Original subtitles

Deep underground,

in a flooded Mexican cave system,

divers make an amazing discovery.

The feeling is like one of those outer space black holes

that sucks all your light.

I see no reflection of my light.

The heart starts to beat very hard.

At the bottom of a vast sunken pit--

a forest of prehistoric bones.

In their midst, the skull of a girl.

It's just incredible to see

another human in this environment-- it's amazing.

He said you can't tell anyone

because we've never really seen anything quite like this before.

Who was she?

How did she die?

It's kind of a missing link right?

And suddenly you are sitting with that.

The mystery of the girl in the cave

leads scientists on a journey

into the world of the very first humans

to arrive in the Americas.

Who were they?

How did they get here?

Finally, there are answers.

It's the most remarkable project

I'll probably ever work on.

They discover the way of life of an Ice Age people.

Rapidly moving big game hunters.

But it all begins with the story of a girl

who lived 13,000 years ago.

Between 15 and 16 years of age.

We know a lot more about the early lives of the Americans

than we would ever have known without her.

And what happened on the day she died.

Fracture at death.

Astonishing new finds

and a glimpse of the "First Face of America."

Right now on "NOVA."

In a dark cave, deep underwater,

a cache of prehistoric bones,

Ice Age animals that walked the earth thousands of years ago.

Among the ancient bones,

the skeleton of a girl,

one of the very first Americans.

Her skeleton is so complete,

it will allow scientists

to reconstruct her life and death in amazing detail,

providing answers to questions that have long puzzled them

about the peopling of the Americas.

In her death she left us this incredible record

of the life of these earliest people.

13,000 years after she died,

a young girl launches

an exciting archaeological adventure,

finally unlocking a great mystery:

how and when did humans first enter the new world?

In the remote jungles of Yucatan in Mexico...

a team of cave divers,

intrigued by reports of prehistoric bones,

is on its way to explore a system of underground cenotes.

It's a dangerous undertaking.

Beneath the surface of the Yucatan Peninsula,

the cenotes are a vast network

of underground caves and tunnels.

They stretch for hundreds of miles

through the limestone bedrock of the peninsula.

They were once dry.

But flooded at the end of the last ice age

about 10,000 years ago.

Only a fraction of the network has been explored.

The possibilities of getting trapped,

lost, or running out of air...

are ever-present.

Over the years, dozens of experienced divers

have drowned in these flooded sinkholes.

Because they don't know how big the cenote system is,

they've prepared carefully.

Their tanks have a special mix of oxygen, nitrogen, and helium

that will allow them to dive deep.

They also have rebreathers that recycle their air,

extending their dive time.

Propelled by underwater scooters,

they travel along submerged tunnels for almost an hour.

In the first passages of the cenote

they notice that guide wires had been laid,

a sign that someone has explored these tunnels before them.

But before long, the lines end.

They are now in a part of the cenote system

that is completely unknown.

With no idea of what lies ahead,

they press on.

Suddenly the floor and walls of the tunnel drop away.

At the end of this tunnel we can see darkness.

And then everything was black.

I was in front.

When I see no reflection of my light,

it wasn't-- the heart starts to beat very hard.

They find themselves suspended in a vast watery pit.

The feeling is like

we were faced with one of those outer space black holes

that suck all your light.

And then I am floating in the dark.

You can't even see the floor,

you can't even see the next wall.

The black hole, Hoyo Negro,

is so big,

the beams of their flashlights cannot find its floor.

Breathless with excitement, they begin their descent.

Finally, at a depth of over a hundred feet,

their flashlights detect the bottom

and reveal a treasure trove of ancient bones

beyond their wildest dreams.

All of a sudden, we start finding bones.

We see this huge pelvis.

And there was this beautiful broken femur on top of a rock.

Big, big bones,

we knew could be something similar to an elephant.

Here is the massive thigh bone of an extinct elephant,

the skull of a cave bear,

a giant sloth.

The floor of the Hoyo is littered

with over 20 skeletons of long-extinct ice age species.

But the most amazing find comes last.

Just as we thought it couldn't get any better,

all of a sudden, we go a little bit up.

There's this human skull.

It's amazing.

I mean this is the discovery

of our lifetime,

it's not going to get any better than this.

The rest of the skeleton is not far away.

A whole human skeleton surrounded by the bones

of ice age megafauna

has never been found before.

Who is it?

How did this person get here?

And when?

For many months the divers explore the Hoyo,

taking bone samples and photos.

Finally, they decide to send them

to the director of subaquatic archaeology

at Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History,

Pilar Luna.

In 2009, Alejandro Alvarez got in touch with me

about an extremely important find

in a place called Hoyo Negro.

The news was very exciting

because I had always believed

that there is much to be discovered

in this area of the Yucatan Peninsula

about the past and the first people

to populate the Americas.

Pilar decided to send a CD of the divers' photos

to the scientist who has studied

more ancient human remains from the Americas

than any other-- Jim Chatters.

I said, "I've been looking at your CD,

do you want to know what you have?"

And she said, "Yes, no one's been able to tell us."

And I said, "Well, you have an adolescent female."

And she said, "Would you like to take over the study

of the human skeleton?"

To work with ancient humans and extinct animals

at the same time, nobody's been able to do that before.

Knowing that the skeleton they have found is a young girl,

the divers give her the name of a mythological water nymph--

Naia.

You get a connection,

and you get more respect if we have a name.

And Naia was a kind of water nymph.

It's a little bit related to the spirits of the cave.

Jim must wait to examine Naia's skeleton

until the divers retrieve her.

But from a few bone and tooth fragments they bring him,

he can at least try to find out how long ago she lived.

He hopes a radiocarbon dating lab

will give him the dates he needs.

It proves to be difficult.

To get radiocarbon dates,

it's necessary to extract proteins such as collagen,

which contain carbon.

But her long sojourn under water

has destroyed all the collagen in Naia's bones.

The problem we have is in tropical environments

bone does not produce good radio carbon dates.

The protein part of the bone is dissolved away

by bacteria and warm-warm weather.

And so what we're trying is sort of second best,

which is the tooth enamel.

And tooth enamel, being a very tight crystalline matrix,

has the best chance of having

a non-contaminated material we can work with.

The key is to find the radioactive isotope

carbon-14, present along with other elements,

in the cells of all living things.

The molecules of this form of carbon are unstable,

slowly losing protons to become nitrogen.

They do this at a steady rate measured as a half-life,

the time it takes half the carbon-14 to decay.

Once an organism dies, the carbon-14 in its tissues

stops being replaced.

So its density in the tooth

relative to other more stable elements

will give Jim a reading on Naia's age.

First of all, they dissolve the tooth fragment...

Then heat the solution

until it becomes gaseous carbon dioxide.

Once frozen and purified,

the solution becomes a fine carbon graphite powder.

A mass spectrometer will then be able to measure

the amount of carbon-14 in the powder,

if it's there in the first place.

At the end of the process,

the mass spectrometer gets a carbon-14 reading

and compares it to a stable form of carbon in the tooth.

That will give its age.

Okay, so it's nearly stabilizing now.

It's about two half-lives.

Yep.

At the end of the analysis,

the tooth proves to be almost 13,000 years old.

It's really exciting.

Makes her one of the oldest human skeletons yet found

in the Americas.

So, I couldn't be happier about that result.

The radiocarbon date tells Jim he is dealing with

a sensational find.

Naia lived at the dawn of human life in the Americas.

13,000 years ago,

the Americas were the only habitable continents

that had not been settled by our species.

Since leaving Africa some 80,000 years ago,

Homo sapiens had spread through the Middle East,

Europe, Australia, and Asia

but had not yet reached the New World.

When sea levels fell, during the last ice age

to create a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska,

they could finally enter the Americas.

Who were those first humans to arrive in North America?

For a long time,

scientists believed that it was the Clovis people.

Known principally by the distinctive stone spear points

they left behind,

the Clovis people have long been a mystery.

Who were they?

Were they the ancestors of modern day Native Americans?

Speculation about the Clovis people began in the 1930s

when archaeologists first discovered

their stone tools near Clovis in New Mexico,

a site dating to around 13,000 years ago.

At that time, the Bering Land Bridge

still connected Siberia and Alaska.

When Clovis points started showing up at sites

all over North and Central America,

archaeologists decided that the people who made them

must have been the first Americans...

Who used them to hunt bison

and ice age animals like woolly mammoths.

Because Clovis points were widely distributed

in most of un-glaciated North America

on down into Central and parts of South America

the notion appeared that the makers of those points

were the very first people in the New World.

The Clovis people left their stone tools in many sites,

but only a handful of bones.

So in 1968, when workers started turning up Clovis points

at a site in Montana,

followed by the bones of a 13,000-year-old child,

it was extremely exciting.

Called Anzick Child, the one-year-old boy

had been buried

with a huge cache of Clovis blades

and provided enough DNA to be sequenced.

Here for the first time was a link

between the Clovis technology and an actual person.

Would Naia also be revealed as one of the Clovis people

as her age would seem to suggest?

Naia and five other mostly partial skeletons

are the only ones we know of

that are older than 12,000 years.

It's an extremely small club.

They are our window into who those early people were.

Naia's skeleton promises to be a treasure trove of information

about those first Americans.

Jim wastes no time in going to Mexico

and organizing a dive to bring her up.

But it won't be easy.

He knows that the bones will be extremely fragile.

Susan Bird is the diver tasked with picking up Naia's skull

and bringing her to the surface.

So, what I've got them set up as

is the best orientation toward you.

They're designed that way to have more room at this end

for your arms to come in.

Jim is nervous

as he and Susan rehearse with plaster casts of the bones.

So, you'll slide your hand under and support it that way.

All right. Your strongest part is here.

Your weakest points are here and here

so we want to protect them.

Then just gently, chin first...

release.

On the day of the dive there was so much tension,

so many people on the verge of freaking out.

The stress level, the tension was palpable.

The entire operation will be carefully documented,

photographed, and filmed.

Underwater lights have been set in the Hoyo

and almost half a mile of cabling to power them.

People don't see that if you go there, it's pitch black.

That's why it's call "Negro."

It's a 200 feet dome and it's totally dark,

but with all of this technology that we're bringing,

now we can finally see it, it's amazing.

Hey Dominique,

tell me how much slack you want.

Leader of the underwater camera crew Mike Madden

rehearses the divers and photographers one last time.

You pick up the skull,

you come around here,

and you try to stay-- try to be at the level

of the table and just set it in there, okay? Okay.

Once you put her in the box,

she's in the box.

You do whatever you got to do, you put the top on the box.

Finally, the moment arrives.

All right.

Let's rock and roll, man!

Good, let's do it!

F55, coming down.

As the divers set off carrying the box for Naia's skull,

Jim is left to anxiously wait.

He feels a heavy burden of responsibility.

Naia has lain for 13,000 years at the bottom of Hoyo Negro.

In a few hours he'll know if she makes it back out safely.

Deep in the cenote system,

the divers are moving through a world

they have only dimly seen before.

The huge underwater lights

reveal the full dimensions of the Hoyo.

As Susan approaches Naia's skull with Beto and Alex behind her,

she too is nervous.

After 13,000 years in the water,

the bone is brittle.

It would be so easy to let Naia's skull slip.

Finally, she has the skull safely in her hands.

Naia is ready for her return to the surface.

It will take time.

The divers must make at least three decompression stops

to avoid the bends.

Finally, for the first time in 13,000 years,

Naia emerges from the water

and into the light of day.

It's just... perfect...

Gingerly, she is carried away from the cenote.

A 4x4 is waiting to take her across the province

to the labs

of the National Institute of Anthropology and History

in Campeche, Mexico.

With conservator Diana Arano,

Jim lifts Naia's skull

onto the bed of a CT scanner.

It will give him basic information

about the state of her bones.

Ah, wow.

Her skull is in very good condition.

She's fossilized to a degree,

which greatly strengthens the bone.

So it's what I was thinking I might see,

and it's even better than I expected it to be.

So yeah, it's fantastic.

After the scan,

her skull is put in a tank with chemicals

to protect it from further exposure to air

after thousands of years underwater.

Meanwhile, the rest of Naia's skeleton

is brought up bone by bone

for forensic analysis.

Finally, in Mexico City,

at the National Museum of Anthropology,

Naia's skeleton is assembled.

Jim and his colleague Vera Tiesler examine it

for clues to her life.

We have a set

of attributes in her skeleton that tell us

that she was between 15 and 16 years of age.

Let's talk about the teeth, for example.

The lower jaw,

basically her permanent dentition is erupted

except for the third molars, which are about to erupt.

She's past her growth spurt but she's still in puberty,

she's still adolescent.

The third molars, which haven't erupted yet,

are Naia's wisdom teeth,

so that's consistent with an age of about 16.

Let's talk a little bit about

what's going on with her pelvis here.

Well, if we take a look at the sacrum,

the segments are not fused yet

and some of them are lacerated, they're open.

There are a lot of indication for trauma.

She must have had a childbirth, a pregnancy,

at an age where... when her pelvis

was not prepared to hold or, well, produce a child.

As more details of her life emerge,

they start to provide clues

to what happened on that day that Naia entered the cave.

What was she looking for?

13,000 years ago, the cenotes were dry.

It was the last ice age,

so much of the world's water was locked up in glaciers.

Sea levels were lower.

So the system where she was found was a vast cave.

But in the recesses of that cave there was water.

The environment of the Yucatan at the time of Naia's life

appears to have been very dry, particularly seasonally dry.

The only way you're going to get at water

is to find it inside the caves during the dry season.

So, she entered the cave almost certainly looking for water.

Even if she knew the cave well, she would have been wary.

She would have known that humans were not the only things

that look for water in caves.

I think it's common knowledge,

when you're a human on the landscape

and you have predators...

That they use caves for denning.

Large scavengers will use caves for denning.

Cats use them.

All across the world.

And so entering a cave is a dangerous thing to do.

Naia would have had that on her mind going into the cave

I'm sure.

But Naia was tough;

that she was used to extreme physical activity

is clear from the muscle attachments on her bones.

We're learning from the muscle developments

in her arms and legs

that she was constantly on the move:

running, walking.

She has leg muscle development more like a 35-year-old man

than she has like a 16-year-old girl.

Naia's physique seems consistent with the nomadic life

of a people always on the move in search of food.

She was also no stranger to violence.

She'd been through a rough life.

She's got a fractured left forearm;

this bone is definitely not the right shape.

It's got a number of jogs to it, its spiral fractured.

It's consistent with being forcibly twisted

by another individual.

Like pulled.

Yeah, twisted and pulled,

which is what often causes these in modern individuals.

So it's a sort of a...

what we might refer to as an abuse fracture.

Naia's abuse fracture is no surprise to Jim.

He has studied around two dozen of the oldest skeletons

found in the Americas.

Many of them bear the signs of interpersonal violence--

like a 9,000-year-old skeleton called Kennewick Man--

with trauma likely from fighting.

There are a lot of head injuries in the front of the head.

We have individuals with spear wounds.

Kennewick Man, for example,

had a big spear point healed in his pelvis.

So, we'll see a lot of violence between the males,

but we also see some

of that violence transferred over to the females.

Jim is convinced that extreme male aggression was common

in these ancient hunter-gatherer populations.

As recent arrivals in an unknown continent,

theirs was a dangerous and precarious life.

Women died young, often in childbirth,

and this may have intensified male rivalry.

Females are dying in their early 20s.

Males are dying in their mid to late 30s.

And that's increasing the competition for females

among the males because the males are living a lot longer

there are more of them in proportion to the females.

20 years ago, when Jim started reconstructing

the physical features of these very earliest Americans,

he noticed something perplexing.

Their facial structure was different

from modern Native Americans.

Scientists have long assumed that these earliest people

must be the ancestors of today's Native Americans,

so he was surprised.

If we compare them to modern Native Americans

they look quite different.

And it's been a major question

that I've been struggling with for 20 years.

Why do they look different from each other?

Jim's first exposure to this difference

was when he worked on the 9,000-year-old skeleton

called Kennewick Man.

When he reconstructed the face,

it was clear Kennewick Man looked very different

from a modern Native American.

And he was not the only one.

Here's Kennewick Washington.

He's 9,500 years.

Spirit Cave from Nevada, he's about 10,500.

A Horn Shelter male from Texas close to 12,000 years old.

And here's Naia from Mexico

at 13,000.

And what's distinctive

about these early individuals,

they're much more ruggedly built than modern people.

Heavy brows, big muscle attachments.

Just generally much more massive and much more projecting,

in their form.

By contrast,

modern Native American males all have much smaller heads

and finer features.

You see the much smaller head,

the roundness of the back of the skull.

Less prominent muscle development in the face.

He's also got a longer face,

and if you hold him in a similar position,

his face is tucked in.

It's not projecting anymore.

What did Naia look like?

As Jim and sculptor Tom McClelland set out

to anatomically reconstruct her face,

the mystery of these very first Americans deepens.

Were these people ancestral to today's Native Americans?

If so, how can these differences be explained?

Some folks have suggested that they're different

because they come from different parts of the world.

Perhaps some come from Europe.

Perhaps some come from Asia earlier than the arrivals

that later became Native Americans.

So, that's been a question that needed to be answered.

Finally, answers are emerging

in the place where those early humans

entered the western hemisphere for the first time-- Alaska.

In the Tanana Valley of Central Alaska,

archaeologist Ben Potter and his team

are discovering campsites made by those early nomads

as they crossed over from Siberia.

This is the heart of the land bridge

that once connected Asia and North America.

People think of the Bering Land Bridge

as a bridge that you might fall off of,

when in reality it's a landmass

that stretching a thousand miles or more north and south

that's connecting Asia and North America.

It persisted for a long time.

This lost continent that, for at least 20,000 years,

connected what is now Siberia and Alaska

has been given a name-- Beringia.

It was cut off from the rest of the Americas

by the ice sheets covering northern Canada,

a vast territory of tundra, mountains and grasslands.

For thousands of years, this was the first home

of those very early immigrants from Asia.

At campsites in the Tanana Valley

some 14,000 years ago, they hunted, fished,

and collected roots and berries before moving on,

following the herds that wandered Beringia.

We have evidence that they're hunting mammoth,

possibly horse,

and later on they're definitely subsisting on bison.

Theirs was a way of life that left few traces,

but they did leave some of their stone tools.

These have given Ben important clues to who they were.

The tools are stored at the museum

of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.

What we see,

going back at least 20,000 years ago

in parts of northern China, Mongolia, southern Siberia

is the emergence of very sophisticated

stone tool technology

that we think partly allowed them to expand northward.

And we see some of that same material here in Beringia

in some of the very earliest sites.

Their stone blades and spear points tell the story

of an immigrant population

that had changed very little

since arriving from Siberia.

What we have here is a representative collection

of some of the Beringian material that we have.

Some of the earliest people coming across

into this region are making material

that are quite similar to what we find in Asia.

So, microblade cores like this, microblade technology.

Quite distinctive so, we connect them really well

with the Asian antecessors.

But their tools are completely different

from the distinctive spear points found

in North America south of the ice sheets--

the hallmark of the Clovis culture.

If you compare this Clovis point

to some of the points that are being made up here,

they're quite distinct.

So, this has been one of the problems

that we're trying to grapple with

is how do we derive Clovis from some of this

Beringian material, which looks quite Asian.

What is the relation between these Beringian Asians

and the Clovis people?

And where do Naia and modern Native Americans fit in?

The answer would come from Ben's most remarkable discovery;

On the banks of Alaska's Upward Sun River,

the grave of two infants.

Clearly loved, these children had been carefully buried

with symbolic artifacts and red ochre.

Dating revealed that they were over 11,000 years old

making this one of the oldest ceremonial burials

ever discovered in the Americas.

Here at last was a window on the belief system

of those first humans in the new world.

Even more important for the archaeologists,

the children provided enough bone to retrieve their DNA.

Would their genes allow scientists

to untangle the connections

between those first immigrants to Beringia, the Clovis people,

Naia, and today's Native Americans?

Ben sent samples to Copenhagen,

to the Danish geneticist who is one of the leaders

of the ancient genomics revolution,

Eske Willerslev.

His research is providing remarkable insights

into the early peopling of the Americas.

Ancient genomics

have completely transformed our ability to reconstruct

the biological history of human beings,

including the biological history

of early peopling of the Americas.

At his lab in the Museum of Natural History,

Eske and his team extracted DNA from the bones

of one of the Upward Sun children.

Then, using massive computer power

to piece together the DNA data...

the team was able to painstakingly reconstruct

the entire genome.

The results revealed distinctive patterns

of DNA's chemical bases, known as A, C, T, and G.

These so-called markers can link a particular individual

to both ancestors and living descendants.

Now Eske's team compared the genome of the Upward Sun child

with other DNA results:

from the Anzick Child-- the only human remains

definitively identified as Clovis;

from Naia's DNA, studied by Jim and his team;

and from modern Native Americans.

The results were momentous.

They showed that the Upward Sun people,

known as Ancient Beringians,

provide links to the ancestors of all Native Americans.

The Upward Sun sample is extremely important

in the sense that it's the oldest skeleton found in Alaska.

And when we did the genome of Upward Sun

it became even more interesting

because it turns out to be basal to all Native Americans.

The genomic analyses indicated the existence

of a single population

of ancient Asian hunters in Beringia,

some 25,000 years ago,

who were the ancestors of all Native Americans--

ancient and modern.

Educator Shane Doyle views these results

from his perspective as a member of the Crow tribe.

What happened was the ancestors of tribal people

all were able to come to a confluence at the Bering

about 25,000 years or more ago.

And all these people brought their own

genetic profiles with them.

They all had their own skin color,

their own eye color, their own size.

They have all their own phenotypes.

And after they had children together,

these ancient peoples,

they produced a new group of people,

and that is who American Indian people are.

For many years,

Shane has worked to bridge the gap

between scientists and Native American spiritual leaders.

He was instrumental in bringing them together

for the reburial of the Anzick Child in 2012.

Eske's discoveries are important to him

because they establish a clear Native American identity.

There's not Native American DNA

on the other side of the Bering Strait.

Nowhere else in the world is there Native American DNA

except for the Americas.

And so that was one of the most profound things

that came from this study.

So at last the story is clear.

Arriving in Beringia from different parts of Asia,

about 15,000 years ago,

groups of those very first Native Americans left

and began the long trek south,

exploring a land that no human had ever seen before.

Once south of the ice sheets, these same people

developed a new way of making stone tools and weapons--

the distinctive Clovis culture.

Their descendants are today's Native Americans.

Naia's people were part of that great southward migration.

When Naia lived,

Jim believes her people were recent arrivals in Yucatan.

A micro CT scan of her jaw and her teeth reveals evidence

that they were not familiar with their environment.

We're setting up a micro CT scan

of Naia's mandible, her lower jaw.

And the focus is on the teeth.

We want to look at density variations in the teeth

to look at growth patterns.

Density variations are clues to periods of malnourishment.

They soon become obvious in both Naia's teeth and jaw bone.

Yeah, so you want to pick right up...

Mm-hmm. ...there.

From the growth patterns in her bones,

there is periodic growth interruption.

That is one season every year

she doesn't get enough protein to eat.

If her people were well adapted to the place the lived,

they'd been there a long time, they would've known

how to feed themselves protein year round.

They don't-- they're new.

Naia has already told scientists so much about her people.

Her skeleton has one last piece of information for them.

It's about the day she died.

This is the most indicative.

See the fracture of the bone and the jagged character

of that fracture?

Jagged-edged breaks occur

in relatively fresh bone, if not fresh bone.

Mm-hmm.

So that jagged fracture is consistent

with fracture at death.

Jim has thought a lot about that day--

the day she walked into the cave 13,000 years ago,

the last day of her life.

It's hard when you know someone this well,

you get to learn their life so much,

not to become attached to them and have a sense of...

that's why it's hard to tell her story.

What happened on that fateful day?

At some point she must've gone deeper into the cave

in search of water.

The pit where she was found is a long way

from the nearest entrance to the cenote system.

Deep in the system's recesses,

the Hoyo was dry

with a shallow pool of water at its base.

I think, like the animals, she got lost.

How did she get lost?

Jim can only speculate.

She probably had a torch to go in with

in order to see her way around in the cave.

If she lost control of the fire,

lost her light...

unlike the animals, she can't scent-orient

to find her way out.

She might have wandered for hours,

perhaps even days.

She's wandering in this cave for quite a while,

and at some point, she simply takes a fatal step.

And the bottom is no longer there.

Her pelvis was almost certainly broken by the fall.

She fell a hundred feet

and there's a good chance she struck something.

I don't think death took long, if it were not immediate.

Over the centuries and millennia,

other animals fell into the pit just like Naia did.

10,000 years ago the cave system flooded as sea-levels rose,

preserving them all in the anoxic environment

at the bottom of the Hoyo.

And there they lay

until divers discovered the cenote,

a time capsule preserving a unique record of ice age life

on this continent.

Scientists will be studying this treasure trove of material

for many years to come.

But it is Naia who has opened a window on the world

of a mysterious people.

Naia lived a very difficult life

but, in her death she left us this

incredible record of the life of these earliest people.

Carefully reconstructed,

Naia has revealed to us the first face of America.