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Description
Edit: It appears Luzia#2 was actually Lapa do Santo, so the file has been amended. Thanks @
linalco for the correction.

Brazil's Luzia Woman. She's a national icon, a girl who wandered the country when South America was still full of Smilodons, Toxodons and Giant Glyptodonts, and the story around her is really weird.

Luzia's 11,500-year-old skeleton was discovered in 1974 by archaeologist Annette Laming-Emperaire. Her nickname "Luzia" was chosen in homage to the Australopithecus fossil Lucy.

Luzia's bones were housed at the National Museum of Brazil. Disastrously, a fire that destroyed the museum on September 2, 2018 destroyed her skeleton. Fortunately, most of Luzia's remains were identified from the Museu Nacional debris, which allowed them to rebuild a bit of her skeleton.

Based on an initial phenotype analysis of her skull, it was believed that she had a partial Australo-Melanesian origin. Many argued that it was just cranio-facial variability could just be due to genetic drift and other factors affecting cranio-facial plasticity in Native Americans. And many pointed out that the modern Aimoré people of the same region looked just like her, but this was ignored.
I think the artist really did everyone a disservice by giving her Aboriginal Australian soft tissue features that just weren't warranted by the skull itself, just to enhance a theory.

By 2018 however, DNA and further phenotypic analysis clearly showed that she was made of the same stuff as other Native Americans.

Comparison to the original reconstruction in the comments.

Description
Edit: It appears Luzia#2 was actually Lapa do Santo, so the file has been amended. Thanks @
linalco for the correction.

Brazil's Luzia Woman. She's a national icon, a girl who wandered the country when South America was still full of Smilodons, Toxodons and Giant Glyptodonts, and the story around her is really weird.

Luzia's 11,500-year-old skeleton was discovered in 1974 by archaeologist Annette Laming-Emperaire. Her nickname "Luzia" was chosen in homage to the Australopithecus fossil Lucy.

Luzia's bones were housed at the National Museum of Brazil. Disastrously, a fire that destroyed the museum on September 2, 2018 destroyed her skeleton. Fortunately, most of Luzia's remains were identified from the Museu Nacional debris, which allowed them to rebuild a bit of her skeleton.

Based on an initial phenotype analysis of her skull, it was believed that she had a partial Australo-Melanesian origin. Many argued that it was just cranio-facial variability could just be due to genetic drift and other factors affecting cranio-facial plasticity in Native Americans. And many pointed out that the modern Aimoré people of the same region looked just like her, but this was ignored.
I think the artist really did everyone a disservice by giving her Aboriginal Australian soft tissue features that just weren't warranted by the skull itself, just to enhance a theory.

By 2018 however, DNA and further phenotypic analysis clearly showed that she was made of the same stuff as other Native Americans.

Comparison to the original reconstruction in the comments.