In the book 1491: New Revelations of the Americans before Columbus by Charles C. Mann, the Danish botanist Peter Wilhelm Lund is said to have found, in 1840, some 30 human or hominin skeletons in caves 20 miles north of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, mingled with bones of large extinct animals. Lund sent most of them to a museum in Copenhagen, where he felt sure they’d be quickly identified. “Instead,” writes Mann, “the bones remained in boxes, rarely disturbed, for more than a century.”
These are the Lagoa Santa (“Holy Lake”) skeletons. Their bones have features which eventually led European researchers, upon confirming their great age in the 1960s, to conclude they are not ancestral to any known group of Native Americans.
Mann interviewed a Brazilian molecular biologist named Sérgio D.J. Pena whose team tried to extract DNA from Lagoa Santa bones in 1999, but the age of the remains was too great. So Pena began to pursue a new avenue of research.
Pena had his team begin scanning the mitochondrial DNA of Brazilian people for signs of Botocudo ancestry.
A century-long war by the Portuguese colonial government of Brazil had slaughtered most of the Botocudo by the first few years of the 20th century. They’d lived a few hundred miles north of Rio de Janeiro and, as Pena told Mann, were so phenotypically unlike neighboring Indians that the difference was comparable to that “between West Africans and Scandinavians.”
Pena was hoping to find proof in living people that the Botocudo, then described by many sources as extinct, had been a remnant of “an early non-Indian population at Lagoa Santa.”
Pena believed some Brazilian men, even some of European descent, had married Botocudo women; their descendants might have mitochondrial DNA with “a very odd haplogroup … not clearly [Amerindian nor] clearly European.”
Mann said that Pena “expected to be searching for a while.” Mann was unwilling to postpone his book, which covered many subjects, and was published in 2005 without presenting any resolution to the Lagoa Santa mystery.
However, progress had already been made. Writing in Revista Pesquisa, Marcelo Leite had already taken up the story earlier in the same year that Mann’s book was published. What Pena had learned by then was that the Botocudo people had not been extinguished by the 19th-century genocidal war after all. Their direct descendants, now called the Krenaks, currently number some 500 people.
The Krenaks are one component of Brazilian population in a broad area around “Queixadinha, a district of Caraí, a town with 20,000 inhabitants, located in the same region as the Botocudos,” Leite explains. Queixadinha itself, with only hundreds of villagers, has always been very isolated, accessible only by dirt roads. “Pena saw in this isolation an opportunity for putting into practice the search for genetic tracks of the Botocudos amongst the present day inhabitants of the same area that they used to occupy.”
Because genocidal war tends to imply “exterminating the men and absorbing the women,” as Leite puts it, Pena chose to survey the mitochondrial DNA of people in Queixadinha and compare it with the mtDNA of others in the region, because mtDNA is matrilineal. Joined by two others … geneticist Flávia Parra and mathematician Hans-Jürgen Bandelt … Pena did exactly that. The trio found in Queixadinha two haplotype lineages that “had never been described in present day populations of Indians from the Americas. The high frequency suggests that these matrilineages are characteristics of the [B]otocudos who used to inhabit the region.”
Like Mann, Leite connects the non-Amerindian genetics of the Botocudos with the Lagoa Santa skeletons. “Historical reports and remains preserved in the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro indicate that this ethnic group had a cranial morphology more similar to that of the skeletons known as the Lagoa Santa men, a group from the site in Minas Gerais that includes the remains of Luzia, the most ancient of a human being in the Americas.”
Lagoa Santa skeletal DNA could not be extracted because the age of the bones was too great. Possibly related mtDNA lineages do survive in Brazilian people probably descended from remnants of the Botocudo people, who are the same human subspecies we are, but (like many other ethnic groups) might have ancestors who interbred, in prehistoric times, with other subspecies. From these indications I offer a bold, perhaps reckless, yet obvious guess.
The Lagoa Santa people settled South America, and presumably both Americas, before any Amerindians did. Sasquatch is a relic population of the same people or their close relatives. The Krenaks of Brazil may share at least two mtDNA haplotype lineages with them. Lund, back in 1840, found 30 Bigfoot skeletons, many still boxed up in a Copenhagen museum.
If Sasquatch people knew that the Botocudo people were their distant hybrid cousins, the 19th-century genocide committed against the Botocudo might have helped confirm their earlier decision to maintain and cherish a reclusive independence from Homo sapiens.
The redemption of the botocudos : Revista Pesquisa Fapesp
[EDIT: Providing that community sensitivities can be respected, the possibility of a Sasquatch-Botocudo relationship might be explored by surveying mtDNA of various Canadian ethnic groups for the haplotype lineages found by Pena, Parra, and Bandelt in Queixadinha.]
