South America Provides the First Skulls
So far as anthropology is concerned, it was a busy and important decade that ended in 1850. Prescott’s histories of the conquest of Mexico and Peru, and John L. Stephens’s two books of travel and study in the Maya area had become best-sellers. Lord Kingsborough was publishing his nine-volume Antiquities of Mexico. Boucher de Perthes was finding additional hand axes, and beginning to write upon them. More important for our purposes is the report of the Danish naturalist Lund that he found the skulls of men mingled with the bones of extinct mammals in the Lagoa Santa caves of Brazil.
It would be pleasant to think that Lund left Europe in 1835 imbued with enthusiasm for the discoveries of Boucher de Perthes, but this is highly unlikely. The Frenchman and his theories were pretty generally ignored by science until the late fifties. We don’t know why Lund chose to explore caves in the state of Minas Gerais, north of Rio de Janeiro, but in the end it was a fortunate choice. He examined over two hundred caves, and in six of them he found human remains. For eight or nine years he was dubious about his finds, but he was convinced in 1844 when he found human bones mingled with the bones of extinct animals, all equally fossilized.
Though it was the bones of the mammals that convinced Lund of the antiquity of the Lagoa Santa craniums, it is certain peculiarities of the skulls themselves that have given them a very special importance in the whole argument for early man in the New World. These skulls were long and narrow, while those of most Indians and other Mongoloid peoples are relatively short and broad. Again in contrast to the men of northern Asia, the Lagoa Santa had very heavy brow ridges; their skulls were straight-sided and had keeled vaults. The total effect was archaic. This was to prove a basic type to which all the later finds of the bones of early man could be related.
Dr. Lund’s bones were not received with too much enthusiasm. If they had belonged to any animal other than man, says Sir Arthur Keith, “their antiquity would never have been questioned, but being human all sorts of doubts were raised as to how and when they became mixed with the remains of extinct animals.”[19] Many years passed before the Lagoa Santa skulls began to win respectful attention and final acceptance as other long and narrow skulls with even stronger brow ridges turned up under similar conditions.
No one worked in the Lagoa Santa regions for almost a century. In 1933 members of the Academy of Science of Minas Gerais excavated a neighboring cave called Confins. They found the molars of a young mastodon under a few feet of dirt inside the entrance. Deeper down and farther back, they discovered fossils of horse, giant sloth, mastodon, and other extinct mammals. Finally they came on a nearly complete human skeleton. They had cut through a layer of stalagmitic material and more than six feet of alluvial soil to reach the bones of Confins man, and so they knew that he had died during or just before a period of great moisture. They write of this time as the Post-Pleistocene, or Pluvial. Post-Pleistocene means, of course, Postglacial, and Pluvial means a time of much rain. Some scientists push the Pluvial back into the Glacial, but the finders of Confins man prefer to date him at “a few thousands of years ago.” The discoverers of the Confins skull write of it as “one of the most primitive types of Homo sapiens ... yet discovered in South America.”[20] But this statement seems based more on the conditions under which it was found than on its shape. The skull is long and narrow, with heavy brow ridges and a low forehead; but it is not straight-sided, and its vault is not keeled. It is somewhat less archaic than the Lagoa Santa craniums.
Certain skulls from Ecuador seem much more archaic than any of those found in Brazil. These are the Punin specimen found in 1923, and the group discovered at Paltacalo almost twenty years before.[21] Associated with the fossils of extinct horse, camel, and mastodon, they have all the peculiarities of the Lagoa Santa specimens, and in addition they have retreating foreheads, lower vaults, and unusually large teeth.
Far down in Chile long-headed skulls have been found in association with fossils of extinct horse and ground sloth. They are not so extreme in appearance as the Lagoa Santa skulls, though they resemble them. As for their age, Junius Bird, who made the discovery in caves just north of the Strait of Magellan, reckons—in what he calls “a few degrees better than an outright guess”—that they belonged to men who were given cremation burials not more than 5,400 years ago. We now have radiocarbon dates for such caves from 6,500 to 9,000 years ago. Bird did not venture to guess how many years it took these people to travel the 11,000 miles from the strait of Vitus Jonasson Bering to the strait of Ferdinand Magellan.[22]