The animals that have defined Mesoamerican ecology in recorded history — the deer, the peccary, the jaguar, the tapir — were present too, but they shared the landscape with creatures that would be unrecognizable to anyone who knows only the modern fauna of the region.

The extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna — the process that eliminated the gomphotheres and the ground sloths and the other large animals from the Americas — occurred in the centuries or millennia after Naia’s death.

She was alive at the end, not the beginning, of the world those animals defined.

Why The Underwater Cave Matters For Understanding Human History

The Hoyo Negro discovery added something to the study of early Americans that could not have been supplied by land-based sites, however significant.

It demonstrated that the founding population of the Americas was present not just in the regions where most early American archaeological research has focused — the Great Plains, the Pacific Coast, various parts of North America — but in the heart of Mesoamerica as well.