Skeletons of over 60 mammoths found under-construction site of future Mexico airport

In the future airport of the city, a team of archeologists working near Mexico City has discovered the remains of more than 60 mammoths.

The bone fragments found at the proposed construction site of the Felipe Angeles International Airport date back some 15,000 years, said the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

Both discoveries reveal how appealing the area — once a shallow lake — was for the mammoths.

Thursday, the National Institute of Anthropology and History said there was no immediate evidence that the 60 mammoths newly discovered at the old Santa Lucia military airbase had been butchered by humans.

The remains were uncovered close to the spot where the airport’s future control tower is to be built. INAH excavators have been working at the site – some 50 kilometers (about 30 miles) north of the capital – since April last year, seeking animal remains from the Pleistocene era.

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The team reported in December that it had found the bones of a far smaller number of animals at the old Santa Lucia Air Base, a military airport being converted for civilian use.

The area was formerly submerged under the Xaltocan Lake, part of the Mexican Basin, and a focal point of the country’s pre-Colombian civilization. Traps for the hunting of mammoths, thought to have been dug soon after the lake dried up, were found at the site last year.

Almost all of the giant skeletons are thought to belong to the Colombian mammoth species.

Other types of fauna, including bison, camels, and horses were also found, as well as bones of humans buried in the pre-Hispanic era and various artifacts.

“The main challenge is that the richness of fauna and relics is greater than we had considered,” Pedro Francisco Sánchez Nava, INAH’s national anthropology coordinator told Mexico’s Excelsiornewspaper.

INAH says the discoveries are not intended to put a brake on the building of the airport, and that they had little impact on the building work.

“It would be a lie to say that we have not had an influence on the work being carried out, but we are working in coordination with those responsible,” said Sanchez Nava. “We are able to continue at our own pace without having too much influence on the times of the work.”

Scientists find evidence of fires built in Yucatán cave 10,000 years ago

In Mexico the oldest traces of charcoal ever discovered is found in a cenote of the Yucatán Peninsula.

Recent archeological evidence from tests of burnt charcoal has shown that the first inhabitants on the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico constructed bonfires in the cave now flooded with water for over 10,000 years.

Chemical charred samples of 14 prehistory bonfires were obtained by the scientists of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 2017 and 2018 from the cenote of Aktun Ha (sinkhole) at a distance of around nine kilometers from Tulum, Quintana Roo.

In late April this year archaeologist Luis Alberto Martos López authored an article about the charcoal sample analysis which was published in the journal  Geoarchaeology detailing how they had all been found in the Ancestors Chamber of the Aktun Ha cenote.

The subsequent study included controlled heating experiments, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and carbon dating to determine the fires had burned between “10,250 and 10,750 years ago.”

Located beside the Tulum-Cobá highway the cenote is known locally as the “Car Wash,” for before becoming a major heritage and tourist attraction taxi drivers used to get water for washing their cars.

The dating of the fires corresponds to the early Holocene period, which is the geological epoch we are still in that began more than 11,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age, and the 14 charcoal remnants have been called the “oldest ever discovered in a Yucatán Peninsula cenote” according to a report in Mexico News Daily.

Mr. Martos López said this finding is helping him and his fellow scientists to reconstruct the history of fire in the Americas which he believes is of great importance for the “study of evolution and human migration.”

Before this discovery was cemented as bonafide archaeology the scientists first had to negate the possibility that waters from elsewhere had swept the charcoal remains into the cenote cave.

And increasing this possibility, in 2018, the discovery of an underground link between the Sac Actun underwater river system which is approximately 263 kilometers long, and the Dos Ojos system in Tulum which is 84 kilometers long, which Geo Mexico called “the world’s largest underwater cave system .” However, the archaeologists were able to determine that the fires had been burned locally to the cenote.

Analysis of the charcoal revealed the fires had reached temperatures as high as 600 C and archaeological divers discovered stone tools and artifacts in the cave, such as hammers and scraper tools, suggesting it was a temporary shelter where butchery and cooking occurred.

But the researchers say the early hunter-gatherers who lived on the Yucatán Peninsula may have used the Ancestors Chamber “for ritual purposes”.

Describing how the ancient sacred site was accessed over 10 millennia ago, Martos explained that to get into the cave in prehistoric times people would have had to crawl through “a narrow five-meter-long tunnel whose entrance was hidden by a mound of rocks.”

At the end of the tunnel, the Ancestors Chamber of the Aktun Ha cenote measures 20 square meters high and five to six meters wide, and around 10,000 years ago a natural well-formed at the back of the cave and Martos explained that before it was flooded with water it had been “well ventilated allowing the fire smoke to escape.”

This new discovery jigsaw into the content of a Feb 2020 news article I wrote for Archaeology org about new research published in the journal  PLOS One detailing the discovery of “a 9,900-year-old human skeleton,” found in the Chan Hol cave, near the Tulum archaeological site in Quintana Roo.

Belonging to a woman who had died in her 30s, the archaeologists referred to her as being among the “first people to set foot in the Americas.”

In context, when this 9,000-year-old woman sat around a fire at night considering where she might have come from, her fire burning ancestors who left the charcoal behind in the Aktun Ha cenote were as distant to her as the Norman Invasion of Britain in 1066 AD is to us, having occurred almost 1,000 before our present day.

It seems that as technologies rapidly advance, every few months archaeologists in Mexico push back the anthological clock penetrating deeper into our Ancient Origins, and very soon we may have an answer to the big question: where did the 10,000-year-old fire starters come from?

1,600-Year-Old Elongated Skull with Stone-Encrusted Teeth Found in Mexico Ruins

The 1600-year-old skeleton of an upper-class woman whose skull was purposely deformed and teeth encrusted with mineral stones was found by archeologists near ancient Teotihuacan ruins of Mexico.

When she died, between the ages of 35 and 40, the woman was buried with 19 jars that served as offerings, the National Anthropology and History Institute said.

The institute said in a statement that her cranium had been elongated by being compressed in a “very extreme” manner, a technique commonly used in the southern part of Mesoamerica, not the central region where she was found.

Her teeth contained two round pyrite stones, which were encrusted in her top front teeth.

This was a practice that was used among the nobility in Maya regions in southern Mexico and Central America. 

The Maya are credited with being the masters of cosmetic dentistry as they were known to decorate teeth by embedding them with precious stones or by carving notches and grooves into them.

Tiny holes were chipped out of teeth and ornamental stones—including jade—were attached with an adhesive made out of natural resins, such as plant sap, which was mixed with other chemicals and crushed bones.

The dentists likely had a sophisticated knowledge of tooth anatomy because they knew how to drill into teeth without hitting the pulp inside.

Last year, archaeologists discovered liquid mercury in a subterranean tunnel beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent in Teotihuacan, which may represent an underworld river that leads the way to a Royal tomb or tombs.

The remains of the kings of Teotihuacan, some of the most powerful rulers of the pre-Hispanic world, have never been found.

Such a discovery would be monumental as it would unravel many of the mysteries surrounding this ancient civilization.

The enigmatic pre-Hispanic city of Teotihuacan, some 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of Mexico City, thrived between the first and eighth centuries, after which its civilization vanished.

Its two majestic Sun and Moon pyramids are major tourist attractions.

Studies of bodies buried 500 years ago in Mexico reveal stories of 3 African slaves

The men excavating a new metro line in central Mexico City stumbled on a long-lost cemetery in the late 1980s. Documents showed it had once been connected to a colonial hospital built between 1529 and 1531—only about 10 years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico—for Indigenous patients.

Three stood out as archeologists excavated the uncovered skeletons. Their teeth were filed into shapes similar to those of enslaved Africans from Portugal and people living in parts of West Africa.

Chemical and genetic studies also suggest that these people are among the first African generation to arrive in the Americas, likely as early victims of the burgeoning transatlantic slave trade.

Tens of thousands of slaves and free Africans lived in Mexico during the 16th and 17th centuries. Today, almost all Mexicans have little African ancestry

Rodrigo Barquera, a graduate student in archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, suspected the remains might offer a window into lives often left out of historical records.

To confirm their origins, he and his adviser Johannes Krause extracted DNA and analyzed chemical isotopes, including strontium, carbon, and nitrogen, from their teeth.

Their DNA revealed that all three were men with ancestry from West Africa. (Researchers couldn’t connect them to particular countries or groups.) And the ratios of the chemicals in their teeth, which preserve a signature of the food and water they consumed as children, were consistent with West African ecosystems, the researchers report today in Current Biology.

“It’s really nice to see how well the different lines of evidence come together,” says Anne Stone, an anthropological geneticist at Arizona State University, Tempe, who wasn’t involved with the research.

All three skeletons, now at the National School of Anthropology and History in Mexico City, show signs of trauma and violence.

The men were likely in their late 20s or early 30s when they died. Before that, one man survived several gunshot wounds, and he and another man showed a thinning of their skull bones associated with malnutrition and anemia.

The third man’s skeleton showed signatures of stress from grueling physical labor, including a poorly healed broken leg. These signs of abuse make it likely that the men were enslaved rather than free, Krause says.

The two men with malnutrition also carried pathogens linked to chronic diseases, according to a genetic analysis of the microbes preserved in their teeth.

One had the hepatitis B virus, and the other carried the bacterium that causes yaws, a disease in the same family as syphilis.

Both microbes were most closely related to African strains, making it likely the men caught these pathogens in Africa. Or perhaps they picked up the microbes on an overcrowded slave ship voyaging to the Americas, suggests Ayana Omilade Flewellen, an archaeologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the experiences of enslaved Africans and wasn’t involved in the study.

Such journeys killed millions between the 16th and 19th centuries. Either way, this is direct evidence that the transatlantic slave trade introduced novel pathogens to the Americas, Krause says, just as European colonization did.

The three men survived all these hardships. In fact, researchers still aren’t sure what killed them.

They were buried in a mass grave in the hospital’s cemetery that could be linked to an epidemic, perhaps of smallpox or measles. But researchers didn’t find DNA from deadly infectious diseases in their remains.

The men’s presence in a hospital for Indigenous people highlights the largely forgotten diversity of early colonies in the Americas, Flewellen says. “We need to break out of the binary of just Native [American] and European experiences” and remember that Africans were part of the story as well.

Postclassic Period Maya Village Discovered in Mexico

In between the Mangroves and the Forest, experts from the Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) documented the Post-Classic Mayan Pre-Hispanic Settlement (1200-1546 AD), which represents the first of that era detected in the locality on the eastern coast of the Yucatan peninsula.

The ancient village named by the specialists of the INAH Quintana Roo Center, as Mahahual has as a particularity remarkable proximity to the Caribbean coast, for which, together with the fact that all the structures located at this time are of residential or water supply structures, it is theorized that the fundamental vocations of those who inhabited it were fishing and agriculture.

However, according to archaeologist Fernando Cortés de Brasdefer, a continuation of research work will be carried out at the site to find any indications of elite zones, or ritual or civic-religious areas, because the area prospected in the first stage of the study, was only 1.5 kilometers long by 450 meters wide.

“Up to now the settlement has a heterogenous network form which is a conformation interweaving paths constituted by family estates that gave origin to a large group of highly organized people”.

So, he explains, what the current inhabitants of Mahahual had believed were natural stone walls, in fact are constructions that bordered lands in whose interior were orchards and “small houses made of guano palm and mud walls built upon limestone platforms equal to the traditional houses built by the contemporary Maya”.

The surface tours carried out by archaeologists, at the request of the owner of the land, for which a tourism development project is planned, reveal to now an estimated 80 structures: most of them water-related habitational vestiges, man-made vessels to collect the vital liquid; and ‘sartenejas’ natural wells that were dug to reach aquifers.

The region on which the archaeological site is located also has cenotes, caves and caverns, as well as various elements that over time have accumulated there, for example, remains of a metal boiler, which is calculated to be from the Porfirian era.

Another peculiarity of Mahahual is that no additional objects such as ceramic remains, stone (lithic) or bone elements have been found. This could be explained by the fact that the site was occupied for a relatively short generational time.

For now, the researchers of the INAH Quintana Roo Center continue working with the research team and reports will be delivered to the Institute’s Council of Archaeology.

A copy of the file will also be made available to the individual who requested the inspection, together with pertinent indications in order to compel all those involved to further research, conserve and protect the archaeological heritage detected.

Fernando Cortés concludes that although Mahahual is not a site with large ritual structures it still is important because it provides new data revealing to which geographies of the eastern coast of the Yucatan peninsula, closest to the border with Belize, the Mayans extended.

“We know little about the way of life of those who lived in this region; however, this survey reveals that they could have been farmers who complemented their diet with fishing.

In addition, their direct access to the sea would have given them advantages to exchange commercial products with other coastal and inland peoples”, he concluded

Cave Full of Untouched Maya Artifacts Found at Chichén Itzá

In Mexico, archeologists found some 200 Mayan artifacts that seem to have been untouched for 1,000 years. In a cave of ruins in the ancient Mayan City of Chichen Itza on the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico, objects were discovered.

The discovery has been revealed at a press conference in Mexico City by the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History. The lead researcher on the project is Mexican archaeologist Guillermo de Anda. He called the cave a “scientific treasure.”

He said the artifacts appear to date back to around A.D. 1000. “What we found there was incredible and completely untouched,” he added.

The findings included bone pieces and burnt offering materials. In addition, incense burners, vases, plates, and other objects were discovered. Some items included the likeness of Tlaloc, the rain god of central Mexico.

The Mayans also had their own rain god, called Chaac. But experts believe the Mayans may have imported Tlaloc from other pre-Hispanic cultures.

The cave where the objects were found is part of a cave system known as Balamku or “Jaguar God.” The cave is about three kilometers east of the main pyramid of Kukulkan, which sits at the center of Chichen Itza.

The stone city is described by the United Nations as “one of the greatest Mayan centers of the Yucatán Peninsula.”

The cave sits about 24 meters underground, with areas connected by passages. De Anda said some of the passages were so narrow that researchers had to crawl in or pull themselves through.

He added that his team had so far explored about 460 meters of the cave, and is unsure how far it stretches. The team plans to continue exploring the cave. Artifacts found will not be removed, but studied inside, he said.

The team accidentally found the artifacts while exploring Chichen Itza in an effort to learn more about its underground water system.

A series of sinkhole lakes, known as cenotes, can be seen on parts of the surface. But the archaeologists are exploring other water sites below pyramids, temples, and other buildings.

Water was always central to the city. Its name in Maya means “at the mouth of the well of the Water Wizards.”

The cave had been discovered by local people 50 years ago, but was not fully explored, de Anda said. He hopes the new discovery will help scientists better understand the history, lives, and beliefs of people who lived in Chichen Itza.

He said archaeologists believe there may be another undiscovered cave hidden under the pyramid of Kukulkan that could be connected to the latest find.

“Let’s hope this leads us there,” de Anda said. “That is part of the reason why we are entering these sites, to find a connection to the cenote under the (Kukulkan).”

Ancient Maya kingdom with pyramid discovered in southern Mexico

Since exploring for over a quarter of a century, archeologists have at last discovered the site of Sak Tz’i, a Maya kingdom that’s referenced in sculptures and inscriptions from across the ancient Maya world. But it wasn’t archaeologists who made the find.

A local man discovered a 2- by 4-foot (0.6 by 1.2 meters) tablet near Lacanja Tzeltal, a community in Chiapas, Mexico.

The tablet’s inscriptions are a treasure trove of mythology, poetry, and history that reflect the typical Maya practice of weaving together myth and reality.

Various sections of the tablet contain inscriptions that recount a mythical water serpent, various unnamed gods, a mythic flood, and accounts of the births, lives, and battles of ancient rulers, according to a news statement from Brandeis University in Massachusetts. 

Sak Tz’i’ sat on what’s now the border between Mexico and Guatemala, and it probably wasn’t an especially powerful kingdom, Charles Golden, an associate professor of anthropology at Brandeis University, said in the statement. 

Despite being surrounded by stronger neighbors, evidence suggests that the kingdom’s capital city was occupied for more than a millennium after being settled in 750 B.C.

The kingdom’s longevity may be due to the fortifications that surrounded its capital city. The researchers found evidence that the city was protected by a stream with a steep ravine on one side and defensive masonry walls on the other. 

The team members added that the kingdom may have benefitted from forming strategic peace deals with its more powerful neighbors.

Even though this kingdom never achieved great power, “Sak Tz’i’ was a formidable enemy and an important ally to those greater kingdoms, as evidenced by the frequency by which it appears in texts at those sites,” the researchers wrote in the study, published online in the Journal of Field Archaeology.

That said, the kingdom experienced conflict, both with its neighbors and from nature, the archaeological record suggests. For instance, there’s a figure of a dancing ruler carved into the bottom of the tablet.

This ruler is dressed like the god Yopaat, who is associated with violent tropical storms. The figure holds a lightning-bolt ax in his right hand and a stone weapon used in ritual combat in his left hand. 

What’s more, the researchers found another sculpture at the site that appears to tell of a fire that destroyed part of the city during a violent conflict with one of its neighbors.

Since excavation began in the summer, the researchers have identified several structures that offer insight into political, religious, and commercial life in the kingdom. These include the remains of pyramids, a royal palace, and a ball court. 

One of the capital’s most striking features, the ruins of a pyramid that once stood 45 feet (14 m) tall, is surrounded by structures that might have served as houses for elites and religious rituals, the researchers said.

The pyramid also has a number of stelae (carved stone slabs) around it, including one showing the soles of nobles’ feet facing outward toward the viewer, “an unusual depiction otherwise featured only on a few Maya vases,” the researchers wrote in the study.

In addition, the researchers uncovered a 1.5-acre (0.6 hectares) courtyard called the Plaza Muk’ ul Ton, or Monuments Plaza, where people gathered for religious and political ceremonies.  The discovery marks a major step forward in the study of the ancient Maya world.

The researchers hope further analysis of the site’s architecture and detailed inscriptions will offer new insight into the politics, economy, rituals, and warfare of the Maya civilization’s western regions.  Going forward, the archaeologists plan to use lidar — or light detection and ranging — a tool that uses lasers and can be mounted on an airplane or drone to discover architecture and topography hidden under the dense jungle canopy.

The team is especially interested in how kingdoms such as Sak Tz’i’ managed to survive for so long, despite apparently never becoming as powerful as rival kingdoms in the region.  

An ancient crystal skull was found many years ago in an archeological site in Southern Mexico.

A crystal skull was discovered in an archeological site called Monte Alban in Southern Mexico a number of years ago called Pancho. The location where he was found was once populated by the Zapotec people.

In the Valley of Oaxaca in the south of Mesoamerica, Zapoteca was an indigenous Pre-Columbian civilization. Evidence shows that their civilization goes back at least 2500 years.

The Zapotecas were the second oldest civilization in Mesoamerica. Only the Olmecs were older. Even the Mayas flourished later in what is known as the Classic Period.

The Zapotecas left evidence at the ancient city of Monte Alban in the form of buildings, ball courts, magnificent tombs and grave goods including finely worked gold jewelry. Monte Alban was one of the first major cities in Mesoamerica and the center of a Zapotec state that dominated much of what we know today as the current state of Oaxaca. 

Pancho was carved from one piece of clear quartz crystal. Quartz crystal can be found all over the world and the crystal that was used to create Pancho is probably millions of years old.

He stands about 6.5″ tall and weighs about 15 pounds. Pancho is hollow. Most of the other ancient crystal skulls have human characteristics. Pancho does not.

The most interesting distinction is the fact that Pancho has two rows of teeth with 9 teeth in each row. His head is horizontally flat in the back and he has an elongated looking jaw. Some of the dirt that was on him and inside of him when he was found in the ground still clings on to Pancho.

Who carved Pancho and how was he carved? The answer to these questions remains a mystery. Modern scientists claim that the Pre-Hispanic peoples of Mesoamerica did not have the tools or the technology to carve Pancho and the other crystal skulls so smoothly.

Without modern tools, it would have taken more than 300 years hand polishing the crystal day in and day out without rest to create such a smooth specimen. Could perhaps a more advanced civilization have brought Pancho to Monte Alban? Or did a more advanced culture bring the peoples of this area the tools to create Pancho and the other crystal skulls?

It is widely accepted in the metaphysical and spiritual community that the land of the Maya was a safe place for the survivors of Atlantis after the destruction of that continent.

The Atlanteans had learned to harness crystal energy and used it as part of their culture. Did the Atlanteans or even the Lemurians bring this technology or even the crystal skulls themselves to Mexico and Central America?

Some crystal skull researchers and experts even believe that Pancho and some of the other ancient crystal skulls could have come from outer space or from another dimension. This might explain Pancho’s strange appearance. 

It is very possible that these extraterrestrials placed the crystal skulls strategically in earth grids or landlines to activate the planet. These crystalline grids could perhaps navigate future visits by these aliens to our planet much like crop circles do today.

Assuming that our ancestors carved and created Pancho and the other ancient crystal skulls the question still remains: what was their purpose? Did our ancestors download information into the crystal that perhaps someday would be retrieved by future generations? Our ancestors were wise and knowledgeable.

They built the Great Pyramids, Stonehenge, Macchu Picchu, and the statues on Easter Island. The Maya were able to calculate solar calendars, lunar calendars and even a calendar for the planet Venus. The Egyptians and the Sumerians were advanced in mathematics and understood the codes of the universe. The ancients also figured out that crystal could hold and store information. Much like our modern computers that utilize microchips to store information the ancients utilized the same technology.

They created their computers in the shape of a skull because they knew that the skull was a vessel for thought, knowledge, wisdom, and life. But how could the information be uploaded and downloaded? Twenty years ago the thought of connecting to the worldwide web wireless was impossible. Today, the idea that we can turn on and turn off our computers with our minds is not that far fetched.

Perhaps in a couple of years, we might even be able to connect to the Internet psychically, too. Did the ancients know this? Were they able to connect to the information in the crystal skulls through thought? This is the explanation for why Pancho and the rest of the ancient skulls were created.

It is very possible that Pancho and the other skulls are a web of knowledge and information much like our present Internet. Our ancestors knew that one day a future generation would be in desperate need of their ancient wisdom. Ancient Wisdom for a New Generation.