My Bones Beat Your Bones, Nyah, Nyah, Nyah

When science changes its mind, we get very uneasy.

IS it an active volcano, or isn’t it? Do antibiotics work, or don’t they? C’mon, you’re the ones with the lab coats and the slide rules. This IS science, right? Well then--just the facts, Doc.

Yet “science” is theory and conclusion arrived at by evaluating evidence. Evidence added up to evolution, not Genesis. Evidence added up to an orbiting Earth, not a fixed one. Change the evidence--a “dormant” volcano blows its top, an antibiotic runs up against an infection it can’t beat--and science’s theories and conclusions have to change too.

Now science is considering a pair of human thigh bones that could help to send the prevailing scientific theory about the First Americans into rewrite.

They were discovered on Santa Rosa Island back in the Eisenhower Administration, and four decades later, higher tech testing has found that these bones are 13,000 years old, perhaps the oldest human remains found in North America; indeed, this ancient woman could have walked the shores of Santa Rosa Island in the wet footprints of the pygmy mammoths.

You wouldn’t think rubbing two ancient bones together could fuel a revolution.

But remember the textbook illustrations of “the first Americans”? The blitzkrieg arrows tracked tiny figures in skins trudging ever south over a vanished Bering Straits land bridge, and suddenly the pre-Columbian Americas are populated.

The female femurs of the Channel Islands are now laid on the scales of evidence--more than a dozen finds in the span of a few years--that maybe the Bering-migrant forebears of current-day native Americans were not here alone. Maybe they were not even here first.

Think of the disputes over who “discovered” modern America, Columbus or Norsemen or space aliens. Now multiply that by a continent, and you see why the Channel Islands woman is both the oldest and the newest player in paleo politics.

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After long decades of doing dirt to native Americans, the United States made a few posthumous atonements. One of these was a 1990 government policy that “repatriates” ancient bones for formal burial.

Here is where the bureaucrats and the labcoats are about to butt heads. The government policy is based on a scientific theory of 40-plus years’ standing that the only ancient Americans were the landbridge arrivals, the so-called Clovis people.

So if the Clovis/native Americans were here first, and these are the oldest human remains found, therefore they must be Clovis, in which case they are not ossified guinea pigs for testing but human remains reqiring burial.

But also since 1990, scientists have been rethinking that theory; the Channel Island femurs are among very old “finds” -- in Texas, Idaho, Montana, Argentina too -- that could signal other precolumbian immigrants, and other ethnic strains, migrated here from southern Asia and beyond.

The diciest of these is the 9,300-year-old Kennewick Man skeleton, found in Washington state, with a skull that looked far less like Clovis Americans and more like, well, actor Patrick Stewart -- or more precisely, ancient southern Asians.

Native Americans want to bury K-man as their undisputed forebear, without further study. Researchers want to examine him to find whether he really IS their forebear, something that ancient DNA techniques are making possible. And the government unhappily finds itself being expected to play Solomon.

Chief plaintiff in a lawsuit to keep K-man from being interred without science’s scrutiny is Rob Bonnichsen, director for the Study of First Americans at Oregon State University, whom I called about the Channel Island “find.”

Frankly, he figures that the Americas of the 1990s should be delighted that new data point “not to a single colonizing event but multiple . . . We were a melting pot from Day One, that’s what this record is starting to say.”

Soon we will know whether it can be said of old bones what is said of new ones,in every anatomy class that has ever convened over a lifeless human being: that the dead teach the living.

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I hope California school children still learn the story of the Yahi called Ishi, last survivor of a tribe obliterated by bounty hunters and disease. He died in 1916, and was cremated as he wished--all but his brain, which still bobs in a jar of formaldehyde at the Smithsonian Institution.

From the day Ishi was found in Oroville, starving and terrified, he lived at UC Berkeley’s anthropology museum as a living exhibit, and recreated out of his sad and orphaned present his people’s rich and distant past . . . and thus allowed the rest of us to know, and in our knowledge to understand, and atone.

Patt Morrison’s e-mail is patt.morrison@latimes.com