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MEXICO CITY, (Reuters) A 13,000-year-old skull found in Mexico may help prove theories that some of the New World's first settlers arrived along a Pacific Coast route from Japan, and not just across the Bering Strait.

The skull is believed to be the oldest ever discovered in the Americas and is among 150 mostly undated specimens being studied by Silvia Gonzalez, a leading world authority on prehistoric man and mammoths, after being gathered at Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology and other museums.

The skull has the long, narrow-headed cranial features common to the native peoples of Central and South America, as opposed to the short and broad-headed type characteristic of North American Indians. Gonzalez, with the help of a laboratory in Britain, has determined it is 13,000 years old.

Prevailing theory has it that migrations to the New World came in successive waves across the Bering Strait land bridge that joined northeast Asia and modern Alaska, although recent evidence has emerged that migrations may also have come along the Pacific coast from Japan.

Gonzalez said she plans to take DNA samples on the skull, as well as others, to see if they can help identify where the native people of Mexico and Central America first migrated from.

She said the skull is similar to others found belonging to the now extinct Pericues people who populated the southern tip of Mexico's Baja California state, along the Pacific Coast route, until the 18th century.

"The question is, we have these very ancient individuals, but where did they come from?" said Gonzalez, an earth sciences lecturer at Liverpool's John Moores University in England.

"Are these ones that we find right here in the basin of Mexico coming from the north, from the Bering Strait, or are they coming from the south, heading north toward Mexico?"

The Pacific Coast theory is supported in part by the discovery recently of the oldest confirmed site of human habitation in the Americas, located in Monte Verde, Chile, and dating back 14,000 years.

Gonzalez said the ancient skulls discovered in Mexico may provide more evidence to support that theory.

"The thing is that there are about 150 skeletons in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico awaiting study.

So that's the next step as well, trying to go through that collection ... and see if there is really scientific support for this coastal route of migration," she said.

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