No one worked in the Lagoa Santa regions for almost a century. In 1933 members of the Academy of Science of Minas Gerais excavated a neighboring cave called Confins. They found the molars of a young mastodon under a few feet of dirt inside the entrance. Deeper down and farther back, they discovered fossils of horse, giant sloth, mastodon, and other extinct mammals. Finally they came on a nearly complete human skeleton. They had cut through a layer of stalagmitic material and more than six feet of alluvial soil to reach the bones of Confins man, and so they knew that he had died during or just before a period of great moisture. They write of this time as the Post-Pleistocene, or Pluvial. Post-Pleistocene means, of course, Postglacial, and Pluvial means a time of much rain. Some scientists push the Pluvial back into the Glacial, but the finders of Confins man prefer to date him at “a few thousands of years ago.” The discoverers of the Confins skull write of it as “one of the most primitive types of _Homo sapiens_ ... yet discovered in South America.”[20] But this statement seems based more on the conditions under which it was found than on its shape. The skull is long and narrow, with heavy brow ridges and a low forehead; but it is not straight-sided, and its vault is not keeled. It is somewhat less archaic than the Lagoa Santa craniums. Certain skulls from Ecuador seem much more archaic than any of those found in Brazil. These are the Punin specimen found in 1923, and the group discovered at Paltacalo almost twenty years before.[21] Associated with the fossils of extinct horse, camel, and mastodon, they have all the peculiarities of the Lagoa Santa specimens, and in addition they have retreating foreheads, lower vaults, and unusually large teeth. Far down in Chile long-headed skulls have been found in association with fossils of extinct horse and ground sloth. They are not so extreme in appearance as the Lagoa Santa skulls, though they resemble them. As for their age, Junius Bird, who made the discovery in caves just north of the Strait of Magellan, reckons—in what he calls “a few degrees better than an outright guess”—that they belonged to men who were given cremation burials not more than 5,400 years ago. We now have radiocarbon dates for such caves from 6,500 to 9,000 years ago. Bird did not venture to guess how many years it took these people to travel the 11,000 miles from the strait of Vitus Jonasson Bering to the strait of Ferdinand Magellan.[22] North American Skulls and Bones Since the discovery of human bones in glacial gravels near Trenton, New Jersey, three skeletons of some importance and a number of skulls that resemble those of Lagoa Santa and Punin have been found in the United States.