black dot: the State capital, Belo Horizonte
red dot: Lagoa Santa area
54. Possible Relatives in the Americas
Lagoa Santa sites (Minas Gerais, Brazil)
by George Weber
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Table of Contents The Lagoa Santa archaeological area "Luzia" (Lapa Vermelha IV hominid 1) |
The Lagoa Santa archaeological area
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black dot: the State capital, Belo Horizonte red dot: Lagoa Santa area |
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Detailed map of the region in which the Lagoa Santa is located. Belo Horizone is the capital of Minas Gerais State. Incidentally, Timoteo near Ipatinga is the birthplace of Maria Eloi Weber, wife of George Weber. I just thought you might be thrilled to know. |
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The countryside of Lagoa Santa (shown here the Fazenda Lapa Vermelha) |
It was the Danish naturalist Peter Wilhelm Lund (1801-1880) who discovered one of America's most spectacular concentration of very ancient archaeological sites. He was the first to explore and report on the Lagoa Santa area scientifically 1835 to 1845.
The area had been ravaged for more than a century by construction work as well as plundering and amateur "archaeology."
Modern scientific research in he area began in 1971 when the leader of a French-Brazilian team of archaeologists, Annette Laming-Emperaire selected six sites in the Lagoa Santa area which she numbered I-VII. Work on site IV started that same year and from 1974-1975 most of the bones of what was named Lapa Vermelha IV hominid 1 had already been discovered. Tragedy struck in 1976 when Abbette Laming-Emperarie died in an accident . Work at the site ceased . One of her assistants, Andre Prous, had earlier gone to work on another site, Santana de Riocha and he returned to Lapa Vermelha IV in 1979 to take over the project and continue it.
The Luzia skull represents a major advance in our knowledge of South American prehistory and was quite rightly presented as such to the world by Andre Prous in cooperation with craniometric specialist Walter Neves (who examined the skull in 1995). Luzia had a deep effect on the way the first settling of South America is seen by science. It helped, for example, together with the Monte Verde results to sink the "Clovis First" theory.
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A selection of geological and archaeological sites in the
Lagoa Santa Area. 1.Gordura massive sites 2. Cauaia region sites 3. Poções sites 4. Porteira de Chave sites 5. Jaguara sites 6. Mocambeiro plain sites, Caetano 7. Cerca Grande sites 8. Vargem da Pedra sites 9. Macacos Baú sites 10. South Ciminas sites 11. Sumidouro site 12. Lapinha sites 13. Lapa Vermelha sites
The airport shown used ot be known as Airport Confins but has been renamed to Airport Tankredo Neves. It serves Belo Horizonte. Lakes shown can be permanent and temporary. |
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The Lagoa Santa area is one of the richest archaeological areas in the Americas. The list on the left merely gives some sites that have yielded ancient human remains. The list is from W. Neve and M. Hubble. 2005."Cranial Morphology of early Americans from Lagoa Santa, Brazil: Implications for the settlement of the New World." PNOS 2005, vol. 102, 51:18309-18314).
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The following map gives mmore detailed information for some sites (adapted from a map prepared by the Serviço Geológico do Brasil)
Sites mentioned in the map above identified:
* Site is mentioned in literature but could not be identified in the field and so is missing in the map above.
** Relationship of A1 to C7 not clear
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Site number |
Site name |
Site number |
Site name |
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A1** A2 A3
B1 B2 B3 B4 B5 B6 B7 B8 B9 * B10 * B11 B12 * B13 B14 * B15 B16 B17 B18 |
Lapa Vermelha Lapa da Pedra dos Indios Lapa dos Coxos
Cerca Grande Lapa da Sumidouro Serra d'Arts Serra das Abehas Periperi 1-2 Gruta do Baú Lapa do Caetano Gruta dos Confins Gruta do Engenha Lapa do Bento Gruta do Galinheiro Cesinhos Lapa dos Tatus Lapa da Marinha 1-2 Lapa dos Borges Lapa da Robeira Lapa do Morro Redondo Limeira |
C1 C2 C3 * C4 C5 C6 C7** C8 C9 C10 C11 C12 C13 C14 C15 C16 C17 C18 C19 C20 C21 C22 C23 C24 |
Sitio de Preguiça Experienda da Jaguara Lagoa Funda Gruta do Intoxicado Gruta dos Helicites Gruta da Escada Lapa Vermelha Gruta das Aranhas Gruta dos Tunels Gruta do Lameiro Paradao da Fenda III Gruta do Pomar Lapa da Mãe Rosa Sitio da Mina Buraco do Foes II Gruta das Conchas Samambaia Tombo Marguipegus Casarturn Lavoura Nossa Casa Ciminas Fedor |
Lapa Vermelha IV cave with Luzia
The French archaeologist, Annette Laming-Emperaire and leader of a French-Brazilian archaeological expedition chose seven sites to work on which she named Lapa Vermelha I-VII. Work began at Lapa Vermelha IV in 1971with André Prous one of the excavators. In 1974 at a depth of between 12 and 13 m a skeleton with the bones widely scattered was discovered and named Lapa Vermelha IV hominid 1. Laming-Emperarie tragically died in 1976 and so could not follow up her discovery which rested, almost unnoticed, in a museum.
After a gap of more than 20 years in 1999 Laming-Emperaire's former assistant, Brazilian archaeologist Prof. Andre Prous took up the work again and - as the saying goes - the rest is history.
The skull and other bones turned out to have belonged to a young woman roughly 20 years of age when she died around 12,500 years ago, was excavated in the Lagoa Santa area by a Brazilian-French team under archaeologist Annette Laming-Emperaire in the 1970s. Laming-Emperaire died in a tragic acccident in 1977 before she could do any work on her discovery.
Detailed craniometric analyses on Luzia's and many other skulls found in the Lagoa Santa area were carried out by Prof. Walter Neves. The results of these analyses were sensational: they revealed clear African and/or Australian traits not just of Luzia herself butof an entire prehistoric population at Lagoa Santa more than 10,000 years ago.
Several specialists have reconstructed Luzia's face based on the detailed data supplied by Prof. Neves. When the results became available, even to a layperson it it had become obvious that Luzia was not an Amerind. Instead she had had features strongly suggesting an African or Australoid ancestry (also see the craniometric graphic below).Luzia was not an Amerind!
No trace of Luzia's hair has survived so the reconstructions all had to leave the top of her head bald or cover it discreetly with a towel. Nor, of course, is there any indication of what her skin colour might have been as such a superficial trait does not survive 12,500 years.
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One reconstruction of Luzia's face,
At the time of her death, Lucia was between 20 and 24 years of age. With a body hights of 1.52 m she was a short (by modern standards) 1.5 m. The cause of her death could not be established.
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Another reconstruction of Luzia's face. |
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Luzia's skull, front. |
Luzia's skull.
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Luzia's skull was analysed by Brazilian Prof. Walter Neves. He named his ancient customer "Luzia" in analogy to the famous and much older African "Lucy". The press and a wider public preferred "Lucy" to the skull's cumbersome official designation.
By 2006, Lagoa Santa sites had produced no less than 75 sufficiently well-preserved ancient skulls. Craniometric analysis of these have confirmed that Luzia was not an aberrant individual but belonged to an established population with African and/or Australian and Southern Asian characteristics. that had been well-established in Minas Gerais for at least 11,000 years.
Her investigators think of Luzia as Australoid and indeed she could be. However, at the Andaman Association we cannot help thinking that Luzia also has distinctly Andamanese Negritoid traits. In fact, our first reaction to seeing a facial reconstruction of the lady was "Good Heavens! An Onge woman in Brazil!" (see Chapter 8 of the Andaman section).
Assuming that Luzia is indeed Negritoid, it would do away with some rather unlikely scenarios. For example, with the proposed crossing of the Southern Pacific from Australia or an even more unlikely trek by Australians from Australia back into East Asia and via Siberia and Alaska into the Americas. More likely than a direct migration of early Australians into the Americas would be that modern Australians and modern Negritos (along with Melanesians, Papuans, Veddoids and some other groups) came from the same original immigrant stock that had arrived from Africa in India and Southeast Asia (likely after the Toba eruption around 60,000 years ago. In such a plausible scenario, people who were essentially of the same group would have separated in India or Southeast Asia and then went their own ways. There is no doubt that this separation must have been spread over a long period, but with the discovery of Luzia, the evidence for such a scenario is getting stronger. Yet: it is still far from definitively and unquestionably proven. As always: the cry for more evidence goes up.
Interesting evidence linking a living Amerindian group with the long-extinct Palaeoindians to which Luzia belonged has been repeorted in a study among the living Cayapa (Chachi) of Ecuador. This suggests some molecular similarities with Japanese and Southeast Asians populations (Trachtenberg E.A. et al, 1995. "HLA Class II Linkage Disequilibrium and Haplotype Evolution in the Cayapa Indians of Ecuador", American Journal of Human Genetics 57:415-424).
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Another skull found at Lagoa Santa also had its facial features modelled on Prof Neves' craniometric analysis. This was of a young and muscular man, He lived around 8,500 years ago and is estimated to have been around 18 years of age at the time of death. Inevitably, he has been christened "Luizão's". He lived in the same area as Luzia and may well have been a distant descendant of her - 4,000 years or very roughly 200 generations after his great-great-great-great-etcetcetcetc grandmother. |
Luzia and her people are important because they show that a non-Amerind population actually lived in Brazil at least 12,500 or so years ago and that these same people were still there 4,000 years later. This in turn indicates the depth of our ignorance ragrding the peopling of the Americas. When the Portuguese arrived to conquer and settle in Brazil in the 16th century, not a trace of a Luzia-like population was ever reported. What happened to them? We simply do not know.
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This three-dimension graph based on the first three canonical variates shows the morphological relationship between living human populations and Luzia. For full information and many more graphs see
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From the shape of her skull, Luzia is close to Australian and Papuan people and - most remarkably - closer to modern Japanese than to any modern Amerindian people! Unfortunately, the Prof Neves has not included Andamanese Negrito in their analyzed samples (they were included in his later work but this did not reveal a close affinity to the Lapa Vermelha people (Neves W.A. and Hubbe M. 2005. "Cranial morphology of early Americans from Lagoa Santa, Brazil: Implications for the settlement of the New World." PNAS, vol. 102, 51:18309-18314).
Luzia's cranium is now exhibited in the National Museum, Rio de Janeiro. Most of the other Luzia remains are stored at the Natural History Museum, Belo Horizonte.
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The Lapa Vermelha site at the time of the first excavations. |
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A view of Lapa Vermelha IV. The figure of a visitor gives an impression of the size and depth of the site. Since Luzia's discovery, more than 50 similarly un-mongoloid Palaeoamerican remains have been found in the Lagoa Santa area near where Luzia herself was found. They all seem to have been buried within a small area that could have have been a dedicated cemetery. |
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The Lapa Vermelha IV excavation at a level above (i.e. later than) "Luzia". P = rock paintings Dates given are years before the present Some rock paintings had been painted on the wall and wereee later covered by the slowly rising surface of the cave. The soil at the level of the paintings could be dated (dating paintings directly is very difficult), giving a "latest date" for each.
(drawing adapted from Prous A. 1999. "Dating Rock Art in Brazil". In: Dating ther Earliest Known Rock Art, eds. M.Strecker and P. Bahn, Oxbow Books. Pages 29-34) |
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Locations of Luzia bones when found (adapted and translated from a sampler of the German-language Abenteuer Archäologie 1/2004) |
Luzia is dated to between 11,500 to 13,000 yearsbefore the present. Hers is the earliest human remains found so far in the Americas and she has been among the most powerful arguments for an earlier non-Amerind population in the Americas.
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A stone tool (shown from three different sides) found in a level of Lapa Vermelha IV of roughly the same date as that of Luzia. |
The pioneers most involved with the discovery of and the research into the Lapa Vermelha IV hominid 1.
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Left:
Prof. André
Prous (*1944) Prof. Walter Alves Neves (*1957) A |
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The Danish palaeontologist, geologist and zoologist Peter Wilhelm Lund (18091-1880), born in Denmark, died in Lagoa Santa) was the first person with scientific training in to take an interest in the area. He explored widely in 1842/43, taking an interest in the peculiar Karst geology of the Lagoa as well as in his archaeological finds. Lund discovered and excavated many of the archaeological sites of the Lagoa Santa area, among them the important site at the eastern end of the Lagoa de Sumidouro. Lund realized that he had found a prehistoric cemetery when he excavated 30 human skeletons in close proximity to the bones of long-extinct megafaunal prehistoric mammals. This finding led the naturalist to realize that humans and the prehistoric animals had been contemporaries. It was a shock at the time, not least to Lund himself. Lund was a student and follower of Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), professor of comparative anatomy at the Museum of Natural Historyx at Paris and the most influential naturalist and zoologist of his time. Cuvier held that the extinction of species was caused by natural catastrophes and that faunas from regions not affected by the catastrophes would then migrate and re-populate the newly uninhabited area. This became known as the catastrophe theory and was to be the guiding light of Lund's scientific work. Today, Lund is regarded as the founder of Brazilian palaeontology and there is a town in Lagoa Santa named after him. |
In 1833 Lund went to Brazil where he spent the next two years collecting specimens in the area of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. In 1835 he travelled inland through Minas Gerais where he discovered caves with bones of huge, extinct Ice Age animals. Lund then set himself up at the tiny village of Lagoa Santa (now near the main airport of Belo Horizonte) and dedicated the next eight years to the excavation, collection, classification, study and description the bones of dozens of animals. Many were new to science, such as extinct mastodons, giant ground sloths and sabre-toothed cats.
In 1843, during a severe drought, Lund discovered 30 fossilized human skulls and bones among the remains of long-extinct animal species in Sumidouro cave. In 1844 Lund suddenly stopped the work in the Lagoa Santa caves, claiming a lack of money for further excavations. It is thought, however, as more likely that Lund perceived an unbridgeable gap between the evidence he had unearthed and Cuvier's theory, and that this troubled him so much that he abandoned further excavations. Lund donated the whole of his collection to the king and the people of Denmark. His collection is still in Copenhagen today but is generousloy and unproblematically accessible to modern Brazilian researchers.
In 1844 Lund suddenly stopped his archaeological work forr lack of financial ressources .Although he never explained himself further, it is likely that his sudden cessation of archaeoelogical work was because of a perceived conflict with Cuvier's theories. At the same time Lund donated his very large collection of fossil bones and other archaeological finds to the King and the People of Denmark and decided to stay on at Lagoa Santa. He never returned to Europe.
The Lago de Sumidouro today.
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Peter Lund was also among the earliest people to recognize, appreciate and record prehistoric cave and rock paintings in South America. He is shown here (in a picture by Andreas Brandt) copying just such a rock painting at Lagoa Santa. |
Many human skulls found by Lund at Sumidouro Cave are kept at Copenhagen. They included some with heavy browridges (see below under The Case of the Missing Calotte). Heavy browridges are a trait that is not observed on later skulls.
The Case of the missing Calotte
While the discovery, excavation and publication of Lapa Vermelha IV hominid 1 described above is among the triumphs of Brazilien archaeology, the lamentable "case of the missing calotte" is not.
Between 1833 and 1880 the Danish naturalist P.W. Lund excavated many human bones in the upper layers of a number of caves in the Lagua Santa area. Most were stained red with ochre. At one (unidentified) cave at deep level he found bones stained black and they looked as if these bones had originally been buried at Sumidouro cave (B2 on the main map of Lagoa Santa above). Among these bones was at least one calotte (or skullcap) that somehow, somttime just disappeared (Beattie O.B., Bryan A.L. 1984. "A Fossilized calotte with Prominent Browridges from Lagoa Santa, Brazil". Current Anthropology, vol. 25, no. 3:345-346). Photographs from Beattie's article are reproduced below.
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On the left is a back view of the missing Lagoa Santa calotte (adapted from Beatty et al. 1984). The fingers give a sense of scale. The red arrows indicate the un-Homo-sapiens-like
thickness of the bone (medial to lateral)
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Right side view, showing the very heavy browridges. |
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Interior view of the missing skull.. |
The following information on the missing calotte also comes from Beattie et al, 1984:
The animal and human bones from these excavations were stored in crates in the State University in Belo Horizonte. The collection of megafaunal bones was examined for indications of human workmanship. Evidence of chopping with an axe or an adze before fossilization was found on several long bones, demonstrating the direct association of man with pleistocene megafauna. All of the chopped bones were stained red, and some were traceable by inked markings to specific caves. A few megafaunal bones in this collection were stained black, as was an unmarked human calotte, the subject of this report. The chopped bones and the calotte were photographed, but there was no time to describe and measure the calotte. All of these items had become lost by 1975.The calotte may or may not date to the Pleistocene. Populations with heavy browridges are known elsewhere in the Americas from Holocene contexts. The calotte is significant not so much because it may be old but because it suggests that a transitional form of early Homo sapiens was present in America as well as in east Asia. In fact, the closest morphological similarities are with transitional Homo Sapiens in China and Australia.
Evidence for a Homo erectus-like creature or a transitional form to Homo sapiens in South America would at any time be a major scientific sensation and the ruin of many a theory.
Homo erectus was an early human form who is known to have lived in northern Africa, the Caucasus, China and Java between 1,8 million and 40,000 years ago. These very early humans were the first of their species known to have spread far outside Africa. It is thought that Homo sapiens developed out of (or branched off from) Homo erectus - in other words, that erectus is our direct ancestors. Could the transformation from erectus to sapiens have included the Americas besides Asia and Europe? It is hard to see how this could be so. Homo erectus besides his known talents would also have had to be an alarmingly early and competent sailor.
The association with Homo erectus has to be purely speculative in the absence of the hard evidence. There is also a less sensational possibility that Beattie also notes: populations with heavy browridges are known elsewhere in the Americas from Holocene contexts. But do these alternatives have skulls as inhumanely thick and with browridges as huge as those shown in the photographs above? Unlikely - for if they had, they would have been the talk of the anthropological community.
Conspiracy theories should be resisted but the fact that precisely this most unusual and potential theory-busting find should have gone missing does, to put it mildly, makes one think unkind thoughts.
In 1984 Beattie et al also noted, rather forlornly, that
the possibility that by now the calotte has come into the possession of someone who does not know its history but would be willing to have it properly analyzed is the reason for presenting this report in an international anthropological journal.
... and it is precisely our reason for mentioning Beattie's report here on the internet in 2007.
It gets even worse: there is actually a whole gaggle of missing calottes!
Other less well reported excavations were carried out in Lund's and other caves in the area during the 19th and early 20th century. The animal and human bones from these excavations were stored in crates in the State University in Belo Horizonte. Examination of the contents of the crates in l970 revealed evidence of human workmanship (chopping) on a few fossil bones but also a human calotte with features similar to the missing one found earlier by Lund except that the browridges were even more pronounced. The calotte was misplaced before it could be studied properly, although the similar state of permineralization and the morphological features suggest that it came from Sumidouro Cave.
We have here described a human cranium with archaic characteristics found (or allegedly found) at Lagoa Santa - and then lost. Now meet a cranium that was (allegedly) found at Lagoa Santa and that was not lost. While the lost cranium on the photographs that have survived gives the distinct impression that it is (or was) was of one piece. It could therefore be genuine since a whole, unbroken cranium would be difficult to forge. However, without that cranium being found again, we cannot say for sure since a photograph cannot be definitive proof of a genuine piece.
Now meet a cranium that was not lost but that definitively is not genuine.
This is a drawing of a calotte that was discovered in
1975 by Alan Bryan among a collection of fossilized bones
from the Sumidouro cave (see above). Investigation with a new technique (EDXRF -
energy-dispersive x-ray fluorescence analysis) revealed that
the calotte is a fake. A very well-made fake cleverly put
together from different pieces of unknown origin and
antiquity, but still a fake. Seven different pieces were indentified through
restoration marks. What is not clear is whether the calotte outed as a
forgery is the (very discreetly re-found) calotte reported
as missing above, or another calotte that never went
missing. Or what? The question one is left with in this
confusion of calottes is: what IS it with calottes at Lagoa
Santa and in Belo Horizonte Museums? Drawing adapted from Anjos M.J., Lopes R.T.,
Mendonça deSouza S.M.F., and de Jesus E.F.O. 2005.
"Investigation of a fossilized calotte from Lagoa Santa,
Brazil, by EDXRF". X-Ray Spectrometry,
34:189-193.
- http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1415-47571999000400001 (Luzia, craniometric analysis)
- http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0507185102v1.pdf#search=%22%22Lapa%20Vermelha%20IV%22%22 (Luzia, craniometric analysis)
- http://www.desvendar.com/especiais/colunistas/alexandre/blog/noticias.asp (archaeology)
- http://www.unb.br/ig/sigep/sitio015/sitio015english.htm (Lagoa Santa Karst)
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Last change 27 October 2007
