A prehistoric skeleton found deep in a flooded Mexican cave was likely placed there in a ritual

MEXICO CITY (AP) — A prehistoric skeleton has been found in an intricate underwater cave system along Mexico’s Caribbean coast, an area that flooded at the end of the last ice age 8,000 years ago, according to a cave-diving archaeologist who made the find with others.

Octavio del Río, who collaborates with the National Institute of Anthropology and History, said it is the 11th such skeleton found in the caves over the last three decades between the tourist destinations of Tulum and Playa del Carmen. Some of the oldest human remains in North America have been discovered in the sinkhole caves known as “cenotes,” with some earlier skeletons dating to around 13,000 years ago.

Del Río told The Associated Press this week that the skeleton was found in a flooded cave about 26 feet (8 meters) below the surface after swimming about 656 feet (200 meters) through the cave. Archaeologist recovered the skeleton in late 2025, and it is now being analyzed.

But “with the distance (from the cave entrance) and the depth … it could not have gotten there at any other time than when the cave was dry, at least 8,000 years ago,” he said. Even now, only expert divers with specialized equipment can access and work in those caves.

The skeleton was on a dune of sediments in a narrower part of an interior chamber, which “suggests that it was a funereal deposit where the body was placed intentionally, perhaps as part of a ritual practice,” Del Río said.

Even after three decades of making such discoveries, Del Río said his pulse quickened. “You can shout even under water,” he said smiling.

Del Río said you start picturing the cave, imagining how this person came to be there, thinking about the context.

Luis Alberto Martos, director of archaeological studies at the National Institute of Anthropology and History, said the new find will help to understand how these people arrived at Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, which then was a plain with cliffs, not jungle and beaches like now, and how they used the caves.

DNA data support more and more the idea that some arrived from Asia along a land bridge that today is the Bering Strait, though there are also some clues suggesting another route from South America.

“The puzzle of Yucatan prehistory is becoming better understood,” he said

The hundreds of miles of underwater rivers and cave systems below the Caribbean coast was severely impacted in recent years by construction of the Maya Train under former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The government cut down swaths of jungle and drove support columns down into the caves to build the tourist train.

Del Río, who was one of that project’s most outspoken critics, said that now Mexican authorities are working to try to designate the entire zone as a national protected area.

Mexico’s Environmental Ministry confirmed to the AP that the goal is to achieve that designation in 2026.

Ecologists have been trying to protect the delicate caves for years as development and pollution increasingly threaten the underwater waterways.

Besides the area’s natural value and importance, Martos said the National Institute of Anthropology and History has argued that it should also be protected on the grounds of cultural heritage. That’s because the caves have shown themselves to be “archaeological windows,” also offering up more modern finds like a small cannon and 19th-century rifles, he said.

Divers who are passionate about exploring the flooded caves continue to find fossils, researchers said, although archaeologists have not yet been able to begin recovering them.