‘Ancient One’ upholds migration theory
Two young men were watching hydroplane races on the Columbia River in 1996 when one of them waded into shallow water, dislodged what looked like a rock and noticed it had teeth. It was the 9,000-yearold skull of a man whose skeletal remains, remarkably preserved, would inspire a furious legal battle between scientists who wanted to study them and American Indian tribes who wanted to rebury them.
The scientists won in court, and now the scientific dispute is largely resolved, thanks to a newly published genetic comparison with modern indigenous people. Kennewick Man, or the Ancient One, as he came to be known, was not a Polynesian or an ancient indigenous Japanese, and certainly not a European Viking, as some early analyses of his skull shape suggested. His DNA is clearly Native American, closely related to modern members of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation.
“There’s some kind of irony there,” said Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, one of several authors on the new paper in Nature. “It is very clear that genome sequence shows he is most closely related to contemporary Native Americans.”
It is an anticlimactic outcome for a long-running anthropological scandal that threatened to overturn the common understanding of how human beings, a species that arose in Africa, first arrived on the virgin continent of North America.
Not wanting to miss the races, the college kids hid the skull in the bushes, came back later with a bucket, and took their find to police, thinking they had stumbled on a murder victim.
Excavation revealed nearly all of a prehistoric skeleton, almost 400 bones, with a stone spear point embedded in the hip, around which new bone had healed. Kennewick Man was about 5-foot-8, 40 or 50 years old, and right handed. His arm bones were noticeably bent, possibly from muscles developed over a lifetime of vigorous spear hunting. Although he was found far inland, in shallow water in a reservoir of the Columbia River, near a golf course, his bone chemistry suggested he spent most of his life on the Pacific Coast, eating fish and other marine life.
He had been deliberately buried — on his back, arms at sides, palms facing down, clearly ceremonial — and the remains were only recently scattered by erosion.
Early efforts to extract DNA failed, but examinations of the skull shape suggested the man was a white European, which would have thoroughly undermined the established understanding of early migration to North America.
What is known is that there was once a land bridge from Siberia across the Bering Sea, which allowed early populations to reach North America from Asia about 25,000 years ago, and then move southward down the Pacific Coast before spreading east to the Atlantic and south into South America. Later migrations came by sea, first over the Pacific, and only relatively recently from Europe, first by Vikings, and then the fateful voyage of Columbus.
Proof of Kennewick Man’s Asian or Polynesian heritage would have meant ocean migration happened much earlier than currently thought. This would have threatened indigenous origin myths, and forced mainstream science into a total rethink of prehistoric human migration. As it turns out, though, the skeleton — temporarily held in the Burke Museum at the University of Washington — is now likely to be turned over for traditional burial as a Native American.
As Willerslev put it in a press conference, it is an ironic outcome, given the vigour with which anthropologists fought Indian tribes for access to the bones.
The land Kennewick Man was found on is controlled by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the government backed the native claims. In 2000, the U.S. Interior Department ruled the remains should be handed over to five tribes who claimed him as their own, under laws that protect native grave sites. But anthropologists sued for access, and in 2004, a court ordered that the remains be made available to scientists, largely because the government and native tribes had failed to demonstrate kinship.
This was mainly a technical problem, as all efforts to extract DNA had found the bones were impossibly contaminated with genetic material from the environment. This latest experiment, however, was able to extract a full genome from a small piece of hand bone. With that, and with DNA samples from the local Colville tribe, it was relatively straightforward to show Kennewick Man was Native American all along, either an ancestor of modern native populations, or a cousin with a recent common ancestor.
“We’re just glad the findings are able to prove what we’ve maintained all along,” Jim Boyd, chairman of the Colville tribal council, told the Seattle Times. “For us, it’s great news. ... We want him back in the ground for his final resting place, and not to be poked and prodded.”