Cast of the skull known as Luzia as displayed at National Museum of Natural History Washington DC Photo by Ryan Somma CC BY-SA 2.0 |
Luzia Woman belonged to an ancient population formerly known as Lagõa Santa Man or Paleoamerind. The first to excavate such skulls was the Danish Naturalist Peter Lund, who found them as far back as 1840. Based on the classical craniometric criteria used by anthropologists until well into the twentieth century, this population clearly diverged from all others in North and South America.
Lagõa Santa skull excavated 1840 by Peter Wilhelm Lund |
We already know of two branches to the population that crossed the Bering Strait and peopled North and South America - thanks to work by Eske Willerslev's group (here). Was there a third branch that gave rise to the Paleoamerinds or even a separate and earlier migration?
To piece this together it would have been useful to extract ancient DNA from the Luzia skull. That had not been done prior to the fire. There are other skulls around including those excavated by Peter Lund and now housed in Copenhagen. They may yet yield new pieces to complete the puzzle.
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