Lagoa Santa
Encyclopedia
Lagoa Santa, Goiás
Lagoa Santa is a small city and municipality in southeast Goiás state, Brazil. Lagoa Santa is one of the most recent municipalities in the state, having been installed on 1 January 2001...
Lagoa Santa (Holy Lake) is a municipality and region in the state of Minas Gerais
Minas Gerais
Minas Gerais is one of the 26 states of Brazil, of which it is the second most populous, the third richest, and the fourth largest in area. Minas Gerais is the Brazilian state with the largest number of Presidents of Brazil, the current one, Dilma Rousseff, being one of them. The capital is the...
, Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
. It is located 37 km north-northeast from Belo Horizonte
Belo Horizonte
Belo Horizonte is the capital of and largest city in the state of Minas Gerais, located in the southeastern region of Brazil. It is the third largest metropolitan area in the country...
and belongs to the mesoregion Metropolitana de Belo Horizonte and to the microregion of Belo Horizonte.
Cradle of Brazilian paleontology
The Danish palaeontologist Peter Wilhelm LundPeter Wilhelm Lund
Peter Wilhelm Lund was a Danish paleontologist, zoologist, archeologist and who spent most of his life working and living in Brazil...
, known as the father of Brazilian paleontology, discovered a cave filled with human bones (15 skeletons) and megafauna
Megafauna
In terrestrial zoology, megafauna are "giant", "very large" or "large" animals. The most common thresholds used are or...
(very large mammals) dating to the Pleistocene
Pleistocene
The Pleistocene is the epoch from 2,588,000 to 11,700 years BP that spans the world's recent period of repeated glaciations. The name pleistocene is derived from the Greek and ....
era. Eugen Warming
Eugenius Warming
Johannes Eugenius Bülow Warming , known as Eugen Warming, was a Danish botanist and a main founding figure of the scientific discipline of ecology...
assisted Lund 1863-1866, and described the flora of the area and the adaptations of the plants to the hazards of cerrado
Cerrado
The Cerrado, is a vast tropical savanna ecoregion of Brazil, particularly in the states of Gioas and Minas Gerais...
– drought and fire – in a work that still stands as a paradigm of ecological study ('Lagoa Santa').
A century later, in the 1970s, French archeologist Annette Laming-Emperaire
Annette Laming-Emperaire
Annette Laming-Emperaire was a French archeologist.Born in Petrograd, Annette Laming studied philosophy in Paris until World War II began. She then turned to teaching while participating in the French Resistance...
carried out excavations in the area and discovered the oldest human fossil in Brazil, over 11 thousand years old, given the nickname Luzia
Luzia Woman
right|thumb|250px|Reconstruction of her faceLuzia Woman is the name for the skeleton of a woman found in a cave in Brazil, South America. Some archaeologists believe the young woman may have been part of the first wave of immigrants to South America...
.