The first time she saw it four years ago in a museum, Silvia Gonzalez knew there was something special about the skull found in Mexico City in 1959. Known as Peñon Woman III, it was long and narrow, not round and broad cheeked like the usual skulls of prehistoric Native Americans. “It looked so incredibly different,” Gonzalez says. “Physically, it was very pleasing to the eye.”
So Gonzalez, a geoarchaeologist, and her colleagues at Liverpool John Moores University in England radiocarbon-dated the skull and found its beauty was more than bone deep. Surprisingly, the analysis showed Peñon Woman III is 12,755 years old, older than any known ancestor of modern Native Americans.
Scientists believed the Siberian forebears of Native Americans arrived 9,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age. But Peñon Woman III could help prove that the first Americans came from Australia much earlier. Based on ...
