1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [78]
In that year Peter Wilhelm Lund, a Danish botanist, found thirty skeletons in caves twenty miles north of Belo Horizonte. The caves were named Lagoa Santa, after a nearby village. Inside them were a jumble of remains from people and big, extinct beasts. If the human and animal bones were from the same time period, as their proximity suggested, the implication was that people had been living in the Americas many thousands of years ago, much longer than most scientists then believed. Who were these ancient hunters? Regarding Europe as the world’s intellectual capital, the intrigued Lund sent most of the skeletons to a museum in his native Copenhagen. He was certain that researchers there would quickly study and identify them. Instead the bones remained in boxes, rarely disturbed, for more than a century.
Scientists finally examined the Lagoa Santa skeletons in the 1960s. Laboratory tests showed that the bones could be fifteen thousand years old—possibly the oldest human remains in the Western Hemisphere. Lund had noted the skulls’ heavy brows, which are rare in Native Americans. The new measurements confirmed that oddity and suggested that these people were in many ways physically quite distinct from modern Indians, which indicated, at least to some Brazilian archaeologists, that the Lagoa Santa people could not have been the ancestors of today’s native populations. Instead the earliest inhabitants of the Americas must have been some other kind of people.
North American researchers tended to scoff at the notion that some mysterious non-Indians had lived fifteen thousand years ago in the heart of Brazil, but South Americans, Pena among them, were less dismissive. Pena had studied and worked for twelve years overseas, mainly in Canada and the United States. He returned in 1982 to Belo Horizonte, a surging, industrial city in the nation’s east-central highlands. In Brazilian terms, it was like abandoning a glamorous expatriate life in Paris to come back to Chicago. Pena had become interested while abroad in using genetics as a historical tool—studying family trees and migrations by examining DNA. At Belo Horizonte, he joined the university faculty and founded, on the side, Brazil’s first DNA-fingerprinting company, providing paternity tests for families and forensic studies for the police. He taught, researched, published in prestigious U.S. and European journals, and ran his company. In time he became intrigued by the Lagoa Santa skeletons.
The most straightforward way to discover whether the Lagoa Santa people were related to modern Indians, Pena decided, would be to compare DNA from their skeletons with DNA from living Indians. In 1999 his team tried to extract DNA from Lagoa Santa bones. When the DNA turned out to be unusable, Pena came up with a second, more unorthodox approach: he decided to look for Lagoa Santa DNA in the Botocudo.
The Botocudo were an indigenous group that lived a few hundred miles north of what is now Rio de Janeiro. (The name comes from botoque, the derogatory Portuguese term for the big wooden discs that the Botocudo inserted in their lower lips and earlobes, distending them outward.) Although apparently never numerous, they resisted conquest so successfully that in 1801 the Portuguese colonial government formally launched a “just war against the cannibalistic Botocudo.” There followed a century of intermittent strife, which slowly drove the Botocudo to extinction.
With their slightly bulging brows, deepset eyes, and square jaws, the Botocudo were phenotypically different (that is, different in appearance) from their neighbors—a difference comparable to the difference between West Africans and Scandinavians. More important, some Brazilian scientists believe,