Lagoa Santa (''Holy Lagoon'') is a Brazilian

municipality A municipality is usually a single administrative division having municipal corporation, corporate status and powers of self-government or jurisdiction as granted by national and regional laws to which it is subordinate. The term ''municipality' ...

and region in the

state State most commonly refers to: * State (polity), a centralized political organization that regulates law and society within a territory **Sovereign state, a sovereign polity in international law, commonly referred to as a country **Nation state, a ...

Minas Gerais Minas Gerais () is one of the 27 federative units of Brazil, being the fourth largest state by area and the second largest in number of inhabitants with a population of 20,539,989 according to the 2022 Brazilian census, 2022 census. Located in ...

. It is located 37 km north-northeast from

Belo Horizonte Belo Horizonte is the List of largest cities in Brazil, sixth-largest city in Brazil, with a population of around 2.3 million, and the third largest metropolitan area, containing a population of 6 million. It is the List of cities in Sout ...

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 Brazilian paleontologist, zoologist, and archeology, archeologist. He spent most of his life working and living in Brazil. He is considered the father of Brazilian paleontology as wel ...

, known as the father of Brazilian paleontology, discovered a cave filled with human bones (15 skeletons) and

megafauna In zoology, megafauna (from Ancient Greek, Greek μέγας ''megas'' "large" and Neo-Latin ''fauna'' "animal life") are large animals. The precise definition of the term varies widely, though a common threshold is approximately , this lower en ...

(very large mammals) dating to the

Pleistocene The Pleistocene ( ; referred to colloquially as the ''ice age, Ice Age'') is the geological epoch (geology), epoch that lasted from to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was fin ...

era. Eugen Warming 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 Tropics, tropical savanna in central Brazil, being present in the states of Goiás, Mato Grosso do Sul, Mato Grosso, Tocantins, Maranhão, Piauí, Bahia, Minas Gerais, São Paulo (state), São Paulo, Paraná ...

– drought and fire – in a work that still stands as a paradigm of ecological study ( 'Lagoa Santa'). The tomb of illustrator

Peter Andreas Brandt Peter Andreas Brandt (14 June 1792 – 20 September 1862) was a Norwegian painter and illustrator. He worked as an illustrator with the Danish paleontologist Peter Wilhelm Lund in Brazil Brazil, officially the Federative Republic of Braz ...

, also an assistant of Lund, is located in the town. The municipality contains 56% of the

Sumidouro State Park The Sumidouro State Park () is a State park (Brazil), state park in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The remains of the first human inhabitants of Brazil were found in the park area in the early 19th century, along with bones of now-extinct mega ...

, 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.

References

* Charles C. Mann, ''1491'', Random House, 2005. Municipalities in Minas Gerais Archaeological sites in Brazil {{MinasGerais-geo-stub

Cradle of Brazilian paleontology

See also

References