It establishes that the area of the Yucatán was part of the early Americas — that the founding population of the hemisphere was present not just in Montana and New Mexico and the sites that dominate the North American record, but in Mesoamerica as well, at a time before the development of the cultural and linguistic distinctions that would eventually separate the peoples of different regions.

It also raises questions about how the cave system itself was used.

Naia was in that cave.

Whether she was there alone or with others, whether the people of her community knew about the cave and used it for purposes we cannot reconstruct, whether the specific chamber of Hoyo Negro had significance to them — none of this is recoverable.

But the fact that she was there, navigating in what was presumably complete darkness in a cave system that even modern trained divers find challenging, speaks to a capacity for underground exploration and cave use that is consistent with what archaeology knows about human relationships with caves throughout the Pleistocene and early Holocene.

What The Animals Tell Us