The remains of a teenage girl who fell to her death in a cave in Mexico over 12,000 years ago may shed light upon the origins of the first Americans.

The remains are the oldest to have been discovered in the western hemisphere and is one of the world's oldest complete skeletons.

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Titled 'Naia', the bones are the frame of a 15-16 year old girl who is believed to have plunged to her death in a large pit known as 'Hoyo Negro', Spanish for 'black hole', in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.

Researches say that Naia may have entered the cave to search for water and died when she broke her hip after the fall.

Naia's remains shed new light upon the history and beginnings of humans in America as their origins have long been disputed by scientists because there are very few similarities between early skeletons from the region and Native Americans.

It has long been argued that Native Americans descended from early humans who migrated from the Bering Strait. Palaeoamericans had different features from Native Americans and are believed to have lived in regions around Australia and Europe.

According to Naia's bone structure, she can be identified as palaeoamerican, but genetic material extracted from her molar shows that she also has Native American lineage.

The evidence proves that palaeoamericans can also be traced back to ancestors from the Bering area.

"What this study is presenting for the first time is evidence that palaeoamericans, with those distinctive features, can also be directly tied to the same Beringian source population as contemporary Native Americans," said Deborah Bolnick, a co-author on the paper at the University of Texas, Austin.

Naia wasn't the only fantastic find which divers uncovered in the cave. Alongside her skeleton, explorers also discovered the bones of sabre-tooth cats, giant ground sloths and cave bears.

TagsScience, early Americans, ancient skeletons