9,300-Year-Old Bones Declared Indian Remains
SEATTLE — He was probably only a teenager when he got hit with the sharpened stone arrowhead, which struck him so hard it buried itself in his hipbone. But he managed to get away from his attacker, and lived to what was a distinguished old age of 45, maybe 50.
The now-fabled Kennewick Man, whose bones were found in 1996 on the banks of the Columbia River, “turned out to be one tough hunter-gatherer,” said Francis McManamon, consulting archeologist for the National Park Service.
Kennewick Man is, according to radiocarbon dating tests released Thursday, 9,300 years old. He was also, federal archeologists have concluded, a Native American.
Those findings--pending the result of final cultural studies--establish Kennewick Man’s skeletal remains as among the oldest and most complete ever found in North America. And scientists hope he might provide answers to perplexing questions about the continent’s first human inhabitants.
But federal officials still must rule on the controversial issue of what connection can be drawn between a man who died 9,300 years ago and modern Native American tribes.
That action, scheduled to occur before a court-imposed deadline in March, will determine whether native tribes have the right to reclaim Kennewick Man’s bones and bury them, or scientists can proceed with DNA and other studies to explore suspicions that he may have ancestral connections to parts of the world never firmly linked to early North American migrations.
The key to the interest in Kennewick Man always has been his long, narrow skull--cranial features, originally described as “Caucasoid,” that do not match those of any modern Native American population.
McManamon, who has led the U.S. Interior Department scientific team trying to classify the remains, said Kennewick Man is most likely descended from north Asians who--under what is the most commonly accepted belief about the early populating of the continent--migrated across the Bering Strait via a land bridge that existed 12,000 years ago.
But the issue is far from settled, and a number of the country’s leading archeologists say Kennewick Man could shed light on the possibility of other migrations from other parts of the world.
The Bering Strait connection “is a very likely scenario; however, there are other scenarios,” said Vance Haynes, professor emeritus of geophysics at the University of Arizona. Haynes is one of eight scientists who have filed suit seeking access to the remains for further study.
“A lot of us feel now there wasn’t just an initial migration to the New World, and everything evolved out of that. It’s looking like there were a number of migrations over time, and from different areas,” including possibly Southeast Asia or even Europe, Haynes said.
Richard Jantz, professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee, has examined most of the earliest skeletons of North American inhabitants.
Also a plaintiff in the lawsuit, Jantz is dubious about some scientists’ suggestions that evolution could account for the difference between Kennewick Man’s skull features and those of modern Native Americans.
“Of course, it’s possible,” he said. “But you know what’s funny about that idea? . . . Modern Native Americans bear a strong resemblance to east Asians, especially Siberians, of the present day. So what McManamon would be asking us to believe is that Native Americans started off looking like Kennewick Man and in Asia and in America the evolution took a similar path, and they evolved to look similar. That’s unlikely, in my view.
“I think the reason modern Native Americans look like east Asians is because there’s been recent contact, recent gene flow, recent migration. And that these recent migrations displaced the more ancient people that were here,” Jantz said.
That theory goes directly to the question of “cultural affiliation” between Kennewick Man and modern Native Americans, a finding the Department of Interior must make before tribes in the Columbia Valley can succeed in their claim to get the remains and bury them.
In the tribes’ view, it is not a matter open to question.
“We’ve always known it was Native American,” said Rex Buck, a spokesman for the Wanapum Tribe, a non-federally recognized tribe whose homeland is nearest to where Kennewick Man was found.
“Kennewick Man carried the teachings of when time began. Our people were given disciplines to live by, and we have followed these disciplines throughout time. That’s why we are waiting for the time when our ancestor can be put back in the ground where he came from,” said Richard Buck, another tribe member.
“I was here last year to witness the cutting up of the bones [during testing to date the skeleton],” he added. “That really hurt, to breathe in, to witness something that never should have taken place.”
The Interior Department has assigned scientists to look at a variety of areas that, under the law, can be used to establish cultural connections. They will look at issues ranging from linguistics to similarities in tools, housing and food.
But establishing cultural links across a span of 9,000 years is likely to be extraordinarily difficult, scientists said.
“What the law asks is, does Kennewick Man belong to an identifiable earlier group, and is there a relationship of shared group identity that can reasonably be traced between that identifiable earlier group and a modern, federally recognized tribe,” said Keith Kintigh, an Arizona State University anthropology professor who is president of the Society for American Archeology.
“I don’t doubt that there were self-identified groups 10,000 years ago, but to detect those in the archeological record . . . no one has ever done that to my knowledge,” Kintigh said.
