Kennewick Man
Kennewick Man or Ancient One was a Paleo-Indian whose skeletal remains were found washed out on a bank of the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington, on July 28, 1996. Radiocarbon tests show the man lived about 8,900 to 9,000 years before present, making his skeleton one of the most complete ever found this old in the Americas, and thus of high scientific interest for understanding the peopling of the Americas.
Skull of Kennewick Man. Resin cast by James Chatters | |
| Common name | Kennewick Man |
|---|---|
| Species | Homo sapiens |
| Age | 8.9k – 9k years BP |
| Place discovered | Columbia Park in Kennewick, Washington |
| Date discovered | July 28, 1996 |
| Discovered by | Will Thomas and David Deacy |
The discovery precipitated a nearly twenty-year-long dispute. Native American tribes asserted legal rights to rebury the man under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), a law which protects Indian remains from disrespectful treatment, such as storage in labs, museums, and private collections. The United States Army Corps of Engineers, that holds jurisdiction over the land where the remains were found, retained legal custody. The science community wished to conduct research on the skeleton, and asserted he was only distantly related to today's Native Americans and more closely resembled Polynesian or Southeast Asian peoples, a finding that would exempt the case from NAGPRA.
Technology for analyzing ancient DNA had been improving since 1996, and in June 2015 scientists at the University of Copenhagen announced that Kennewick Man is a genetic ancestor of Native Americans, including the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, the region where the bones were found. In September 2016, the US House and Senate passed legislation to return the remains to a coalition of Columbia Basin tribes. The Ancient One was buried according to Indian traditions on February 18, 2017, with 200 members of five Columbia Basin tribes in attendance, at an undisclosed location in the area. Within the scientific community since the 1990s, arguments for a non-Indian ancient history of the Americas, including by ancient peoples from Europe, have been losing ground in the face of ancient DNA analysis. Kennewick Man symbolically marks an "end of a [supposed] non-Indian ancient North America".