Kennewick Man: The Ancient One and the Fight Over His Bones

On 28 July 1996, two college students, Will Thomas and David Deacy, waded into the Columbia River at Columbia Park in Kennewick, Washington, to get a good view of a hydroplane race. Thomas stepped on something round and hard. It was a human skull.

The county coroner called in a local archaeologist, James Chatters, who found more bones on the river bank and in the shallows, eventually assembling around 90% of a skeleton. From the shape of the skull, Chatters initially thought he was looking at a European settler. Then he noticed a stone point lodged in the man’s hip bone.

An old man with a hard life

Radiocarbon dating placed the skeleton at about 9,000 years old, in the early Holocene. The man was middle-aged, perhaps 40 to 55, and about 1.7 metres tall. His bones tell a story of injury and toughness:

• A stone projectile point of Cascade type embedded in his right hip, healed over, which he had survived.
• Several healed injuries, including fractured ribs, a shoulder injury and a small depressed fracture on the forehead.
• Heavy wear from a physically demanding life.

Isotope analysis of his bones suggested that much of his diet was marine or salmon-based, even though the Columbia River site is hundreds of kilometres from the coast. He may have travelled far or lived along a river with rich runs of salmon.

Why the skull started a fight

By 1996, the standard picture of the first Americans was that they arrived from Siberia or Beringia towards the end of the last Ice Age, and that their descendants were the Native American peoples. (See when humans reached the Americas.) Early skull measurements of Kennewick Man, by Chatters and later by Douglas Owsley of the Smithsonian and Richard Jantz of the University of Tennessee, suggested a long, narrow face and skull that looked unlike most modern Native Americans, and closer to some Pacific and East Asian populations. Some scientists took this as evidence of a separate early wave of settlers.

Native nations saw it differently. The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Yakama Nation, the Nez Perce Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and the Wanapum Band all considered the man an ancestor. They called him the Ancient One, and, under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990, they asked for him to be returned and reburied.

Skeleton in the courtroom

The Army Corps of Engineers, which controlled the land, prepared to hand over the remains. But a group of eight scientists, led by anthropologist Robson Bonnichsen, sued to stop that and study the skeleton. NAGPRA covers remains that are “Native American”, and the key question was whether Kennewick Man could be shown to have a relationship to any present-day tribe.

In 2002 Judge John Jelderks ruled that it had not been. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in 2004. Scientists were allowed to study the skeleton, held at the Burke Museum in Seattle, and the results were published in a 2014 book edited by Owsley and Jantz.

The case exposed a deep tension. To the scientists, an exceptional 9,000-year-old skeleton was a unique window on the first Americans. To the tribes, it was a relative whose burial they had a right and religious duty to conduct. The case shaped how archaeologists and Indigenous communities approach ancient remains ever since.

The genome settles the question

In 2015 a team led by Morten Rasmussen and Eske Willerslev at the University of Copenhagen sequenced DNA from a fragment of Kennewick Man’s hand bone. It was published in Nature on 18 June 2015. The findings:

• Kennewick Man was more closely related to living Native Americans than to any other population in the world.
• Among the populations tested, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation were the most closely related, though other tribes were not available for comparison because they had not agreed to take part.
• He was not especially close to the Ainu of Japan or Polynesians, as the skull shape had suggested.

The likeliest explanation for the unusual skull is that early Americans were physically diverse, and later drift and mixture changed the skull shapes of their descendants. Skull shape, it turned out, is a poor guide to ancestry. It is a reminder, as with skin colour, that visible features can mislead.

Homecoming

With DNA confirming the tribes’ long-held position, Congress included a provision in the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act of December 2016 authorising the return of the remains. On 18 February 2017, roughly 200 members of the five tribes gathered at a private ceremony and reburied the Ancient One in an undisclosed location in the Columbia River basin. The site is not publicly known.

Why Kennewick Man matters

Kennewick Man showed how the same skeleton can be seen as a scientific specimen and a revered ancestor at the same time. His case also pushed research in a new direction. Recent studies of ancient American DNA, including the genomes of the Anzick child from Montana (about 12,700 years old) and the Spirit Cave remains in Nevada, have been done in consultation with descendant communities, with agreement before sequencing. The Ancient One’s reburial is not the end of the science, but a change in how it is done.