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Researchers have found one of the oldest complete skeleton that can help them solve a mystery about the difference in body types between the first humans to arrive in the Americas and later Native Americans. The skeleton dates back to more than 12,000 years ago.

Anthropologists have long puzzled over why Native Americans don't look more like their ancient ancestors who migrated into Americas during the Pleistocene - epoch that encompassed the last ice age and that ended about 12,000 years ago.

According to scientists, the recently discovered skeleton is a big piece of the puzzle containing both the craniofacial features of ancient Paleoamericans and mitochondrial DNA possessed by latter-day Native Americans.

The skeleton belongs to a teenage girl who fell more than 100 feet to her death nearly a half mile inside an elaborate network of karst caves that were largely dry at the end of Pleistocene, according to National Geographic. 

"This is the first time that we have genetic data from a skeleton that exhibits these distinctive skull and facial features," said Deborah Bolnick, an anthropological geneticist at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the study's co-authors, in the press release.

Genetic analyses indicate that modern Native Americans descended from a founding population that originated in Asia.They were isolated from other population groups for several thousand years somewhere in or near the region known as Beringia.

According to researchers, it was there that this founding population developed its unique genetic markers.

"Now we've got two specimens, both from a common ancestor that came from Asia," said Michael Waters, director of the Center for the Study of First Americans at Texas A&M University in College Station, according to NG. "Like Hoyo Negro, the Anzick genome shows that Paleoamericans are genetically related to native peoples, so the latter cannot be a replacement population. Their differences have to be a result of evolutionary change. What drove that change, we don't know."

The research has been published in the journal Science.