The overall picture is of a population that occupied this region during and shortly after the end of the Pleistocene, as the world’s climate was warming and the Ice Age megafauna were disappearing.

The ancient people of Lagoa Santa were genuine early Americans.

They were among the first human beings to leave a clear archaeological record in South America.

What they were not was simple or easy to categorize.

The Skull Debate and Why It Lasted So Long

The distinctive morphological characteristics of the Lagoa Santa skulls — and of similar early American skeletal material from other sites across the Western Hemisphere — attracted sustained scientific attention from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and the resulting debate was sometimes scientifically rigorous, sometimes shaped by the racial assumptions of its era, and always more complicated than the simple question it appeared to be asking.

The question was: if the earliest known Americans looked different from later Native American populations, what did that mean?