CLAS Lecture Series: "Hoyo Negro and the Oldest Most Complete Human Remains Ever Found in the Americas"

Date
-
Event Sponsor
Center for Latin American Studies
Location
Bechtel International Center, Assembly Room, 584 Capistrano Way, Stanford, CA 94305

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CLAS Lecture Series: "Hoyo Negro and the Oldest Most Complete Human Remains Ever Found in the Americas"

This talk will recall the exploration efforts leading to the discovery of Hoyo Negro (Black Hole), a large pit at 57m inside an underwater cave in the Yutacan Peninsula. It will show amazing images of the site, as well as of the extinct mega-fauna (sabertooth cats, mastodons, ground giant sloth), and images of the remains of a young girl that is the oldest most complete skeleton ever found of the peoples that first entered the american continent.  The presentation will describe the documentation efforts conducted at the site over the last few years: the largest giga-pixel spherical images ever taken underwater, advanced photogrammetry techniques leading to a reconstruction of the human remains, and many more.
Speaker: Alberto Nava, co-director and lead diver for the Hoyo Negro Project and a National Geographic Society grantee, is an underwater explorer and cartographer working on the caves of the Yucatán Peninsula. In 2007, while exploring a large section of the Sac Aktun Cave System (one of the longest on earth), his team discovered Hoyo Negro, a large, submerged pit that contains remains of animals and a human skeleton from the late Pleistocene. A native of Venezuela, Nava now lives in Monterey, Calif., where he teaches technical diving for Global Underwater Explorers and works as a software engineer. He is also a visiting researcher at the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archeology (CISA3) at the University of California in San Diego.

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