Archaeologists have discovered an iron cannonball fired by Texans at the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. This is the second intact cannonball they have discovered from the famous conflict. The first one, a bronze cannonball, was found earlier this year and was likely fired by the Mexican army.

"It's a huge deal," Tiffany Lindley, director of archaeology at the Alamo, said in a video statement from Alamo Trust. "We all thought, 'There's no way we can top it,'" she said, referring to the bronze cannonball discovered March 5, just a day before the 190th anniversary of the conflict that killed Davy Crockett, "and then we found another one."

Both cannonballs were recovered from the northeast corner of the church at the Alamo, which was originally built in 1718 as a Spanish mission and fortress in what is now San Antonio. But the Alamo is better known as the location of an 1836 battle during the Texas Revolution, in which Anglo-American settlers and Hispanic Texans known as Tejanos seceded from the Republic of Mexico.

In a 13-day siege culminating in a deadly assault on March 6, 1836, Mexican troops, commanded by Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna, surrounded the Alamo and killed the 180 Texan rebels defending the structure, including Davy Crockett. The cry "Remember the Alamo!" was used in later skirmishes in the Texas Revolution as soldiers fought Mexican troops for independence.

The newly excavated iron cannonball was found June 2, according to a statement from Alamo Trust.

Of the two cannonballs, "the newest one is slightly larger" and was likely fired from a cannon that shot 6-pound [2.7 kilogram] cannonballs, Kolby Lanham, a senior researcher and historian at the Alamo, said in the statement. "The likelihood is that the bronze one belonged to the Mexican Army and the iron one belonged to the Texans."

Over the years, archaeologists have found numerous pieces of ammunition and shrapnel at the Alamo, Lindley said, but these cannonballs are the first examples of solid shots — spherical projectiles fired from a gun or cannon — they have ever found.

"It's just a huge kind of once-in-a-lifetime deal," Lanham said. "But obviously, it's happened twice."

The Mexican and Texan cannonballs were found near each other, so they are likely the historic remains of the two sides shooting at each other in the fateful siege nearly two centuries ago.

"Whenever they were dropped the very first time — possibly in 1836, probably — they haven't been touched since, and that's what makes them extra special," Lindley said. "I don't think you can undersell it."

The Alamo remains an active archaeological site, where experts have discovered artifacts that span its centuries of history, from Indigenous stone tools that predate the Spanish mission through the late 19th century, when the structure was converted into a general store and warehouse.

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An elusive dwarf fox that was feared extinct has been photographed for the first time, after being spotted near a highway in Cozumel, Mexico.

The tiny animal was part of the mysterious Cozumel fox population, a potentially undescribed species that had not been officially sighted in more than 20 years.

Cozumel foxes live only on Cozumel, an island near Cancún. Researchers know very little about these mysterious predators, which are roughly 20% to 40% smaller than their gray fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus) cousins that live on the mainland.

Park and museum officials spotted and captured the fox in 2023 and, after a health assessment, released it back into the wild. Researchers have now shared the photographs and documented the encounter in a new study published May 4 in the journal Neotropical Biology and Conservation.

Although the rediscovery confirms that Cozumel foxes are still alive, they are likely on the brink of extinction, the study authors noted; the photographs highlight the need for focused research and conservation efforts.

"The biggest challenge facing the Cozumel fox is that we still know almost nothing about it, including its remaining population size, distribution, or ecology," study first author Travis Bayer, executive director of the conservation organization Pathos Wildlife, said in a statement. "That uncertainty alone is dangerous, because it makes effective conservation extremely difficult."

Cozumel foxes are an example of insular dwarfism, an evolutionary process in which larger animals, including fox-sized mammals, evolve to be smaller after colonizing islands, where there are limited resources and less space than on the mainland. The foxes aren't the only mammals that have shrunk on Cozumel over time; other examples include the island's critically endangered pygmy raccoons (Procyon pygmaeus) and dwarf coatis.

Archaeological evidence suggests that Cozumel foxes have lived on the island for at least 5,000 years, likely since before the arrival of the Maya within the past few millennia, and potentially for tens of thousands of years before that. Prior to this rediscovery, the last confirmed sighting of a Cozumel fox was in 2001, according to the study.

The rediscovery began with reports of a disoriented animal wandering near the highway on the southeastern side of the island. Officials with the Parks and Museums Foundation of Cozumel located and captured the fox, an adult male, on Sep. 14, 2023. They checked its health and later released the fox in the Laguna Colombia State Reserve, a protected area just south of where it was captured.

Recent and historical sightings suggest that Cozumel foxes could have an extremely restricted range in the island's South, where nature is increasingly threatened by development, land-use change, invasive species and natural disasters, the study authors noted.

The researchers recommended surveys to determine the current distribution and size of the Cozumel fox population, along with morphological and genetic assessments to establish its evolutionary status and conservation efforts to protect its assumed habitat in southern Cozumel and minimize human-wildlife conflict.

"Ultimately, we hope this work helps move the Cozumel fox from a little-known, uncertain presence on the island to a better-understood key part of Cozumel's ecosystems," Bayer said. "We also hope it demonstrates that conservation is often most urgent when certainty is lowest and that uncertainty itself can be a call to action."

Archaeologists in Mexico have unearthed a square stone altar used for human sacrifices during the Toltec Empire more than 1,000 years ago.

The altar, human bones, obsidian knives and ceramic vessels were discovered during excavation for a transportation project near the archaeological site of Tula, about 55 miles (88 kilometers) north of Mexico City.

In a translated statement posted Tuesday (March 24) by Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), archaeologists described the altar — also called a momoztli in Nahuatl — as a three-layer construction of stones that measures about 10 square feet (1 square meter). Four human skulls and several human leg bones were recovered from three sides of the altar, likely from people who were sacrificed.

"We know that they are offerings because they are located specifically in certain sections of the feature, but we don't know if they have any other remains underground that cannot be physically seen," Víctor Francisco Heredia Guillén, the archaeologist who's coordinating the project, said in a translated video.

Archaeologists discovered the remains of walls around the altar, suggesting it was located in a courtyard. Additional rooms flanked the courtyard and may have been part of a palace or other residential structure housing ancient Tula's elite, Heredia said.

Between the fall of Teotihuacán around A.D. 550 and the rise of Tenochtitlán in 1325, Tula was an important Mesoamerican urban center and the capital of the Toltec Empire, which lasted from 950 to 1150. Located in Mexico's Hidalgo state, Tula was contemporary with the Maya site of Chichén Itzá in the Yucatán Peninsula. Tula boasts a large pyramid dedicated to the feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl that is topped with four massive statues of Toltec warriors.

The newly discovered altar likely dates to the imperial period of Tula's occupation, according to the archaeologists. By that time, the Toltec had gained a reputation as fierce warriors, and the human sacrifices may have been enemies offered after the Toltec defeated them.

One of the skulls appears to still be attached to part of the spine, suggesting decapitation was part of the sacrificial ritual.

"In this case, although metal was already being worked in the postclassic period, we know that decapitations were still done here with obsidian or flint knives, and they left cut marks on the bones," Heredia said.

But additional research will be required to learn more about the sacrificial victims. Anthropological analysis should reveal whether the bones came from men or women, and chemical analysis may show whether the victims were local or came to Tula from afar, Heredia said.

"Each discovery like this expands our knowledge of one of the great civilizations of Mesoamerica," Claudia Curiel de Icaza, the Mexican secretary of culture, said in the statement.

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Archaeologists have unearthed an intact bronze cannonball used at the Battle of the Alamo. They made the discovery one day before the 190th anniversary of the historic conflict between Mexican troops and white settlers in Texas.

The Alamo's director of archaeology, Tiffany Lindley, announced the find in an episode of the Alamo's podcast, "Stories Bigger than Texas," on Thursday (March 19).

"We found a complete cannonball," Lindley said in the podcast. "I don't think words can express the feelings that we all felt."

The Alamo is a historic Spanish mission and fortress that was built in 1718 in what is today San Antonio, Texas. It was the location of a key 1836 battle in the Texas Revolution, when Anglo-American settlers in Texas seceded from the Republic of Mexico.

During a 12-day siege, thousands of Mexican troops commanded by General Antonio López de Santa Anna surrounded the Alamo, which was defended by a small group of about 180 Texan rebels led by William Travis, James Bowie and Davy Crockett. The Mexican army launched an assault on March 6, 1836, killing all the Alamo's defenders. During later skirmishes in the Texas Revolution, soldiers cried out "Remember the Alamo!" as they fought Mexican troops for independence.

In early March, the archaeology team was working near the northeast corner of the church, which had been a part of the Spanish mission, when they discovered the cannonball buried approximately 3 feet (0.9 meters) below the surface.

"I basically sprinted over to the unit," Kolby Lanham, Alamo's senior researcher and historian, said in the podcast. "That's a literal artifact from the Battle of the Alamo and you're holding it for the first time since the battle happened."

Lanham noted the artifact is a 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) bronze ball, which is the kind of ammunition that the Mexican army used. The Texans, on the other hand, preferred iron cannonballs.

"I would say with a fair amount of certainty that this is a Mexican army cannonball and it was likely fired at the Battle of the Alamo or could have been during the 12-day siege," Lanham said. "That artifact waited 190 years to be pulled out of the ground."

In addition to the intact ball, the archaeologists recovered four cannonball fragments outside the church. At least one of those fragments is likely from the Battle of the Alamo, Lindley said. But the fragments are from hollow balls that were probably fired by the Mexican army from a short-barreled cannon called a howitzer, said Lanham, whose team is now working to piece the fragments back together.

Archaeological and historical work is ongoing at the Alamo, and researchers are regularly recovering new information and artifacts like the cannonballs. "Things like that change the Alamo's story," Lanham said.

The Alamo recently marked the 190th anniversary of the battle on March 6.

"We found this cannonball on March 5," Lindley said, "the day before the commemoration. I have chills now just thinking about it."

Archaeologists in Mexico have discovered a 1,400-year-old tomb from the Zapotec culture that features well-preserved details, including a sculpture of a wide-eyed owl with a man in its beak, multicolored murals and calendrical carvings.

Officials found the tomb after following up on an anonymous report of looting at the site. Their investigation revealed the "most significant archaeological discovery in a decade in Mexico," Mexico's president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, announced at a Jan. 23 news conference in Spanish.

The tomb was discovered in San Pablo Huitzo, a municipality in Oaxaca in southern Mexico, in 2025. It dates to about A.D. 600, when the Indigenous Zapotecs — also known as the "Cloud People" — flourished in the area. The Zapotec civilization was established around 700 B.C. and collapsed due to the Spanish conquest in 1521. However, hundreds of thousands of Zapotec-speaking people still live in Mexico today.

At the entrance to the newly announced tomb, archaeologists found a large carved owl whose beak opens to reveal the painted face of a Zapotec lord. In ancient Zapotec culture, the owl represented death and power, suggesting it held in its mouth a portrait of the ancestor the tomb honors, according to a translated statement from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

Inside the tomb, a threshold between two chambers boasts an elaborately carved doorway. The top has a horizontal beam made of stone slabs engraved with "calendrical names" — a naming system in which deities and important people were given a specific symbol associated with their birth date. Flanking the doorway were engraved figures of a man and a woman, perhaps representing ancestors buried in the tomb or guardians of the palace, according to the INAH statement.

The walls of the burial chamber preserved multicolored murals in white, green, red and blue. They depict a funeral procession of people carrying bags of "copal," a tree resin that was burned as incense during ceremonies in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica.

The highly decorated tomb is an "exceptional discovery due to its level of preservation and what it reveals about Zapotec culture: its social organization, its funerary rituals, and its worldview, preserved in its architecture and mural paintings," Claudia Curiel de Icaza, Mexico's secretary of culture, said in the statement.

An interdisciplinary team from the INAH is currently working to conserve and protect the tomb, and further research will address the ceramic evidence, the iconography, and the handful of human bones recovered from the tomb.

The Huitzo tomb joins a dozen other ancient Zapotec tombs discovered in Oaxaca in the past decade, many of which had been looted before archaeologists could study them. But even though some information about the ancient Zapotec civilization has been lost to looting, the Huitzo tomb is "a source of pride for Mexicans; a testament to the greatness of Mexico," Sheinbaum said.

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Archaeologists digging at a Mesoamerican site in Mexico have discovered an unusual, cube-shaped human skull. It is the first evidence that people in this area practiced a unique form of head-shaping, scientifically known as cranial modification, around 1,400 years ago.

The skull was unearthed near the archaeological site of Balcón de Montezuma (Balcony of Montezuma) in the east-central Mexican state of Tamaulipas. Various Mesoamerican ethnic groups lived in the area between 650 B.C. and A.D. 1200. Around A.D. 400, a village sprang up, eventually encompassing around 90 circular houses in two plazas, according to the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

In a recent review of artifacts and bones discovered at Balcón de Montezuma, researchers noticed that the skull of a middle-aged man was a shape they'd never seen before.

In a Nov. 25 translated INAH statement, biological anthropologist Jesús Ernesto Velasco González explained that, while artificially modified skulls have been discovered in the area before, the shape of this man's skull is unique.

Many people are familiar with cultures that practiced cone-shaped cranial modification, as these skulls have an almost "alien" appearance. Those skull shapes were typically created by using lengths of fabric or soft padding to "bind" the heads of infants and encourage the skull to grow in an "oblique" direction, and they appear elongated.

Most of the modified skulls from Balcón de Montezuma, meanwhile, are shaped in an "erect" direction by placing soft padding on the back and/or front of the skull, causing the person to have a more upright or pointy head.

But the man from Balcón de Montezuma has a different form of "erect" modification in which the top of his head was flattened, giving his skull a cube-shaped appearance that some experts refer to as parallelepiped (shaped like a three-dimensional parallelogram or rhombus).

Since examples of this flat-topped skull shape had only been seen outside the area, including in Veracruz and in the Maya area, the researchers wanted to test whether the man was local or foreign. Analyzing the chemistry of the man's bones and teeth, however, revealed that he was born in the area, likely lived there his entire life, and died there.

The researchers' speculate that man's uncommon head shape may have some sort of culturally-specific meaning that is still unknown. In many parts of Mesoamerica, slightly different head shapes are known to correlate with different cultural groups. Although this man himself was not from another geographic location, it is possible that the people who shaped his head were members of a different cultural group.

Research into the material recovered from past archaeological investigations at Balcón de Montezuma is ongoing, according to INAH Tamaulipas director Tonantzin Silva Cárdenas, and will help expand experts' understanding of the site and its cultural and historical relationships with other pre-Hispanic groups in the area.

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For more than 4,000 years, Indigenous Americans painted rock art depicting their conception of the universe in what is now southwestern Texas and northern Mexico, a new study finds.

Innovative dating techniques revealed that the rock art, known as the Pecos River style tradition, likely first appeared almost 6,000 years ago and persisted until about 1,400 to 1,000 years ago, spanning roughly 175 generations.

Over this period, the style, found in a region known as the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, remained remarkably consistent in the imagery and the techniques used to create the paintings, which appear to follow a strict set of rules, the researchers reported in the study, which was published Wednesday (Nov. 26) in the journal Science Advances. The authors believe the artworks convey the creators' "cosmovision," a culture's overarching worldview and conception of the universe.

"Frankly, we were stunned to discover that the murals remained in production for over 4,000 years and that the rule-bound painting sequence persisted throughout that period as well," study co-author Carolyn Boyd, a professor of anthropology at Texas State University, told Live Science in an email.

She compared the canyonlands to an "ancient library containing hundreds of books authored by 175 generations of painters," adding that "the stories they tell are still being told today."

The ancient murals found on limestone rock faces across the canyonlands consist of elaborate multicolored paintings depicting animal- and human-like figures, as well as more enigmatic symbols. The artists who made them created visual narratives that relate myths and prescribe rituals, according to Boyd.

"Many of the 200-plus murals in the region are huge; some span over 100 feet [30 meters] long and 20 feet [6 m] tall and contain hundreds of skillfully painted images," Boyd said.

The painters were nomadic hunter-gatherers, but their identity remains unknown, according to Boyd.

"They were highly skilled problem solvers with a sophisticated cosmology and a robust iconographic system to communicate that cosmology," Boyd said.

Dating rock art comes with significant challenges. But for their study, the authors used two independent radiocarbon methods that had typically not been used together to date paintings at 12 mural sites within the Lower Pecos Canyonlands. This ensured that the researchers could be confident that their dating results were consistent, study co-author Karen Steelman, a chemist and science director at the Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center in Texas, told Live Science.

The researchers also analyzed the iconography and compositional makeup of the murals at the sites, finding that, in many cases, the artists appeared to have adhered to a strict set of technical rules and established stylistic conventions, even though they were created over a 4,000-year-period. For example, the authors determined that the creators generally followed the same sequence when applying colored paints to the artworks — a practice passed down over multiple generations.

The consistency that these complex murals display over several millennia, despite major environmental and technological changes — for example in stone tools and fiber crafts — indicate the persistence of an enduring cosmovision that must have been hugely significant to the hunter-gatherers, according to Boyd. This sophisticated cosmovision encompasses creation stories, the concept of time being cyclical and complex calendrical systems, among other elements.

The researchers have identified elements of this belief system in later Mesoamerican civilizations, such as the Aztecs, as well as among modern Indigenous American communities, like the Huichol of Mexico, she said.

"These paintings may be the oldest surviving visual record of the same core cosmology that later shaped Mesoamerican civilizations and is manifested today throughout Indigenous America," Boyd said in a statement.

"The murals are viewed by Indigenous people today as living, breathing, sentient ancestral deities who are still engaged in creation and the maintenance of the cosmos," Boyd told Live Science.

Sistema Ox Bel Ha, meaning "three paths of water" in the local Mayan language, is a gigantic submerged labyrinth that runs for at least 326 miles (524 kilometers) underground, according to the Investigation Center of the Aquifer System of Quintana Roo (CINDAQ). This makes it the longest submerged system and the second-longest cave system in the world, after the 426-mile-long (686 km) Mammoth Caves in Kentucky.

The Yucatán Peninsula is home to several massive cave systems because it has a thin layer of top soil covering limestone, which is soluble, enabling rain water to quickly pass through into caverns below the surface, according to a 2020 study. This is also the reason why the region has few rivers or streams.

The caverns form through a process called karstification, in which rain water dissolves calcium carbonate from the limestone. In the case of Ox Bel Ha, this process is supercharged as the fresh water meets salt water that's entered the system from the ocean.

The fresh and salt water form distinct layers and meet at a point in the cave water called the halocline. This line varies in Ox Bel Ha, varying from 33 feet (10 meters) near the coast, where there is more salt water, to 66 feet (20 m) deep further inland. CINDAQ estimated that 27% of the system is salt water and 73% fresh water. This fresh water feeds the vast Maya aquifer, which is the only source of drinking water in the region.

The karstification process can cause cavern roofs to collapse, creating an exposed pool or sinkhole, known as a cenote. Ox Bel Ha has at least 160 cenotes, and they are important water sources for animals and ecosystems, according to CINDAQ. The organization has recently recorded a number of species around the cenotes, such as cougars (Puma concolor), jaguars (Panthera onca) and various deer and other animals.

The system also supports a range of creatures below the surface. In 2018, scientists discovered that the subterranean system supports its ecosystem with methane. Methane forms below the jungle floor and then migrates down into the caves, where microbes and bacteria consume it. These in turn become food for cave-dwelling crustaceans as well as several species of fish, including an eyeless albino cave fish.

Ox Bel Ha runs near the historical Maya town of Tulum. The ancient Maya believed that cenotes were gateways to Xibalba, the Maya underworld, and these pools, along with those of the nearby Sistema Sac Actun, have yielded a number of important archaeological finds.

Most notably, researchers found the remains of a 25- to 30-year-old woman, named Eve of Naharon, whose remains may date to 13,700 years ago — potentially making these the oldest human remains found in the Americas. However, a 2021 review noted that this date has not been replicated or verified. Evidence suggests the woman was deliberately placed on the cave floor, which wasn't flooded at that point, although this also isn't clear, a 2020 study noted.

Ox Bel Ha's system is under threat from construction and developments, including the Maya Train and Tulum International Airport, and it already runs under a number of urban areas, CINDAQ said. This makes studying and mapping the vast underwater system critically important, CINDAQ added.

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A 3,000-year-old Maya site is actually a giant, city-size map depicting the "order of the universe," researchers say. The ruin, in what is now southeastern Mexico, was a cosmogram — a representation of how ancient people at the site viewed the cosmos, a new study suggests.

The site, known as Aguada Fénix, is the "oldest and largest monumental architecture in the Maya area" and is larger than many ancient cities in Mesoamerica, the researchers wrote in the study. Although its construction was a major endeavor, its cultural significance, likely motivated people to help construct it, meaning its builders were probably not coerced into labor, the researchers suggested.

In effect, building Aguada Fénix may have been a celebrated communal activity for ancient people, just like Stonehenge likely was in prehistoric England.

"Large construction events and collective rituals may also have involved feasting, the exchange of goods among different groups, and opportunities to meet mates, which probably provided additional incentives for people to gather," the authors wrote in the new study, which was published Wednesday (Nov. 5) in the journal Science Advances.

Aguada Fénix dates to 1050 B.C., before the Maya's writing system was invented, so there are no written records of the site. It was abandoned around 700 B.C. Scientists investigated it between 2020 and 2024 to learn more about the site. They not only excavated Aguada Fénix but also used lidar (light detection and ranging), a technique in which lasers are pulsed out from an aircraft, and the reflected light is then measured and used to create imagery of the landscape.

Their analysis showed that the cosmogram was created using a system of structures that include canals, causeways and a dam. These structures crisscross each other to create a series of cross shapes. The size of the cosmogram, which measures 5.6 by 4.7 miles (9 by 7.5 kilometers), "is comparable to, or even greater than, those of later Mesoamerican cities," including Tikal and Teotihuacan, the team wrote in their paper.

At the center of the structure is a series of small buildings and platforms, which archaeologists call "E group." It has several buried deposits that contained objects that likely had a ceremonial meaning, including greenstone ornaments that may represent a crocodile, a bird and possibly a female giving birth; ceramic vessels; and pigments.

While a small lake provided water for the canals, the archaeologists noted that the sheer size of the cosmogram, and the small size of the lake, would have prevented its canals from being filled with water for lengthy periods. They also said there are no signs of agricultural irrigation, suggesting that the canals were not used to grow crops.

The cosmogram was ultimately unfinished when the site was abandoned in 700 B.C., and some of the canals were never completed, the team wrote.

The researchers noted they did not find any signs of social hierarchy at Aguada Fénix — unlike at other, later Maya sites such as Tikal in Guatemala and Copan in Honduras that have evidence of the Maya's strict social structure. The team estimated that more than 1,000 people were needed to build Aguada Fénix. Perhaps "leading figures, who had specialized skills and knowledge of astronomical observations and calendrical calculations" designed the large cosmogram, the authors wrote.

Understanding the meaning

Understanding the full meaning of the cosmogram is difficult given that there are no written records that date to this time, but study lead researcher Takeshi Inomata, a professor of archaeology at the University of Arizona who specializes in the Maya, said that the movement of the sun was reflected in its design.

The people who used the site "probably thought the universe is ordered according to the north-south and east-west axes," Inomata told Live Science in an email. The east-west axis "was tied to the movement of the sun and was probably related to the passage of time as well," he said.

Additionally, the builders "aligned Aguada Fenix to a specific direction of the sunrise, which were associated with the cycle of 260 days, which became the most important ritual calendar cycle for the later Maya and Aztec," he said. "So they probably thought the orders of space and time were tied together."

Scholars react

Scholars not involved with the research had mixed reactions to the team's findings. Michael Smith, a professor of archaeology at Arizona State University, told Live Science in an email that this "is a fascinating and important site, but the authors have not demonstrated that the site was a 'cosmogram.'" He said that the team needs to define what exactly they consider to be a cosmogram and develop a clear method to identify one.

Other scholars were more supportive of the findings. David Stuart, a professor of Mesoamerican art and writing at the University of Texas at Austin, told Live Science in an email that "I see this as an important discovery, with a very careful and meticulous analysis by Takeshi and his team."

Arlen Chase, an anthropologist and the chair of the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Houston, was also supportive of the team's findings, noting that the deposits found in the E group support the team's ideas. The deposits were in the center of the settlement and tended to be placed in cross shaped patterns, mimicking the site layout.

Ed Barnhart, director of the Maya Exploration Center, told Live Science in an email that "This report is very exciting!" and noted that "both the cosmogram and the canal systems are among the earliest ever found in Mesoamerica."

James Aimers, a professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Geneseo, said that whether this could be considered a cosmogram depends on how you define it. "For me, the most important claim in the article is that all this monumentality was built collectively rather than under the direction of powerful rulers," Aimers told Live Science in an email. "This is in line with a lot of new interpretations that stress collective action rather than hierarchy in Mesoamerica."

Ancient Maya quiz: What do you know about the civilization that built pyramids across Mesoamerica?

By deciphering hieroglyphic inscriptions on centuries-old rocks, researchers have identified the name of a previously unknown Maya queen. Known as Ix Ch'ak Ch'een, she ruled Cobá, or the "city of choppy water," in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula in the sixth century, according to a translated statement from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

Cobá was a major urban center in the Maya world and was occupied from around 350 B.C. to the 14th century. It had a core of elite houses built around four lakes, along with thousands of residential structures, numerous white stone roads and several pyramids.

In 2024, archaeologists with INAH discovered an extensive hieroglyphic text carved into a stone staircase at Cobá, which they named the Foundation Rock, according to The Yucatan Times. Erosion had badly damaged the Foundation Rock, making it difficult to translate the 123 hieroglyph panels. But additional discoveries, including 23 stelae — freestanding inscribed stone pillars — have provided clues to help experts interpret the texts.

Ancient Mayan text experts David Stuart of the University of Texas at Austin and Octavio Esparza Olguín of the National Autonomous University of Mexico recently matched one panel from the Cobá Foundation Rock with two stelae from the site and realized they referred to the same person: Ix Ch'ak Ch'een.

Although the Foundation Rock mentions the coronation of Ix Ch'ak Ch'een, the specific dates for her reign are unclear. However, the Maya queen's name is mentioned in association with building projects that included a ball court, the construction of which is noted to have happened around the date 9.7.0.0.0 in the Maya calendar, or Dec. 8, 573.

Ix Ch'ak Ch'een may have been a particularly powerful queen, as the researchers have linked her to Testigo Cielo, a ruler of the politically and militarily influential Kaan kingdom that was part of the Maya civilization and known for its snake kings.

Female rulers among the Maya were rare — with only a couple dozen known compared to hundreds of kings — but during the Late Classic period (550 to 830), prominent women such as the "Red Queen" came to power. The Red Queen ruled the Maya city of Palenque in the mid-seventh century.

According to Esparza, research on the Foundation Rock has already provided essential information on dynastic rulers and historical events that happened at Cobá, but their investigation is ongoing.

Ancient Maya quiz: What do you know about the civilization that built pyramids across Mesoamerica?

Scientists analyzing 1,300-year-old human feces from the Cave of the Dead Children in Mexico have discovered that people often dealt with nasty intestinal infections more than a millennium ago.

"Working with these ancient samples was like opening a biological time capsule, with each one revealing insight into human health and daily life," study lead author Drew Capone, an assistant professor of environmental health at Indiana University, said in a statement.

Capone and colleagues used molecular analysis techniques to study 10 ancient desiccated feces samples — also called paleofeces — found in a cave in Mexico's Rio Zape Valley just north of the city of Durango in northwestern Mexico, that dated from A.D. 725 to 920. The researchers published their findings Wednesday (Oct. 22) in the journal PLOS One.

In the late 1950s, archaeologists excavated the Cave of the Dead Children and recovered human and non-human paleofeces, plant remains and animal and human bones from a large trash heap. The cave was used by people from the prehistoric Loma San Gabriel culture, who practiced small-scale agriculture, produced unique ceramics, lived in small villages and occasionally practiced child sacrifice. Archaeologists named the cave after the skeletons of children found there.

Previous studies of paleofeces from the cave revealed the presence of hookworm, whipworm and pinworm eggs, suggesting the people who deposited their feces in the cave were infected by a variety of parasites.

In the new study, the scientists used cutting-edge molecular techniques to detect additional microbes in paleofeces from 10 "distinct defecation events" with the aim of expanding their understanding of the burden of disease among the Loma people. "There is a lot of potential in the application of modern molecular methods to inform studies of the past," study co-author Joe Brown, a professor of environmental sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said in the statement.

The researchers extracted DNA from the 10 paleofeces samples and then used polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to amplify the DNA of the microbes in the feces. Every sample had at least one pathogen or gut microbe in it, and the two most common were the intestinal parasite Blastocystis, which can cause gastrointestinal issues, and multiple strains of the bacterium E. coli, which were found in 70% of the samples. Also identified were pinworms as well as Shigella and Giardia, which cause intestinal illnesses.

The high number of microbes discovered in the paleofeces "suggests poor sanitation among the Loma San Gabriel culture from 600-800 CE resulted in exposures to fecal wastes in the environment," the researchers wrote in the study. People likely ingested the microbes via feces-contaminated drinking water, soil or food, the team added.

While these pathogen-associated genes persisted in the paleofeces for up to 1,300 years, there may have been even more pathogens in the samples that have since decayed and are no longer detectable, the researchers noted in the study.

Still, the new analysis revealed the DNA of pathogens that were not previously found in paleofeces, including Blastocystis and Shigella.

"The application of these methods to other ancient samples offers the potential to expand our understanding of how ancient peoples lived and the pathogens that may have impacted their health," the researchers wrote.

A gigantic scorpion-shaped mound built centuries ago in Mexico may align with the winter and summer solstices, a new study finds.

Archaeologists documented the 205-foot-long (62.5 meter) mound in 2014 while surveying prehistoric irrigation systems in Tehuacán Valley, about 160 miles (260 kilometers) southeast of Mexico City. Several artifacts and offerings were found at the scorpion mound, which helped the team date it to the Late Classic and Early Postclassic periods (circa A.D. 600 to 1100).

The scorpion effigy mound has remained remarkably intact over the centuries. It has a head, body, pincers and tail sculpted with a mix of dirt and rocks that are piled up to 31 inches (80 centimeters) high. The team found buried artifacts where the "stinger" would have been.

"This sort of effigy feature is quite unusual in Mesoamerica," the researchers wrote in the study, which was published Aug. 29 in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica.

The discovery also suggests that regular Mesoamericans, not just the elite, were looking to the sky and monitoring astronomical events, said study first author James Neely, a professor emeritus of archaeology at the University of Texas at Austin.

"It is the first indication that knowledge and control of astronomical phenomena based on solar observations was not totally in control of the elite class," Neely told Live Science in an email.

Astronomical observatory

The scorpion is one of 12 mounds, which appear to be part of a civic and ceremonial complex that spans about 22 acres (9 hectares) and includes what may be a looted burial or storage pit. This complex may have been used for astronomical observation, helping agricultural workers know when to perform rituals and plant and harvest their crops, the team said.

Some of the mounds have rooms and walls, but only the scorpion has a specific shape, making it an effigy mound — or piled dirt that is purposefully formed into a specific shape, symbol or figure. While thousands of earthen mounds built by Indigenous Americans are found in North America, effigy mounds are "notably sparce" in Mesoamerica, making the scorpion one a rare find.

The scorpion, known as Tlāhuizcalpantēcuhtli, was a powerful deity in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. Many Mesoamerican peoples saw it as a celestial deity and a prominent figure in the Aztec pantheon of gods. To Mesoamericans, Tlāhuizcalpantēcuhtli represented Venus, the morning star planet, the researchers wrote in the study.

While studying the scorpion effigy mound, the team noticed that it was oriented east-northeast, a clue that it aligns with sunrise on the summer solstice, they wrote in the paper. To investigate, the researchers calculated the sun’s trajectory on both the summer and winter solstices.

"We estimate that on the morning of the summer solstice, if a person sighted from the 'stinger' (the circular ceramic cluster at the presumed end of the scorpion’s tail), the sun would rise above the tip of the northern (left) claw," they wrote in the study.

The summer solstice was an important ceremonial date in Mesoamerica, as it kicked off the beginning of the rainy and planting season, the researchers noted.

"For the days leading up to the solstice, the sun would rise between the two claws, and thereby signal the approach of the rainy season so the local farmers could prepare their fields for planting," the researchers added.

Likewise, the sunset on the winter solstice also connected with the scorpion effigy mound. If a person stood at the tip of the left claw, they could see the setting sun beyond the stinger, the team found.

"Based on these estimates, the [scorpion] mound would allow its users to identify the dates of both the summer and winter solstices, common alignments for Mesoamerican architecture," the researchers wrote in the study.

Among the artifacts found at the scorpion effigy mound were bowls, jars and plate fragments. The archaeologists also found molcajetes — tripod bowls that were used for grinding food — as well as an incense burner and the fragment of a hollow figurine that was likely involved in a ritual, they wrote.

The discovery of the mounds and astronomical observatory among the irrigation canals shows the complexity of the Mesoamerican civilization that built them, Neely said, adding that "this points to the prehistoric campesinos [countryside farmers] having lived a life way of greater independence and self-determination from elite/state control as do their modern counterparts."

The Maya population during the civilization's peak 1,400 years ago may have been far larger than previously thought, new research reveals. The study also hints that Maya settlements at that time were far more complex and interconnected than prior studies had suggested.

A 2018 study estimated there were 11 million Maya between A.D. 600 and 900, known as the Late Classic Period. But in new research published online July 7 in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, some of the 2018 study's authors have revised the estimate to 16 million.

Both studies estimated the Maya population size using lidar (light detection and ranging) data, which is obtained with an aircraft carrying a machine that shoots laser pulses at the ground to create 3D maps of an area. The ruins of buildings on these maps can provide clues about population density, which researchers can extrapolate to come up with a total population count.

"We expected a modest increase in population estimates from our 2018 lidar analysis, but seeing a 45% jump was truly surprising," Francisco Estrada-Belli, a research professor in the Middle American Research Institute at Tulane University in Louisiana and the new study's lead author, said in a statement. "This new data confirms just how densely populated and socially organized the Maya Lowlands were at their peak."

The Maya Lowlands are swathes of forested land that include parts of modern-day Guatemala, Belize and Mexico. Specifically, the researchers created lidar maps for 36,700 square miles (95,000 square kilometers) of land in Guatemala's Petén department, western Belize, and the Mexican states of Campeche and Quintana Roo.

The Maya civilization peaked between A.D. 250 and 900, with numerous cities thriving in Mesoamerica during that time. Researchers have long thought that, aside from these cities, the civilization was limited to scattered settlements interspersed with farmland in the region's sprawling tropical rainforests.

Related: Genomes from ancient Maya people reveal collapse of population and civilization 1,200 years ago

However, the new research shows that Maya settlements were far more complex and interconnected than previously thought.

"We're confident these lidar-based findings give us the clearest picture yet of ancient Maya settlement patterns," Estrada-Belli said. "We now have hard evidence that Maya society was highly structured across both cities and rural areas and far more advanced in resource and social organization than previously understood."

The researchers found the same construction patterns across urban and rural areas, with a central public square controlled by the elite, and residential areas and agricultural fields distributed around these plazas. Almost all of the buildings revealed with lidar were located within 3 miles (5 km) of a plaza, suggesting that rural folk, who generally weren't elites, had access to most aspects of civic and religious life, according to the study.

The findings challenge the long-held assumption that rural Maya settlements were isolated from the cities and, therefore, disconnected from administrative and ceremonial centers. "No rural community could be regarded as isolated, disembedded or independent," the researchers wrote in the study.

The results also showed that the northern Maya Lowlands were more urbanized and densely populated than previously recognized, explaining the bump in the estimated population size.

"The northern Central Maya Lowlands were far from predominantly rural," the researchers wrote. "The relative proportions of urban to rural density zones [...] are remarkably similar between the southern and northern regions, challenging earlier assessments."

Still, the northern Maya Lowlands had extensive agricultural infrastructure, which was likely run by elites who managed food production and distribution, the researchers wrote.

The new population estimates raise new questions about the civilization's fall between A.D. 800 and 1000, because a bigger population may have exacerbated political turmoil and environmental problems, the team concluded in the study.

Today, many Maya continue to live in Mesoamerica, including about 8 million in southern Mexico and Central America, according to the MesoAmerican Research Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Rainclouds and thunderstorms off the Pacific coast of Mexico will likely trigger the first Western Hemisphere tropical storm of the 2025 season in the coming hours — with a chance this storm could strengthen into a hurricane, meteorologists say.

There is a near 100% chance that a tropical storm will form in the next 48 hours, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s National Hurricane Center (NHC). Once the storm is confirmed, its name will be tropical storm Alvin, and it will have formed just two weeks after the beginning of the Eastern Pacific hurricane season on May 15.

As of 7:50 a.m. EDT on Wednesday (May 28), an area of low pressure producing heavy rain clouds and storms was located south of the coastal Mexican city of Acapulco. The system was moving in a west to northwest direction at a speed of about 10 miles per hour (16 km/h), according to the NHC.

"An elongated area of low pressure located several hundred miles south of the coast of southern Mexico continues to produce showers and thunderstorms, but the system still lacks a well-defined circulation," NHC meteorologists wrote on a map showing the location of the system. "Environmental conditions remain favorable for further development, and a tropical depression or tropical storm is expected to form later today or tonight."

The system's current direction of travel suggests that any tropical depression or storm born from it will fizzle out in the Eastern Pacific without making landfall, according to The Weather Channel — but it's possible that the system could curl around and migrate northeastward, with stormy weather hitting Mexico's coast around Saturday (May 31).

A tropical storm is a type of tropical cyclone with maximum sustained wind speeds between 39 and 73 mph (63 to 117 km/h). According to NOAA's National Ocean Service, meteorologists use the term "tropical cyclone" to describe any organized system of clouds and thunderstorms that originates over tropical or subtropical waters, and then starts to rotate in a closed, low-level vortex. The weakest tropical cyclones are called tropical depressions, and they are characterized by winds slower than 39 mph. Once maximum sustained wind speeds exceed 73 mph, tropical cyclones are called hurricanes.

Related: La Niña is dead — what that means for this year's hurricanes and weather

Tropical cyclones are typically caused by pre-existing weather disturbances, but they also require high moisture and relatively light winds to form, according to the National Ocean Service. If the conditions persist for long enough, their combined effects will whip up violent winds and large waves, and potentially trigger torrential rain and coastal flooding.

According to The Weather Channel, a very strong Alvin could transform into a hurricane as soon as Thursday (May 29). Regardless of whether Alvin makes landfall, high surf, rip currents and heavy rain could hit parts of Mexico's coast later this week if the tropical storm develops, the broadcaster said.

It's unclear whether the storm could impact the U.S. West Coast, but scientists say the Southwest could receive more moisture than usual.

Alvin may be the Western Hemisphere's first tropical storm of 2025, but it's very unlikely to be the last. The Eastern Pacific hurricane season starts two weeks before the Atlantic hurricane season, which runs every year from June 1 through Nov. 30, peaking between mid-August and mid-October.

This year's Atlantic hurricane season is expected to be particularly ferocious, with NOAA predicting above-normal activity and between 13 and 19 named tropical storms. Six to 10 of these storms will likely strengthen into hurricanes, and three to five could become major hurricanes, forecasters say.

The forecasted hyperactivity of 2025’s Atlantic hurricane season follows from 2024, as record-shattering ocean temperatures fuelled the rapid intensification of hurricanes such as Beryl, Helene and Milton, which sowed devastation across Florida and the Caribbean.

"For the second straight year, NOAA predicts an above-average hurricane season," CBS reporter Karen Hua said in a video. "Five hurricanes made landfall in the U.S. last season, causing more than $100 billion worth of damage."

While 2025's Atlantic hurricane season may bring above-normal tropical cyclone activity, NOAA predicts normal to below-average activity in the Pacific. In terms of numbers, forecasters think there could be 1 to 4 tropical cyclones between now and November.

While investigating a cave high in the mountains of Mexico, a spelunker thought she had found a pile of trash from a modern-day litterbug. But upon closer inspection, she discovered that the "trash" was actually a cache of artifacts that may have been used in fertility rituals more than 500 years ago.

"I looked in, and it seemed like the cave continued. You had to hold your breath and dive a little to get through," speleologist Katiya Pavlova said in a translated statement. "That's when we discovered the two rings around the stalagmites."

The cave, called Tlayócoc, is in the Mexican state of Guerrero and about 7,800 feet (2,380 meters) above sea level. Meaning "Cave of Badgers" in the Indigenous Nahuatl language, Tlayócoc is known locally as a source of water and bat guano. In September 2023, Pavlova and local guide Adrián Beltrán Dimas ventured into the cave — possibly the first time anyone has entered it in about five centuries.

Roughly 500 feet (150 m) into the cave, the ceiling dipped down. The pair of explorers had to navigate the flooded cave with a gap of just 6 inches (15 centimeters) between the water and the cave ceiling. "Adrián was scared, but the water was deep enough, and I went through first to show him it wasn't that difficult," Pavlova said.

While taking a break to look around, Pavlova and Beltrán were shocked to discover 14 artifacts.

"It was very exciting and incredible!" Pavlova said. "We were lucky here."

Related: 2,500-year-old burials of 3 people discovered in a cave in Mexico

Among the artifacts were four shell bracelets, a giant decorated snail shell (genus Strombus), two complete stone disks and six disk fragments, and a piece of carbonized wood. Pavlova and Beltrán immediately contacted Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), which sent archaeologists to recover the artifacts in March.

Given the arrangement of the bracelets — which had been looped over small, rounded stalagmites with "phallic connotations" — the archaeologists speculated that fertility rituals were likely performed in Tlayócoc cave, they said in the statement.

"For pre-Hispanic cultures, caves were sacred places associated with the underworld and considered the womb of the Earth," INAH archaeologist Miguel Pérez Negrete said in the statement.

Three of the bracelets have incised decorations. An S-shaped symbol known as "xonecuilli" is associated with the planet Venus and the measurement of time, while the profile of a human-like figure may represent the creator god Quetzalcoatl.

Pérez dated the artifacts to the Postclassic period of Mesoamerican history, between A.D. 950 and 1521, and suggested that they were made by members of the little-known Tlacotepehua culture that inhabited the region.

"It's very likely that, because they were found in a close environment where humidity is fairly stable, the objects were able to survive for so many centuries," Pérez said.

Ancient Maya quiz: What do you know about the civilization that built pyramids across Mesoamerica?

The ancient Maya civilization stretched throughout Central America and lasted for nearly three millennia. Although never unified into one massive empire, the Maya controlled dozens of city-states, also known as "polities," which arose when people settled in permanent villages and began to cultivate maize. The ancient Maya are well known for their pyramids and for their series of calendars — one of which convinced many people that the world would end in an apocalypse on Dec. 21, 2012. While the ancient political system collapsed between A.D. 800 and 1000, the society did not. Today, more than 7 million Maya live in their original homelands and beyond.

Are you up to date on recent research on the ancient Maya? Take our quiz to find out.

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Lasers shot from an aircraft have revealed the remains of a 600-year-old Zapotec city in southern Mexico, a new study finds.

The technique, known as lidar (light detection and ranging), works by having a machine aboard an aircraft send millions of laser pulses toward the ground and then calculating how long it takes for the lasers to bounce back. With this information, scientists can map the topography of the land.

To learn more about a 15th-century city known as Guiengola, a team led by Pedro Guillermo Ramón Celis, a post-doctoral fellow at McGill University in Canada, used lidar to map out the site in December 2022. The results were published by Celis on Nov. 8, 2024, in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica.

The Zapotecs are an Indigenous people that continue to thrive in Mexico. In the 14th and 15th centuries, some of the Zapotec migrated to the southern Isthmus of Tehuantepec, where they established Guiengola close to the Pacific Ocean. Although its existence was mentioned in historic Spanish texts and archaeologists have conducted work at the site, the city's full extent was not known until scientists used lidar to map it.

They found that "it covered 360 hectares [890 acres], with over 1,100 buildings, four kilometres [2.5 miles] of walls, a network of internal roads and a clearly organized urban layout with temples and communal spaces such as ballcourts, and the elites and commoners lived in separate neighbourhoods," according to a statement describing the research. There is a river that runs near the city.

They also identified a complex that measures about 148 feet (45 meters) from east to west and 164 feet (50 m) from north to south. "I propose that this complex was the residence and seat of power of Guiengola," Celis wrote in the journal article.

It appears that the site was inhabited for about 150 years, between roughly 1350 and 1500, and "was abandoned a few decades before European contact in 1521," Celis told Live Science in an email.

In the city's heyday, it likely had thousands of inhabitants. "I would say that at least 5,000 people were living permanently on the site," he noted.

At the time the city was founded, the Zapotecs were gradually conquering the region. After the conquest was complete, "it was no longer necessary to inhabit the mountains, and they moved 20 km [12.4 miles] south to where the modern town of Tehuantepec is located," Celis said.

Spanish records claim that the Aztecs attacked Guiengola in 1497 but were defeated by the Zapotecs. Celis found archaeological remains that may be from that campaign.

"In the most fortified sectors of the site, which are closest to the river, we have detected what could be accumulations of round pebbles and small river rocks by the thousands," Celis said, noting that they could be from the battle. The Aztecs, among other groups, used stones that were hurled with slings in warfare.

Celis plans to conduct more detailed archaeological research in that area later this year.

What it is: A turquoise-encrusted wooden mask from the Aztec civilization

Where it is from: Somewhere in Mesoamerica

When it was made: Between 1400 and 1521

Related: Book of Kells: A 1,200-year-old manuscript made by monks escaping the Vikings

What it tells us about the past:

This mask, which is on display at the British Museum in London, is one of several turquoise objects that the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés likely took from the Aztec Empire as treasure in the early 16th century.

The mask was carved out of Spanish cedar and is decorated with turquoise mosaic pieces, mother-of-pearl eyes rimmed with gold, and conch shell teeth, according to the British Museum. The inside is covered in cinnabar, a brick-red mineral that contains mercury. It is about 6.6 inches (16.8 centimeters) tall and has small holes at the temples, suggesting the mask was once worn or affixed to something.

Xiuhtecuhtli, whose name means "turquoise lord" in the Nahuatl language, was the Aztec "new fire" god. The Aztecs kept a "holy fire" continuously burning in the Fire Temple at Tenochtitlan, from which all other fires were lit.

Once every 52 years, Aztec priests let the fire die out. The high priest, wearing a turquoise mask representing Xiuhtecuhtli, would then perform a Xiuhtlalpilli, or "new fire ceremony", which involved starting a fire on the chest of a sacrificial victim. When the flames were high, the victim’s heart was cut out and cast into the fire. This ritual ensured the Aztec civilization was renewed for another half century. The darker turquoise mosaic pieces on the cheeks and nose of the mask appear to form a butterfly, another symbol of renewal associated with Xiuhtecuhtli.

But it's not clear if the mask was ever worn or if it represents Xiuhtecuhtli. In fact, the mask's raised turquoise may depict the wart-faced god Nanahuatzin, who, according to Aztec mythology, sacrificed himself to the fire and emerged to become the sun.

Laser surveys have revealed a massive centuries-old Maya city in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula.

The city contains up to 6,674 structures, including pyramids like the ones at Chichén Itzá and Tikal, according to a study published Tuesday (Oct. 29) in the journal Antiquity. The researchers used previously created lidar (light detection and ranging) maps, which are created by shooting laser pulses at the ground, to reveal the potentially 1,500-year-old site.

With the rise of lidar technology over the past few decades, the discovery of ancient settlements has risen dramatically. However, this technology is expensive and often not accessible to early-career scientists like Luke Auld-Thomas, an archaeologist at Northern Arizona University and first author of the study. But the researchers had an idea of how to get around this barrier.

"Scientists in ecology, forestry and civil engineering have been using lidar surveys to study some of these areas for totally separate purposes," Auld-Thomas said in a statement. "So what if a lidar survey of this area already existed?"

Related: Lasers reveal massive, 650-square-mile Maya site hidden beneath Guatemalan rainforest

By combing through previously commissioned lidar studies, Auld-Thomas located a survey created to measure and monitor carbon in forests in Mexico. By analyzing 50 square miles (129 square kilometers) in east-central Campeche, Mexico, that had never been searched for Maya structures before, Auld-Thomas and his colleagues found hidden imprints of a Maya city tucked within modern farms and highways.

The city, which the researchers named Valeriana after a nearby freshwater lagoon, dates to the Classic period (A.D. 250 to 900), and shows "all the hallmarks of a Classic Maya political capital," including multiple enclosed plazas connected by a broad causeway, temple pyramids, and a ball court, the researchers noted. Farther from the Valeriana city center, terraces and houses dot the hillside, suggesting a dense urban sprawl. This study is the first to reveal Maya structures in east-central Campeche.

"The government never knew about it; the scientific community never knew about it," Auld-Thomas said. "That really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we have not found everything, and yes, there's a lot more to be discovered."

"Unfailingly, everywhere that this sort of work is done, there's more settlement [discovered]," Thomas Garrison, an archaeologist at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. "It all provides more pieces for this huge puzzle, and every puzzle piece counts." The next step in the research is for archaeologists to confirm the city on-site, Garrison added.

As the diversity and density of the Maya civilization is slowly revealed, study of this time period becomes even more important, Auld-Thomas noted.

"Given the environmental and social challenges we're facing from rapid population growth, it can only help to study ancient cities and expand our view of what urban living can look like," Auld-Thomas said. "Having a larger sample of the human career, a longer record of the accumulated residue of people's lives, could give us the latitude to imagine better and more sustainable ways of being urban now and in the future."

A newly described duck-billed dinosaur unearthed in Mexico has an epic schnoz to rival that of Yoshi from Super Mario World. 

The dino, named Coahuilasaurus lipani after the region where it was found and the Lipani Apache tribe that lives there, also has unique tooth-like spikes jutting from the roof of its mouth. These spikes that may have been used to eat rough and woody plants in tropical forests 73 million years ago. 

Paleontologists first unearthed the partial skull of C. lipani in the 1980s in the Parras Basin but previously described it as another genus. In the new study, published Sept. 1 in the journal Diversity, researchers took a second look at the fossil, which had been housed in the collections at the National Autonomous University of Mexico since its discovery. Newer analysis techniques allowed them to reclassify the fossil. Claudia Serrano, lead author of the study and paleontologist at Benemérita Escuela Normal de Coahuila, was present during the first description of the specimen in 2006. "When we started working on the material again, we decided 'no, this is different,'" Serrano told Live Science. "We have become much better at describing these things."

Related: Rare fossils reveal basketball-like skin on duck-billed dinosaur

While the partial skull consists only of the dinosaur's snout, this section of the skull is useful in identifying the differences between species, similar to how a bird's beak can reveal a lot about the bird as a whole. The sharp angle of the dinosaur's snout was key to differentiating C. lipani from other species. The scientists also found the distinct tooth-like protrusions projecting from the roof of the mouth,  which hadn't been emphasized in the previous analysis. 

These protrusions may mean that C. lipani was specialized to eat tough plants like palms that flourished in the tropical conditions of the late Cretaceous period when the big-nosed dino lived, around 73 million years ago. Duck-billed dinosaurs, also known as the "cows of the Cretaceous," would have roamed the forests of Mexico at a time when sea levels were higher and temperatures were warmer, according to a statement. Serrano estimates they would have been around 26 feet (8 meters) long, or about the size of two sedans. 

This discovery adds to a growing list of dinosaurs that are unique to Mexico, Serrano said. Discoveries like that of C. lipani and other Mexico-specific species have started to overthrow the assumption that dinosaur species were wide-ranging, the study authors wrote in their paper. Large animals usually have large ranges — that goes for the bison that used to roam from Canada down to Mexico. But instead, individual dinosaur species appear to have had relatively small ranges. Differences in climate, geographical barriers, or perhaps something about the way dinosaurs reproduce may have contributed to their small ranges, but paleontologists still don't quite understand why they stuck to one area, Serrano noted.

The "Pyramid of the Moon" at Teotihuacán, the site of an ancient city near modern-day Mexico City, is aligned with the sun on the summer and winter solstices, a research team in Mexico says. However, not all experts agree with the assessment.

Teotihuacán flourished between roughly 100 B.C. to A.D. 800 and had a population of around 100,000 people. The "Pyramid of the Moon" was built in stages between roughly A.D. 1 and 350 and is located at the end of the "Causeway of the Dead," a long street that runs through the center of the city. 

The team took a large number of measurements, including information from drone flights, to reveal that the northeast corner of the Pyramid of the Moon aligns with the sun when it rises over the El Xihuingo volcano on the summer solstice, which occurs between June 20 and 21 each year in the Northern Hemisphere, Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) said in a Spanish-language statement. The researchers also found that the southwest corner of the pyramid aligns with the sun as it sets behind a hill during the winter solstice, which occurs between Dec. 21 and 22 each year. 

The summer-solstice alignment involving the volcano is particularly interesting, the team said, as there is evidence that the people of Teotihuacán used the volcano as an astronomical observatory of sorts. 

"On the slopes of the El Xihuingo volcano is the Xihuingo archaeological site, a place where petroglyphs known as dotted crosses were created [and] whose function has been proposed as astronomical markers," Aarón González Benítez, an archaeoastronomer at the National School of Anthropology and History in Mexico and a member of the research team, told Live Science in an email. 

Related: 5 catastrophic megathrust earthquakes led to the demise of the pre-Aztec city of Teotihuacan, new study suggests

The pyramid's alignment with the solstice sun appears to have affected the orientation of the entire city. "The city of Teotihuacan stands out among other things for its magnificent reticular design, and if the solar orientations of the Pyramid of the Moon determined the orientation of the city, the other monuments that are parallel to this great building would be following and replicating the same canonical orientation," González Benítez said. 

Sun or moon?

It may sound strange that a structure called the "Pyramid of the Moon" would instead follow the solstice sun. But González Benítez noted that the name was given by the Mexica people, who founded the Aztec Empire, and they didn't name the pyramid until sometime after the city was abandoned. We don't actually know what the inhabitants of Teotihuacán would have called the structure, he said. 

Interestingly, there is another pyramid at Teotihuacán called the "Pyramid of the Sun," but the team's research suggests that the northeast and southwest corners of that pyramid actually align with the "lunistices" (also known as lunar standstills), a time when the moon appears at its highest or lowest points in the sky. 

Some of the team's results also turned up in previous research, Steven Gullberg, a professor of cultural astronomy at the University of Oklahoma, told Live Science. "I don't disagree with the orientations that they found, and this will make for an interesting debate among those who specialize in the astronomy of this area. I look forward to seeing their opinions."

Ivan Sprajc, head of the Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, said it is difficult to believe that the city was built with a solstice alignment involving the Pyramid of the Moon in mind. He noted that the Pyramid of the Moon was modified during its construction and its earliest phase had a different orientation than it does today. 

The team, which includes project coordinator and principal researcher Ismael Arturo Montero García, is writing a book that will include the results of their research. Additionally, they have released a documentary on their findings. 

Archaeologists in Mexico have discovered a mysterious subterranean structure with painted walls hidden beneath a Maya ball court.

The team found the building while excavating the ball court, the playing space for the ritual ball game played by the Maya and other Mesoamerican peoples.

"We located parts of an earlier building that had painted walls, but only further excavations may reveal the shape of that underlying building and what its function was," said Ivan Šprajc, an archaeologist at the Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies in Slovenia and director of the excavation. 

The finding is "evidently a very important structure, because ball courts are normally found only at major Maya sites, which were centers of the regional political organization," Šprajc told Live Science in an email. The structure could date to the Early Classic period (A.D. 200 to 600) and is covered with a layer of painted stucco, according to a translated statement from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History.

Previously, Šprajc and his colleagues surveyed a large area of the Maya Lowlands in the Mexican state of Campeche with lidar, a technique that shoots millions of laser pulses from an aircraft. These pulses then bounce off the ground and return to the machine in the aircraft, allowing researchers to map the landscape's topography.

"We have found several ancient Maya settlements, with remains of residential buildings and temple pyramids," Šprajc said. In 2023, the team found Ocomtún, a lost Maya city that has several large pyramids from the Maya Classic period (circa A.D. 200 to 900). The newfound site is in a previously unexplored area south of Ocomtún, he said.

In addition, the team discovered another site that includes a plaza, a 52-foot-high (16 meters) pyramid and a rectangular water reservoir, according to the statement. On top of the pyramid, the archaeologists found some offerings: ceramic vessels; a ceramic animal leg, possibly of an armadillo; and a chert knife or spear point.

These offerings "were deposited on top of the temple in the Late Postclassic period (last centuries before the arrival of Spanish conquerors)," from 1250 to 1524, Šprajc said.

By the Late Postclassic, the central Maya Lowlands had already fallen into political disarray. But people "remained in the area after the crisis that led to the drastic demographic decrease in the 9th and 10th centuries, caused by overpopulation, soil depletion, climatic change (prolonged droughts) and destructive warfare," he said.

"The offering indicates that, even after most of the Classic period Maya settlements had been abandoned, small and impoverished human group[s] were still rambling around, putting offerings on or near the buildings of their forebears," Šprajc said.

In this 2017 satellite photo, a trio of hurricanes — including one of the most powerful tropical storms of the last decade — formed a near-perfect line as they marched through "hurricane alley." Some of the swirling storms, which initially appear to be in the wrong order, later made landfall in the U.S. and Mexico.

The three hurricanes — Katia (left), Irma (center) and Jose (right) — were spotted by the Suomi NPP weather satellite, which is co-run by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). While they appear to be following one another, the storms are each traveling in a different direction: Katia made landfall in Mexico on Sept. 9; Irma struck Florida on Sept. 10; and Jose eventually dissipated off the New England coast on Sept. 22.     

Most Atlantic hurricanes form in the same expanse of water between Northwest Africa and the Gulf of Mexico, dubbed hurricane alley. However, it's rare to see so many of them so close together — and forming such a regimented line, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.  

Major Atlantic storms are named alphabetically based on the order they appear in each year's hurricane season. So it might seem strange that Katia is in front of both Irma and Jose in the queue to make landfall.

However, the storms did not form in the order they appear in the image. Irma formed first, on Aug. 30 near Africa's Cape Verde islands. Jose appeared next on Sept. 5 in the mid-Atlantic, not far from where it is in the photo. Katia also formed on Sept. 5, slightly after Jose, but was birthed in Mexico's Bay of Campeche, which is why it is closest to land in the photo.

Related: 12 amazing images of Earth from space

Hurricane Irma was the most destructive of the three storms. This powerful Category 5 storm triggered storm surges up to 8 feet (2.5 meters) high, unleashing as much as 20 inches (50 centimeters) of rain in certain areas and spawning at least five separate tornadoes, according to the National Weather Center. One person was killed directly by its winds, which reached a maximum speed of 130 mph (210 km/h), while up to 33 people were killed indirectly by the storm.

At the time, it was reported that Hurricane Irma had the greatest accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) — the total amount of wind energy generated throughout the life of a tropical cyclone  — of any tropical storm on global record, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. However, calculations later downgraded its power. 

The all-time ACE record was recently broken in 2023 by Cyclone Freddy, which appeared in the Indian Ocean and made landfall three separate times, decimating parts of Madagascar and Mozambique. 

Research has shown that rising ocean temperatures triggered by human-caused climate change have likely made hurricanes more powerful on average. Some experts believe we may have to create a new sixth hurricane category to keep track of future storms.

The upcoming 2024 season is expected to be particularly active, with up to 25 named storms predicted, due to record-breaking surface temperatures caused by the recent El Niño event. This year's season has already started with a bang thanks to Hurricane Beryl, which formed earlier in the year than any other Category 5 hurricane on record.

A mass burial contains the remains of more than 100 individuals who were sacrificed as part of a series of ancient Maya rituals, a new study finds. Unusually, the remains were all from young boys, and they were buried over a 500-year period.

Archaeologists made the discovery after conducting DNA analyses on 64 of the skeletons, which were found in 1967 inside a chultun, or underground water storage chamber, at the Maya city of Chichén Itzá on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. The researchers revealed their findings in a study published Wednesday (May 12) in the journal Nature.

Radiocarbon dating showed that the cistern was in use between the early seventh century and the mid-12th century, and the genetic analysis revealed that all of the individuals were boys, of whom a quarter were closely related. Researchers also discovered two sets of twins in the mass burial. 

"Most of them were between 3 and 6 years old," lead author Rodrigo Barquera, a postdoctoral researcher at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, told Live Science. "Since many of the individuals were related to each other to some extent, that tells us that it's probable that only specific families would have had access to this burial and that not just anyone could put their kids in there — it was a big honor."

It is currently unclear how the boys buried there died.

Related: Traces of hallucinogenic plants and chile peppers found at Maya ball court suggest rituals took place there

"As we studied the bones, we didn't find any signs of trauma, so they weren't thrown into the chamber," Barquera said, adding that further analysis could help them determine if they were poisoned.

Researchers found some characteristics of the burial surprising, as similar Maya burials typically contained either only young females or a mix of males and females, the latter of which was the case at a known burial called the Sacred Cenote, also at Chichén Itzá.

"Traditionally, burials associated with an underground environment are usually fertility offerings," Barquera said. "But when we found that this burial was all male and that many of [the individuals] were related to each other, the narrative changed. Now we need to try to make sense of it."

Barquera said that we may "never know" what the exact purpose of the burial was and that it's possible the sacrifices could have been a plea to the gods for crop yields or for rainfall. However, one clue is the presence of the two twin burials.

"We do know that for the Maya, male twins were important and that there's a story of the hero twins who went to the underworld to avenge their father," Barquera said. "It's possible this was a memorial to the hero twins."

Lastly, the genetic analysis showed ancestral lineage between the sacrificed boys and present-day people who live in this region of Mexico, indicating that the individuals were from local communities. The modern-day populations had higher incidence of genes tied to resistance to Salmonella enterica than did the sacrificed children, supporting the hypothesis that epidemics introduced during the colonial period fueled the rise of these genes in the population, the study authors noted in the paper.

The researchers plan to conduct community outreach with locals to get new insight into their culture and heritage.

"We can learn so much from them," Barquera said.

A person in Mexico recently died after catching the first known human case of H5N2 bird flu.

The case marks the first time someone in Mexico has been sickened by any type of influenza A(H5) virus, a broad group of related bird flu viruses, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported June 5. 

Initially, authorities reported that the infection was a "confirmed fatal case" of H5N2. However, in an update issued June 14, they said that, although the man had tested positive for the flu virus around his time of death, he likely actually died of complications related to his underlying medical conditions.  

Specifics about those conditions haven't been released, but the investigators said that the patient's medical records pointed to this conclusion. Notably, the man had reportedly been "bedridden" for other reasons three weeks prior to developing any bird flu symptoms.  

Related: 'Increased evidence that we should be alert': H5N1 bird flu is adapting to mammals in 'new ways'

The case is still notable, though, because it demonstrates that H5N2 can spread to humans and cause disease. 

The broad category of virus that H5N2 belongs to also includes the one currently circulating among U.S. dairy cows, called H5N1. H5N1 recently sickened three people who had close contact with cattle. When it's caused sporadic infections in people, H5N1 has led to severe pneumonia and death in at least 50% of cases. In general, bird flu-related deaths have been reported in people with and without underlying medical conditions, the WHO says. 

The spread of bird flu to people is concerning, in part, because these viruses can sometimes be deadly. Another reason for concern is that the more times bird flu jumps into people, the more chances it has to pick up mutations and gain the ability to spread easily between humans. As of yet, no A(H5) viruses can sustainably spread from person to person, the WHO reported — but that could change in the future. 

For now, though, "based on available information, WHO assesses the current risk to the general population posed by this virus [H5N2] as low," the agency reported June 14. 

The recent case in Mexico involved a 59-year-old who developed fever, shortness of breath, diarrhea, nausea and general malaise in mid-April. The person sought medical treatment at a Mexico City hospital on April 24 but died the same day.

A sample of the patient's respiratory fluids, taken April 24, revealed he'd had H5N2. The virus is similar to H5N1, in that both viruses carry the same type of protein — H5 — on their surfaces, but a second protein called neuraminidase (N) is a slightly different shape on each virus. 

A close genetic analysis of the man's sample revealed that the virus was 99% similar to a strain of H5N2 detected this year in birds in Texcoco, Mexico. The strain is known to have low pathogenicity in birds, meaning it causes few to no symptoms in poultry. Highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses, in contrast, cause severe disease and death in poultry. 

Both highly and low pathogenic H5N2 viruses have caused outbreaks among birds in several Mexican states this year. 

According to the WHO, the man had had no recent contact with poultry or other animals; typically, people catch bird flu through contact with sick or dead animals, or from contact with materials those animals contaminated with the virus. As of June 14, authorities are still investigating the potential source of the patient's infection.

So far, none of the person's close contacts have tested positive for bird flu, and there's no evidence the virus has spread between people. "This case and this update do not change the current WHO recommendations on public health measures and surveillance of influenza," the agency reiterated in its June 14 statement.

Since people generally catch A(H5) viruses from animals or from handling those animals' bodily fluids, you can reduce the risk of bird flu by avoiding sick and dead animals and regularly washing your hands with soap and water. In the U.S., dairy workers have been advised to wear personal protective equipment around potentially sick animals, as an additional safety measure, and authorities have also emphasized that drinking raw milk could pose a risk to consumers. 

Again, the risk of transmission to the general public is low and overall these bird flu infections are rare. Should you catch an A(H5) virus, existing drugs for seasonal flu can help treat the infection.

Editor's note: This story was updated on June 14, 2024, following an update from the WHO that clarified the man likely died of comorbidities. The original story was published on June 6. 

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Dozens of wildfires are burning across Canada in May 2024 and sending unhealthy smoke blowing into the northern U.S. again. At the same time, the southeastern U.S. is getting smoke from Mexico, where drought conditions have been fueling fires.

Last year, Canada's record 2023 wildfire season introduced millions of Americans across the Midwest and northeastern states to the health hazards of wildfire smoke, with air quality alerts that reached levels never seen there before.

Professional baseball games were postponed and the skies in New York City turned orange with haze, at times exposing millions of people to the worst air quality in the world. In some regions, the smoke hung on for days.

The pressing question on many people's minds: "Is this the new normal?" From our perspective as air quality scientists, we think the answer is likely "yes."

Global warming means more fires

Hotter, drier conditions, coupled with dry grasses and underbrush that accumulated over decades of fire suppression, have made large wildfires more common.

Canada is experiencing a second consecutive extremely dry year in 2024, and it is also facing the reemergence of fires that smoldered underground through the winter. May 12-14, 2024, smoke from fires in British Columbia and Alberta reached unhealthy levels from Montana to Wisconsin and began to spread south and east into the Midwest and Great Lakes region.

The North American Seasonal Fire Assessment and Outlook for May through July highlights drought conditions in western Canada and Central America and higher than normal fire risk in both regions. It also notes the challenge of forecasting fire risk for later in the year as the El Niño climate pattern transitions to La Niña in late summer.

Computer simulations of the future in a warming climate show there will be more smoky days, higher smoke concentrations, larger burned areas and higher carbon emissions from the fires — which further fuel climate change.

States and the Forest Service can use prescribed fires and forest thinning to help reduce the number and intensity of fire outbreaks, but smoke exposure is still likely to increase as temperatures rise and moisture levels change.

In short, people will need to learn to live with wildfire smoke. It won't be every year, but it will be more common.

Fortunately, there are several tools and strategies for managing a smokier future.

Preparing for smoky days

Managing the risk of wildfire smoke starts with making smart personal choices.

Think of smoke waves like heat waves: They're easier to face if you're prepared and know they're coming. That means paying attention to forecasts and having face masks, air monitors and clean-air shelters available.

Inhaling the particulate matter and the chemicals in wildfire smoke can exacerbate asthma, worsen existing respiratory and cardiac problems and leave people more susceptible to respiratory infection. People caring for individuals sensitive to smoke, such as young children and older adults, will need to plan for their needs in particular.

To prepare, read up on the risks and warning signs from public health professionals. Living with wildfire smoke may mean using air filtration devices, wearing N95 or KN95 masks on bad air days, modifying outdoor commuting patterns and activity schedules and changing household ventilation choices.

What schools and communities can do

Living with smoke will also require changes to how schools, businesses, apartment buildings and government buildings operate.

Schools can start with setting a threshold for canceling outdoor activities and making sure staff are ready to meet the needs of kids with asthma.

Building managers may need to rethink air filtration and ventilation and deploy air quality sensors. Communities will also need contingency plans for festivals and recreation venues, as well as rules for business to protect outdoor workers.

Decisions on how to deal with smoke can be complicated. For example, selecting an air purifier can be a daunting task, with over 900 products on the market. The effectiveness of different smoke management interventions are not well known and can vary depending on small implementation details, such as how a mask fits the wearer’s face, whether exterior doors and windows seal tightly and whether filters are installed properly and are replaced often enough.

Improving smoke monitoring and forecasting

The U.S. has an extensive air quality monitoring and forecasting system to help provide some early warning. It uses ground-based air quality monitors, satellite remote sensing systems to detect smoke and fires and computer systems that tie observations together with wind, chemistry and weather. These are supplemented by expert guidance from meteorologists.

However, for average people trying to make decisions about the safety of outdoor activities, the current forecasting system is wanting. This is especially true when smoke blows in from fires far away, or when rapidly changing smoke emission rates and complex wind patterns lead to conflicting forecasts and advisories.

A few key improvements would go a long way for practical decision making around wildfire smoke. More accurate 10-day forecasts and neighborhood-level forecasts would help communities plan ahead. Merging seasonal weather forecasts of precipitation, humidity and winds with satellite assessments of wildfire fuel conditions could also enhance emergency planning.

Maintaining a strong air quality monitoring network is also important. However, state and local government agencies have reduced the number of ground monitors by about 10% from its peak in 2001. Smoke estimates from satellites and low-cost portable sensors can help, but they work best when they can be cross-calibrated to a well-maintained network of high-accuracy monitors.

We still have a lot to learn

More effective adaptations to smoke will require more research to better understand the effects of repeated exposures to wildfire smoke and the compound hazards that develop when smoke hits simultaneously with other challenges, such as extreme heat.

Community responses, such as providing clean-air shelters — the equivalent to a cooling center during extreme heat — are gaining attention, but there is only limited guidance on what constitutes a clean-air shelter and where and when one would be used.

Living with smoke is emerging as a new reality that people across much of North America will have to contend with again this year, and prepare for in the future.

Charles O. Stanier, Professor of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, University of Iowa, Gregory Carmichael, Professor of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, University of Iowa, and Peter S. Thorne, University of Iowa Distinguished Chair, Professor of Environmental Health, University of Iowa.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. It is an update to an article originally published Sept. 1, 2023.

Name: Olmec colossal heads

What they are: A series of massive heads that were each carved out of a single basalt boulder, often transported from miles away, during the Olmec civilization, an agricultural Mesoamerican culture and the earliest known society in what is now Mexico. Each of these imposing artifacts averages about 10 feet (3 meters) tall and weighs 8 tons (7.3 metric tons). Artisans used stone tools to shape them, adding in details such as pupils in the eyes and dimples in the cheeks, chins and lips, before painting the pieces in bright colors, according to the World History Encyclopedia.

Where they were found: Mexico, specifically in Tres Zapotes in Veracruz, and the Gulf Coast

When they were made: 1200 to 400 B.C.

What they tell us about the past: Of the 17 known Olmec colossal heads found across Mexico, no two look alike. For instance, one is decorated with a crown engraved with jaguar paw prints while another wears a headdress. This has led archaeologists to think that each of the massive statues depicts a specific ruler. 

While it remains a mystery whose likeness the heads portray, one researcher identified a single statue, known as Colossal Head 5, as a second-millennium B.C. ruler from San Lorenzo, the oldest known Olmec city.

Related: Twin 'grumpy mouth' reliefs of Olmec contortionists discovered in Mexico

However, archaeologists have yet to find any burials at San Lorenzo, and the few known instances of Olmec writing remain undeciphered, so the identity of the region's rulers and residents remains unknown, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

It's unclear how the Olmec used the sculptures, however some researchers think that citizens would move the carvings to different spots in the city during important rituals. They may have also used them as markers to establish dominance or political authority, or even for protection, according to the World History Encyclopedia. For example, in the Olmec city of La Venta, archaeologists discovered four heads positioned on the north and south sides of the city. But instead of facing toward the city center, the heads looked outward as if they were guarding it from intruders.

Around 900 B.C., some of the heads in La Venta were buried, possibly as a ritual to move forward into the future. However, some researchers think that the burial happened closer to when the heads were produced as either a way to worship ancestors or in a move to "neutralize the dead ruler's power," according to the World History Encyclopedia. 

Three people who traveled to Mexico for stem-cell injections that are not approved in the U.S. contracted difficult-to-treat, drug-resistant infections, a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Thursday (May 9).

The infections were caused by Mycobacterium abscessus, a bacterium that's distantly related to the ones behind tuberculosis and leprosy. The microbe commonly lurks in soil, water and dust, and it's known to sometimes contaminate medications and medical devices and thus cause infections in health care settings. 

Symptoms can include boils and pus-filled bubbles, in the case of skin infections, as well as fever, chills and muscle aches, when soft-tissue infections occur. Sometimes, the bacteria can invade the bloodstream. Treating the infection involves removing infected tissues and draining pus from the body, as well as giving antibiotics for a prolonged period.

For a given patient, doctors may have to test different drugs against samples of bacteria from their body, in order to find the most lethal combination against the drug-resistant bug.   

All three patients who got stem-cell injections in Mexico underwent the procedures in 2022, and as of March 2024, they were still being treated for M. abscessus infection in U.S. hospitals, according to the MMWR.

Related: Dangerous 'superbugs' are a growing threat, and antibiotics can't stop their rise. What can? 

"Providers and public health agencies need to be aware of the risk for M. abscessus infections from stem cell treatments for indications not approved by the Food and Drug Administration and maintain vigilance for similar cases," the report's authors wrote. "They also are advised to provide guidance for persons considering medical tourism." 

The only stem-cell products currently approved in the U.S. contain precursors to different cells in the blood, and they're cleared to treat disorders that affect the production of blood. 

The first of the three cases involved a Colorado woman in her 30s, who in October 2022 had traveled to Baja California to get stem-cell injections in the tissues that surround the brain and spinal cord. 

The injections were reportedly intended to treat the autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis, for which there are no approved stem-cell treatments in the U.S. After the injections, she developed headaches and fever, and at a hospital in the U.S., the fluid around her brain and spinal cord tested positive for M. abscessus. This indicated she had a serious infection called bacterial meningitis.

Two similar cases involved men in their 60s — one from Arizona and one from Colorado. The Arizona man had developed an infection in his elbow after traveling to Baja California for treatment of psoriatic arthritis. He was treated at a different clinic than the Colorado woman was, and the clinics were 167 miles (269 kilometers) apart. 

The Colorado man, meanwhile, had traveled to Guadalajara, Mexico, for treatment of osteoarthritis in his knees and then developed infections in both knees. The use of stem-cell injections for multiple sclerosis and arthritis are unproven, as potential stem-cell therapies for these conditions are still being investigated.

While treating the patients, a U.S. hospital obtained samples of the M. abscessus bacteria from the Colorado woman and Arizona man; samples from the Colorado man still need to be closely assessed, but they've been confirmed to be M. abscessus. 

Genetic analyses revealed that the two patients' samples were a near-perfect match. Therefore, the investigators "suspect a common infected source" for these two patients, meaning the same products or equipment may have been contaminated in both cases. 

However, authorities "attempted to contact clinics that performed the stem cell injections, but received no response," the MMWR notes, and "attempts to identify the product or gather details about its administration have been unsuccessful to date." Authorities in the U.S. and Mexico are continuing to investigate the three known cases and are looking for additional ones. 

Medical tourism has been tied to M. abscessus infections in the past. For example, a Canadian man who underwent a hair transplant in Panama developed such an infection on his scalp. So these superbug infections can arise after both cosmetic procedures and therapies intended to treat disease. 

This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.

Ever wonder why some people build muscle more easily than others or why freckles come out in the sun? Send us your questions about how the human body works to community@livescience.com with the subject line "Health Desk Q," and you may see your question answered on the website!

The Cave of Crystals is an underground cavern filled with tree-size gypsum crystals, including some of the largest natural crystals ever found. The cave is located around 980 feet (300 meters) deep and is connected to a lead, zinc and silver mine in Naica, 65 miles (105 kilometers) southeast of Chihuahua City.  The mine was flooded almost 10 years ago after workers accidentally broke into an aquifer, but the Cave of Crystals sits higher in the ground, meaning the water didn't reach it. 

Miners discovered the Cave of Crystals by chance in 2000 while drilling a side tunnel to help ventilation in the mine. When they stepped inside, they discovered a chamber packed with enormous, milky-white crystals — the largest measuring over 37 feet (11 meters) long and 3.3 feet (1 m) wide. The crystals are made of selenite gypsum, a sulfate mineral that forms from salts dissolved in groundwater. It is so soft you can scratch it with a fingernail.

Related: Water leaking into Earth's core may have birthed a mysterious layer that churns out crystals

Mining operations in Naica began in 1974, and several crystal-filled caves have since been discovered — including the Cave of Swords, which is studded from floor to ceiling with dagger-like crystals. But the Cave of Crystals is by far the biggest, stretching 360 feet (110 m) across with a maximum volume of 210,000 cubic feet (6,000 cubic meters) — more than twice the size of an Olympic swimming pool. The cave is shaped like a horseshoe and carved out of limestone rock. 

"It's the Sistine Chapel of crystals," Juan Manuel García-Ruiz, a geologist with the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and at the University of Granada in Spain, who has studied the cave, told National Geographic in 2007. 

The cave sits on a fault line and above a magma reservoir buried 2 to 3 miles (3 to 5 km) beneath Naica. Roughly 26 million years ago, magma rose from this chamber, forcing mineral-rich waters upward through cracks in the rock. The scalding water opened caverns in the limestone and formed deposits that crystallized over thousands of years as it slowly cooled. Temperatures later stabilized at around 136 degrees Fahrenheit (58 degrees Celsius), creating ideal conditions for gypsum crystals to grow to mammoth proportions from a mineral called anhydrite. 

The conditions in the cave are just right for crystals, but they are deadly to humans. Temperatures stayed the same after the water drained but humidity reached over 90%. At that humidity level, sweating has no cooling effect on the body. As a result, people need proper protection to stay in the cave for longer than 10 minutes. Walking among the crystals is also dangerous, because the beams are slick and with condensation and extremely slippery.

The crystals are growing more slowly now they aren't submerged, and their appearance will likely change over time as they become progressively more dehydrated. But for now, the cave "is OK," García-Ruiz told Live Science in an email.

Discover more incredible places, where we highlight the fantastic history and science behind some of the most dramatic landscapes on Earth.

Mexico's Taam Ja' Blue Hole is the deepest known underwater sinkhole in the world, researchers have discovered — and they haven't even reached the bottom yet. 

New measurements indicate the Taam Ja' Blue Hole (TJBH), which sits in Chetumal Bay off the southeast coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, extends at least 1,380 feet (420 meters) below sea level. 

That's 480 feet (146 m) deeper than scientists initially documented when they first discovered the blue hole in 2021, and 390 feet (119 m) deeper than the previous record holder — the 990-foot-deep (301 m) Sansha Yongle Blue Hole, also known as the Dragon Hole, in the South China Sea. 

"On December 6, 2023, a scuba diving expedition was conducted to identify the environmental conditions prevailing at the TJBH," researchers wrote in a study published Monday (April 29) in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science. During the expedition, the researchers took measurements with a conductivity, temperature and depth (CTD) profiler — a device with a set of probes that read and transmit water properties to the surface in real time via a cable. The data revealed that the Taam Ja' blue hole is "the world's deepest known blue hole, with its bottom still not reached," the researchers wrote in the study. 

Related: Colossal cave in Mexico that formed 15 million years ago is even more enormous than we thought 

The profiler also highlighted different layers of water within the blue hole, including a layer below 1,312 feet (400 m) where the temperature and salinity conditions resembled those of the Caribbean Sea and nearby coastal reef lagoons. This suggests the TJBH may be connected to the ocean via a hidden network of tunnels and caves, according to the study.

Blue holes are water-filled vertical caverns, or sinkholes, found in coastal regions where the bedrock is made of soluble material, such as limestone, marble or gypsum. They form when water on the surface percolates through the rock, dissolving minerals and widening cracks, which eventually causes the rock to collapse. Famous examples include Dean's Blue Hole in the Bahamas, the Dahab Blue Hole in Egypt and the Great Blue Hole in Belize. 

Initial measurements of the TJBH were taken using an echo sounder — an instrument that sends sound waves down to the bottom of the water and measures the speed they come back to calculate distance. However, there are limitations to echo sounding techniques in blue holes due to fluctuations in water density and the unpredictable shape of each hole, which may not be perfectly vertical.

"Confirmation of the maximum depth was not possible due to instrument limitations during the scientific expeditions in 2021," the researchers wrote in the study.

The CTD instrument used for the recent work did not find the bottom of the blue hole either, as it could only operate down to depths of 1,640 feet (500 m). Scientists lowered the profiler down to that depth, but the cable it was attached to may have drifted on underwater currents or bumped into a ledge that stopped the device in its tracks 1,380 feet down, according to the study.

Next, the scientists plan to"decipher TJBH's "maximum depth and the possibilities of forming part of an underwater intricate and potentially interconnected system of caves and tunnels," the researchers wrote.

"Within the depths of TJBH could also lie a biodiversity to be explored," they added.

A bundle of botanicals buried at an ancient Maya ball court in Mexico may have been placed there as part of a ritual, according to a new study.

Archaeologists made the discovery while conducting fieldwork in what was once the ancient Maya city of Yaxnohcah, on the Yucatán Peninsula. During excavations, they noticed a dark stain in the soil and collected samples of it, the team reported in the study, which was published Friday (April 26) in the journal PLOS One.

Back in the lab, researchers conducted an environmental DNA analysis of the soil, using a method they developed that involves collecting specimens in sealable, cryogenic tubes and preserving the samples as they are transported from the field to the lab. To preserve the samples, the researchers applied a solution called RNAlater, which helps to inhibit bacterial growth in the soil.

"It keeps the bacteria from eating DNA in there," lead author David Lentz, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Cincinnati, told Live Science.

The analysis revealed that the stain was actually the remnants of four types of plants, all of which have known "religious associations and medicinal properties" and were often used by the Maya, according to a statement from the University of Cincinnati. The botanicals included a morning glory known as xtabentun, which has hallucinogenic properties, as well as lancewood and chile peppers. The plants were then wrapped in the leaves of the jool plant — a common step in Maya rituals.

Related: Maya nobility performed bloodletting sacrifices to strengthen a 'dying' sun god during solar eclipses

"For the Maya, chile peppers were more than just a condiment and were often used in rituals and had medicinal applications," Lentz said. "Xtabentun has similar physiological effects as LSD, and we've seen evidence of its use in a ceremonial context. It turns out that this was a ceremonial bundle."

Researchers think the Maya likely made a ceremonial offering during the ball court's construction. The Maya were known for playing several ball games, sometimes called pok-a-tok, in which players and even royalty would use their bodies, but not their hands or feet, to hit a rubber ball.

But they also used the ball courts for ceremonial purposes.

"Today we think of ball courts as a place for recreation, but the Maya also saw them as sacred," Lentz said. "They would have placed the bundle while they were building the ball court as an offering to the gods to let them know that they were changing the landscape and to please bless it. This [ritual] coincides with similar ceremonies we've found evidence of at other [Maya] sites."

Based on the analysis, the researchers determined that the ceremonial bundle was placed at the site around A.D. 80, Lentz said.

The researchers were impressed that traces of the plants lasted nearly 2,000 years in a tropical climate.

"For the study, we collected about 5 grams [0.2 ounce] of soil, and in that, there were over 100,000 DNA sequences," Lentz said. "Of those, only 15 were from plants. It was pulling a needle out of a haystack."

A chain of massive earthquakes may have led to the decline and eventual desertion of the pre-Aztec Mesoamerican city of Teotihuacan, a new study suggests.

Teotihuacan, which is located northeast of modern-day Mexico City and flourished between 150 B.C. and A.D. 650, had a population of more than 100,000 inhabitants at its heyday, but several centuries later that number plummeted substantially, according to a study published in the May issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

Researchers have long wondered what caused this dramatic population drop, with hypotheses including war and famine. However, a new analysis of some of the city's iconic pyramids reveals that Teotihuacan was hit by five treacherous megathrust earthquakes that shook the city roughly between A.D. 100 and 600.

"Megathrust earthquakes stand out as the most formidable seismic events ever documented," lead study author Raúl Pérez-López, an earthquake geologist at the Geological and Mining Institute in Spain, told Live Science in an email. "These earthquakes originate in subduction zones, such as the Middle American Trench (MAT) [an oceanic trench in the Pacific Ocean that's one of the world's largest subduction zones and the boundary between several tectonic plates, including the Nazca and North American]. What sets them apart is their extraordinary magnitude and relatively infrequent occurrence compared to other seismic events."

For example, one megathrust earthquake is so powerful that the seismic energy it emits "is equivalent to the energy unleashed by around 32,000 Hiroshima nuclear bombs," Pérez-López said. A more recent megathrust earthquake occurred in Japan in 2011.  

Related: 'Lost' 1,500-year-old Teotihuacan village discovered in the heart of Mexico City

"The release of such staggering energy during a megathrust earthquake can have catastrophic consequences for the surrounding regions, illustrating the immense destructive potential of these seismic events," he added.

For the study, the researchers analyzed three of Teotihuacan's pyramids, including the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon, for earthquake archaeological effects, or damage patterns that are related to strong ground shaking. They found that the seismic shocks rattled the city from the southwest to the northeast, leaving tell-tale evidence in their facades, according to the study.

Perhaps the most vulnerable of the three pyramids was the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, which showed "displacement and fracturing of [its] massive andesite [rock] masonry blocks." The researchers also noticed examples of "chipped corners" of the outer stair blocks and "dislodged bricks," he said. 

While the researchers were aware of the megathrust earthquakes and researched them in a 2010 study, it wasn’t until this new study that they discovered the full extent of the damage caused by them. 

"Remarkably, in the past century, earthquakes with magnitudes exceeding 8.6 in Mexico have not significantly impacted the infrastructure of Teotihuacan," he said. "This highlights the necessity of exceptionally powerful earthquakes to induce the specific destructive patterns observed in this ancient city."

In response to the earthquakes, the city's occupants reinforced their pyramids as a precautionary measure.

"The initial response by the Teotihuacanos was to reinforce the Sun Pyramid, the largest structure in their city, along its north-south axis in an attempt to fortify it against future earthquakes," he said. "Additionally, they repurposed and removed other elements damaged by seismic activity. Interestingly, they opted to conceal one of the most conspicuous signs of earthquake damage: the rotation and displacement of the west staircase of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent."

He added, "Today, these archaeological effects of earthquakes remain visible, offering valuable insights into the ancient civilization's resilience and adaptive strategies."

However, even architectural changes weren't enough to save the city from its eventual abandonment at the end of the seventh century, when there was "a sharp decrease of the population and an abrupt loss of geopolitical power," the authors wrote in the study. 

"The disruption caused by a devastating earthquake not only shakes the physical foundations of a society but also destabilizes its social and political structures," Pérez-López said. "Mismanagement of societal discontent in the aftermath of such a disaster can foment internal revolts, especially in the absence of effective military and urban infrastructure. This creates fertile ground for unrest, potentially sparking rebellions fueled by neighboring cities and exacerbating existing tensions."

Centuries-old codices from what is now Mexico hold a wealth of knowledge about the Aztecs in their native language, including details about the founding of their capital, their conquests and their fall to the Spanish, according to Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

The Mexican government recently bought three illustrated codices, known as the Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco, from a private family that had passed down the Aztec documents for generations, the Spanish newspaper El País reported.

The Aztecs ruled over a large area of Mexico during the 15th and 16th centuries. Their capital was at Tenochtitlán, in what is now Mexico City. Between 1519 and 1521, a Spanish force conquered the Aztecs and established Spanish rule over the area. Codices written in the Indigenous Nahuatl language and Spanish continued to be produced into the early 17th century.

Related: 'Lost' 1,500-year-old Teotihuacan village discovered in the heart of Mexico City

One of the newly purchased codices describes the founding of Tenochtitlán around 1300 and the lords who ruled it in pre-Hispanic times, INAH representatives said in a translated statement. The codex also describes the Aztec conquest of the city of Tetepilco around 1440 and how that city's ruler swore vassalage to the Aztecs. It even details the arrival of the Spanish in 1519 and their rule up to the year 1611, the statement said. The Spanish continued to rule Mexico until 1821. 

The codices were owned by a Mexico City family, who requested anonymity. When scientists at Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City examined the codices, they found that two of the sheets were written on amate, or bark paper, and that the codices' inks were made from plants, charcoal and indigo, creating the colors red, yellow ochre, black and blue. After the documents' authenticity was confirmed, the government negotiated with the family and purchased the three codices for 9.5 million pesos (about $570,000), the statement said.

The two other codices sold by the family include one that describes the founding of Tetepilco and another that details the assets held by a church in Tetepilco, El País reported.

All three codices are now in the  National Library of Anthropology and History's Collection of Mexican Codices (BNAH), and researchers will study the texts in greater detail to learn more about Mexico's history, according to the INAH statement.

A greenish obsidian blade, believed to have been found on the Texas Panhandle, may be from the 16th-century expedition led by the Spanish explorer Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, a new study suggests.

The sharp tool's provenance is hazy, but a chemical analysis of the obsidian reveals that it came from the Sierra de Pachuca mountain range of Central Mexico, where many Indigenous people on the expedition got raw materials for cutting tools, the researchers found. It's possible that an Indigenous person traveling with Coronado crafted the blade in Mexico and later discarded it in Texas, which could help determine Coronado's exact route through the Lonestar State, the researchers said.

"Although Coronado's exact route through the Texas Panhandle in AD 1541 is uncertain, current understanding suggests that it passed through or close to Mclean," the researchers wrote in the study, published in January in the Journal of the North Texas Archeological Society.

Related: 'Spirit mirror' used by 16th-century occultist John Dee came from the Aztec Empire

The 2.6-inch-long (6.5 centimeters) blade belonged to Lloyd Erwin (lived 1920 to 1992), who began collecting Indigenous American and historical artifacts as a boy on his family's ranch north of McLean. However, Erwin didn't leave any archaeological notes describing the blade, so it's unclear when or where he got it. But the study's authors suggest that he likely found the blade on the Texas Panhandle, possibly around McLean, as he did many of the other artifacts in his collection.

According to common lore, Coronado and Spanish knights were sent by the king of Spain to look for the fabled gold Seven Cities of Cíbola. Nowadays, historians note that it was Antonio de Mendoza, Viceroy of New Spain (modern-day Mexico), who ordered Coronado to find the rumored city; instead, Coronado's expedition journeyed to modern-day Kansas before returning empty handed. And Mendoza may actually have tasked Coronado with finding a route to Asia, Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint, a husband and wife team who are research associates at the Latin American and Iberian Institute at the University of New Mexico, told Live Science. Neither of the Flints, who wrote "A Most Splendid Company: The Coronado Expedition in Global Perspective" (University of New Mexico Press, 2019), were involved with the new study.

The expedition of at least 2,800 people journeyed across Mexico, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Oklahoma and Kansas from 1540 to 1542. Because obsidian blades are brittle, they were often discarded. "We suspect that this blade represents a hafted knife or razor carried northward," the researchers wrote in the study.

"This small unassuming artifact fits all of the requirements for convincing evidence of a Coronado presence in the Texas panhandle," study co-author Matthew Boulanger, an anthropologist at Southern Methodist University, said in a statement. Boulanger conducted the study alongside Charlene Erwin, the daughter-in-law of Lloyd Erwin.

X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometry, a non-invasive technique that determines an object's elemental composition, revealed that the blade is "wholly consistent with obsidian from the Sierra de Pachuca source in Central Mexico," about 55 miles (90 kilometers) northeast of Mexico City, the authors wrote in the study.

Indigenous people, including the Nahua, used obsidian to make tools until shortly after the Spanish conquest, at which time they switched to iron, the authors wrote. There was no known evidence of a trade network between the Indigenous peoples of Central Mexico and the Texas Panhandle at that time, the researchers noted, suggesting that the blade didn't come to Texas through trade, but through an "entrada," or a Spanish expedition into "new lands." 

While there were other entradas in this region in the 16th and 17th centuries, Coronado's was the largest and had the most warriors, so they were more likely to carry these obsidian blades, the researchers wrote. 

But, given the uncertainty of the blade's origins, it's hard to say for certain whether it came from the Coronado expedition, the Flints said.

"If it was really found there [in McLean], it helps confirm what most of us think is already that corridor" where the expedition traveled, Shirley Cushing Flint told Live Science. "Which is nice. You know, we don't have a piece from there."

Richard Flint told Live Science the find "would be more convincing if there were other objects, not necessarily the same kind, but other ones that might be also associated with the Coronado expedition." Such a discovery, said Flint, could offer better evidence that Coronado passed through hundreds of years ago.

Archaeologists in Mexico have uncovered a 1,500-year-old burial of human remains, whose bones were stacked, possibly as part of a ritual.  

The pre-Hispanic discovery was made during a sewer system construction project at Pozo de Ibarra in the western Mexican state of Nayarit, according to a translated statement from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

The burial contained one complete skeleton, along with human bones from other individuals. Some of the bones were intentionally stacked, and they were separated into different categories, with long bones like femurs (thigh bones) and tibias (lower leg bones) in one section and seven complete skulls in another, Claudia Servín Rosas, a field archaeologist with the INAH who led the excavation, said in the statement.

An analysis revealed that all of the skulls belonged to men of various ages, with some of the specimens showing signs of cranial modification, which was frequently practiced in Mesoamerica.

Researchers determined that the bones were interred simultaneously and that the funerary rituals were reminiscent of similar practices done during the Amapa era, which stretched from A.D. 500 to 850. 

Related: 2,500-year-old burials of 3 people discovered in cave in Mexico

Ceramic vessels and figurines found at the site also helped archaeologists link the burial to this time period, according to the Miami Herald.

Servín Rosas thinks the burial could have been part of family funerary rites in which men were buried to commemorate the establishment of a new settlement. However, there are no other records of similar practices in the region, according to the statement.

The INAH is working with town authorities to preserve the remains for future study.

Mexico City is facing severe water shortages that could see large parts of the city run dry in months.

The megacity and its environs, home to approximately 22 million people, has been suffering from moderate to exceptional drought since the beginning of 2024. In an effort to conserve this water, officials have restricted access for many residents to an hour or so of water every few days.

A combination of factors — including diminishing rainfall, increased temperatures, leaky infrastructure and urban sprawl — are pushing the city's water supply further to the brink. Without drastic measures experts have warned that a "day zero," where freely-available water services completely collapse across the city, could be just a few months away.

"We're extracting water at twice the speed that the aquifer replenishes. This is causing damages to infrastructure, impacts on the water system and ground subsidence," Jorge Alberto Arriaga, the coordinator of the water network for the National Autonomous University of Mexico, told Spanish newspaper El Pais.

Roughly 60% of Mexico City's water comes from an underground aquifer and the remainder is pumped uphill from outside the city. But the aquifer has been overused, causing the land to sink at a rate of around 20 inches (51 centimeters) per year since 1950.

The pumped water, on the other hand, is prone to leaks, with 40% of its contents getting lost in transit. And as much of the once-permeable ground is now covered in concrete, the water doesn’t necessarily seep back into aquifers. 

According to Reuters, the biggest of these systems, the Cutzamala System, was pumping only 39.7% of its full capacity at the end of January. This is a decrease from 41% in December, and a sharp decline from 54% in January 2023.

Related: New York City may be sinking under its own weight because the buildings are too heavy, scientists warn

The city's situation is compounded by its geography and history. Situated at high-altitude, it was once the location for the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan — a city founded on an island on Lake Texcoco and built outward through an ingenious network of canals, bridges and artificial islands.

After conquering Tenochtitlan in 1521, the Spanish tore down the city and drained its lake, founding Mexico City on the soft, clay-rich soil of the lake bed. The result is a metropolis vulnerable both to earthquakes and, from the destruction of its natural water cycle, droughts. 

These droughts have been getting longer and harsher, partly because of climate change and also due to this year's El Niño climate pattern (which has boosted temperatures in the region and across Latin America).

To address the problem, officials have said they will begin to dig for more wells around the city alongside improving wastewater treatment to ensure all residents get enough water.

Whether or not these efforts avert "day zero", or whether it has already begun to arrive, remains to be seen.

"We have to consider that 'day zero' is now, because the rivers are contaminated, the springs are overexploited, this is what we must understand," José Antonio Rodríguez Tirado, a water management consultant who gave advice to Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies on the crisis, told Forbes Mexico.

With the monsoon season not due to arrive until May or June, residents have some time yet until there is a reprieve.

A skeleton visible within a burial at the entrance of the palace of Hernán Cortés —the Spanish conquistador who caused the fall of the Aztec Empire — is not the remains of a Spanish monk as was long thought. Instead, a new analysis reveals that the bones belonged to a middle-aged Indigenous woman.

When a powerful magnitude 7.1 earthquake rattled the Mexican states of Puebla and Morelos as well as Mexico City in 2017, buildings collapsed and thousands of people were injured. The Palace of Cortés, which was built by 1535 and now serves as a museum, was severely damaged, requiring extensive repair work that was completed in early 2023. During this work, researchers took stock of all objects within the museum, including an open burial exhibited at the entrance to the palace. 

Originally excavated in 1971, the burial was left in place, and was eventually walled off and accompanied by a label noting that the person was likely the Spanish monk Juan Leyva. To arrive at this identification, a team of historians had found a 16th-century Franciscan codex that told the story of how Leyva slept with his head in a niche in the wall and how he was eventually buried next to the gate of the old house. After archaeologists noticed some issues with the neck vertebrae in the burial, the pieces fell into place: The skeleton with a twisted neck at the palace's entrance could have been Leyva.

Despite these clues, other aspects of the burial did not mesh with what would be expected for a Spanish monk, including the fetal-like burial position.

In a Jan. 18 statement, Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) announced a new analysis of the burial, with a wildly different identification: the supposed Spanish monk burial was actually the remains of an Indigenous woman.

Related: Ancient burial of fierce female hunter (and her weapons) discovered in Peru

INAH anthropologists Pablo Neptalí Monterroso Rivas and Isabel Bertha Garza Gómez undertook a thorough examination of the remaining bones in the burial and detailed their findings in a published report.

Both the skull and the pelvis suggest the person was female, who was about 30 to 40 years old when she died, Monterroso Rivas and Garza Gómez noted in the report. They did not see any clear indications of the "distorted" neck vertebrae that the 1971 researchers noted, but they did see some flattening of the back of the woman's head, likely from the practice of cranial modification. A fetal-like burial position along with cranial flattening suggests an Indigenous origin for the skeleton, they wrote in Spanish. But why was she buried in the Palace of Cortés?

Beginning around 1150, centuries before Cortés set foot in central Mexico, the region was occupied by the Tlahuica, an Aztec people. They built a city called Cuauhnáhuac (modern-day Cuernavaca), which was wealthy, full of buildings and densely populated at the time of Cortés' incursion. Upon destroying the city in 1521, the Spanish burned the "tlatocayancalli" — the Aztec tax collection house — and built a palace for Cortés on the ruins.

Given the archaeological evidence for various floors that were put in over time, the anthropologists suggested that the Tlahuica woman was buried very close to the time that Cuauhnáhuac fell to Spanish invasion, between 1500 and 1521. In an email to Live Science, Monterroso Rivas suggested that, rather than a traditional cemetery-type burial, "it would be more pertinent to think of a series of ritual events, perhaps of sacrifice, with the Tlahuica woman being the last to take place."

Even though a new identification of a historical burial has been made, there are still open questions. The anthropologists reexamining the burial also identified a handful of bones from other individuals, including an infant and a child. Monterroso Rivas does not know if the two children were kin, but he suggested that a DNA study could clarify their relationship. And after half a century of exposure and years of humidity issues following earthquake damage to the palace, the Tlahuica woman's skeleton is seriously damaged — the team hopes that the skeleton can be preserved and studied more in the future.

"It is worth reiterating the importance of the burial and its emblematic association with the palace," they wrote in their report, since "the archaeological window" was created to show the burial, which greets guests who visit the museum.

The 2,500-year-old burials of three people, buried with a variety of grave goods, have been discovered inside a cave in northeastern Mexico.

An analysis of the skeletal remains revealed that two of the people were adolescents and one was a baby, Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) said in a translated statement. Remnants of basketry, textiles and fibers were found alongside the human remains — a clue that the dead may have been buried in bundles made of those materials in what is now the Mexican state of Nuevo León, the statement said.

The remains were found in pieces and it's possible that they were ritually dismembered; however detailed osteological analysis has not been done.

Related: 'This is complete nonsense': Scientists rail against 'alien' bodies shown before Mexican congress

The dead were also buried with beads crafted from freshwater shells, some of which originated 186 miles (300 kilometers) away, to the east toward the Gulf of Mexico, said Moisés Valadez Moreno, an archaeologist with the INAH who excavated the remains, told Live Science in an email, noting that remains of seeds, spearpoints and plants were also found.

The human remains date to sometime between 3,000 and 2,500 years ago, the statement said. This window includes a time that archaeologists sometimes call the "Preclassic" period in Mexico. During this time, the peoples who lived in northern Mexico engaged in long-distance trade and practiced a variety of lifestyles, including hunting and gathering and growing crops, wrote historians Alfredo López Austin and Leonardo López Luján in their book "Mexico's Indigenous Past" (University of Oklahoma Press, 2001).

The relationship among the three people found in the cave is still unclear; osteological and DNA studies would need to be done to determine this, Valadez Moreno said. The proximity of their remains and location in the same soil layer suggest that the three people may have died around the same time, he noted. It's also not clear how the three people died, although future analyses may shed light on this, Valadez Moreno said.

Excavations at the cave started in 2003, and about 30,000 artifacts and ecofacts (biological remains that humans may have used) have been discovered since that time, the INAH statement said.

It may occur only from within a path 115 miles (185 kilometers) wide and 10,000 miles (16,000 km) long, but the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024, will be one of the most urban eclipses for decades.

"The total eclipse of the sun next April 8 will envelop many millions of people," Michael Zeiler, eclipse cartographer at GreatAmericanEclipse.com, told Live Science's sister site Space.com in an email. "31 million people already live inside the path within the U.S., and when you add the millions more Mexicans and Canadians in the path, plus the visitors who come to see totality, between 40 and 50 million people will witness the total solar eclipse."

From Mazatlán and Torreón in Mexico via big cities in Texas, Indianapolis and Montreal in Canada, millions of city-dwellers across North America will witness totality from a city. About 10 million will be in just 10 cities, each with populations above 500,000.

Here are the most significant 10 cities in the path of totality — and what's being planned in each of them:

All times, totality durations and historical cloud statistics for April 8, 2024, come from the Eclipse Calculator — City Lookup on Timeanddate.com and eclipse expert Xavier Jubier's interactive Google Map.

MONTRÉAL, QUEBEC, CANADA

Montreal is right on the northern edge of the path of totality. The North Shore and even Laval must be avoided, with only the southern half of Île de Montréal within the path of totality. Totality will last longest close to the St. Lawrence River and peak at about 2 minutes at the Île aux Hérons Migratory Bird Sanctuary. It's been cloudy in Montreal on April 8, about 69% of the time since 2000.

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS, U.S.

Like Montréal, this city is split in two by the edge of the path of totality, in this case, the southern limit. However, unlike Montréal, the center of San Antonio lies outside of the path, with only its northern and western suburbs within it. It's been cloudy in San Antonio on April 8 about 55% of the time since 2000.

DALLAS-FORT WORTH METROPLEX, TEXAS, U.S.

Although it comes third on this list, the population of the wider metroplex includes more than 60 cities and over 8 million people. About 1.5 million visitors are expected to a region with the largest selection of hotels anywhere in the path of totality. Organizers are now adding new observing events all the time, with confirmed events including the Frontiers of Flight Museum and the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden. It's been cloudy in Dallas on April 8 about 60% of the time since 2000 and in Fort Worth about 49%.

AUSTIN, TEXAS, U.S.

Although many will stay in Austin and drive into the Texas Hill Country for a longer totality, central Austin will experience a relatively long totality. Just be sure to avoid its southeastern suburbs and Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, which will be outside the path. It's been cloudy in Austin on April 8 about 59% of the time since 2000.

INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA, U.S

A few big cities in the Midwest are close to the path of totality — among them Columbus, St. Louis, and Cincinnati — but only Indianapolis will experience totality There are big plans for Indy's 2024 Solar Eclipse Weekend, including events at Indianapolis Zoo, The Children's Museum of Indianapolis, Conner Prairie and Indiana State Museum NASA will broadcast internationally from a huge public event at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. It's been cloudy in Indianapolis on April 8 about 60% of the time since 2000.

VICTORIA DE DURANGO, DURANGO, MEXICO

With a primarily dry climate year-round, this large city — the capital of Durango — will be where many tour groups are based. It could also be a venue for eclipse-chasers in Mazatlán, who must find clear skies if forecasts are poor. In a mountainous region and slightly south of the centerline, the city has a historic center with several well-preserved baroque buildings. It's been cloudy in Durango on April 8 about 30% of the time since 2000.

HAMILTON, ONTARIO, CANADA

A prominent port city on the western tip of Lake Ontario, Hamilton is part of Canada's Golden Horseshoe. It's set to be extremely busy on the day of the eclipse, despite only just being inside the northern limit of the path of totality, because of its proximity to Toronto, a city of 3 million that completely misses out on totality. It's been cloudy in Hamilton on April 8 about 61% of the time since 2000.

TORREÓN, COAHUILA, MEXICO

Given its higher chance of clear skies, this eclipse could go down in history as the Great Mexican Eclipse. If it does, a high proportion of Mexicans who experience the nation's first totality since 1991 will do so from the environs of this industrial town in the country's northwest. It's been cloudy in Torreón on April 8 about 27% of the time since 2000.

MAZATLÁN, SINALOA, MEXICO

Although it comes last on this list, the beach-blessed colonial town of Mazatlán in northwest Mexico has been in the plans of many eclipse-chasers for several years because of its low chance of clouds. While tourists will fill its resorts, locals will swarm its 4-mile (7 km) paved malecón boardwalk to be the first people in North America to see an eclipsed sun. It's been cloudy in Mazatlán on April 8, about 28% of the time since 2000.

A potentially deadly disease spread by ticks recently sickened five people who had traveled to or lived in Baja California, Mexico, and three of those patients have died, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned.

The disease, called Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF), is caused by the bacterium Rickettsia rickettsii and spreads to humans through tick bites. If left untreated, the infection can rapidly progress and lead to serious complications, including nerve and organ damage, partial paralysis, loss of bladder or bowel control, and gangrene, which may require amputation.

If left untreated, RMSF can lead to death — before effective treatments were available for the condition, case-fatality rates ranged from 20% to 80%.

Between late July and Dec. 8, 2023, the CDC confirmed five cases of RMSF in people who had traveled to or lived in Tecate, Baja California, the agency reported in a health alert published Friday (Dec. 8). Three were U.S. residents, and two were residents of Mexico. They'd all been in Tecate, a city about 40 miles (64 kilometers) southeast of San Diego, within the two weeks prior to developing symptoms, but all were diagnosed and treated in Southern California.

All five patients were hospitalized, and three died.

Related: Your skin should be toxic to ticks. Here's why it's not.

"RMSF is endemic in multiple border states in northern Mexico, including but not exclusive to Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Nuevo León," the CDC noted. Health care providers should consider RMSF as a potential diagnosis in patients who have recently traveled to northern Mexico and have developed an unexplained fever. U.S. residents should seek medical attention if they or a family member has recently traveled to northern Mexico and developed a fever, headache or rash within two weeks of returning to the U.S.

Doctors should consider starting these patients on the standard treatment, the antibiotic doxycycline, if their symptoms and travel history point to RMSF. "Do not delay treatment pending the result of a confirmatory laboratory test," the CDC advised. "Early treatment with doxycycline saves lives."

The early symptoms of RMSF resemble those of many other diseases, making it tricky to catch early. 

These initial symptoms include fever, headache, loss of appetite, vomiting and stomach pain. In most people, the infection also causes a skin rash that often starts on the wrists and ankles before spreading to the rest of the body. The rash doesn't typically emerge until days after the fever starts, and it may change appearance throughout the illness, looking like red blotches or pinpoint dots, for example.

If not treated promptly — within five days of the first symptoms — RMSF can start to cause confusion, shortness of breath, numbness, weakness or seizures. At that point, the most serious complications that can lead to lifelong disability or death can occur.

In 2022, doctors reported 88 cases of RMSF in the Baja California region, and 36, or 47%, were fatal, according to the California Health Alert Network. By comparison, there was one probable and one confirmed case among San Diego County residents in 2022, and no deaths.

"Half of all people who die from this disease succumb within 8 days of illness onset," the CDC alert states. "Untreated disease is often fatal." The case-fatality rate for treated RMSF, however, is around 3% to 5%.

RMSF is not unique to Mexico. Three tick species spread the disease within the U.S. Cases are most commonly reported in North Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma but occur throughout the country. Between 3,000 and 7,000 cases of RMSF and other types of spotted fever rickettsioses are reported in the U.S. each year; these conditions can be difficult to differentiate with available diagnostic tests.

People can protect themselves from RMSF, whether at home or abroad, by taking measures to prevent tick bites and regularly checking their dogs for ticks.

Ever wonder why some people build muscle more easily than others or why freckles come out in the sun? Send us your questions about how the human body works to community@livescience.com with the subject line "Health Desk Q," and you may see your question answered on the website!

Hammerhead sharks have seemingly disappeared from two underwater mountains in the southwestern Gulf of California, and fishing is likely to blame, a new study has found. 

Researchers looked at observations from divers over the last 50 years and found that scalloped hammerhead sharks (Sphyrna lewini) experienced a 97% decline at the El Bajo seamount and a 100% decline at the Las Animas seamount — both off the coast of Mexico — between the 1970s and 2010s.

Study lead author Kathryn Ayres told Live Science in an email that she was "saddened but not surprised" by the results.

Ayres investigated the sharks' decline as part of an internship with nongovernmental organization (NGO) Pelagios Kakunjá and is now a research scientist at a separate NGO called Beneath The Waves. The study will appear in the January 2024 issue of the journal Marine Policy but has been available online since Nov. 22. 

Scalloped hammerhead sharks are a critically endangered species threatened by fishing, according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The sharks are targeted for their large fins, which are used in shark fin soup, the authors noted. Researchers don't know how many of these sharks are left globally.

"Scalloped hammerhead sharks, and most shark species in general, are vulnerable to extinction as they produce few offspring, have long gestation periods and are slow growing," Ayres said. 

The El Bajo and Las Animas seamounts were once hotspots for large schools of hammerhead sharks — one survey carried out in the late 1970s and 1980s recorded 225 hammerhead sharks at El Bajo, according to the study. Ayres said the sharks use seamounts as a refuge during the day, where strong currents force oxygenated water over their gills so they don't have to use energy swimming around. 

To learn more about hammerhead shark decline at the seamounts, the authors sent a questionnaire to divers between 2017 and 2020. All of the people who participated — 50 for El Bajo and 32 for Las Animas — were either diving guides, experienced recreational divers, researchers or photographers. However, their responses were still based on memories from up to 50 years ago.

Ayres said she believes human memories are reliable enough for studies like this with such a charismatic species. "When a scuba diver encounters a large school of hundreds of hammerhead sharks, it's not something you forget, and a school of over one hundred compared to a school of less than ten is very noticeable," Ayres said.

The authors acknowledge that relying on people's memories is a limitation of the study — and only some of the participants had observed the seamounts in the 1970s, the team wrote. 

Divers reported seeing an average of 150 sharks at El Bajo and 100 sharks at Las Animas per dive in the 1970s, but only five sharks at El Bajo and zero sharks at Las Animas per dive in the 2010s. According to the study, participants put the decline in shark numbers at the two seamounts down to overfishing, fisheries management, changes to prey abundance, habitat degradation and climate change. 

Ayres noted that some of the study participants believed the decline was due to increasing noise from boats and bubbles from scuba divers, but she thinks the decline is primarily down to fishing and called for better protection of the seamounts. 

"In other areas that are protected from fishing such as The Revillagigedo Archipelago, also in Mexico, divers encounter very large schools," Ayres said. "Although they might not hang around the divers for a long time, they are still evidently present."

Editor's note: Ayres' affiliation has been updated. 

Hunter-gatherers from Mexico migrated into California more than 5,000 years ago, potentially spreading distinctive languages from the south into the region nearly 1,000 years earlier than previously thought, a new genetic study details.

The finding challenges the idea that what are known as the Uto-Aztecan languages — which include the Aztec and Toltec language Nahuatl, as well as Hopi and Shoshoni — were spread northward by prehistoric migrants from Mexico along with maize farming technologies.

"The dating and the location of this genetic material coming into California is really important for understanding the Uto-Aztecan migration," study lead author Nathan Nakatsuka, a population geneticist and a postdoctoral fellow at the New York Genome Center, told Live Science.

"We haven't fully figured it out, but we did provide evidence for a substantial migration of people coming into California at this time," he said.

The research, published on Wednesday (Nov. 22) in the journal Nature, was carried out when Nakatsuka was a student at Harvard Medical School.

Related: 'Like a bomb has gone off': Ancient humans may have set megafires that turned Southern California into an uninhabitable 'wasteland' for 1,000 years

Northward migration

Nakatsuka and his colleagues studied ancient DNA extracted from the teeth and bones of 79 ancient people found at archaeological sites in central and southern California. These remains were dated to between 7,400 and 200 years ago.

They also extracted ancient DNA from the remains of 40 people from sites in the northwest and central north of Mexico, which were dated to between 2,900 and 500 years ago.

By comparing the ancient genomes, the researchers found evidence for increased migration from northern Mexico into southern and central California about 5,200 years ago.

The timing of this migration refutes an existing idea that the spread of maize farming from about 4,300 years ago led to the spread of Uto-Aztecan languages, as migrant farmers prospered more than the hunter-gatherers who lived there before them. But the new study indicates that such languages may have been spread instead by a migration of hunter-gatherers that occurred nearly 1,000 years earlier.

Nakatsuka acknowledged the possibility that the later spread of maize farming into California may have been the result of the earlier migration, when the first wave of migrants were joined by related people who farmed corn by that time.

"But at the very least, we see that people are coming up here into California earlier than maize farming," he said.

Ancient California

The first people to reach the Americas arrived tens of thousands of years ago, according to the analysis of evidence found at several sites — including 14,500-year-old human poop from Paisley Caves in Oregon; 14,550-year-old artifacts from Monte Verde, Chile; and 23,000-year-old human footprints in White Sands National Park in New Mexico.

Once humans had arrived, they migrated within the Americas; and this latest study reveals a previously unknown regional migration.

The researchers also found shared genetics between the ancient peoples of California's northern Channel Islands and the adjacent coast, and the Indigenous Chumash people, whose genetics were represented by the individuals in the study who lived about 200 years ago.

Nakatsuka said that an important part of the study was obtaining ancient DNA while trying to ensure that indigenous customs, including burial practices, were respected. "We involved Indigenous groups in the conversations from the get-go," he said. "We wanted them to guide a lot of this research and have the questions that they're interested in be answered."

Robert Hard, a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at San Antonio who wasn't involved in the research, said the study gave a deeper understanding of the relationships among different groups of Indigenous peoples.

"This study helps reject the hypothesis that ancient Uto-Aztecans brought maize into the Southwest from central Mexico and shows Uto-Aztecans were moving from Mexico into California long before maize was present," he told Live Science in an email.

He noted that the remains of many of the individuals analyzed in the study have been curated in museums in the United States and Mexico for many decades. "Now with advances in ancient DNA technology, these individuals are being given a voice through this research to help write their history," Hard said.

Archaeologists in Mexico have discovered a 1,000-year-old statue of a Maya warrior in the basement of a temple at Chichén Itzá in the Yucatán Peninsula.

The statue depicts a warrior wearing a helmet shaped like a serpent with its jaws open, as well as a feathered headdress, Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) said in a translated statement. The statue is 13 inches (33 centimeters) tall and 11 inches (28 cm) wide, and aside from a crack, it's in good shape, according to the statement. The head may have once been part of a larger sculptural design.

Chichén Itzá flourished between the ninth and 13th centuries and covers more than 740 acres (300 hectares). At the center of the site, a pyramid known as El Castillo (The Castle) rises 100 feet (30 meters) high. The site has many temples, as well as a massive ball court and an astronomical observatory.

Related: Palatial 1,500-year-old Maya structure unearthed in Mexico

The site is a popular tourist destination, and over the past few years, the INAH has been modifying and building new visitor centers and museums, as well as a new train line, known as the "Tren Maya," near the site, the statement said. The statue was found during archaeological work accompanying that railway construction.

A wealth of other archaeological finds have been made during this construction work, including about 660 human burials, over 1 million ceramic fragments, the remains of numerous architectural structures, and a variety of other artifacts, the statement said.

Archaeologists in Mexico have unearthed the remains of a circular temple that may have been built in honor of the Maya serpent deity Kukulcán (also spelled K'uk'ulkan).

The roughly 1,000-year-old temple was found in El Tigre, an archaeological site in the Yucatán Peninsula, and served as one of the ancient Maya's last settlements before the civilization collapsed, according to a translated National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) statement. 

Excavations revealed that the circular structure contained two levels and at one time would've been capped off with a flat roof.

Related: Palatial 1,500-year-old Maya structure unearthed in Mexico

"This building broadens our knowledge of the late occupation of El Tigre," Diego Prieto Hernández, an anthropologist and director general of the INAH, said during an Oct. 30 press conference, according to Mexico News Daily. "Circular structures generally correspond to the early Postclassic period between A.D. 1000 and 1200, when the Maya zone had links with other regions of Mesoamerica, in particular with central Mexico, Oaxaca and the Gulf Coast."

He said that at one time the structure would have been "of great importance" to the Maya, according to Mexico News Daily.

Researchers think that the temple may be the same one written about in a historical document known as the "Paxbolón Maldonado Papers," which was penned by Don Pablo Paxbolón, who served as the Chontal chief (leader of the Maya people in the Mexican state of Tabasco) between 1575 and 1576. The text includes details of temples in El Tigre (described in the papers as "Itzamkanac") that were dedicated to the four main deities of the Postclassic Maya, including Kukulcán, a deity that is closely related to Quetzalcoatl of Aztec mythology, according to the statement.

This isn't the first circular structure found in the Yucatán peninsula. Similar sites have been discovered in Edzná, Becán, Uxmal and Chichen Itzá, according to the statement. 

The structure was discovered as part of the "Tren Maya" (Maya Train) project that involves the construction of a 1,000-mile-long (1,609 kilometer) railway between Mexican states that is expected to begin operation in December, according to Mexico News Daily.

An earthquake last year revealed a big surprise beneath a law school in modern-day Mexico City: a giant, colorful snakehead from the Aztec Empire.

The snakehead dates back more than 500 years, to when the Aztecs controlled the area, which at the time was part of the flourishing capital of Tenochtitlan. The sculpture was discovered after a magnitude-7.6 earthquake struck Mexico City on Sept. 19, 2022; the seismic event caused damage and changes in the topography, revealing the snakehead beneath a building that was part of a law school at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) said in a Spanish-language statement.

The Aztecs built temples and pyramids and worshipped a number of deities, including Quetzalcoatl, who was often depicted as a snake. However, it's unclear if this sculpture depicts him, the archaeologists said.

The sculpted snake is 5.9 feet (1.8 meters) long, 2.8 feet (0.85 m) wide and 3.3 feet (1 m) high, and it weighs about 1.3 tons (1.2 metric tons), the INAH said. Several colors — including red, blue, black and white — are preserved on the sculpture.

Related: Stone human 'effigies' unearthed at Aztec temple in Mexico City were likely looted in battle and offered to the gods

Color was preserved on about 80% of the sculpture's surface. To keep it preserved, an INAH team lifted the snakehead out of the ground with a crane and constructed a humidity chamber around the sculpture. This chamber allows the sculpture to lose humidity gradually, with its color being preserved, María Barajas Rocha, a conservationist with the INAH who worked extensively on the sculpture, said in the statement.

While other snakehead sculptures have been found at Tenochtitlan, this one is particularly important for its preserved colors, said Erika Robles Cortés, an archaeologist with the INAH.

"Thanks to the context in which this piece was discovered, but above all, thanks to the stupendous intervention of the restorers-conservators led by Maria Barajas, it has been possible to stabilize the colors for its preservation in almost all the sculpture, which is extremely important, because the colors have helped us to conceive pre-Hispanic art from another perspective," Robles Cortés told Live Science in an email.

The sculpture's "sheer size is impressive, as well as its artistry," but the survival of the colors is remarkable, said Frances Berdan, a professor emeritus of anthropology at California State University, San Bernardino who was not involved with the excavation. "The survival of black, white, red, yellow, and blue paints is particularly interesting — one gains a good image of the visual impact of such sculptures as they were arrayed about the city center," Berdan told Live Science in an email.

In addition to its preserved colors, the snakehead's size is notable, said Bertrand Lobjois, an associate professor of humanities at the University of Monterrey in Mexico who is not involved in the excavation. The "first time I saw this serpent head, I was dazzled by its dimensions," he said in an email.

Lobjois also praised the conservation work that allowed the colors to survive, noting that "the conservation process allows us to appreciate the naturalistic approach of figuration" the Aztec artists used.

This work is ongoing and will continue at the site into next year.

Some of the first cowboys in the Americas may have been enslaved Africans, who helped cattle ranches there thrive thanks to the herding practices they brought with them, a new study of cattle bones and teeth suggests.

Cows did not exist in the Americas prior to the 1492 arrival of Christopher Columbus, who brought the animals with him when he established a Spanish colony on Hispaniola, the large Caribbean island that includes Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The original herds in the Americas, scholars have long suggested, came from European stock from the Spanish-held Canary Islands off the African coast. In the Americas, they quickly multiplied, and their offspring were sent to regions such as Mexico, Panama and Colombia.

But the new DNA research muddies this traditional understanding. Instead, some of the first cattle in the Americas were imported directly from Africa, likely on slave ships.

Related: Plantation slavery was invented on this tiny African island, archaeologists say

In a paper published Aug. 1 in the journal Scientific Reports, Nicolas Delsol, a postdoctoral associate at the Florida Museum of Natural History who specializes in zooarchaeology, and his team analyzed the DNA of 21 cattle from five archaeological sites dating to the 16th to 18th centuries.

Consistent with the traditional picture, seven of the earliest cattle samples, coming from the site of Puerto Real in Haiti and dating to around 1500 to 1550, had similar maternal DNA, which tied their origins broadly to Europe.

But one specimen from a site called Bellas Artes in Mexico revealed a lineage that is particularly rare in Europe and likely means it was imported directly from Africa in the first half of the 17th century.

"This finding supports recent trends in the history of slavery and the central role of African enslaved workers in the implementation of cattle ranching," Delsol told Live Science in an email.

As cattle ranching grew in the 16th-century Americas, it eclipsed the small-scale version that was popular in Spain and Portugal at the time. This has led historians to suggest that slave traders targeted West Africans from herding communities and kidnapped them along with their cattle. Once in the Americas, these skilled ranchers may have invented practices such as lassoing cattle from special saddles.

The new research demonstrates the importance of Africans and their cattle to Spanish trade networks, Tanya Peres, a zooarchaeologist at Florida State University who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "Without the enslaved labor of the knowledgeable and capable African herders," she said, "it is possible that the Spanish cattle ranching industry would not have been as successful as it was."

The combination of a good environment, large expanses of available land and skilled African ranchers almost certainly led to the expansion of cattle ranching in the Caribbean, Mexico and the southern United States, Delsol said — an idea he is expanding into the forthcoming book "Cattle in the Postcolumbian Americas."

"I would like to see them grow the dataset to include sites in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina," Peres said. "If cattle were being imported into these areas — which certainly they were early on — it would be interesting to see how they are related to the cattle in these three areas of early Spanish colonialism."

Archaeologists in Mexico have discovered two housing complexes, including a palace-like building, in the roughly 1,500-year-old Maya city of Kabah on the Yucatán Peninsula.

The team unearthed the buildings, which are the first evidence of residential buildings at this archaeological site, ahead of the Maya Train railroad project, a 930-mile-long (1,500 kilometers) railway that will run through the Yucatán Peninsula.

The palace-like structure is 85 feet (26 meters) long and is decorated with carvings of birds, feathers and beads, Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) said in a translated statement. The building's façade has a portico that includes eight pilasters,  rectangular columns that project from walls.

The palace and the other housing complex were elite living spaces where people slept, ate and lived their daily lives, Lourdes Toscano Hernández, an archaeologist with the INAH who co-led the team, told Live Science in a translated email. A lineage of people who ruled the city would have lived in the buildings, although their names are not known, Toscano Hernández said.

The buildings also may have been used for administrative functions, Toscano Hernández said, noting that public meetings may have been carried out nearby.

Related: Why did the Maya civilization collapse?

The carvings of birds, feathers and beads on the palace-like structure may have symbolized the relationship between the elites who lived in these structures and the Maya gods — something that would have helped to legitimize their status, Toscano Hernández said.

Until recently, the housing complexes, along with other parts of the ancient city, were covered with vegetation, the INAH statement noted. It's unclear exactly when the buildings were built, but the city was founded sometime between A.D. 250 and 500 by people who came from the Petén region, an area that includes Guatemala and Belize, according to the statement. Toscano Hernández said the city's first ruler may have lived in the structures.

Within the buildings, archaeologists found the remains of pottery, including painted vessels and ceramics that had a utilitarian use, the statement said. Research at the site is ongoing.

The Maya flourished in the region between 250 and 900. While many cities collapsed around 900, new cities, such as Chichén Itzá, were built. Today, their descendants, the modern-day Maya, number in the millions and can be found all over the world.

In a now-viral story, "alien" bodies were unveiled before Mexico's congress Tuesday (Sept. 12). But is there any real science behind this bizarre event? 

Not by a long shot, according to scholars, who denounced the claim and affirmed that the bodies are not alien. 

Mexico's congress was holding a hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), a term that is now used to describe UFOs. UAPs have also been the subject of congressional hearings in the United States over the past two years.

During the presentation, a team that included Mexican journalist Jaime Maussan and military medical doctor José de Jesús Zalce Benítez presented two bodies — which appear to be no more than 3.3 feet (1 meter) tall and appear skinny with grayish skin and large heads — in coffin-like boxes before Mexico's congress. They claimed that DNA tests reveal that the remains of these three-fingered beings are not human and that their abdomens hold eggs that may be used in reproduction. The duo also said the bodies came from Peru and that radiocarbon dating shows they date back 1,000 years, National Public Radio reported.

The same bodies made headlines in 2017 and 2018, Maussan told Live Science in an email. At the time, scholars denounced those bodies as consisting of manipulated human body parts. Maussan told Live Science that since that time, more tests have shown that the bodies are not human. He also stressed that he is not saying these bodies are necessarily alien — just that they are not human.

Related: Why are we seeing so many UFOs over America all of a sudden?

"We never said they are extraterrestrial," Maussan said, adding that they had found evidence for implants made of the elements osmium and cadmium inside the bodies, "a technology unknown 1,000 years ago." Live Science was unable to reach de Jesús Zalce Benítez at press time. 

Scientists blast claims

"Let me tell you that all this is complete nonsense," Rafael Bojalil-Parra, research reinforcement director at Metropolitan Autonomous University (UAD) in Mexico City, told Live Science in an email. "That our Congress gives a forum to this self-proclaimed UFOlogist is a reflection of the anti-scientific mood that prevails in our country today." 

There were reports in some media outlets that tests on the bodies were performed at UAD. But Bojalil-Parra said no DNA tests were performed at the university, and while a carbon-14 test was conducted in 2017, a commercial agreement prevents the university from disclosing the results.

Tellingly, if the bodies were aliens, then carbon-14 dating would be useless. "Radiocarbon dating is based on Carbon 14 atoms which are created when the sun's radiation strikes the Earth's upper atmosphere," David Anderson, an assistant professor of anthropology who has written about pseudoarchaeology extensively at Radford University in Virginia, told Live Science in an email. "To radiocarbon date extraterrestrial beings, we would have to know what the rate of production of 14-C was on their home planet, not ours."

Other scientists also denounced the claims. "It is sad to see the well debunked claims of Jaime Maussan returning to the internet," Andrew Nelson, chair of anthropology at Western University in Ontario, told Live Science in an email. The bodies "have been debunked on the basis of anatomy," with studies showing that some of the bodies "are human mummies that had been deliberately manipulated to appear alien," Nelson said. They show, for example, the feet of the "aliens" could have been created by mutilating the foot of a human mummy. 

"The feet would have suffered mutilations of digits I and V, in addition to the cutting of the skin and soft tissue of the foot behind the toes, producing a foot with extremely long toes," Rodolfo Salas-Gismondi, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Cayetano Heredia University and the Museum of Natural History in Lima, wrote in a 2017 analysis. 

Nelson said that "while Maussan claims to have CT, C-14 and DNA evidence, he has not presented that evidence for peer review by the scientific community." Nelson added that if these remains are in fact 1,000 years old and from Peru, it raises questions as to whether they were looted and how they left the country.

Another scientist said that if the remains are human, those involved with the claims should face legal implications. They "should be arrested and tried for whatever laws might apply for exploiting or desecrating human remains," Ken Feder, an archaeology professor at Central Connecticut State University, told Live Science in an email.

The hearing in Mexico took place partly because there have been high profile hearings on UAPs in the United States congress noted Jeb Card, an assistant teaching professor of anthropology at Miami University in Ohio. While "no one has yet wheeled out alien bodies in the US Capitol," Card told Live Science in an email, there has been testimony before the U.S. Congress made by former military officials that the American government has biological remains of aliens.

The growing popularity of conspiracy theories helps to explain why stuff like this is occurring, Card said. "The simple reality is that it is now profitable — figuratively and literally — to push narratives that 'elites' are inflicting their will on the broader people through devious, conspiratorial, and at times supernatural means." 

Live Science contacted Peru's Ministry of Culture, which did not return requests for comment by the time of publication. 

Archaeologists in Mexico City have unearthed a collection of stone figurines depicting humans — carvings that the Aztecs likely used as offerings.

The 15 objects were discovered tucked inside a stone chest buried on the former site of the Templo Mayor, which once served as the temple complex of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec Empire. Spanish forces destroyed the temple in 1521, and the site is now home to the Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral, according to a translated statement.

Fourteen of the artifacts portray men, while the smallest of the group features a woman. 

All of the figurines are in the Mezcala style related to an early Mesoamerican culture that once existed in Guerrero, a state in southern Mexico, that was known for creating objects depicting humans, according to The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Related: Remains of Aztec dwelling and floating gardens unearthed in Mexico City

Researchers think the Aztecs valued Mezcala objects and may have looted the sculptures in battle, according to the statement. 

"This means that when the Mexicas (Aztecs) subdued those peoples, the figurines were already true relics, some of them more than 1,000 years old," archaeologist Leonardo López Luján, director of the Templo Mayor Project, which led the excavation, said in the statement. "Presumably they served as cult effigies, which they appropriated as booty of war."

In addition to the figurines, the chest contained two rattlesnake-shaped earrings, 186 green metamorphic stone beads, snails, shells and marine corals.

"In their homes, the Mexicas used to keep their most precious belongings in palm-frond chests, such as fine feathers, jewelry or cotton garments," López Luján said in the statement. "And if we see it from the Templo Mayor … we can imagine the priests storing in these 'stone cases' the quintessential symbols of water and fertility: sculptures of the rain gods, green stone beads, shells and snails."

Archaeologists in Mexico have discovered the burials of 13 individuals — including two who were beheaded as part of sacrificial rituals and five whose skulls had been elongated through intentional deformation — near a Maya pyramid at the Moral-Reforma archaeological site near Tabasco.

Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) initially found the burials in April but announced their findings this week after analyzing the human remains. The burials date to between A.D. 600 and 900, a time when the Maya civilization flourished in the region, the INAH said in an Aug. 23 translated statement. The burials consist of human skulls, fragments of jaws, and bones of the lower and upper extremities, the archaeologists said in the statement. Their analysis also revealed that some of the bones had been covered in red pigment.

An anatomical examination revealed that all of the individuals were men between the ages of 17 and 35. During the first millennium, the Maya sometimes sacrificed their prisoners of war, but it's unclear for now if these people were captives.

Related: What's hidden inside the ancient Maya pyramids?

The analysis also found that at least five of the individuals had modified, elongated skulls — a shape that can be achieved by constricting a person's head with bands when they are young. This was frequently practiced by the Maya and other ancient societies — including people in Japan, the Huns, medieval European women, and some Native American tribes — and may have raised the social status of those who underwent this practice, the archaeologists said.

Moral-Reforma was the center of a Maya kingdom that at times was allied with other Maya cities, such as Calakmul and Palenque, according to the INAH. Excavation and research at Moral-Reforma is ongoing; so far, archaeologists have unearthed 76 buildings dating to before the arrival of the Spaniards. However, the Maya worshipped many deities, and it's not clear which god(s) this particular pyramid served.