Lagoa Santa (''Holy Lagoon'') is a municipality and region in the state of
Minas Gerais
Minas Gerais () is a state in Southeastern Brazil. It ranks as the second most populous, the third by gross domestic product (GDP), and the fourth largest by area in the country. The state's capital and largest city, Belo Horizonte (literally ...
,
Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
. It is located 37 km north-northeast from
Belo Horizonte and belongs to the mesoregion Metropolitana de Belo Horizonte and to the microregion of Belo Horizonte. In 2020 the estimated population was 65,657.
Cradle of Brazilian paleontology
The Danish palaeontologist
Peter Wilhelm Lund
Peter Wilhelm Lund (14 June 1801 – 25 May 1880) was a Danish paleontologist, zoologist, and archeologist. He spent most of his life working and living in Brazil. He is considered the father of Brazilian paleontology as well as archaeology.
He ...
, known as the father of Brazilian paleontology, discovered a cave filled with human bones (15 skeletons) and
megafauna (very large mammals) dating to the
Pleistocene
The Pleistocene ( , often referred to as the ''Ice age'') is the geological epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was finally confirmed in ...
era.
Eugen Warming
Eugen is a masculine given name which may refer to:
* Archduke Eugen of Austria (1863–1954), last Habsburg Grandmaster of the Teutonic Order from 1894 to 1923
* Prince Eugen, Duke of Närke (1865–1947), Swedish painter, art collector, and pat ...
assisted Lund 1863–1866, and described the flora of the area and the adaptations of the plants to the hazards of
cerrado
The ''Cerrado'' (, ) is a vast ecoregion of tropical savanna in eastern Brazil, particularly in the states of Goiás, Mato Grosso do Sul, Mato Grosso, Tocantins, Minas Gerais, and the Federal District. The core areas of the Cerrado biome are the ...
– drought and fire – in a work that still stands as a paradigm of ecological study (
'Lagoa Santa'). The tomb of illustrator
Peter Andreas Brandt, also an assistant of Lund, is located in the town.
The municipality contains 56% of the
Sumidouro State Park, created in 1980, which protects the cave where Lund made his discovery of the "Lagoa Santa Man".
A century later, in the 1970s, French archeologist
Annette Laming-Emperaire carried out excavations in the area and discovered the oldest human fossil in Brazil, over 11 thousand years old, given the nickname
Luzia.
See also
*
List of municipalities in Minas Gerais
This is a list of the municipalities in the state of Minas Gerais (MG), located in the Southeast Region of Brazil. Minas Gerais is divided into 853 municipalities, which are grouped into 66 microregions, which are grouped into 12 mesoregions.
...
*
Pedra Furada sites
References
* Charles C. Mann, ''1491'', Random House, 2005.
Municipalities in Minas Gerais
Archaeological sites in Brazil
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