She was clearly an early American — her radiocarbon dates placed her at approximately 12,000 to 13,000 years before the present — and her cranial morphology was different from that of later Native American populations.

She seemed, at first analysis, to be another data point in favor of the two-migration model.

Her DNA said something else entirely.

The Dive That Changed Everything

Before the DNA could be extracted and analyzed, before the scientific questions could even be properly framed, the basic work of archaeological documentation had to be accomplished.

And doing archaeology at the bottom of a flooded cave forty meters below the surface, in near-total darkness, with equipment that had to be carried by divers through narrow passages and long underwater tunnel systems, was not straightforward.

The team that eventually conducted the archaeological work at Hoyo Negro was led by Pilar Luna, then director of underwater archaeology at Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).