What Lund could not have imagined — what no one in 1844 could have imagined — was that nearly 180 years after his excavations, researchers would be extracting DNA from the bones he had found, comparing that DNA to genomes from populations on the other side of the planet, and finding a faint but persistent signal that would require a fundamental reconsideration of the models used to explain how the Americas had been peopled.

Lund’s discovery set in motion a chain of scientific inquiry that has still not reached its endpoint.

The caves of Lagoa Santa are still being studied.

New specimens are still being found.

New techniques are still being applied to old collections.

And the questions that Lund’s finds first raised — about the identity and antiquity of the first South Americans, about the relationship between ancient and modern populations, about the deep history of human migration across the Americas — are still being answered, incompletely and imperfectly, by researchers working with tools that Lund could not have conceived.

The Archaeological Record Beyond the Bones