Luzio, the oldest human skeleton in Brazil’s Southeast, was indigenous

By Euan Marshall

A study published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution concluded that Luzio, the oldest human skeleton in Southeast Brazil, is a descendant of indigenous populations that inhabit the country today. The study, which compiled a mass of Brazilian archaeological genomic data, helps to unravel how the so-called Sambaqui coastal societies disappeared, and how their inhabitants relate to today’s indigenous communities.

Luzio was found in the Ribeira Valley region of São Paulo state and his fossilized remains have been reliably dated to around 10,400 years ago. He was named in homage to Luzia, the oldest human fossil in South America. 

There are many debates on the ancestral origin of Luzio and Luiza, as the fossilized skulls exhibit a so-called “Paleoamerican morphology,” not seen in Brazil’s indigenous people today. It was believed that Luzio and Luzia belonged to a biologically different population than the ascendants of today’s indigenous communities, but the DNA evidence in this study suggests otherwise.

The study was led by dozens of authors, predominantly from the University of São Paulo’s Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.  

“Genetics show that Luzio is Amerindian, just like the Tupi, Quechua, or Cherokee indigenous groups,” said André Menezes Strauss, an archaeologist from the University of São Paulo and one of the study’s more senior authors. “That doesn’t mean to say they are identical, but from a global perspective, they all came from a single migratory wave, which reached America no more than 16,000 years ago. If there was another population here 30,000 years ago, it did not leave any descendants among these groups.”

Earlier this month, another Brazilian study challenged paradigms about the peopling of the Americas. Researcher Thais Pansani analyzed bone fragments from giant sloths which had been manipulated into trinkets by humans. Her work concluded that people were present in Central Western Brazil as much as 25,000 years ago, long before the widely held theory that people arrived in the Americas 16,000 years ago.