A prehistoric skeleton recovered from underwater caves along Mexico’s Caribbean coast is shedding light on how people used cenotes long ago, while also underscoring the environmental risks that development poses to fragile submerged sites.
The discovery was made in a flooded cave system in the Yucatán area between the tourist destinations of Tulum and Playa del Carmen, according to cave-diving archaeologist Octavio del Río, who collaborates with Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History. Del Río said the find represents the 11th such skeleton recovered in the caves over the last three decades in that region.
Del Río told The Associated Press that the skeleton was recovered in late 2025 and is now undergoing analysis. He said the remains were found in a cave system flooded over time, about 26 feet (8 meters) below the surface, after divers swam about 656 feet (200 meters) through the cave to reach the site.
Del Río said the cave’s underwater conditions indicate the skeleton could not have arrived there when the cave was flooded. “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, adding that only expert divers with specialized equipment can access and work in the caves even now.
He said the skeleton lay on a dune of sediments in a narrower part of an interior chamber, and that the placement “suggests that it was a funereal deposit where the body was placed intentionally, perhaps as part of a ritual practice.” Del Río also described the emotional impact of such finds, saying his pulse quickened even after years of making similar discoveries. “You can shout even under water,” he said smiling, describing how divers can still communicate inside the flooded caves.
Del Río said divers eventually begin picturing the setting and imagining how the person ended up there, thinking about the broader context. Luis Alberto Martos, director of archaeological studies at the National Institute of Anthropology and History, said the new discovery will help archaeologists understand how these people arrived at the Yucatán Peninsula—then described as a plain with cliffs, not the jungle and beach landscape seen today—and how they used the caves.
Martos said DNA research increasingly supports the idea that some people arrived from Asia along a land bridge that is now the Bering Strait, while other evidence points to the possibility of a different route from South America. “The puzzle of Yucatan prehistory is becoming better understood,” he said.
Development in recent years has also put pressure on the underwater cave systems, researchers said. The AP reported that the hundreds of miles of underwater rivers and caves below the Caribbean coast were severely impacted in recent years as construction of the Maya Train proceeded under former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, when the government cut down swaths of jungle and drove support columns down into the caves.
Del Río, who said he was one of the most outspoken critics of that project, said Mexican authorities are now trying 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 and archaeologists have been trying to protect the cenotes for years as development and pollution threaten the underwater waterways. Martos said the National Institute of Anthropology and History has argued the area should be protected not only for its natural value but also as cultural heritage, describing the caves as “archaeological windows” that have revealed more recent finds such as a small cannon and 19th-century rifles.
Researchers and divers continue to find fossils in the flooded caves, but archaeologists have not yet begun recovering the fossils, the AP reported.