This matters because it helps fill in the geographic picture of the early Americas.

The earliest well-documented Americans in the North American record — the Clovis people, the people represented by sites like the Anzick burial in Montana, the earlier evidence from White Sands in New Mexico — are concentrated in what is now the United States.

The evidence from earlier in the southward expansion of the founding population — the period when people were moving from Beringia through North America and into Mesoamerica and South America — is largely invisible in the archaeological record, because the sites that would document that movement are either under water (in the case of coastal routes) or have not yet been found.

Naia’s remains in the Yucatán provide a data point from a region that the North American-focused early American record has not addressed directly.