Anthropologist Is Digging Up Controversy With 9,000-Year-Old Bones
He was a tall, lanky man with a jutting nose, prominent chin and good teeth who survived at least two close calls before dying of an infection that probably stemmed from old wounds.
More than 9,000 years later, the discovery of his skeleton in a city park has started a battle between anthropologists who want to study him and American Indians who claim him as an ancestor and want him immediately reburied.
Anthropologist Jim Chatters excavated the skeleton after it was discovered July 28 in Columbia Park on the banks of the Columbia River in Kennewick, 50 miles southeast of here.
Radio-carbon dating by UC Riverside showed that the bones--the oldest complete skeleton found in the Northwest--are from sometime between 7265 B.C. and 7535 B.C., Chatters said.
“When I found out, I just kind of took a deep breath and went, ‘Oh my God, is this going to be complicated!’ ” he said.
He was right.
The Colville Confederated Tribes, Nez Perce tribe, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla and the Yakama Indian Nation all claim the remains as ancestral--representative of aboriginal bands that roamed the region. Three of the tribes want the remains reburied without further study. The Colville indicate a willingness to have the skeleton studied.
Chatters, however, does not believe the long-dead man is of American Indian ancestry.
Scientists determine race by comparing measurements at several different points of the skull. The skull has Caucasian features, he said, not those characteristic of American Indians.
“Because it’s old and from around here, they claim it as an ancestor,” Chatters said, frustration evident in his voice. “But its physical characteristics don’t resemble them.”
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, under which the tribes are seeking reburial of the remains, “wasn’t meant to apply to ones this ancient--when they can shed light on the origin of people in the New World as a whole,” he said.
“It just doesn’t seem appropriate to me for one group to dictate what people can learn from something that ancient.”
Chatters, who has worked as a consultant since he left a job as cultural resource manager for Battelle Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, wants the skeleton to remain in the hands of scientists.
The bones, which cannot be photographed in deference to tribal sensitivities, are in federal custody as negotiations continue with the tribes. Chatters expects the matter will be resolved in court.
“I say that with resignation, not anticipation,” he said.
Much can be learned from the bones of a man who walked the region eons ago, Chatters said in a recent interview.
“It pertains to the peopling of the New World. It pertains to understanding the evolution of our species and the movement of our species around the globe,” he said.
He has already learned quite a bit.
The man was between 45 and 55 when he died. He stood 5 feet, 9 inches, tall for his time. His diet was mainly soft--probably a lot of meat and fish. He had little arthritis in his back and leg joints, indicating he had not carried many heavy loads.
His face was dominated by his nose.
“It’s the biggest nose I ever saw,” Chatters said. “It comes virtually straight out.”
Most interesting, however, are the scars from old battles.
An inch-wide stone spearhead is embedded in the man’s hip. And he suffered a chest wound that broke his ribs in at least seven places and left his left arm withered.
“Either he fell on something or got whacked on by a large foot or horn or something,” Chatters said.
“He was a tough, tough guy.”
The infection that killed him was probably related to the spear-point wound, he said.
“You can see that on the outer surface of the skull he had a systemic infection that caused him problems at several times,” Chatters said.
The skeleton was discovered by two local men, Will Thomas, 21, and Dave Deacey, 20, as they waded in the Columbia during hydroplane races.
Floods earlier this year may have churned the river enough to unearth the skeleton, said Chatters, who lives in Richland.
Armand Minthorn, a Umatilla tribal board member from Pendleton, Ore., recently told the Seattle Times that he felt the bones should be allowed to rest undisturbed.
“How would you feel if we came into your cemetery and dug up your ancestors?” he asked.
No problem, said David Murray, a social anthropologist who taught at Brandeis University until two years ago and now runs a Washington-based research foundation.
“Any time you find an ancient European specimen, you do the same thing: Dig it up and get it as quickly as possible into the laboratory,” Murray said.
“There are remarkable things you can derive about the quality of life, disease susceptibility, diet,” he said.
“Who’s to say that’s not all of our heritage? It’s the human story.”
But that view is not unanimous, even among scientists.
Lucille Lewis Johnson, professor of anthropology at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., said the tribes’ wishes should be respected.
“If the groups that are interested in having him reburied are local natives who have a history of occupation of that area, even if one cannot directly say that this individual was one of their ancestors, they in a sense have a presumptive relationship with him,” Johnson said.
“If they are determined he be reburied, then it seems to me that he should be.”
