SCIENCE : Fate of Indian Burial Research Hangs by a Hair : DNA testing of a single strand is halted after Native Americans claim it falls under act that protects human remains.
An archeological breakthrough that could help answer some of the oldest and most perplexing questions about human history has been stopped dead in its tracks by a strict interpretation of recent legislation designed to protect the sanctity of ancient burial grounds.
And archeologist Robson Bonnichsen of Oregon State University believes the issue could eventually shut down many excavation sites in North America and threaten scores of other federally funded projects.
Bonnichsen is on the cutting edge of a technology that could answer such basic questions as where the first inhabitants of North America came from and how they migrated across this continent and into South America.
The key to solving this mystery, which has bedeviled scientists, has been around for thousands of years and was literally right under the feet of archeologists.
It is human hair, preserved in the mud and clay into which it was shed. And until Bonnichsen recently began subjecting ancient hair samples to DNA analysis, no one realized its importance. DNA, which carries the genetic blueprint for every living organism, could offer scientists the best opportunity they have ever had to trace human history back through time.
A single hair could contain enough DNA to reveal the ethnic origin--and thus the cultural history--of someone who crossed the Bering land bridge from Siberia to North America more than 12,000 years ago as part of the first settling of the Americas, Bonnichsen said.
That is why archeologists around the world were electrified earlier this year by Bonnichsen’s announcement that he and his colleagues had managed to extract DNA from an ancient human hair found in a site in southwestern Montana. Although his work is in its embryonic stage, the announcement was heralded as a breakthrough.
However, as he cradled a single strand of human hair in surgically gloved hands at his laboratory here recently, he told of a chain of events that has--at least for now--curtailed his research.
The federal Bureau of Land Management, which controls the desolate region near Dillon, Mont., where Bonnichsen has been excavating, has rescinded his permit to work at the site and ordered him to return the human hair for burial by Native Americans who inhabit the area.
At issue is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, a federal law designed to protect the privacy and sanctity of burial grounds. Two Montana tribes, the Kootenai-Salish and the Shoshone-Bannock, appealed to the bureau on the grounds that human hair is covered by the act, and thus subject to protection and repatriation.
Bonnichsen, who is director of the university’s Center for Study of the First Americans, scoffs at that contention--claiming that human hair is shed naturally throughout a person’s lifetime and that the law was not intended to include naturally shed human products.
“We don’t think that human hair that was naturally shed in life has anything to do with this act,” he said. He and attorney Alan L. Schneider of Eugene, Ore., have petitioned the federal government to make sure that regulations now being developed reflect that.
Top federal officials seem to agree with that position, including Francis P. McManamon, chief archeologist for the National Park Service who is directing the formulation of the new regulations. McManamon said hair that is not found in association with human remains and was apparently shed during life should not be included under the act.
Montana’s Native Americans strongly disagree.
“Under the law, if it (hair) is found in an archeological complex, it is a human remain,” said Karen Atkinson, attorney for the Kootenai-Salish tribe.
Atkinson said her people asked the BLM to rescind Bonnichsen’s permit earlier this year after they discovered that he had been excavating the area for nine years. Under federal law, she said, the bureau is required to consult with Native Americans in the area before granting a permit, and that had not been done.
The presence of human hair in the site, she added, further strengthens the tribes’ position.
In the meantime, Gary Smith, the Bureau of Land Management’s archeologist in Montana, is left in the hot seat, trying to mediate. Smith is the man who shut down Bonnichsen’s site, although he says the archeologist’s failure to complete some required reports and the tribes’ overall objections to the excavation also figured into that decision.
Armed only with proposed regulations published in the Federal Register on May 28, 1993, Smith said he had no choice but to agree with the Native Americans. Those regulations define human remains as “including but not limited to bones, teeth, hair, ashes or mummified or otherwise preserved soft tissues of a person of Native American ancestry.”
Bonnichsen and his center have asked that final regulations exclude “naturally shed” human hair, but Atkinson said that would not resolve the conflict. The law specifies that human remains are protected, and she maintains that human hair is clearly a human remain. Any attempt to change that in the regulations could lead to a legal challenge.
For Bonnichsen, the quandary goes far beyond the importance of his single site.
“Hair is the artifact that human beings produce the most of,” he said. It apparently is easily preserved by nature, so it is probably present in many if not most archeological sites. If it is classified as a human remain, all sites with hair in them, in effect, would be considered burial sites, curtailing archeological research, Bonnichsen said.
The impact could also extend to other projects, he added. If a soil engineer finds a hair in his sample, “he’s got a problem.”
Bonnichsen said he was just starting to make headway when his project was halted. Much remains to be understood about how much the presence of human hair can tell us, but he is convinced his work will enrich the understanding of human history.
It came about almost by accident.
Bonnichsen was working at his Montana site in 1986 when one of his colleagues picked up a rock and noticed what appeared to be a hair on it.
The short strand appeared ancient, Bonnichsen said. It was sent off to Pennsylvania State University, where molecular biologists subjected it to DNA analysis. It was, in fact, a human hair.
Although that particular sample had been contaminated by the man who picked it up, the results convinced Bonnichsen that he had come across a valuable tool.
He teamed up with Marvin Beatty, dean of the college of agriculture at the University of Wisconsin, to take the project a step further. Beatty developed a technique for separating hair from soil by immersing the soil in water and floating the hair to the surface. The solution is passed through a fine screen that traps the hair.
“So we started a major flotation operation,” Bonnichsen said. The results were startling. Almost every bucket of soil produced at least one hair.
It may tell a great story, he said, by allowing scientists to trace the genetic history of a single group of early Americans, or even answer health and nutrition questions about those who passed by so long ago.
It also holds the promise of enhancing the reliability of dates for archeological sites. The age of hair can be determined relatively precisely by examining it in a particle accelerator, which determines the ratio of carbon isotopes that decay at known rates.
Erwin Taylor, chairman of the department of anthropology at UC Riverside, used his university’s accelerator to date hair from a New Mexico site at 12,000 years old.
It requires several hairs to make a sample large enough to carry out the dating, thus increasing the chances of error, but Taylor said he and his colleagues have made so much progress in recent weeks that that could soon change. Dating of “a single strand of hair is not too far off,” he added.
Bonnichsen believes the new technique will be particularly helpful in determining which early Americans inhabited which sites, where they came from and how they migrated across the continent.
But now he fears he may never get the chance.
“This thing could kill it,” he said. “The whole effort could be snuffed out.”
Excavation Site
DNA taken from a human hair excavated at a site near Dillon, in desolate southwestern Montana, could provide a genetic history lesson on the region. But federal authorities revoked the permit allowing work on the site, based on laws protecting Native American burial grounds.
