For the U.S. survey, I’ve just updated tomorrow’s usual lecture on human migration to the Americas to include a specific discussion of “Luzia.”
Having lived about 11,500 years ago, she was one of the oldest sets of human remains in the Americas. She has been a subject of ongoing study, a crucial piece of evidence for researchers debating human arrival and migration patterns in the hemisphere.
She may have been destroyed in the fire that consumed Brazil’s Museu Nacional last night—perhaps one loss to scholarship among millions. I hardly know what to say, but I hope to use the fire as a terrible occasion to emphasize the fragility of historical knowledge, its interconnectedness across regions of the world, and the necessity of robust public funding to protect it.
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Image: A cast of Luzia’s skull at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, Washington, D.C. Photograph by Ryan Somma. Shared under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license.
