Lagoa Santa

Lagoa Santa is an archaeological and paleontological province in Brazil. Formally the term refers to the city of Lagoa Santa, approximately 30 kilometers from Belo Horizonte, the state capital of Minas Gerais, but it is most often used in the scientific literature to refer to the karst where the city of Lagoa Santa is located. The province was first explored by Peter Lund, a Danish naturalist, who investigated the local caves and shelters from 1833 to 1843. Lund described an impressive number of new genera and species of extinct large mammals (megafauna) based on the fossils he collected in Lagoa Santa. The most important site he excavated in the region was Sumidouro Cave, where he found human skeletal remains that were apparently associated with the extinct megafauna. As a consequence, Lund proposed that the Americas were occupied much earlier than what was believed in the nineteenth century. Since then Lagoa Santa has become an icon in the international literature on the occupation of the New World by humans. Although during the twentieth century the region was explored by several successive Brazilian and international missions, the coexistence hypothesis raised by Lund was confirmed only in 2002–2003 by AMS (accelerator mass spectrometry) radiocarbon dating on fossil bones. The region is also one of the few areas in the Americas where a large number of human skeletal remains dated to the Pleistocene-Holocene transition have been found. Among these skeletons, "Luzia," found at Lapa Vermelha IV, is by far the most prominent. She is thought to be one of the earliest, if not the earliest, human skeletons ever found in the New World, estimated to be between 11,000 and 11,500 years old.

See alsoArchaeology .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Laming-Emperaire, Annette, Andre Prous, Águeda Vilhena de Moraes, and Maria da Conceição Beltrão. Grottes et abris de la region de Lagoa Santa, Minas Gerais, Brésil. Cahiers d'Archeology d́Amérique du Sud 1. Paris: École Pratique des Hautes Études, Sciences Économiques et Sociales, 1975.

Neves, Walter A., and Mark Hubbe. "Cranial Morphology of Early Americans from Lagoa Santa, Brazil: Implications for the Settlement of the New World." Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 102 (2005): 18309-18314.

Piló, Luís Beethoven, Augusto S. Auler, Walter A. Neves, Xianfeng Wang, Hai Cheng, and R. Lawrence Edwards. "Geochronology, Sediment Provenance, and Fossil Emplacement at Sumidouro Cave, a Classic Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene Paleoanthropological Site in Eastern Brazil." Geoarchaeology 20, no. 8 (2005): 751-764.

                                     Walter A. Neves