But the co-occurrence of human and megafauna remains at the same site, in the same general time range, is one of many lines of evidence that the people of the earliest Americas lived in a world that still included these large animals.

Whether and how they interacted with them — whether the people of Naia’s community hunted gomphotheres, avoided them, feared them, revered them, ate them when they could — is not known.

What is known is that the extinction of those animals occurred during or shortly after the period when people like Naia were present in the Yucatán, and that the two facts — human presence and megafauna extinction — are at minimum temporally related.

The Cave Diving Community That Made It Possible