https://nationalpost.com/news/world/a-canadian-scuba-diver-in-mexico-accidentally-discovers-a-vast-prehistoric-industrial-complex
[images in online article]
Canadian scuba diver in Mexico accidentally discovers vast, prehistoric
industrial complex
Author of the article:
National Post Staff
Publishing date:
Jul 03, 2020
It was a simple stroke of serendipity that led to the discovery in
Mexico of the earliest underground ochre mine in the New World, which a
new journal article describes as a vast prehistoric industrial complex
as much as 12 millennia old, where Paleonindians prospected for the
valuable red iron-rich mineral that is a major factor in human evolution.
It began in 2017, when a Canadian scuba diving instructor went through a
tight passage to become the first person ever to enter an unknown
chamber in the cave complex in Quintana Roo, on the eastern Yucatan
peninsula, on Mexico’s Caribbean coast.
Fred Devos had been teaching an underwater cave survey class, stringing
new guide lines and estimating the volume of cave passages by measuring
out from the line to the wall, when a student taking a measurement
noticed a tunnel with no exploration line leading into it.
Soon after, Devos and diver Sam Meacham swam their way into the
blackness. Their exploration took them first up into an air dome and
back down into the water, then through a tight restriction, through
which Devos was likely the first person to pass in modern times.
“It’s almost as if we passed through a portal,” said Meacham, a Texan
diver who, with Devos, runs an organization in Mexico to study and
conserve the local underground water systems.
Water is their primary interest, but they come across all kinds of
things, submerged here since the once-dry cave flooded about 8,000 years
ago.
“There’s all sorts of stuff in these caves,” Meacham said in an
interview. Over the years they had noticed weird things out of place,
like rocks piled on top of each other, things that did not look natural
but had no obvious explanation other than people. Other caves nearby had
yielded human remains, but they seemed more the exception than the rule,
people who had somehow died on site, such as Naia, the previously
reported 13,000 year old skeleton of a teenage girl.
“We knew people were in there,” Meacham said. But it was not until they
found this new chamber, and many more beyond, that they saw the full
scale of this prehistoric underground human enterprise.
“We started seeing widespread destruction in what would have been a
pristine cave,” Meacham said. “It must be ingrained in human nature to
pile rocks on top of each other. There was no other way it could have
got there other then a human stacking it on top.”
In places, the floor of the cave had been bashed open to reveal the
ochre layer beneath, and the hole extended by smashing rocks, with
breakage piled up at the sides. There were pits, stone tools, piles of
debris, cairns to mark direction, hearths for charcoal, soot-blackened
spots on the ceiling.
It was an ochre mine, or used to be, back when this cave was dry and
filled with the stench of wood fires for light, the closeness of
humanity pushing itself into the farthest subterranean reaches of planet
Earth.
This is detailed in new research in the journal Science Advances, led by
Brandi MacDonald of the University of Missouri, with Eduard Reinhardt of
McMaster University in Hamilton, and Meacham and Devos among others.
The research presents “uniquely preserved evidence indicating that
people were exploring underground cave systems to prospect and mine red
ochre, an iron oxide earth mineral pigment widely used by North
America’s earliest inhabitants.”
The scale of the thing is what makes it astonishing, spread over three
cave systems — known as Camilo Mina, Monkey Dust, and Sagitario — a few
kilometres from the present day Caribbean coastline. This ochre mine
was, as the authors describe, a “regional-scale activity that was
sustained over multiple generations.”
The cave is thought to have been dry from the Last Glacial Maximum more
than 20,000 years ago, to when it flooded, perhaps as recently as 8,000
years ago.
Humans were already well established in North America, having come
perhaps 14,000 years ago from the north. In 2018, the discovery of two
infants ceremonially buried in Alaska 11,500 years ago was held up as
further evidence for the theory that humans, after becoming anatomically
modern in Africa and spreading across Asia, slowly and fitfully migrated
from Siberia via Alaska into all of the Americas, some via Pacific
coastal waters, others through inland routes depending on glacial activity.
Ochre, a catch-all term for various sorts and colours of iron oxide
mixed with clay and sand, figures into every part of this human story.
Human use of ochre spans 200,000 years or more to the very earliest days
of modern homo sapiens, to the origin art and science of creative
expression and environmental control. Humans learned to get it, and to
use it, and ever since it has been a clue to symbolic thinking and
social behaviour
It is there in Blombos cave in South Africa, where pieces of ochre
pigment along with carved bone tools and decorative etchings seem to
indicate homo sapiens was thinking abstractly as early as 70,000 years
ago. It was also a defining cultural practice of the Beothuk Indigenous
people of Newfoundland, and may be the origin of the notion of “Red”
Indians, which survives today in the name of a professional football team.
One of the abiding questions of anthropology is what ochre was primarily
used for, and why it so reliably followed human migration out of Africa,
through Asia, as far as Australia, Europe, the Americas.
The new paper sketches the question of whether ochre was prized for
utilitarian reasons (such as sunscreen, antiseptic, pesticide,
purgative, hide tanning) or ceremonial reasons (mortuary practices,
paint, when mixed with animal fat).
“Whether ochre procurement or use by Paleoindian groups and their Old
World predecessors constitutes evidence for ritual behavior or
utilitarian purposes remains an ongoing anthropological discussion, yet
consensus suggests that the two are not mutually exclusive,” the paper
reads.
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