Skeleton Embodies Debate on Americas’ First People

It was a Sunday afternoon at the hydroplane races on the Columbia River. A couple of college students kicked through the shallows and stumbled upon a human skull in the muck. Cool, they thought. A murder.

Soon, several people were sloshing through the sludge. By the end of the day, forensic anthropologist James Chatters had most of a skeleton laid out in his basement. It was old, clearly: no recent crime scene here. Yet it didn’t look like the kind of Indian burial that often turned up along this vast salmon highway in central Washington.

It was long and narrow, with an almost delicate brow. It had the receding cheekbones and angular jaw common not to Native Americans, but to Europeans and south Asians. A white settler buried along the river a couple hundred years ago? A fur trapper perhaps?

A few days later, Chatters got a call from the radiocarbon lab at UC Riverside. “Are you ready for this?” he was asked. Eight thousand four hundred years old.

“Unfortunately,” Chatters says, “it got real ugly real fast.”

He knew he had one of the few, and one of the best-preserved, Paleo-American skeletons in existence. Local Indian tribes, backed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, believed he had something else: a Native American ancestor that ought to be returned for reburial without further study.

The debate over the yellowed skeleton known as Kennewick Man has proved much more portentous than a simple argument over who ought to have custody of his bones.

The remains, uncovered last summer and now estimated at 9,200 years old, provide strong evidence that the New World’s earliest arrivals may not have been direct ancestors of modern-day American Indians. Instead, many of the latest studies suggest, America’s earliest inhabitants may have arrived in migrations thousands of years earlier from places much farther away, most probably southern Asia, but perhaps even northern Europe.

Kennewick was the latest in a series of finds and reexaminations beginning in 1992 that have shared a startling common denominator: The oldest of the skeletons appear to have Eurasian features, as opposed to the northern Asian features, common to modern Native Americans, that are characteristic of later-date remains.

No one knows whether the apparent dissimilarity means the earliest inhabitants came from a different place or population, or whether their appearance simply evolved over time. Indeed, many caution that with only about a dozen of the oldest skeletons to examine, it is impossible to draw sweeping conclusions about whether the differences are racial, evolutionary, or just variations of an individual man or woman’s face.

But the issue is potentially explosive because it raises questions about the prehistoric foundation of Native Americans in their ancestral lands. More immediately, it lays open the question of who wins possession of the oldest remains.

Tribal Group, Scientists at Odds

In Kennewick Man’s case, a group of southern Washington and northern Oregon tribes have demanded a halt to all studies and immediate reburial--a move that a coalition of some of the nation’s top anthropologists, pressing for a court order to allow further studies, claim would be an affront to historical inquiry.

“Some scientists say that if this individual is not studied further, we, as Indians, will be destroying evidence of our own history,” says Armand Minthorn, a member of the board of trustees and religious leader with the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla.

“We already know our history. It is passed on to us through our elders and through our religious practices,” Minthorn says. “If this individual is truly over 9,000 years old, that only substantiates our belief that he is Native American. From our oral histories, we know that our people have been part of this land since the beginning of time.”

Alan Schneider, the lawyer representing the scientists seeking access to the Kennewick remains, wonders why the world should have to take the Umatillas’ word for it.

“The subtly implied message is that somehow Native Americans own the history of this country,” Schneider said. “What’s going on here is not a question of whether Native Americans can believe and follow their traditions, but it’s a question of whether all of the rest of the country can be required to follow their traditions.”

In one of the first federal court opinions to explore issues raised by the latest finds and by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act--which requires custody of Indian burials to go to local tribes--a U.S. magistrate in Portland, Ore., in June sharply reprimanded the U.S. Corps of Engineers for moving to hand over Kennewick Man.

For the first time, the court said the federal government has an obligation to first explore what constitutes an “indigenous” people--a potential minefield that could call into question the underpinnings of New World history.

“From a strictly scientific standpoint, the fact is that we do not really know how very ancient human remains might be related to contemporary Indian peoples,” U.S. Magistrate Judge John Jelderks wrote.

Even assuming, the court said, previous conventional wisdom--that modern-day Native Americans descended from northern Asians who crossed over a now-submerged land bridge from Siberia to Alaska more than 11,500 years ago--does that mean these people are “indigenous”?

Issue of Multiple Migrations

What if there had been earlier migrations, and they moved on across the continent, to be followed by others? What if all of the descendants of the original migration died through one of the many natural catastrophes that beset the early Americas, becoming an evolutionary dead end and leaving no living descendants? Who then would be a Native American?

For that matter, if Kennewick Man is a Native American, who are his progeny? Chatters has done the math. Or tried to. When he attempted to calculate where Kennewick Man’s genes would have spread to after 400 to 450 generations, his calculator ran out of digits.

“In 450 generations, if each generation has 1.1 successful offspring, you’re talking about a huge number. I gave up at 265 generations, when you basically cover the population of the world,” Chatters said. “If he had descendants--and it’s really unlikely that he did, since he was apparently injured for a lot of his life--then the probability is he’s related to just about everyone, period.”

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The first inkling that something was amiss in the history books--the old ones about the original Bering Sea land bridge migration--came in 1992.

Two anthropologists conducting biometrical studies of the earliest-dated New World human skulls reported that these people appeared to be uniquely different from more modern Native Americans, or their purported northern Asian forebears, resembling most closely a group of people in Southeast Asia. Smithsonian Institution researchers found potential resemblances to European populations, including the archaic Norse.

Specifically, said anthropologist D. Gentry Steele, there were “structural similarities” to the mysterious Ainu, the aboriginal inhabitants of the Japanese islands, a population that dates back about 30,000 years. Before they intermarried with the Japanese, they had European faces, wavy hair and thick beards.

Scientists looking at two ancient skeletons found in Nevada, one of them dating back 9,200 years, again found certain generalized features seen in contemporary Caucasian populations. Kennewick Man now amplifies these findings.

“What is happening?” asked Robson Bonnichsen, head of Oregon State University’s Center for the Study of the First Americans and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit seeking further study of the Kennewick Man. “Do we have uniquely different early populations? Do we have multiple different early populations? It poses a major new research frontier.”

Turning Back the Anthropological Clock

Even as the western American finds have opened the possibilities on where the New World’s original settlers may have come from, work in South America has busted open the barrier on when. Until recently, the earliest accepted archeological material in the New World dated back no more than 11,000 years.

Archeologists in Chile recently uncovered strong evidence of occupation at least 12,000 years ago. Some material at the site could date back 30,000 years. Other old material is showing up in places like Brazil.

“That means people, if they came across the Bering land bridge, came long before [the previously accepted 11,500 years ago],” said Donald Grayson, a University of Washington anthropologist who was part of a study team that verified the Chile findings.

“My guess is we’ve got multiple migrations into the New World,” Grayson said. With the apparent difference in physical characteristics, he said, “it is possible that we’re looking at evolutionary change through time, but it is fully possible that the original occupants of the New World came from further south in Asia than we originally assumed.”

Once those doors of possibility are open, more follow. Suddenly, anthropologists see the possibility of Eurasian migrants arriving by boat, or across packed ice, or European travelers moving across the northern Atlantic from the East. Kennewick Man could provide a vital link in the database, a next step in the long road to answering who and where and when.

“Its antiquity alone,” says Steele, “places it among the rarest of human remains that can tell us anything about the peopling of the Americas.”

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Imagine, then, Chatters with the Kennewick Man in his laboratory on a residential side street, his sole authority a contract with the Benton County coroner. The Corps of Engineers had issued a permit for excavation of the bones, which were unearthed on federal land. But word of the find was spreading fast, and already the local Indian tribes were demanding return of the bones.

Chatters had examined the skeleton and photographed the skull. He had taken it down to Kennewick General Hospital for an X-ray, probing a dark object that appeared to be lodged in the pelvic bone. When the X-ray didn’t show the material, Chatters ordered up a CAT scan and identified the leaf-shaped point of a spear--a strong argument that Kennewick Man was a Native American; But 9,200 years ago? And who’s to say he wasn’t a wanderer killed by a Native American spear?

UC Davis was only halfway through the DNA analysis when the Corps of Engineers ordered them to stop. The tribes were enraged, since the DNA test had involved pulverizing a small segment of bone. All the parties were called to corps headquarters in Walla Walla, Wash.

The tribes cited NAGPRA, the 1990 federal law that was Congress’ response to years of abuses on the part of museums and archeologists that had left Native American burials stacked up on museum shelves. The law says that human remains that can be linked to Native Americans must be returned to them directly.

“They wanted me to say no more studies,” Chatters recalls. “There’s one of me, there’s 11 of them. I’m listening. And they were getting pretty aggressive . . . talking in my face: ‘No more analysis.’ I said, ‘No more bone will be destroyed.’ ”

Chatters had been phoning around for more sophisticated measuring equipment. The Smithsonian Institution offered to fly him to Washington with the bones to do all the necessary tests. But before he could leave, the coroner phoned Chatters. “I’ve got to come get the bones,” he said.

The Corps published a notice of intent to return the bones to the tribes, a move it believed necessary to comply with NAGPRA.

Chatters was frantic. He hadn’t yet done a work-up on the discrete genetic characteristics; he hadn’t done the digital analysis on the teeth; he didn’t even have photos of most of the skeleton beyond the skull. Nonetheless, he began placing Kennewick Man in a box.

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The Corps has not handed the bones over to the tribes, halted by the court’s ordering last month of an exhaustive review before any determination can be made. The tribes, in the meantime, have been allowed to hold traditional ceremonies in the vault where Kennewick Man rests at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in nearby Richland.

What has been missing in the scientific hand-wringing so far, they say, is the fact that Kennewick Man was more than a set of bones. He was a man. The tribes call him Oid-pa-ma-na-ti-thayt, or Ancient One.

“The scientists are claiming that Native Americans are descendants from people that crossed a land bridge. We strongly oppose that theory. They have no proof that we did not originate here in the Americas. The tribes . . . always believe that Native Americans were created here, and they did not cross no land bridge,” Minthorn said.

“As the Umatilla tribe, we have oral histories that go back 10,000 years,” he said. “We know what they ate. We know how they lived. We know how they died, we know how they were created.”

The national debate over Native American burials wasn’t put to rest with NAGPRA. Tribes in recent years have been beefing up their own archeological departments and raising questions about some of the very underpinnings of modern North American anthropology.

“By saying something is Caucasian, they can raise the question of putting a time barrier beyond which Indians can’t claim skeletons,” said Vine Deloria Jr., a Lakota Indian scholar and University of Colorado professor.

“Just ask yourself this question,” he said of the Kennewick Man. “If this thing’s been lying in the Columbia River all this time, and there surely have been discharges of God knows what from [the nearby nuclear reservation at] Hanford, how can you run radioactive tests on this thing [to establish an age]? . . . You’re building on the speculation of scientists of the last century, and no one has the courage inside academia to say there’s nothing to this stuff.”

Deloria and other scholars are raising increasingly vocal arguments for the scientific validity of oral tradition as one way of establishing history.

“All any Indian wants is to have people say, well, we’ll take a look at your theory, of what your people remember,” he said. “Why should an Indian oral tradition be invalid, and a scientific tradition that frequently has to admit its mistakes, why should that be more valid?”

In addition to deciding who has custody of the bones, the federal court in the Kennewick Man case will take on in the coming months an even broader question: Is there an absolute right to study, to inquire about the past, even when some believe the past should be allowed to sleep?

Increasingly, academia itself is willing to consider alternatives.

“One of the critical issues here is whose data is better than whose,” said James Nason, a professor of anthropology at the University of Washington who is part Native American. “Is the only kind of information that’s worth relying on information that’s derived from a Western scientific perspective? Depending on how you answer that question makes a universe of difference.”