Speleology With a Defined Purpose

"[The research presents] uniquely preserved evidence indicating that people were exploring underground cave systems to prospect and mine red ochre, an iron oxide earth mineral pigment widely used by North America's earliest inhabitants."
"[This ochre mine was a] regional-scale activity that was sustained over multiple generations."
"Whether ochre procurement or use by Paleoindian groups and their Old World predecessors constitutes evidence for ritual behaviour or utilitarian purposes remains an ongoing anthropological discussion, yet consensus suggests that the two are not mutually exclusive."
Research paper

"It's almost as if we passed through a portal. There's all sorts of stuff in these caves."
"We knew people were in there. We started seeing wide-spread destruction in what would have been a pristine cave."
"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 than a human stacking it on top."
Sam Meacham, diver

A diver examines an ochre mine pit and mining debris. (CINDAQ.ORG)

A first for archaeology, with the discovery in Mexico of the earliest underground ochre mine in the New World. Described as a vast prehistoric industrial complex perhaps 112 millennia old, where valuable red iron-rich mineral was prospected by Paleoindians, representing a major factor in enabling human evolution.

The initial discovery of the mine took place in 2017 with a Canadian scuba diving instructor squirming through a tight passage, becoming the first person to ever enter an unknown chamber in Quintana Roo's cave complex on the eastern Yucatan peninsula on the Caribbean coast of Mexico. A student of Fred Devos who taught an underwater cave survey class noticed a tunnel lacking an exploration line.

Which led to Devos and Sam Meacham swimming into the dense black interior which took them into an air dome, then back down into the water, and finally through a tight restriction. The two, involved in conservation of the local underground water systems, found themselves submerged in a once-dry cave that had flooded roughly 8,000 years ago.

A diver examines a rock pile thought to be an ancient navigational marker inside a 12,000-year-old ochre mine in Quintana Roo, Mexico.  © CINDAQ.ORG

The floor of the cave had been cracked open at one time, revealing the layer of ochre that lay beneath, the opening extended by smashing rocks, breakage piled at the sides of the opening. Pits, stone tools, debris cairns as directionals, hearths for charcoal, soot-blackened spots on the ceiling were all revealed as the two explored their discovery; an ochre mine, used when this was a dry cave.

Their discovery, with additional findings by a University of Missouri team headed by Brandi MacDonald, with McMaster University's Eduard Reinhardt, along with Meacham and Devos rounding out the research team, saw their work published as new research in the journal Science Advances. The sheer scale of the three-cave system known as Camilo Mina, Monkey dust and Sagitario, stretch kilometres from the Caribbean coastline.

The authors of the report describe a "regional-scale activity that was sustained over multiple generations". thought to have been dry from the period of the Last Glacial Maximum, over 20,000 years ago, to the time it was flooded, theoretically 8,000 years ago, humans were already well established in North America, arriving an estimated 14,000 years ago, from the north.

The discovery in 2018 of two infants ceremonially buried in Alaska 11,500 years ago , held as evidence for the theory that anatomically modern humans emerged from Africa to spread across Asia, migrating from Siberia through Alaska into the Americas, some in Pacific coastal waters, others inland routes taken.

The various types of iron oxide mixed with clay and sand known as ochre, have a place in humanity's historical evolution. The use of ochre spans 200,000 years, at least to the earliest days of modern Homo sapiens, to the origin of art and sciences of creative expression and environment control, as humans discovered how to mine and make use of it, in an expression of symbolic thought and social behaviour.

The published paper examines the question whether ochre was valuable for its utilitarian purposes such as use as a sunscreen, antiseptic, pesticide, purgative, hide-tanning, or for ceremonial purposes such as mortuary practices, and paint mixed with animal fat. Concluding that all of these purposes both practical and religious found ochre had its invaluable uses as an evolutionary social tool.

A diver from Centro Investigador del Sistema Acuífero de Q Roo (CINDAQ A.C.) examines the oldest ochre mine ever found in the Americas, used 10,000-12,000 years ago by the earliest inhabitants of the Western hemisphere to procure the ancient commodity. (CINDAQ.ORG)