Michael PriceCrouching as she wound her way through a pinched underground corridor, a young woman grasped a torch in one hand, soot blackening the craggy ceiling above her.
Guided by stacks of stones deeper and deeper in the darkness of the cave, she finally spied her prize: a blood-red vein of rock in the fire-lit wall.
It would be 10,000 years before another pair of eyes saw it again.Now the blood-red rock—a treasured crimson mineral known as ochre—has been found again, by underwater divers who were the first people in tens of centuries to return to these now-submerged caves.
Scientists have confirmed that the site, now part of a coastal cave system in Quintana Roo, Mexico, is one of the Western hemisphere’s oldest known ochre mining.