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.