And the human bones appeared to be associated with the extinct animal bones in ways that suggested contemporaneity — that the people had lived at the same time as the animals, during or at the end of the Pleistocene.

The implications were, by the scientific standards of the time, extraordinary.

The prevailing understanding of human prehistory in the mid-nineteenth century was shaped by biblical chronology, which placed the creation of humanity only a few thousand years before the present.

Lund’s finds — human remains associated with Ice Age animals — implied a much greater antiquity for human presence in the Americas than most scientists of the period were prepared to accept.

Lund himself was cautious about the implications of his finds.