Chan Hol

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Chan Hol
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Location in Mexico
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Chan Hol (Mexico)
Location Quintana Roo, Mexico
Coordinates 20°9′N87°34′W / 20.150°N 87.567°W / 20.150; -87.567

Chan Hol, part of the Toh ha cave system, is a cenote and submerged cave system in Quintana Roo, Mexico, of interest to paleoanthropologists. The remains of three prehistoric human fossils were discovered within the cave system. Along with Eve of Naharon, Naia, the Man of El Templo and the Woman of Las Palmas  [ es ], the three fossils at Chan Hol are among several ancient Paleo-Indian skeletons found in the submerged cave systems of the Yucatán Peninsula around Tulum, Quintana Roo. [1]

Contents

Description

Chan Hol is derived from Mayan, meaning "little hole". [2] The Chan Hol cave system extends over 5,000 m (16,404 ft) in length. The entrance, via the cenote, is located around 15 km (9 mi) away from Tulum and around 11.5 km (7 mi) from the modern coastline. [3] As the sea level was over 100 m (328 ft) lower than it is today, the cave system was dry during the Late Pleistocene. [3] During the Late Pleistocene, the Yucatán region was likely composed of dry savanna, grassland and even desert. [1]

Human fossils

The skeletons of first two ancient Paleo-Indians were discovered within the Chan Hol cave system. Both skeletons exhibit sinodont dental morphology. [4]

Chan Hol I

The first fossil, Chan Hol I, was discovered in 2006 by Alexandra and Thorsten Kampe at a location in the cave system around 530 m (1,739 ft) northeast of the cenote entrance, at a depth of around 8 m (26 ft) underwater. Nicknamed El Joven, the fossil is dated to around 9194-8792 BP. The skeleton had fossilized while the cave system was still dry. [3] The skeleton shows evidence of intentional placement of the dead body. [1]

Chan Hol II

The second fossil, Chan Hol II, was discovered in 2009 by Harry Gust [3] at a location in the cave system around 1,240 m (4,068 ft) southwest of the cenote entrance, at a depth of around 8.5 m (28 ft) underwater. [5] In February 2012, photos of the skeleton spread on social media. [5] In March 2012, the site was vandalized and looted. [5] Most of the skeletal remains, including the skull, were stolen. In October 2012, researchers collected the leftover fossil fragments from the site. [3] Although Chan Hol II was given the nickname La Niña, [3] later osteological analysis shows that the remains likely belonged to a young male. [5] The fossil is dated to around 11,311 BP. [5] The individual had died while the cave system was still dry. [3]

Chan Hol III

The third fossil, Chan Hol III, was discovered in 2016 by divers Iván Hernández and Vicente Fito led by Jerónimo Avilés Olguín. The skeleton was discovered in a low cave tunnel in fresh water at 8 m (26 ft) water depth, at 1,141 m (3,743 ft) diving distance from the cenote entrance. Nicknamed Ixchel after the Maya goddess of fertility. The fossil is a 30-year-old woman who lived around 10000 years ago. The skull shows evidence of various traumas and possibly signs of a disease that may have driven her tribe to kill her. [6]

According to craniometric measurements, the skull is believed to conform to the mesocephalic pattern, like the other three skulls found in Tulum caves. Three different scars on the skull of the woman showed that she was hit with something hard and her skull bones were broken.Her skull also had crater-like deformations and tissue deformities that appeared to be caused by a bacterial relative of syphilis. [7]

According to study lead researcher Wolfgang Stinnesbeck, "It really looks as if this woman had a very hard time and an extremely unhappy end of her life. Obviously, this is speculative, but given the traumas and the pathological deformations on her skull, it appears a likely scenario that she may have been expelled from her group and was killed in the cave, or was left in the cave to die there”. [ citation needed ] The newly discovered skeleton was 140 m (460 ft) away from the Chan Hol 2 site. Although archaeologists assumed the divers found the remains of the missing Chan Hol 2, the analysis proved that these assumptions were erroneous in a short time. Stinnesbeck compared the new bones to old photographs of Chan Hol 2 and showed that the two skeletons represent different individuals. [8]

Due to their distinctive features, study co-researcher  Samuel Rennie suggest the existence of at least two morphologically diverse groups of people living separately in Mexico during the transition from Pleistocene to Holocene. [9]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quintana Roo</span> State of Mexico

Quintana Roo, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Quintana Roo, is one of the 31 states which, with Mexico City, constitute the 32 federal entities of Mexico. It is divided into 11 municipalities, and its capital city is Chetumal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tulum</span> Maya site in Quintana Roo, Mexico

Tulum is the site of a pre-Columbian Mayan walled city which served as a major port for Coba, in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. The ruins are situated on 12-meter-tall (39 ft) cliffs along the east coast of the Yucatán Peninsula on the Caribbean Sea. Tulum was one of the last cities built and inhabited by the Maya and achieved its greatest prominence between the 13th and 15th centuries. Maya continued to occupy Tulum for about 70 years after the Spanish began occupying Mexico, but the city was abandoned by the end of the 16th century. Tulum is one of the best-preserved coastal Maya sites, and today a popular site for tourists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Riviera Maya</span> Tourist resort district near Cancún, Mexico

The Riviera Maya is a tourism and resort district south of Cancun, Mexico. It straddles the coastal Federal Highway 307, along the Caribbean coastline of the state of Quintana Roo, located in the eastern portion of the Yucatán Peninsula. Originally the name applied narrowly, focusing on the area of coastline between the city of Playa del Carmen and Tulum. The designation has since expanded up and down the coast, now including the towns of Puerto Morelos, situated to the north of Playa del Carmen, as well as the town of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, situated 40 km (25 mi) to the south of Tulum. This larger region is what is currently being promoted as part of the Riviera Maya tourist corridor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cenote</span> Natural pit or sinkhole that exposes groundwater underneath

A cenote is a natural pit, or sinkhole, resulting when a collapse of limestone bedrock exposes groundwater. The term originated on the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico, where the ancient Maya commonly used cenotes for water supplies, and occasionally for sacrificial offerings. The name derives from a word used by the lowland Yucatec Maya—tsʼonoʼot—to refer to any location with accessible groundwater.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yucatán Peninsula</span> Peninsula in North America

The Yucatán Peninsula is a large peninsula in southeast Mexico and adjacent portions of Belize and Guatemala. The peninsula extends towards the northeast, separating the Gulf of Mexico to the north and west of the peninsula from the Caribbean Sea to the east. The Yucatán Channel, between the northeastern corner of the peninsula and Cuba, connects the two bodies of water.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pantherinae</span> Subfamily of felids

The Pantherinae is a subfamily of the Felidae; it was named and first described by Reginald Innes Pocock in 1917 as only including the Panthera species. The Pantherinae genetically diverged from a common ancestor between 9.32 to 4.47 million years ago and 10.67 to 3.76 million years ago.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Megalonychidae</span> Extinct family of sloths

Megalonychidae is an extinct family of sloths including the extinct Megalonyx. Megalonychids first appeared in the early Oligocene, about 35 million years (Ma) ago, in southern Argentina (Patagonia). There is, however, one possible find dating to the Eocene, about 40 Ma ago, on Seymour Island in Antarctica. They first reached North America by island-hopping across the Central American Seaway, about 9 million years ago, prior to formation of the Isthmus of Panama about 2.7 million years ago. Some megalonychid lineages increased in size as time passed. The first species of these were small and may have been partly tree-dwelling, whereas the Pliocene species were already approximately half the size of the huge Late Pleistocene Megalonyx jeffersonii from the last ice age.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sistema Dos Ojos</span> Flooded cave system at the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico

Dos Ojos is part of a flooded cave system located north of Tulum, on the Caribbean coast of the Yucatán Peninsula, in the state of Quintana Roo, Mexico. The exploration of Dos Ojos began in 1987 and still continues. The surveyed extent of the cave system is 82 kilometers (51 mi) and there are 28 known sinkhole entrances, which are locally called cenotes. In January 2018, a connection was found between Sistema Dos Ojos and Sistema Sac Actun. The smaller Dos Ojos became a part of Sac Actun, making the Sistema Sac Actun the longest known underwater cave system in the world.

Sistema Nohoch Nah Chich, is located 16.5 kilometers (10.3 mi) south of Akumal in Tulum Municipality of Quintana Roo state, southeastern Mexico. It is part of the Sistema Sac Actun underwater cave systems.

Sistema Ox Bel Ha is a cave system in Quintana Roo, Mexico. It is the longest explored underwater cave in the world and ranks second including dry caves. As of January 2023 the surveyed length is 435.8 kilometers (270.8 mi) of underwater passages. There are more than 150 cenotes in the system.

<i>Muzquizopteryx</i> Genus of nyctosaurid pterosaur from the Late Cretaceous

Muzquizopteryx is a genus of nyctosaurid pterodactyloid pterosaur from the Late Cretaceous period of what is now Coahuila, Mexico.

Sistema Sac Actun is an underwater cave system situated along the Caribbean coast of the Yucatán Peninsula with passages to the north and west of the city of Tulum. Discovery of a connection to Sistema Dos Ojos in 2018 made it the longest known underwater cave system. As of January 2023, it is the second longest underwater cave system in the world, only surpassed by Sistema Ox Bel Ha.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eve of Naharon</span> Hominin fossil

Eve of Naharon is the skeleton of a 20– to 25-year-old human female found in the Naharon section of the underwater cave Sistema Naranjal in Mexico near the town of Tulum, around 80 miles (130 km) south west of Cancún. The Naranjal subsystem is a part of the larger Sistema Ox Bel Ha. The skeleton is carbon dated to 13,600 years ago, which makes it one of the oldest documented human finds in the Americas.

<i>Ahytherium</i> Extinct genus of sloths

Ahytherium is an extinct genus of megalonychid sloth that lived during the Pleistocene of what is now Brazil. It contains a single species, A. aureum.

Naia is the name given to a 12,000 – to 13,000-year-old human skeleton of a teenage female who was found in the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico. Her bones were part of a 2007 discovery of a cache of animal bones in a cenote called Hoyo Negro in the Sistema Sac Actun. At the time of Naia's death, the cave system was mostly dry, and she likely died falling into Hoyo Negro.

Xibalbaonyx is an extinct genus of megalonychid ground sloth known from the Late Pleistocene of Mexico. Three species are known: X. oviceps and X. exiniferis from the Yucatan peninsula and X. microcaninus from Jalisco. The genus is named after Xibalba, the underworld in Maya mythology.

<i>Acantholipan</i> Extinct genus of dinosaurs

Acantholipan is a genus of herbivorous nodosaurid dinosaur from Mexico from the early Santonian age of the Late Cretaceous. It includes one species, Acantholipan gonzalezi.

<i>Panthera balamoides</i> Extinct species of carnivore

Panthera balamoides is a species described as an extinct species of the big cat genus Panthera that is known from a single fossil found in a Late Pleistocene age cenote in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. P. balamoides has only a single reported specimen, the distal end of a right humerus, that is notably of exceptional size for a felid. It was unearthed in 2012 from an underwater cave and described in 2019 by an international group of paleontologists from Mexico and Germany led by Sarah R. Stinnesbeck. However, several authors have since proposed that the fossil comes from an ursid, possibly the extinct Arctotherium, and not of felid affinities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hells Bells (cave formations)</span> Underwater cave formation

Hells Bells are hollow bell- or cone-shaped structures of carbonate that can reach lengths of 2 metres. They are found underwater in El Zapote cenote in Quintana Roo, Mexico, on the Yucatan Peninsula; similar formations exist in other caves. In a certain depth range, such structures cover the entire surface of the cave including submerged tree trunks and other Hells Bells, although they never touch each other.

References

Citations

  1. 1 2 3 Braswell 2014, p. 4.
  2. National Geographic News 2010.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 González et al. 2014.
  4. González et al. 2014, p. 404.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 Stinnesbeck et al. 2017.
  6. Stinnesbeck et al. 2020.
  7. February 2020, Laura Geggel-Associate Editor 05 (5 February 2020). "9,900-year-old skeleton of horribly disfigured woman found in Mexican cave". livescience.com. Retrieved 2020-03-24.{{cite web}}: |first= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  8. Stinnesbeck, Wolfgang; Rennie, Samuel R.; Olguín, Jerónimo Avilés; Stinnesbeck, Sarah R.; Gonzalez, Silvia; Frank, Norbert; Warken, Sophie; Schorndorf, Nils; Krengel, Thomas; Morlet, Adriana Velázquez; González, Arturo González (2020-02-05). "New evidence for an early settlement of the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico: The Chan Hol 3 woman and her meaning for the Peopling of the Americas". PLOS ONE. 15 (2): e0227984. Bibcode:2020PLoSO..1527984S. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0227984 . ISSN   1932-6203. PMC   7001910 . PMID   32023279.
  9. "9,900-Year-Old Skeleton Discovered in Submerged Mexican Cave Has a Distinctive Skull"

Bibliography