What do we find in the way of human bones? Not too much, compared with the many skulls and skeletons of the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon in Europe. They range from the top of a cranium or part of a pelvis to a few complete skeletons, some properly buried. They are not all of equal value. The best, however, tell us something about how certain early Americans may have looked. By that, at least, they contribute more than the thousands of stone tools which early man left behind him. South America Provides the First Skulls So far as anthropology is concerned, it was a busy and important decade that ended in 1850. Prescott’s histories of the conquest of Mexico and Peru, and John L. Stephens’s two books of travel and study in the Maya area had become best-sellers. Lord Kingsborough was publishing his nine-volume _Antiquities of Mexico_. Boucher de Perthes was finding additional hand axes, and beginning to write upon them. More important for our purposes is the report of the Danish naturalist Lund that he found the skulls of men mingled with the bones of extinct mammals in the Lagoa Santa caves of Brazil. It would be pleasant to think that Lund left Europe in 1835 imbued with enthusiasm for the discoveries of Boucher de Perthes, but this is highly unlikely. The Frenchman and his theories were pretty generally ignored by science until the late fifties. We don’t know why Lund chose to explore caves in the state of Minas Gerais, north of Rio de Janeiro, but in the end it was a fortunate choice. He examined over two hundred caves, and in six of them he found human remains. For eight or nine years he was dubious about his finds, but he was convinced in 1844 when he found human bones mingled with the bones of extinct animals, all equally fossilized. Though it was the bones of the mammals that convinced Lund of the antiquity of the Lagoa Santa craniums, it is certain peculiarities of the skulls themselves that have given them a very special importance in the whole argument for early man in the New World. These skulls were long and narrow, while those of most Indians and other Mongoloid peoples are relatively short and broad. Again in contrast to the men of northern Asia, the Lagoa Santa had very heavy brow ridges; their skulls were straight-sided and had keeled vaults. The total effect was archaic. This was to prove a basic type to which all the later finds of the bones of early man could be related. Dr. Lund’s bones were not received with too much enthusiasm. If they had belonged to any animal other than man, says Sir Arthur Keith, “their antiquity would never have been questioned, but being human all sorts of doubts were raised as to how and when they became mixed with the remains of extinct animals.”[19] Many years passed before the Lagoa Santa skulls began to win respectful attention and final acceptance as other long and narrow skulls with even stronger brow ridges turned up under similar conditions.