Corps determines Kennewick Man is Native American

The ancient skeleton known as Kennewick Man is related to modern Native American tribes, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Wednesday, opening the process for returning to a tribe for burial one of the oldest and most complete set of bones ever found in North America.

The Northwestern Division of the corps said its decision was based on a review of new information, particularly recently published DNA and skeletal analyses.

The corps, which owns the remains, said the skeleton is now covered by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

The 8,500-year-old remains were discovered in 1996 in southeastern Washington near the Columbia River in Kennewick, triggering a lengthy legal fight between tribes and scientists over whether the bones should be buried immediately or studied. The bones will remain at the Burke Museum in Seattle until the corps determines which tribe will receive them. The next step is for interested tribes to submit a claim to acquire the skeleton for burial, said Michael Coffey, a spokeswoman for the corps in Portland, Oregon.

Determining which tribe receives the bones is likely to be a lengthy process, Coffey said. In the past, the Colville, Yakama, Umatilla, Nez Perce and Wanapum Indians have claimed a connection to them.

"We still have a lot of work to do," Coffey said.

The tribes call the remains the Ancient One and visit the skeleton to hold religious services.

"Obviously we are hearing an acknowledgment from the corps of what we have been saying for 20 years," JoDe Goudy, chairman of the Yakama Nation, told The Seattle Times. "Now we want to collectively do what is right, and bring our relative back for reburial."

New genetic evidence determined the remains were closer to modern Native Americans than any other population in the world. Following that, the corps began to re-examine Kennewick Man's status.

"I am confident that our review and analysis of new skeletal, statistical, and genetic evidence have convincingly led to a Native American Determination," said Brig. Gen. Scott A. Spellmon, commander of the corps' Northwestern Division.

Most scientists trace modern native groups to Siberian ancestors who arrived by way of a land bridge that used to extend to Alaska. But features of Kennewick Man's skull led some scientists to suggest the man's ancestors came from elsewhere. Researchers turned to DNA analysis to try to clarify the skeleton's ancestry. They recovered DNA from a fragment of hand bone, mapped its genetic code and compared that to modern DNA from native peoples of the Americas and populations around the world.

The results showed a greater similarity to DNA from the Americas than from anywhere else, with a close relationship to at least one Native American population, the Colvilles, in Washington state.
_________________
Reference:

Geranios, Nicholas K. 2016. “Corps determines Kennewick Man is Native American”. Phys.org. Posted: April 27, 2016. Available online: http://phys.org/news/2016-04-corps-kennewick-native-american.html

Kennewick Man will be reburied, but quandaries around human remains won’t

A mysterious set of 9,000-year-old bones, unearthed nearly 20 years ago in Washington, is finally going home. Following bitter disputes, five Native American groups in the Pacific Northwest have come together to facilitate the reburial of an individual they know as “Ancient One.” One of the most complete prehistoric human skeletons discovered in North America, “Kennewick Man” also became the most controversial.

Two teenagers searching out a better view of a Columbia River speedboat race in 1996 were the first to spot Kennewick Man’s remains. Since then, the bones have mostly been stored away from public view, carefully preserved in museum storerooms while subject to hotly contested legal battles.

Some anthropologists were eager to scientifically test the bones hoping for clues about who the first Americans were and where they came from. But many Native Americans hesitated to support this scientific scrutiny (including tests which permanently destroy or damage the original bone), arguing it was disrespectful to their ancient ancestor. They wanted him laid to rest.

This high-profile discovery served as an important, if maddening, test case for a significant new law, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). It aimed to address the problematic history behind museum human remains collections. First it mandated inventories – many museums, in fact, were unaware how large their skeletal collections really were. Then, in certain cases, it called for returning skeletons and mummies to their closest descendant group. Since NAGPRA passed in 1990, the National Park Service estimates over 50,000 sets of human remains have been repatriated in the United States.

The legal framework fits well in cases where ancestry could be determined – think remains found on a specific 19th-century battlefield – but other instances became more contentious. Scientists sometimes argued that very old remains, including Kennewick Man, represented earlier migrations into the Americas by groups who might have moved on long ago. This point of view often clashed with indigenous perspectives, particularly beliefs that their ancestors have lived in specific places since the dawn of time.

Drawn against this complex background, it’s no wonder it’s taken almost two decades to bring the Kennewick Man story into better focus.

Long history of scientizing some human remains

Museums in the U.S. and Europe have collected and studied human remains for well over a century, with the practice gaining considerable momentum after the Civil War. Archaeologists, anatomists and a mishmash of amateurs – influenced by an array of emergent sciences and pseudosciences – gathered bones by the thousands, shipping them in boxes to museums in an effort to systematically study race and, gradually, human prehistory.

Museum “bone rooms,” organized to collect and study human remains, helped facilitate new scientific work in the late 19th and early 20th century. The skeletons provided better data about diseases and migration, as well as information about historic diet, with potential impact for living populations.

But building museum bone collections also represented major breaches in ethics surrounding traditional death and burial practices for many indigenous people across the Americas and around the world. For them, data gathering was simply not a priority. Instead, they sought to return their ancestors to the earth.

Considered in context, the concerns raised by many Native Americans are not particularly difficult to comprehend. For example, doing archival research for my book “Bone Rooms,” I learned of the case of several naturally mummified bodies discovered in the American Southwest in the 1870s. The dried corpses were paraded around San Francisco, before being exhibited for the public in Philadelphia and Chicago. Once the immense popularity of the exhibitions died down, the bodies were distributed to several museums across the country where they were put into storage.

Presenting human remains as purely scientific specimens and historical curiosities hurt living descendants by treating entire populations as scientific resources rather than human beings. And by focusing mainly on nonwhite groups, the practice reinforced in subtle and direct ways the scientific racism permeating the era. While some European American skeletons were collected by these museums for comparative purposes, their number was vastly outpaced by the number of Native American bodies collected during this same period.

Anthropologists and other scientists have worked to address some of these negative legacies. But the vestiges of past wrongdoings have left their mark on many museums across the country. Returning ancestral human remains, sacred artifacts and special objects considered to hold collective cultural value attempts to serve as partial redress for these problematic histories.

Kennewick Man’s odyssey

Inaccurate initial media reports muddled the Kennewick Man story. After the first anthropologist who looked at the skull proclaimed a resemblance to European Americans (specifically the actor Patrick Stewart), a New York Times headline in 1998 announced, “Old Skull Gets White Looks, Stirring Dispute.” Indeed, as the paper commented, the bogus reports leading people to believe Kennewick Man might be a white person “heightened an already bitter and muddled battle over the rights to Kennewick Man’s remains and his origins.”

Hidden away from public view, the prehistoric remains were anything but forgotten. Many indigenous people came to view Kennewick Man as a symbol for the failings of the new NAGPRA law.

Some scientists, on the other hand, made impassioned arguments that the bones did not fall under the purview of the new rules. Their extreme age meant the remains were unlikely to be a direct ancestor of any living group. Following this logic, several influential scientists argued the bones should therefore be available for scientific study. Indeed, extensive scientific tests were carried out on the skeleton.

Two years after his discovery, Kennewick Man moved to the behind-the-scenes bone rooms at the Burke Museum on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle. The long tradition of gathering and interpreting human bones in museums made the decision seem almost natural. Still, it proved a highly problematic (and temporary) “solution” for many Native Americans who wanted the remains buried.

Last year, genetic testing finally proved something many people had suggested for some time: Kennewick Man is more closely related to Native Americans than any other living human group.

Reconciling scientific curiosity with scientific ethics

Should human remains – including the rare, ancient or abnormal bodies sometimes considered especially valuable for science – ever be made into scientific specimens without their approval or that of their descendants? If we do choose to collect and study them for science, who controls the knowledge drawn from these bodies?

These are big questions. I argue that the effort to scientize the dead brings about distinct and specific responsibilities unique to human remains collections. Careful consideration is necessary. Cultural and historical context simply cannot be ignored.

By some estimates, museums today house more than half a millionindividual Native American remains. Probably hundreds if not thousands of sets of skeletal remains will face these big questions in the coming decades.

Indicative of changing attitudes and ethical approaches to museum exhibition, recent calls to display Kennewick Man’s remains have largely been rebuked, despite potential for engaging large audiences. The prospect for new knowledge or effective popular education is tantalizing, but these objectives should never eclipse basic human and civil rights.

Two-and-a-half decades after NAGPRA, museums in the United States – including the American Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History – join the Burke Museum in continuing to maintain sizable human remains collections. Kennewick Man may be among the most high-profile cases of human remains going under the microscope – both in terms of the scientific study he was subject to and the intensity of the debate surrounding him – but he is certainly far from alone.

Skeletons wait patiently while the living attempt to work these problems out, but this patience is granted only because the bones have no other choice.
_________________
Reference:

2016. “Kennewick Man will be reburied, but quandaries around human remains won’t”. The Conversation. Posted: May 19, 2016. Available online: https://theconversation.com/kennewick-man-will-be-reburied-but-quandaries-around-human-remains-wont-59219

Corps determines Kennewick Man is Native American

The ancient skeleton known as Kennewick Man is related to modern Native American tribes, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Wednesday, opening the process for returning to a tribe for burial one of the oldest and most complete set of bones ever found in North America.

The Northwestern Division of the corps said its decision was based on a review of new information, particularly recently published DNA and skeletal analyses.

The corps, which owns the remains, said the skeleton is now covered by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

The 8,500-year-old remains were discovered in 1996 in southeastern Washington near the Columbia River in Kennewick, triggering a lengthy legal fight between tribes and scientists over whether the bones should be buried immediately or studied. The bones will remain at the Burke Museum in Seattle until the corps determines which tribe will receive them. The next step is for interested tribes to submit a claim to acquire the skeleton for burial, said Michael Coffey, a spokeswoman for the corps in Portland, Oregon.

Determining which tribe receives the bones is likely to be a lengthy process, Coffey said. In the past, the Colville, Yakama, Umatilla, Nez Perce and Wanapum Indians have claimed a connection to them.

"We still have a lot of work to do," Coffey said.

The tribes call the remains the Ancient One and visit the skeleton to hold religious services.

"Obviously we are hearing an acknowledgment from the corps of what we have been saying for 20 years," JoDe Goudy, chairman of the Yakama Nation, told The Seattle Times. "Now we want to collectively do what is right, and bring our relative back for reburial."

New genetic evidence determined the remains were closer to modern Native Americans than any other population in the world. Following that, the corps began to re-examine Kennewick Man's status.

"I am confident that our review and analysis of new skeletal, statistical, and genetic evidence have convincingly led to a Native American Determination," said Brig. Gen. Scott A. Spellmon, commander of the corps' Northwestern Division.

Most scientists trace modern native groups to Siberian ancestors who arrived by way of a land bridge that used to extend to Alaska. But features of Kennewick Man's skull led some scientists to suggest the man's ancestors came from elsewhere. Researchers turned to DNA analysis to try to clarify the skeleton's ancestry. They recovered DNA from a fragment of hand bone, mapped its genetic code and compared that to modern DNA from native peoples of the Americas and populations around the world.

The results showed a greater similarity to DNA from the Americas than from anywhere else, with a close relationship to at least one Native American population, the Colvilles, in Washington state.
_________________
Reference:

Geranios, Nicholas K. 2016. “Corps determines Kennewick Man is Native American”. Phys.org. Posted: April 27, 2016. Available online: http://phys.org/news/2016-04-corps-kennewick-native-american.html

DNA study backs Native American claim to Kennewick Man remains

Kennewick Man, perhaps the most controversial of all North American archaeological finds, has finally had his DNA sequenced. The results suggest he is closely related to Native Americans – and could even be a direct ancestor of some living populations.

Discovered in Washington state in 1996, the skeleton quickly became the subject of a legal battle between a group of scientists who wanted to study it, and the US government, which was prepared to hand the remains over to Native American groups for reburial under a repatriation act.

The case was finally settled in 2004: the courts ruled that the Native Americans could not prove that Kennewick Man was their ancestor, and so repatriation laws did not apply. The scientific study of the remains resumed.

Last year the fruits of those studies were published in a book that seemed to vindicate the 2004 ruling. Among many findings, the studies concluded that the shape of Kennewick Man's skull showed similarities with indigenous communities found today in Polynesia and Japan, from where the ancestors of Kennewick Man were thought to have migrated independently of the forebears of Native Americans.

In other words, Kennewick Man was unlikely to be genetically close to living Native American populations. But new genetic evidence calls that conclusion into question.

DNA samples

Eske Willerslev at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and his colleagues have managed to extract and sequence DNA from one of Kennewick Man's hand bones. And despite many Native American groups in the US harbouring suspicions about archaeological research, Willerslev's team was able to work with the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in Washington state, who provided DNA samples.

The team found that of all the modern genomes available – including sequences from Europeans, Polynesians, East Asians and South Americans – the Colville DNA is the most similar to the Kennewick DNA. The two are so similar that Kennewick Man must be closely related to the modern Colville population, say the researchers. This suggests it's simply a coincidence that the Kennewick skull shape resembles those from indigenous Polynesian and Japanese groups.

In fact, the DNA sequences were so similar that the forebears of Kennewick Man and the Colville tribes may have diverged from a shared ancestor about 9200 years ago, just 700 years before Kennewick Man was born.

There is an alternative explanation for the similarities: that Kennewick is actually a direct ancestor of the modern Colville population, and that any genetic differences are down to gene flow into the Colville population from other human groups over the last few thousand years.

"We could not distinguish between those two hypotheses," Rasmus Nielsen of the University of California in Berkeley told a press conference yesterday. "But since it seems likely that the Colville in fact have received some gene flow from other populations, we think the evidence is in favour of the second hypothesis perhaps more than the first hypothesis."

Irony

If that's confirmed, then the Native American cause has ultimately been helped by science despite their opposition to earlier investigations. Science might have belatedly produced the proof that could lead to a successful bid to have Kennewick Man repatriated for reburial. "There's some kind of irony there," said Willerslev at the press conference.

Ideally, genome regions are each read several times independently so that any chance errors in a single read can be identified and corrected. Because the Kennewick DNA was damaged, the results are based on a rather patchy and low-resolution genome sequence, with the genome read only once: as geneticists say, the "coverage" is low. But Willerslev says we can be confident that the ancestry result is sound even at low coverage.

Iosif Lazaridis at the Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the work, agrees the coverage is sufficient. "It is very exciting to get even such coverage from a skeleton of this age," Lazaridis says. But while Willerslev and his colleagues are talking about Kennewick Man's past with some certainty, they are less clear about his future.

"We are just putting out the results of our analyses," said Willerslev. It's for others to argue about the ultimate fate of Kennewick Man's remains, he added.
_________________
Reference:

Barras, Colin. 2015. “DNA study backs Native American claim to Kennewick Man remains”. New Scientist. Posted: June 18, 2015. Available online: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27750-dna-study-backs-native-american-claim-to-kennewick-man-remains.html

Kennewick Man’s Injuries, Bones Reveal Ancient Secrets

The discovery of the ‘Kennewick Man’ has changed how scientists look at early man, says one of the researchers who is the lead investigator of the project during a presentation Thursday at Texas A&M University.

Doug Owsley, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, says the discovery of the skeletal remains of the Kennewick Man, found in 1996 on the banks of the Columbia River near Kennewick, Wash., is highly significant because “it is a very old skeleton and it is complete.

“He’s in many pieces, but he’s all there,” Owsley explains.

“It’s very rare that you find such an old skeleton that still has the bones with it, but that is the case with Kennewick Man.  He is a remarkable fellow and he is slowly revealing many secrets to us.” v Owlsey and co-author Richard Jantz of the University of Tennessee have written a detailed book about the project titled  Kennewick Man: The Scientific Investigation of an Ancient American Skeleton that has been published by the Texas A&M University  Press.

Because of legal battles with Native Americans in the Northwest, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other groups, it took almost 10 years before researchers could study Kennewick Man, Owsley points out.

The skeleton is one of the most complete and ancient ever found and tests have shown it to date to almost 8,000 years old.  A five-inch stone projectile was found imbedded in the man’s hip, and researchers believe it was a spear point used by hunters of that time.

“The injured area shows that a spear was probably thrown at him and the point remained in him,” Owsley notes.

“This had to have been a very painful injury.  His body sort of ‘walled off’ the area around the wound, and he kept on going.  He did not have time to let the wound heal like it should – he had to eat and to survive.  So walking around with this spear point in him must have been very painful.”

Tests show that Kennewick Man stood about 5-7 to 5-8 and weighed 161 pounds. “His right arm bone tells us he was a strong man, and he threw a spear,” Owsley says.

“He also had many other injuries. He had five fractured ribs, a shoulder injury and other ailments.  He had a hard life.” The researchers believe Kennewick Man was probably of Mongolian descent and he was a maritime hunter-gatherer.  Isotopes show that he ate a great deal of salmon and seals found in the area.

“He was a traveler, and we know he came from the North,” Owsley notes.

“It has been an honor to work on this skeleton.  A discovery like this is so rare that you have to take time to study and learn from it.  We are just now learning the secrets he has held for almost 8,000 years. We have so much more to learn about him – we have just scratched the surface.”
_________________
Randall, Keith. 2014. “Kennewick Man’s Injuries, Bones Reveal Ancient Secrets”. Tamu Times. Posted: October 16, 2014. Available online: http://tamutimes.tamu.edu/2014/10/16/kennewick-mans-injuries-bones-reveal-ancient-secrets/#.VGP5aVfF9Ds

The Kennewick Man Finally Freed to Share His Secrets - Day 4

Day four. You can learn more about Doug Owsley at Wikipedia.

The most poignant outcome? The researchers brought Kennewick Man’s features back to life. This process is nothing like the computerized restoration seen in the television show Bones. To turn a skull into a face is a time-consuming, handcrafted procedure, a marriage of science and art. Skeletal anatomists, modelmakers, forensic and figurative sculptors, a photographic researcher and a painter toiled many months to do it.

The first stage involved plotting dozens of points on a cast of the skull and marking the depth of tissue at those points. (Forensic anatomists had collected tissue-depth data over the years, first by pushing pins into the faces of cadavers, and later by using ultrasound and CT scans.) With the points gridded out, a forensic sculptor layered clay on the skull to the proper depths.

The naked clay head was then taken to StudioEIS in Brooklyn, which specializes in reconstructions for museums. There, sculptors aged his face, adding wrinkles and a touch of weathering, and put in the scar from the forehead injury. Using historic photographs of Ainu and Polynesians as a reference, they sculpted the fine, soft-tissue details of the lips, nose and eyes, and gave him a facial expression—a resolute, purposeful gaze consistent with his osteobiography as a hunter, fisherman and long-distance traveler. They added a beard like those commonly found among the Ainu. As for skin tone, a warm brown was chosen, to account for his natural color deepened by the harsh effects of a life lived outdoors. To prevent too much artistic license from creeping into the reconstruction, every stage of the work was reviewed and critiqued by physical anthropologists.

“I look at him every day,” Owsley said to me. “I’ve spent ten years with this man trying to better understand him. He’s an ambassador from that ancient time period. And man, did he have a story.”

Today, the bones remain in storage at the Burke Museum, and the tribes continue to believe that Kennewick Man is their ancestor. They want the remains back for reburial. The corps, which still controls the skeleton, denied Owsley’s request to conduct numerous tests, including a histological examination of thin, stained sections of bone to help fix Kennewick Man’s age. Chemical analyses on a lone tooth would enable the scientists to narrow the search for his homeland by identifying what he ate and drank as a child. A tooth would also be a good source of DNA. Biomolecular science is advancing so rapidly that within five to ten years it may be possible to know what diseases Kennewick Man suffered from and what caused his death.

Today’s scientists still have questions for this skeleton, and future scientists will no doubt have new ones. Kennewick Man has more to tell.
________________
References:

Preston, Douglas. 2014. “The Kennewick Man Finally Freed to Share His Secrets". Smithsonian Magazine. Posted: August 26, 2014. Available online: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=/history/kennewick-man-finally-freed-share-his-secrets-180952462/

The Kennewick Man Finally Freed to Share His Secrets - Day 3

Day Three. You can learn more about Doug Owsley at Wikipedia.

There’s a wonderful term used by anthropologists: “osteobiography,” the “biography of the bones.” Kennewick Man’s osteobiography tells a tale of an eventful life, which a newer radiocarbon analysis puts at having taken place 8,900 to 9,000 years ago. He was a stocky, muscular man about 5 feet 7 inches tall, weighing about 160 pounds. He was right-handed. His age at death was around 40.

Anthropologists can tell from looking at bones what muscles a person used most, because muscle attachments leave marks in the bones: The more stressed the muscle, the more pronounced the mark. For example, Kennewick Man’s right arm and shoulder look a lot like a baseball pitcher’s. He spent a lot of time throwing something with his right hand, elbow bent—no doubt a spear. Kennewick Man once threw so hard, Owsley says, he fractured his glenoid rim—the socket of his shoulder joint. This is the kind of injury that puts a baseball pitcher out of action, and it would have made throwing painful. His left leg was stronger than his right, also a characteristic of right-handed pitchers, who arrest their forward momentum with their left leg. His hands and forearms indicate he often pinched his fingers and thumb together while tightly gripping a small object; presumably, then, he knapped his own spearpoints.

Kennewick Man spent a lot of time holding something in front of him while forcibly raising and lowering it; the researchers theorize he was hurling a spear downward into the water, as seal hunters do. His leg bones suggest he often waded in shallow rapids, and he had bone growths consistent with “surfer’s ear,” caused by frequent immersion in cold water. His knee joints suggest he often squatted on his heels. I like to think he might have been a storyteller, enthralling his audience with tales of far-flung travels.

Many years before Kennewick Man’s death, a heavy blow to his chest broke six ribs. Because he used his right hand to throw spears, five broken ribs on his right side never knitted together. This man was one tough dude.

The scientists also found two small depression fractures on his cranium, one on his forehead and the other farther back. These dents occur on about half of all ancient American skulls; what caused them is a mystery. They may have come from fights involving rock throwing, or possibly accidents involving the whirling of a bola. This ancient weapon consisted of two or more stones connected by a cord, which were whirled above the head and thrown at birds to entangle them. If you don’t swing a bola just right, the stones can whip around and smack you. Perhaps a youthful Kennewick Man learned how to toss a bola the hard way.

The most intriguing injury is the spearpoint buried in his hip. He was lucky: The spear, apparently thrown from a distance, barely missed the abdominal cavity, which would have caused a fatal wound. It struck him at a downward arc of 29 degrees. Given the bone growth around the embedded point, the injury occurred when he was between 15 and 20 years old, and he probably would not have survived if he had been left alone; the researchers conclude that Kennewick Man must have been with people who cared about him enough to feed and nurse him back to health. The injury healed well and any limp disappeared over time, as evidenced by the symmetry of his gluteal muscle attachments. There’s undoubtedly a rich story behind that injury. It might have been a hunting accident or a teenage game of chicken gone awry. It might have happened in a fight, attack or murder attempt.

Much to the scientists’ dismay, the corps would not allow the stone to be analyzed, which might reveal where it was quarried. “If we knew where that stone came from,” said Stanford, the Smithsonian anthropologist, “we’d have a pretty good idea of where that guy was when he was a young man.” A CT scan revealed that the point was about two inches long, three-quarters of an inch wide and about a quarter-inch thick, with serrated edges. In his analysis, Stanford wrote that while he thought Kennewick Man had probably received the injury in America, “an Asian origin of the stone is possible.”

The food we eat and the water we drink leave a chemical signature locked into our bones, in the form of different atomic variations of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. By identifying them, scientists can tell what a person was eating and drinking while the bone was forming. Kennewick Man’s bones were perplexing. Even though his grave lies 300 miles inland from the sea, he ate none of the animals that abounded in the area. On the contrary, for the last 20 or so years of his life he seems to have lived almost exclusively on a diet of marine animals, such as seals, sea lions and fish. Equally baffling was the water he drank: It was cold, glacial meltwater from a high altitude. Nine thousand years ago, the closest marine coastal environment where one could find glacial meltwater of this type was Alaska. The conclusion: Kennewick Man was a traveler from the far north. Perhaps he traded fine knapping stones over hundreds of miles.

Although he came from distant lands, he was not an unwelcome visitor. He appears to have died among people who treated his remains with care and respect. While the researchers say they don’t know how he died—yet—Owsley did determine that he was deliberately buried in an extended, prone position, faceup, the head slightly higher than the feet, with the chin pressed on the chest, in a grave that was about two and a half feet deep. Owsley deduced this information partly by mapping the distribution of carbonate crust on the bones, using a magnifying lens. Such a crust is heavier on the underside of buried bones, betraying which surfaces were down and which up. The bones showed no sign of scavenging or gnawing and were deliberately buried beneath the topsoil zone. From analyzing algae deposits and water-wear marks, the team determined which bones were washed out of the embankment first and which fell out last. Kennewick Man’s body had been buried with his left side toward the river and his head upstream.
________________
References:

Preston, Douglas. 2014. “The Kennewick Man Finally Freed to Share His Secrets". Smithsonian Magazine. Posted: August 26, 2014. Available online: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=/history/kennewick-man-finally-freed-share-his-secrets-180952462/

The Kennewick Man Finally Freed to Share His Secrets - Day 2

Day Two. You can learn more about Doug Owsley at Wikipedia.

To get to Owsley’s office at the National Museum of Natural History, you must negotiate a warren of narrow corridors illuminated by fluorescent strip lighting and lined with specimen cases. When his door opens, you are greeted by Kennewick Man. The reconstruction of his head is striking—rugged, handsome and weather-beaten, with long hair and a thick beard. A small scar puckers his left forehead. His determined gaze is powerful enough to stop you as you enter. This is a man with a history.

Kennewick Man is surrounded on all sides by tables laid out with human skeletons. Some are articulated on padded counters, while others rest in metal trays, the bones arranged as precisely as surgeon’s tools before an operation. These bones represent the forensic cases Owsley is currently working on.

“This is a woman,” he said, pointing to the skeleton to the left of Kennewick Man. “She’s young. She was a suicide, not found for a long time.” He gestured to the right. “And this is a homicide. I know there was physical violence. She has a fractured nose, indicating a blow to the face. The detective working the case thinks that if we can get a positive ID, the guy they have will talk. And we have a positive ID.” A third skeleton belonged to a man killed while riding an ATV, his body not found for six months. Owsley was able to assure the man’s relatives that he died instantly and didn’t suffer. “In doing this work,” he said, “I hope to speak for the person who can no longer speak.”

Owsley is a robust man, of medium height, 63 years old, graying hair, glasses; curiously, he has the same purposeful look in his eyes as Kennewick Man. He is not into chitchat. He grew up in Lusk, Wyoming, and he still radiates a frontier sense of determination; he is the kind of person who will not respond well to being told what he can’t do. He met Susan on the playground when he was 7 years old and remains happily married. He lives in the country, on a farm where he grows berries, has an orchard and raises bees. He freely admits he is “obsessive” and “will work like a dog” until he finishes a project. “I thought this was normal,” he said, “until it was pointed out to me it wasn’t.” I asked if he was stubborn, as evidenced by the lawsuit, but he countered: “I would say I’m driven—by curiosity.” He added, “Sometimes you come to a skeleton that wants to talk to you, that whispers to you, I want to tell my story. And that was Kennewick Man.”

A vast amount of data was collected in the 16 days Owsley and colleagues spent with the bones. Twenty-two scientists scrutinized the almost 300 bones and fragments. Led by Kari Bruwelheide, a forensic anthropologist at the Smithsonian, they first reassembled the fragile skeleton so they could see it as a whole. They built a shallow box, added a layer of fine sand, and covered that with black velvet; then Bruwelheide laid out the skeleton, bone by bone, shaping the sand underneath to cradle each piece. Now the researchers could address such questions as Kennewick Man’s age, height, weight, body build, general health and fitness, and injuries. They could also tell whether he was deliberately buried, and if so, the position of his body in the grave.

Next the skeleton was taken apart, and certain key bones studied intensively. The limb bones and ribs were CT-scanned at the University of Washington Medical Center. These scans used far more radiation than would be safe for living tissue, and as a result they produced detailed, three-dimensional images that allowed the bones to be digitally sliced up any which way. With additional CT scans, the team members built resin models of the skull and other important bones. They made a replica from a scan of the spearpoint in the hip.

As work progressed, a portrait of Kennewick Man emerged. He does not belong to any living human population. Who, then, are his closest living relatives? Judging from the shape of his skull and bones, his closest living relatives appear to be the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands, a remote archipelago 420 miles southeast of New Zealand, as well as the mysterious Ainu people of Japan.

“Just think of Polynesians,” said Owsley.

Not that Kennewick Man himself was Polynesian. This is not Kon-Tiki in reverse; humans had not reached the Pacific Islands in his time period. Rather, he was descended from the same group of people who would later spread out over the Pacific and give rise to modern-day Polynesians. These people were maritime hunter-gatherers of the north Pacific coast; among them were the ancient Jōmon, the original inhabitants of the Japanese Islands. The present-day Ainu people of Japan are thought to be descendants of the Jōmon. Nineteenth-century photographs of the Ainu show individuals with light skin, heavy beards and sometimes light-colored eyes.

Jōmon culture first arose in Japan at least 12,000 years ago and perhaps as early as 16,000 years ago, when the landmasses were still connected to the mainland. These seafarers built boats out of sewn planks of wood. Outstanding mariners and deep-water fishermen, they were among the first people to make fired pottery.

The discovery of Kennewick Man adds a major piece of evidence to an alternative view of the peopling of North America. It, along with other evidence, suggests that the Jōmon or related peoples were the original settlers of the New World. If correct, the conclusion upends the traditional view that the first Americans came through central Asia and walked across the Bering Land Bridge and down through an ice-free corridor into North America.

Sometime around 15,000 years ago, the new theory goes, coastal Asian groups began working their way along the shoreline of ancient Beringia—the sea was much lower then—from Japan and Kamchatka Peninsula to Alaska and beyond. This is not as crazy a journey as it sounds. As long as the voyagers were hugging the coast, they would have plenty of fresh water and food. Cold-climate coasts furnish a variety of animals, from seals and birds to fish and shellfish, as well as driftwood, to make fires. The thousands of islands and their inlets would have provided security and shelter. To show that such a sea journey was possible, in 1999 and 2000 an American named Jon Turk paddled a kayak from Japan to Alaska following the route of the presumed Jōmon migration. Anthropologists have nicknamed this route the “Kelp Highway.”

“I believe these Asian coastal migrations were the first,” said Owsley. “Then you’ve got a later wave of the people who give rise to Indians as we know them today.”

What became of those pioneers, Kennewick Man’s ancestors and companions? They were genetically swamped by much larger—and later—waves of travelers from Asia and disappeared as a physically distinct people, Owsley says. These later waves may have interbred with the first settlers, diluting their genetic legacy. A trace of their DNA still can be detected in some Native American groups, though the signal is too weak to label the Native Americans “descendants.”

Whether this new account of the peopling of North America will stand up as more evidence comes in is not yet known. The bones of a 13,000-year-old teenage girl recently discovered in an underwater cave in Mexico, for example, are adding to the discussion. James Chatters, the first archaeologist to study Kennewick and a participant in the full analysis, reported earlier this year, along with colleagues, that the girl’s skull appears to have features in common with that of Kennewick Man and other Paleo-Americans, but she also possesses specific DNA signatures suggesting she shares female ancestry with Native Americans.

Kennewick Man may still hold a key. The first effort to extract DNA from fragments of his bone failed, and the corps so far hasn’t allowed a better sample to be taken. A second effort to plumb the old fragments is underway at a laboratory in Denmark.
________________
References:

Preston, Douglas. 2014. “The Kennewick Man Finally Freed to Share His Secrets" Smithsonian Magazine. Posted: August 26, 2014. Available online: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=/history/kennewick-man-finally-freed-share-his-secrets-180952462/

The Kennewick Man Finally Freed to Share His Secrets - Day 1

The following article is divided over the next four days. A good read. You can learn more about Doug Owsley at Wikipedia.

In the summer of 1996, two college students in Kennewick, Washington, stumbled on a human skull while wading in the shallows along the Columbia River. They called the police. The police brought in the Benton County coroner, Floyd Johnson, who was puzzled by the skull, and he in turn contacted James Chatters, a local archaeologist. Chatters and the coroner returned to the site and, in the dying light of evening, plucked almost an entire skeleton from the mud and sand. They carried the bones back to Chatters’ lab and spread them out on a table.

The skull, while clearly old, did not look Native American. At first glance, Chatters thought it might belong to an early pioneer or trapper. But the teeth were cavity-free (signaling a diet low in sugar and starch) and worn down to the roots—a combination characteristic of prehistoric teeth. Chatters then noted something embedded in the hipbone. It proved to be a stone spearpoint, which seemed to clinch that the remains were prehistoric. He sent a bone sample off for carbon dating. The results: It was more than 9,000 years old.

Thus began the saga of Kennewick Man, one of the oldest skeletons ever found in the Americas and an object of deep fascination from the moment it was discovered. It is among the most contested set of remains on the continents as well. Now, though, after two decades, the dappled, pale brown bones are at last about to come into sharp focus, thanks to a long-awaited, monumental scientific publication next month co-edited by the physical anthropologist Douglas Owsley, of the Smithsonian Institution. No fewer than 48 authors and another 17 researchers, photographers and editors contributed to the 680-page Kennewick Man: The Scientific Investigation of an Ancient American Skeleton (Texas A&M University Press), the most complete analysis of a Paleo-American skeleton ever done.

The book recounts the history of discovery, presents a complete inventory of the bones and explores every angle of what they may reveal. Three chapters are devoted to the teeth alone, and another to green stains thought to be left by algae. Together, the findings illuminate this mysterious man’s life and support an astounding new theory of the peopling of the Americas. If it weren’t for a harrowing round of panicky last-minute maneuvering worthy of a legal thriller, the remains might have been buried and lost to science forever.

The storm of controversy erupted when the Army Corps of Engineers, which managed the land where the bones had been found, learned of the radiocarbon date. The corps immediately claimed authority—officials there would make all decisions related to handling and access—and demanded that all scientific study cease. Floyd Johnson protested, saying that as county coroner he believed he had legal jurisdiction. The dispute escalated, and the bones were sealed in an evidence locker at the sheriff’s office pending a resolution.

“At that point,” Chatters recalled to me in a recent interview, “I knew trouble was coming.” It was then that he called Owsley, a curator at the National Museum of Natural History and a legend in the community of physical anthropologists. He has examined well over 10,000 sets of human remains during his long career. He had helped identify human remains for the CIA, the FBI, the State Department and various police departments, and he had worked on mass graves in Croatia and elsewhere. He helped reassemble and identify the dismembered and burned bodies from the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Later, he did the same with the Pentagon victims of the 9/11 terrorist attack. Owsley is also a specialist in ancient American remains.

“You can count on your fingers the number of ancient, well-preserved skeletons there are” in North America, he told me, remembering his excitement at first hearing from Chatters. Owsley and Dennis Stanford, at that time chairman of the Smithsonian’s anthropology department, decided to pull together a team to study the bones. But corps attorneys showed that federal law did, in fact, give them jurisdiction over the remains. So the corps seized the bones and locked them up at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, often called Battelle for the organization that operates the lab.

At the same time, a coalition of Columbia River Basin Indian tribes and bands claimed the skeleton under a 1990 law known as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA. The tribes demanded the bones for reburial. “Scientists have dug up and studied Native Americans for decades,” a spokesman for the Umatilla tribe, Armand Minthorn, wrote in 1996. “We view this practice as desecration of the body and a violation of our most deeply-held religious beliefs.” The remains, the tribe said, were those of a direct tribal ancestor. “From our oral histories, we know that our people have been part of this land since the beginning of time. We do not believe that our people migrated here from another continent, as the scientists do.” The coalition announced that as soon as the corps turned the skeleton over to them, they would bury it in a secret location where it would never be available to science. The corps made it clear that, after a monthlong public comment period, the tribal coalition would receive the bones.

The tribes had good reason to be sensitive. The early history of museum collecting of Native American remains is replete with horror stories. In the 19th century, anthropologists and collectors looted fresh Native American graves and burial platforms, dug up corpses and even decapitated dead Indians lying on the field of battle and shipped the heads to Washington for study. Until NAGPRA, museums were filled with American Indian remains acquired without regard for the feelings and religious beliefs of native people. NAGPRA was passed to redress this history and allow tribes to reclaim their ancestors’ remains and some artifacts. The Smithsonian, under the National Museum of the American Indian Act, and other museums under NAGPRA, have returned (and continue to return) many thousands of remains to tribes. This is being done with the crucial help of anthropologists and archaeologists—including Owsley, who has been instrumental in repatriating remains from the Smithsonian’s collection. But in the case of Kennewick, Owsley argued, there was no evidence of a relationship with any existing tribes. The skeleton lacked physical features characteristic of Native Americans.

In the weeks after the Army engineers announced they would return Kennewick Man to the tribes, Owsley went to work. “I called and others called the corps. They would never return a phone call. I kept expressing an interest in the skeleton to study it—at our expense. All we needed was an afternoon.” Others contacted the corps, including members of Congress, saying the remains should be studied, if only briefly, before reburial. This was what NAGPRA in fact required: The remains had to be studied to determine affiliation. If the bones showed no affiliation with a present-day tribe, NAGPRA didn’t apply.

But the corps indicated it had made up its mind. Owsley began telephoning his colleagues. “I think they’re going to rebury this,” he said, “and if that happens, there’s no going back. It’s gone."

So Owsley and several of his colleagues found an attorney, Alan Schneider. Schneider contacted the corps and was also rebuffed. Owsley suggested they file a lawsuit and get an injunction. Schneider warned him: “If you’re going to sue the government, you better be in it for the long haul.”

Owsley assembled a group of eight plaintiffs, prominent physical anthropologists and archaeologists connected to leading universities and museums. But no institution wanted anything to do with the lawsuit, which promised to attract negative attention and be hugely expensive. They would have to litigate as private citizens. “These were people,” Schneider said to me later, “who had to be strong enough to stand the heat, knowing that efforts might be made to destroy their careers. And efforts were made.”

When Owsley told his wife, Susan, that he was going to sue the government of the United States, her first response was: “Are we going to lose our home?” He said he didn’t know. “I just felt,” Owsley told me in a recent interview, “this was one of those extremely rare and important discoveries that come once in a lifetime. If we lost it”—he paused. “Unthinkable.”

Working like mad, Schneider and litigating partner Paula Barran filed a lawsuit. With literally hours to go, a judge ordered the corps to hold the bones until the case was resolved.

When word got out that the eight scientists had sued the government, criticism poured in, even from colleagues. The head of the Society for American Archaeology tried to get them to drop the lawsuit. Some felt it would interfere with the relationships they had built with Native American tribes. But the biggest threat came from the Justice Department itself. Its lawyers contacted the Smithsonian Institution warning that Owsley and Stanford might be violating “criminal conflict of interest statutes which prohibit employees of the United States” from making claims against the government.

“I operate on a philosophy,” Owsley told me, “that if they don’t like it, I’m sorry: I’m going to do what I believe in.” He had wrestled in high school and, even though he often lost, he earned the nickname “Scrapper” because he never quit. Stanford, a husky man with a full beard and suspenders, had roped in rodeos in New Mexico and put himself through graduate school by farming alfalfa. They were no pushovers. “The Justice Department squeezed us really, really hard,” Owsley recalled. But both anthropologists refused to withdraw, and the director of the National Museum of Natural History at the time, Robert W. Fri, strongly supported them even over the objections of the Smithsonian’s general counsel. The Justice Department backed off.

Owsley and his group were eventually forced to litigate not just against the corps, but also the Department of the Army, the Department of the Interior and a number of individual government officials. As scientists on modest salaries, they could not begin to afford the astronomical legal bills. Schneider and Barran agreed to work for free, with the faint hope that they might, someday, recover their fees. In order to do that they would have to win the case and prove the government had acted in “bad faith”—a nearly impossible hurdle. The lawsuit dragged on for years. “We never expected them to fight so hard,” Owsley says. Schneider says he once counted 93 government attorneys directly involved in the case or cc’ed on documents.

Meanwhile, the skeleton, which was being held in trust by the corps, first at Battelle and later at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington in Seattle, was badly mishandled and stored in “substandard, unsafe conditions,” according to the scientists. In the storage area where the bones were (and are) being kept at the Burke Museum, records show there have been wide swings in temperature and humidity that, the scientists say, have damaged the specimen. When Smithsonian asked about the scientists’ concerns, the corps disputed that the environment is unstable, pointing out that expert conservators and museum personnel say that “gradual changes are to be expected through the seasons and do not adversely affect the collection.”

Somewhere in the move to Battelle, large portions of both femurs disappeared. The FBI launched an investigation, focusing on James Chatters and Floyd Johnson. It even went so far as to give Johnson a lie detector test; after several hours of accusatory questioning, Johnson, disgusted, pulled off the wires and walked out. Years later, the femur bones were found in the county coroner’s office. The mystery of how they got there has never been solved.

The scientists asked the corps for permission to examine the stratigraphy of the site where the skeleton had been found and to look for grave goods. Even as Congress was readying a bill to require the corps to preserve the site, the corps dumped a million pounds of rock and fill over the area for erosion control, ending any chance of research.

I asked Schneider why the corps so adamantly resisted the scientists. He speculated that the corps was involved in tense negotiations with the tribes over a number of thorny issues, including salmon fishing rights along the Columbia River, the tribes’ demand that the corps remove dams and the ongoing, hundred-billion-dollar cleanup of the vastly polluted Hanford nuclear site. Schneider says that a corps archaeologist told him “they weren’t going to let a bag of old bones get in the way of resolving other issues with the tribes.”

Asked about its actions in the Kennewick Man case, the corps told Smithsonian: “The United States acted in accordance with its interpretation of NAGPRA and its concerns about the safety and security of the fragile, ancient human remains.”

Ultimately, the scientists won the lawsuit. The court ruled in 2002 that the bones were not related to any living tribe: thus NAGPRA did not apply. The judge ordered the corps to make the specimen available to the plaintiffs for study. The government appealed to the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which in 2004 again ruled resoundingly in favor of the scientists, writing:

because Kennewick Man’s remains are so old and the information about his era is so limited, the record does not permit the Secretary [of the Interior] to conclude reasonably that Kennewick Man shares special and significant genetic or cultural features with presently existing indigenous tribes, people, or cultures.

During the trial, the presiding magistrate judge, John Jelderks, had noted for the record that the corps on multiple occasions misled or deceived the court. He found that the government had indeed acted in “bad faith” and awarded attorney’s fees of $2,379,000 to Schneider and his team.

“At the bare minimum,” Schneider told me, “this lawsuit cost the taxpayers $5 million.”

Owsley and the collaborating scientists presented a plan of study to the corps, which was approved after several years. And so, almost ten years after the skeleton was found, the scientists were given 16 days to examine it. They did so in July of 2005 and February of 2006.

From these studies, presented in superabundant detail in the new book, we now have an idea who Kennewick Man was, how he lived, what he did and where he traveled. We know how he was buried and then came to light. Kennewick Man, Owsley believes, belongs to an ancient population of seafarers who were America’s original settlers. They did not look like Native Americans. The few remains we have of these early people show they had longer, narrower skulls with smaller faces. These mysterious people have long since disappeared.
________________
References:

Preston, Douglas. 2014. “The Kennewick Man Finally Freed to Share His Secrets" Smithsonian Magazine. Posted: August 26, 2014. Available online: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=/history/kennewick-man-finally-freed-share-his-secrets-180952462/

Who owns the bones? Should bodies in museum exhibits be returned home?

From Egyptian mummies to Ötzi the Iceman, human remains are a common, if macabre, feature of museum exhibits. Writing in Clinical Anatomy, Dr. Philippe Charlier explores the argument that curators have an ethical obligation to return these bodies to their native communities for burial.

The recent case of the 'Irish Giant' Charles Byrne reveals that this is not an issue limited to cadavers from pre-antiquity. Byrne found celebrity in the 1780s and while his skeleton remains in the Royal College of Surgeons in London, ethics experts argue his remains should be buried at sea in accordance with his wishes.

Dr. Charlier argues that human remains in museums and scientific institutions can be divided into four categories, 'ethnographical elements' such as hair samples with no certain identification; anatomical remains such as whole skeletons or skulls; archaeological remains; and more modern collections of skulls, used in now discredited studies in the early 20th century.

After exploring case study examples from around the world, Dr. Charlier argues that the concept of the body as property is anything but clear and depends heavily on local political views and the administrative status of the human remains. The author proposes that the only precise factor permitting restitution should be the name of the individual, as in the case of Charles Byrne.

"The ethical problem posed by the bones of this 18th century individual approximates to that of all human remains conserved in public collections, displayed in museums or other cultural institutions," said Dr. Charlier. "In the near future, curators will have to choose between global conservation of all (or almost all) anthropological collections on the one hand and systematic restitution to their original communities or families on the other."
________________
References:

EurekAlert. 2014. “Who owns the bones? Should bodies in museum exhibits be returned home?”. EurekAlert. Posted: February 4, 2014. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-02/w-wot020414.php

The ancient American bones at centre of two lawsuits

They may have been dead for more than 9000 years, but the future looks uncertain for two early Americans unearthed in 1976 below the University of California in San Diego.

Members of a local Native American tribe – the Kumeyaay – want to rebury the remains, which they believe are their ancestors. In December, UCSD agreed to hand over the skeletons, but in April three palaeoanthropologists filed a lawsuit against UCSD to keep the remains for research. The Kumeyaay had anticipated the move and filed their own lawsuit days earlier. Last week, the university agreed to a judge's order to keep the remains in a safe place until a final ruling.

Since 1990, US law has mandated universities to return Native American artefacts and remains to their respective tribes. But UCSD's scientific advisory board determined that there is no evidence that these two skeletons are related to the Kumeyaay, even though they were discovered on that tribe's ancestral lands. Isotopic evidence taken from the skeletons suggests they ate seafood – unlike the Kumeyaay's traditional diet – and the Kumeyaay traditionally cremate their deceased rather than bury them.

James McManis, an attorney in San Jose who represents the three palaeoanthropologists, is confident that scientific evidence outweighs the tribe's claim. Lawyers for the tribe nevertheless insist that research on the bones would be disrespectful.

"Nowhere in the world is this sensitivity so acute as in the US," says anthropologist Bryan Sykes at the University of Oxford. He believes that tensions were escalated by a recent case where researchers in Arizona performed DNA analysis on the Havasupai tribe's ancestry without their consent. The results indicated that the people hadn't always lived in North America, contrary to tribal beliefs.
_____________________
References:

Reardon, Sara. 2012. "The ancient American bones at centre of two lawsuits". New Scientist. Posted: May 16, 2012. Available online: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21817-the-ancient-american-bones-at-centre-of-two-lawsuits.html

Ancient American Skeletons Safe From Reburial, But Only for the Moment

A federal court judge in San Francisco granted a temporary restraining order Friday to prevent the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), from handing over 9000-year-old human bones to Native Americans, in the latest twist in an unusual custody battle for two human skeletons that are among the earliest found in the Americas. Three University of California professors filed a lawsuit last week to prevent UCSD from transferring the bones, which have been described as better preserved than those of the Kennewick Man, another ancient skeleton that has been the center of debate and lawsuits.

The restraining order will be in effect until Friday, 11 May, when Judge Richard Seeborg of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California will decide whether to extend it until the case is settled, according to Jim McManis, an attorney in San Jose, California, who represents the professors pro bono.

Meanwhile, in anticipation of the professors' lawsuit, members of the Kumeyaay tribes filed their own lawsuit in federal court in San Diego on 13 April demanding transfer of the skeletons. The bones were discovered in 1976 during an excavation at University House in La Jolla, which is the traditional home of the UCSD chancellor. The Kumeyaay, representing 12 federated tribes, have been seeking the remains for reburial, claiming that they were found on their traditional lands. Under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, museums and other institutions must repatriate remains and artifacts that can be traced to a tribe. A controversial rule concerning this law, issued in 2010 by the Department of the Interior, gives tribes a way to recover even remains that cannot be linked to specific groups. The new lawsuits may test that rule.

After years of legal dispute, UCSD officials were preparing to give the bones to representatives of the Kumeyaay, against the advice of a UCSD scientific advisory committee and a separate system-wide UC research committee that reviewed the claims. The professors, anthropologist Margaret Schoeninger of UCSD, paleoanthropologist Robert Bettinger of UC Davis, and paleoanthropologist Tim White of UC Berkeley, filed the lawsuit to block the repatriation, saying that there is no evidence that these bones are related to the Kumeyaay, and in fact, the evidence suggests otherwise. The scientific advisory committee found that the Kumeyaay language moved into the region 2000 years ago, and that the Kumeyaay traditionally cremated their dead rather than burying them. Moreover, Schoeninger's lab's analysis of stable isotopes from samples of the skeletons indicated that they ate a diet of marine mammals and offshore fish—a coastal adaptation that contrasts with the desert origins of the Kumeyaay. Anthropologists who study the bones and DNA of Paleoindians also agree that the remains are probably too old to have any affiliation, cultural or otherwise, with tribes living in southern California today.

Because of their great antiquity, the bones are important for exploring the mystery of the identity of the first people to migrate from the Old World to the New World. They also should be saved for future scientific analysis, the lawsuit argues, because new methods are being developed to extract and study ancient DNA and to analyze the diet and lifestyles of ancient people.
_________________

References:

Gibbons, Ann. 2012. "Ancient American Skeletons Safe From Reburial, But Only for the Moment". Science. Posted: May 1, 2012. Available online: http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/05/ancient-american-skeletons-safe.html

Scientists Fight University of California to Study Rare Ancient Skeletons

Two ancient skeletons uncovered in 1976 on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, during construction at the home of a University of California chancellor, may be among the most valuable for genetic analysis in the continental United States. Dated between 9,000 and 9,600 years old, the exceptionally preserved bones could potentially produce the oldest complete human genome from the continent.

But only if scientists aren’t barred from studying them.

Source: The La Jolla skeletons. (Jan Austin/Santa Monica Community College).

Attempts to unlock the skeletons’ genetic secrets are stalled in a dispute pitting UC scientists against their own administration. Five of the scientists wrote with alarm in a letter published May 20 in the journal Science that UC administrators aren’t allowing studies on the skeletons, which were discovered on property owned by UC San Diego in La Jolla, California.

Before samples can be extracted for genetic analysis, the scientists fear administrators will give the bones to politically powerful local Native Americans who could permanently block study.

“To give them away without study, would be like throwing the genetic crown jewels of the peopling of the Americas in the ocean,” said Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, who is among about a half dozen researchers who have unsuccessfully sought in recent months to sample or study the bones. “It would be a major loss for all, including Native Americans.”

A few studies were done years ago on the skeletons before UC withdrew access to them, but recent technological advances would allow scientists to do much more, including a digital skull calibration and possibly a full genome sequence.

“The potential loss of the La Jolla skeletons would have a profoundly negative impact on our knowledge of the peopling of the Americas,” wrote the authors of the letter, led by Margaret Schoeninger, an anthropologist at UCSD.

Science letter co-author Tim White, a prominent paleoanthropologist at UC Berkeley, told Wired.com, “Administrators are doing everything they can to ignore the scientific value of the specimens. They are trying to illegally repatriate them to a lobbyist for a dozen San Diego County tribes.”

UC officials are seeking to provide the skeletons to the Kumeyaay Nation east of San Diego under a complex process guided by the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). But critical scientists say NAGPRA requirements aren’t being followed properly, setting the stage for a potential legal battle over the bones.

“This is Kennewick Man II,” White said, referring to the long federal court battle in 2004 when scientists won the right to study bones found in Washington.

In a May 11 letter, Mark Yudof, president of the 10-campus UC system, authorized UCSD chancellor Marye Anne Fox to dispose of the bones — after clarifications are made to a report done under NAGPRA requirements, and other tribes that may be interested in the bones are consulted.

Steve Benegas, the repatriation spokesman for the Kumeyaay nation’s 12 tribes, said they are entitled to the bones and to decide about future analysis. Some Native Americans believe scientific research amounts to desecration of remains, and Benegas said he personally is against studies.

“The university has handled this poorly over the years,” he said. “We have no trust in them. They have treated the remains of our ancestors without respect.”

One of the previous analyses done years ago showed the bones have connective tissue and amino acids that are used in cell function. This means it is very likely ancient DNA can be extracted. And two skeletons buried together offers a rare opportunity to compare their genomes to see if they were related.

Genetic reports on human remains this old on the continent are very limited. In 2007, researchers published about 7 percent of the maternally inherited mitochondrial genome of bones found in a cave in southeast Alaska that are about the same age as the La Jolla skeletons. But the full genome of that individual hasn’t been sequenced and published, and DNA from bones found in wet caves can be more difficult to extract and analyze.

“The La Jolla skeletons are very special,” said Brian Kemp of Washington State University. Kemp was part of a team that retrieved samples from the Alaska bones before they were repatriated in 2007 to local tribes in an exchange seen as model of cooperation among scientists and Native Americans.

Anthropologist Robert Bettinger of UC Davis, another co-author of the Science letter, says he and others would like a similar arrangement for the La Jolla skeletons.

Scientists say UC is overlooking two key points. First, there has been no official determination the bones are actually from ancestors of modern Native Americans. Though many tribes believe their history goes further back, scientists can only confidently trace the ancestry of Native Americans to about 7,000 years ago.

Second, scientific evidence shows skeletons around this age are not always related to those who now live near burial sites. For example, last year Willerslev sequenced the genome of a 5,000-year-old man in Greenland and found he was descended from Siberian ancestors, not today’s Greenland tribes.

“It is unscientific to provide them to local people,” said Willerslev.

Since the NAGPRA rules were first issued in 1990, thousands of bones have been repatriated, almost all of which were shown to be culturally affiliated to the tribes that received them. But last year, federal officials issued new NAGPRA rules that make it easier to return bones and funerary objects that are not culturally affiliated to tribes.

Scientists and museums have been considering a legal challenge to the new rule, fearing the loss of many valuable specimens. The La Jolla skeletons could end up as the case by which that rule is challenged.

UCSD scientists determined the La Jolla skeletons are not culturally affiliated to any tribe. In fact, isotopic analysis done 30 years ago in Schoeninger’s lab (and published in 2009) showed the bones reflected a diet of seafood and marine mammals, not terrestrial foods such as nuts and wild fruits like the early Kumeyaay ate.

Schoeninger suspects UC’s efforts to give the bones to the tribe stem from a plan to renovate the chancellor’s house, and she says that Benegas, the tribe spokesman, told her as much.

UCSD officials want to rebuild the home, also known as University House, because it has become uninhabitable due to structural problems. They have received pledges totaling at least $6 million for the project from wealthy donors. Earth moving for the renovation is expected to uncover more ancient bones, which could cause costly delays if the tribes make a political or legal issue out of it.

By providing the two skeletons to the Kumeyaay, Schoeninger believes UCSD officials are hoping that refurbishing the home will go smoothly.

When asked about this theory, Benegas chuckled as he told Wired, “We wouldn’t be talking if they weren’t trying to rebuild the chancellor’s house.”

_________________
References:

Dalton, Rex. 2011. "Scientists Fight University of California to Study Rare Ancient Skeletons". Wired. Posted: May 20, 2011. Available online: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/ucsd-skeleton-fight/

U.K. Archaeologists Protest Rule Forcing Reburial of Human Remains

United Kingdom archaeologists are protesting a recent change in the licensing of excavations that requires the reburial of any human remains found in England or Wales.

In a letter in the Guardian, 40 leading archaeologists write:

The current licence conditions are impeding scientific research, preventing new discoveries from entering museums, and are not in the public interest. The long-term retention of excavated ancient human remains is a fundamental principle of scientific research, regulated by professional ethics and guidelines, and is a museum practice that has been much examined around the world. Curated remains continue to be reanalysed for centuries, as new techniques are developed. Such research makes important contributions to the public's understanding of the lives of the people who came before us; it helps put our own lives into perspective. If the requirement for wholesale reburial remains, Britain risks losing its leading role in archaeology, a decline that will be observed by a mystified international scientific community.

This story is interesting because it smacks of NAGPRA in the United States. I'm not opposed to reburial, but I am an avid supporter of the scientific method and that includes the scientific inspection of remains. Reburial and repatriation can occur, should occur, but scientific inquiry and investigation must be carried out, particularly in remains that are considered ancient i.e. old enough to not reflect modern humanity or modern human groups. In NAGPRA, this repatriation/reburial scenario has seriously affected the study of Clovis Point people who have no relation to modern Native American populations, but are routinely turned over to them for reburial.

___________________
References:

Travis, John. 2011. "U.K. Archaeologists Protest Rule Forcing Reburial of Human Remains". Science Magazine. Posted: February 4, 2011. Available online: http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/02/uk-archaeologists-protest-rule.html

Gibson bones predate Columbus

Bones found in the basement of a Gibson home last year could be more than 700 years old and likely came from the Indian mound on which the house was built, state officials said.

The bone fragments were found Nov. 21, 2009, amid the remains of a cardboard box in the basement of 234 Fandall St. by a real-estate agent showing the house to potential buyers.

The bones are likely those of American Indian inhabitants of the area and could be more than 700 years old, archeologists say in a soon-to-be-released study.

The report, from the state Division of Archeology, indicates that they came from one of two mounds on the property. Initial plans are for the Chitimacha tribe in Charenton, St. Mary Parish, to receive the bones. They will likely be returned to the Gibson mound, said state anthropologist Chip McGimsey, although discussions with the Chitimacha and local Indian groups are still pending.

While the bones were not carbon-dated or other “invasive procedures,” McGimsey estimates they date back to between 800 and 1300 A.D. Pottery shards recovered along with the bones aided scientists in establishing the timeline.

Scientists have not determined the tribe of origin.

What is known, according to the report, is that the remains are of at least four people — three adults and a child.

Rob Mann, the state anthropologist whose region includes Terrebonne Parish, said the Gibson mounds are “already considered a significant site.”

The Archaeological Conservancy, a private, nonprofit organization, bought the Fandall Street house and land, site of one mound. Negotiations are under way for the adjacent property, site of the second mound. “We preserve these sites for research and educational purposes,” said Jessica Crawford, the conservancy’s regional director,

“There could be future limited testing and mapping of the mounds and maybe coring of some parts,” she said. “It is one of the few remaining mound sites in the area so that would make it unique.”

Crawford, who was traveling when contacted, was not certain of the purchase price of the house.

The house was previously owned by Mark Morgan of Schriever.

According to the report, the bones were likely removed from the mound beneath the house over many years, likely by different people.

Officials discounted the possibility that the basement — perhaps a fallout shelter built by a prior owner decades ago — was the scene of a modern-day crime. Terrebonne Parish Coroner’s Office investigators had previously determined the bones were very old, but they couldn’t be more specific.

Those determinations came from researchers at the FACES Laboratory at Louisiana State University.

Their inventory shows 661 bones or bone fragments were recovered, 504 of which were animal and 157 were human. The human bones, according to the report, included ribs, legs, arms and skull fragments. Researchers said they couldn’t determine gender with any certainty.

Representatives of local Indian groups said they are waiting to hear from the Division of Archeology, but several acknowledged that turning the bones over to the Chitimacha for reburial is a good thing.

“They should go to the proper people which is probably the Chitimacha,” said Lora Ann Chaisson, 45, a United Houma Nation Tribal Council member living in Pointe-aux-Chenes. “And they need to bury them in the proper ways.”

Chaisson said she and other Indian people were dismayed upon learning the bones had been disinterred from their mounds and found in a basement.

She expressed hope that property owners will take care when discovering evidence of Indian burials on their lands, so that the dead are not disturbed.

“People need to be aware and respect it,” she said. “Contact the proper authorities. If you find it mark it and document and leave it. That is my personal preference.”
________________
References:

DeSantis, John. 2011. "Gibson bones predate Columbus". Daily Comet. Posted: January 8, 2011. Available online: http://www.dailycomet.com/article/20110108/ARTICLES/110109561/

Archaeologist finds mystery skulls mailed to Brigham Young University are prehistoric

The Utah state archaeologist has determined the age of three mystery skulls mailed to Brigham Young University.

KSL-TV reports the skulls were determined to be from about 1100 to 1300 A.D.

That fits with the early suspicions of investigators that the skulls might be ancient artifacts.

The skulls will be turned over to Utah's Native American leaders.

The skulls were delivered to BYU's history department last month in a box labeled with a Montana return address.

University police say they don't know why the skulls were sent to BYU.
_______________
References:

2010. "Archaeologist finds mystery skulls mailed to Brigham Young University are prehistoric". . Posted: Available online: http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5jSwcAUvDgvDksPfcAXQl_490Ooqw?docId=5043520

Kennewick Man

For this topic I would like to recommend a visit to this blog. It is dedicated to Kennewick Man and has some very interesting information. This ties into yesterday's post about the Spirit Cave Mummy, and other similar finds. It's too bad that the author of the blog hasn't kept it up.
_______________
References:

eoliver. 2009. "Kennewick Man… The Other Data". Eoliver Blog. Posted: April 7, 2009. Available online: http://eoliver.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/kennew.jpg?w=497&h=312

The Spirit Cave Mummy

____________________
References:

Ahwahneechee. 2006. "Spirit Cave Man Mummy Native American Indian Shoshone Paiute". YouTube. Posted: December 27, 2006 Available online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xppOQnAAIZA

Researchers Fear 'Incalculable' Loss From Reburial Rule

The debate rages on. It is ethically wrong to repatriate skeletons of individuals who are scientifically proven to not related to current Native peoples. There is an ancient culture that resided in the Americas over 10,000 years ago that is being obliterated by political shenanigans.

Leading lights of anthropology have submitted a plea to the Department of the Interior to change a rule concerning how museums and universities are to dispose of "culturally unaffiliated remains"—ancient bones and objects that cannot be linked to a particular tribe or group. Under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) passed in 1990, remains culturally affiliated with certain tribes must be returned to those tribes, who may then rebury them. But the new rule goes further in requiring unaffiliated remains to be given to organizations whose tribal lands are nearby if they request it, or even to be given to other groups.

In a 17 May letter of protest to Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, researchers say that the rule as written will cause "an incalculable loss to science" by permanently making such remains unavailable, and that the rule is "contrary to both the letter and the spirit of the law." The letter is signed by a who's who of 41 prominent archeaologists and anthropologists, all members of the National Academy of Sciences.

The original NAGPRA statute strove to balance the interests of science and Native Americans, and has spurred cooperation between them, says lead author Bruce Smith of the Smithsonian Institution. NAGPRA requires that museums and other repositories repatriate culturally affiliated remains and draw up a list of unaffiliated remains, but it is silent on what to do with the unaffiliated remains. The new rule requiring their disposal is "very bad news for science," Smith says. He adds that "the potential for overlapping and conflicting requests [for remains] is enormous."

Other groups have also written to protest the rule, with many comments submitted during the 3-year comment period and the most recent this month. But the scientific concerns were not addressed, says Smith, and the rule went into effect last Friday, 14 May. Smith says that the next steps for scientists may be to get Congress to look at the rule "to see if they think, as we do, that these regulations go far beyond what Congress intended and what Interior has a right to do as a regulatory agency." Or, they could go to court.
___________________
References:

Culotta, Elizabeth. 2010. "Researchers Fear 'Incalculable' Loss From Reburial Rule". Science Magazine. Posted: May 20, 2010. Available online: http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/05/researchers-fear-incalculable-lo.html

Rule poses threat to museum bones

This is huge. There is sufficient evidence to show that there were an earlier people who predate the Native people of America. If they can claim these skeletons, which obviously have no connection to them, then an important piece of history is being destroyed. While I'm all for the repatriation of Native skeletons to their respective tribes, I do not approve of irresponsible repatriation to satisfy some political whim.

Law change will allow Native American tribes to reclaim ancient bones found close to their lands.

Deep in the bowels of dozens of US museums lie caches of unidentified ancient human bones that hold vital clues to the history of the continent's earliest inhabitants. But many Native Americans believe that the remains should to be returned to them, often for reburial or destruction.

A federal rule unveiled on 15 March could give Native Americans a way to claim these bones — and some researchers fear that this could empty museum collections.

The final rule, due to take effect on 14 May, amends the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which set out steps to correct a history of insensitive handling of bones and funerary objects. The law was a compromise, balancing native rights and those of all Americans who might benefit from scientific study of the remains.

US institutions were required to complete and publish by 1995 inventories of their Native American remains. If tribes could trace the remains to their ancestors or show some other cultural affiliation, they could claim the material from the inventories. Those specimens determined to be not culturally affiliated remained at institutions.

Following years of pressure from Native American groups, the new rule would give them the right to claim specimens without a cultural link if they had been found close to tribes' historic lands. "This is a major departure, going way beyond the intent of the original law," says John O'Shea, a curator at the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology in Ann Arbor, which has about 1,400 specimens considered culturally unaffiliated. Overall, there are more than 124,000 culturally unidentified ancient human remains in US institutions; although estimates vary widely, at least 15% of these could be affected by the new rule.

Dennis O'Rourke, a population geneticist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and president of the American Association of Physical Anthropology, argues that the loss to science would be greater than ever before, because new techniques allowing the extraction of DNA from increasingly ancient bones has boosted the scientific value of such specimens (see Nature 464, 472–473; 2010).

But the National NAGPRA office, the division of the US Department of the Interior that administers the law, says that the rule is in keeping with the intent of the 1990 act. Sherry Hutt, programme manager of the NAGPRA office, says that scientists have had sufficient time to study specimens that have been held for decades. "Holding the remains in perpetuity" isn't appropriate, she says.
Local links

Most scientists say that geographical connections between remains and current tribes may be meaningless, pointing out that the early peoples of the Americas travelled far and wide, as a recent study identifying migration from Siberia to Greenland shows (M. Rasmussen et al. Nature 463, 757-762; 2010). "Geographical proximity is not a great way to define a relationship," says O'Rourke.

The rule, published in the US Federal Register, is open for comment for 60 days — but it will be enacted once that period is over. Ryan Seidemann, a Louisiana state assistant attorney general based in Baton Rouge who is familiar with NAGPRA, called the rule's enactment a form of "guerrilla tactics" that ignores scientists' concerns.

Although Native American tribes are hopeful that the rule will enable them to recover more of their ancestors' bones, they point out that related funerary objects are not covered by it. "As the rule now stands, it won't work," says Mervin Wright Jr, chair of the Pyramid Lake Paiute tribe in Nixon, Nevada. "It is offensive to not include the objects, which for us are a traditional part of the burial." He expects that tribes will lobby to change the rule to address this point.

Some museums — including the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois, and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts — are discussing whether they will challenge the rule. The issue could have the same import as the long legal fight to study the 9,000-year-old Kennewick man skeleton against Native American wishes (see Nature 436, 10; 2005). In 2004, scientists won that court battle, affirming the principle that bones would be returned only to culturally related tribes.

Anthropologists and archaeologists are also gearing up to debate the rule. Discussions have already been scheduled for the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropology, which starts on 14 April in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the Society for American Archaeology meeting, which begins on the same day in St Louis, Missouri.
_________________
References:

Dalton, Rex. 2010. "Rule poses threat to museum bones". Nature News. Posted: March 31, 2010. Available online: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100331/full/464662a.html