive there is the possibility of finding something new. Never in my wildest dreams did I think we were going to find a prehistoric mine. I can’t even imagine what we will be able to see in the next year ”, he says.
The CINDAQ explorers advanced in their internment in the tunnels during this 2021, however they estimate that there are still more than 2,000 kilometers of caves to be explored minutely.
Meacham perfectly describes what is to come: “We have no doubt that there is much more waiting to be found to be understood. We hope that these astonishing discoveries of ancient human activities preserved in these waters for so long will serve to draw attention to the threats these aquifers face due to human activity today. The true treasure of these caves is what flows through them and allows people and wildlife to thrive. “
