The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
Canadian diver discovered vast prehistoric complex
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.