While writing yesterday's post on the Diprothomo skull, I revisited an old post about the Lagoa Santa skull, a calotte with heavy brow ridges and a thick bone structure (pictured below). While reading it I came across its closing comments, that suggested it was a hoax. In this post I will delve deeper into that possibility.
Lagoa Santa, skull with thick brow ridges
The original comment read: "Notice how thick the bones are! Definitively primitive and erectus-like. Actually, comparing it with the photograph of Diprothomo they look very similar" And continued with the remark about the skull being fake: "I would love to end the post here but, the source that provides the photograph shown above goes on to mention another paper Investigation of a fossilized calotte from Lagoa Santa, Brazil, by EDXRF by Anjos, Lopes and Souza (2005) that reproduces a calotte from Lagoa Santa that is identical to the one in the photographe above and which, disclosed after an X-Ray study that it "had been mounted with pieces from different origins", meaning that it is a fake."
Some context and background: an unusual human skullcap discovered in Brazil was first described by Dr. Alan Lyle Bryan, of the University of Alberta. It had been found in the Lagoa Santa / Sumidouro region in 1958 by Harold Victor Walter (1887-1976) who was the British consul in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Bryan examined it and took some photographs in 1970. Then the skull got lost. It has a primitive apparance ant the anthropologists who saw the pictures thought that it was a fake, or, alternatively it could have been a cast or a fossil from an Old World hominin that somehow had got misplaced with genuine Brazilian specimens in the museum. But Bryan said that he had seen it, and that it wasn't a fake, it was genuine. He did, however, note that it was very different from the other crania found in Lagoa Santa, suggesting perhaps an ancestor or older lineage from which the later Lagoa Santa people had evolved.
Update — 2026
A 1985 paper by Richard A. Rogers and Larry D. Martin (Paleoindian Studies and the Disappearance of Collected Material, Current Research in the Pleistocene, vol 2, p.58) addressed the issue of lost or misplaced archaological samples, especially Paleoindian ones. It mentions the Lagoa Santa skull: "An important question in Paleoindian studies is whether some of the Pleistocene human immigrant populations had "Neanderthaloid" features. A highly mineralized human calotte with extremely large brow ridges and thick skull walls, was recovered from the Lagoa Santa region of Brazil. The specimen was photographed, but later become lost at the museum where it was stored (Bryan 1978:318). The Yuha skeleton has also disappeared... It is apparent that loss of material due to theft is a serious problem in Paleoindian studies and has already contributed to the slowing down of the acceptance of new ideas and data.
The loss of such important data in the Western Hemisphere points up the need for special precautions to be taken with Paleoindian material. The material is either easily misplaced or attracts thieves." A conclusion that does not include deliberate hoaxes with fake specimens, or destruction of inconvenient samples by Clovis-First supporters.
I came across a paper (Taylor, 2009, Six Decades of Radiocarbon Dating in New World Archaeology), which states that the skull was a forgery: "It has subsequently been determined that the large brow ridges on this specimen had been faked (Anjos et al. 2005). According to information provided to M Beltrão, as reported in Beltrão et al. (2005), the thick ridges had been modeled on the cranium using a mixture of glue and plaster mixed with ground bone fragments and the resultant modeled surface was then painted to approximate the original color of the bone. At the time, it was viewed by Bryan, the facts associated with how the specimen had acquired its brow ridges apparently had not been known to the museum personnel and thus was not communicated to Bryan. This Logoa (sic) Santa skull might thus be regarded as the South American example of a “Piltdown-like” specimen."
The work of Marí Beltrão cited by Taylor is also co-authored by him: Beltrão M, Taylor RE, Kirner DL, Southon JR. 2005. Historical context and radiocarbon age of Lagoa Santa human populations in Brazil. In: Dillon DB, Johnson KL, editors. Onward and Upward: Papers in Honor of Clement W. Meighan. Lancaster: Labyinthos. p 257–64.
The other source, is the one I mentioned in my posts, Anjos, M.J., Lopes, R.T., Mendonça de Souza, S.M.F. and de Jesus, E.F.O. (2005), Investigation of a fossilized calotte from Lagoa Santa, Brazil, by EDXRF. X-Ray Spectrom., 34: 189-193. https://doi.org/10.1002/xrs.783 🔒. Unfortunately it his locked behind a paywall, but it is mentioned in a more recent work by Pereira de Freitas, R., 2021 (O Uso de técnicas físico-químicas de análise como suporte na conservacão, catalogacão e investigacão forense de acervos museológicos. Museologia & Interdisciplinaridade, 10 (Especial), 182-195. https://doi.org/10.26512/museologia.v10iEspecial.36104) who comments on Anjos' paper: "Anjos et al. (2005) analyzed an ancient fossilized skullcap belonging to the collection of the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro using XRF. In analyzing this artifact, which the researchers believed to be authentic and directly related to the ancient civilizations that populated Brazilian territory, it was verified that the concentration of elements such as calcium (Ca) and strontium (Sr), which are the base materials of the skullcap, vary between regions. The results confirmed that the skullcap was actually assembled from parts of different materials, unrelated to the soil of the region where it was found."
This agrees with Anjos' abstract: "The origin of the component parts of a fossilized calotte (skull cap) from Lagoa Santa in Brazil was investigated by using energy-dispersive x-ray fluorescence analysis. The specimen was irradiated with a miniaturized and low-power x-ray generator (2.25 W, tungsten anode). The calotte and rock samples from the two known sites have a similar chemical composition, especially rich in S, K, Ca, Ti, Mn, Fe, Cu, Zn, Pb, Br, Rb and Sr. These elements are associated with the geological constitution of the limestone complex where the archaeological samples were found. The small differences in the relative amount of each element, especially the Ca/Sr ratio, in different parts of the calotte reinforce the hypothesis that the calotte had been mounted with pieces from different origins."
But if Anjos analyzed the skullcap in 2005, was it lost? Are we sure it is the same skull mentioned by Bryan? Also, they don't mention the plaster and ground bone or darkening paint that were added to the skull according to Beltrão. Maybe the skull studied by Anjos was a composite, legitimate, genuine, pieced together by mistake, but not the one that Bryan reported as lost.
Beltrão is a firm believer in the ancient peopling of America, and wrote several articles on the subject (see, for instance O Homem Pré-histórico há 300 Mil Anos no Brasil. Revista Geográfica Universal, 84-91, 1992 — Prehistoric Man in Brazil 300 thousand years ago). So, why would she be so critical about the Lagoa Santa calotte?
It seems that there was not one calotte, but two, from different sites! George Weber, 1984 mentions a lost calotte and a fake calotte (George Weber, Lagoa Santa sites (Minas Gerais, Brazil).
Weber cites Bryan A.L., and Beattie O.B., 1984 who wrote about the calotte (A Fossilized calotte with Prominent Browridges from Lagoa Santa, Brazil. Current Anthropology, vol. 25, no. 3:345-346) as follows: They reported the excavations done by P.W. Lund in Sumidouro cave in the 1800s. Most of them were tinted red with ochre, but in a part of the cave he found black colored remains both animal and human, among them was the calotte that was later seen by Bryan and vanished by 1975. This is what Weber calls the Lost Calotte.
Then, separately, Weber describes the Fake Calotte which was reported by the EDXRF X-ray technique as "a fake. A very well-made fake cleverly put
together from different pieces of unknown origin and antiquity, but still a fake. Seven different pieces were indentified through restoration marks."
Weber wonders if they are the same or different calottes: "What is not clear is whether the calotte outed as a forgery is the (very discreetly re-found) calotte reported as missing above, or another calotte that never wentd missing. Or what? The question one is left with in this confusion of calottes is: what IS it with calottes at Lagoa Santa and in Belo Horizonte Museums?"
What did Alan L. Bryan say about the calotte?
Alan Lyle Bryan, (1978) in his research article Early man in America from a circum-pacific perspective. Issue 1 of Occasional papers of the Department of Anthropology, University of Alberta. Archaeological Researches International, included photographs (below) of the calotte:
Bryan, after explaining the circumstances of his discovery (the calotte in the Belo Horizonte museum, and the reaction of his colleagues, who considered it improbable, and either a fake or a cast of a European hominin), adds that he discards the hoax option (see page 318 ) stating that "My wife Ruth Gruhn, and I have had considerable experience in handling human skeletal material and we are both positive that it was neither a fake nor a cast. It was a human skullcap, the frontal and both parietals, all sutures fused, highly mineralized, and stained black, the same color as a minority of fossilized animal bones in the Walter paleontological collection (most are stained red)."
Closing remarks
We don't necessarily need to imagine a hoax in the case of the mixed-bones skull. In fact the Sumidouro cave has a complex stratigraphy, which has been flooded many times over the millennia. Piló et al., 2005 mention that "Seasonal flooding reworked and mixed these two highly asynchronous assemblages [fauna and human remains] U-series and radiocarbon ages indicate that there are at least two distinct episodes of sediment input in the cave, at ˜240,000 yr B.P. and ˜8000 yr B.P. Human remains represent a later emplacement event, probably at ˜8400 cal yr B.P. Although the human remains are of considerable age, the cave's complex stratigraphy, flooding dynamics, and extensive removal of the cave's filling during earlier excavations do not allow the determination of an unequivocal co-existence between Paleo-Indians and extinct megafauna at the site" It could explain how different bones were mixed naturally inside the cave, and assembled as if they were of the same skull.
Finally, the use of ochre to stain the bones red in burials dating back to 9,400-9,600 years, as reported by Strauss et al., 2016 at Lagoa Santa, shows that Bryan was correct. The black-stained calotte must surely be older, when ochre was not used (or the ochre washed off the old bones). We should also point out that ochre was used, not only by humans, but also by Neanderthals (Roebroeks et al., 2012) 200 to 250 kya, and Homo erectus, as shown by Deino and McBrearty, 2022 reported its use at the Kapthurin site in Kenya, in sediments dated to 509-284 kya coexisting with Levallois stone tools during the transition from older Achulean ones (typical of Homo erectus) and of a similar age, reported by Watts, Chazan and Wilkins, 2016 in South Africa.
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