Kennewick Man: The Ancient One and the Battle Over His Remains

Kennewick Man, known to Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest as the Ancient One, is the skeleton of a man who lived about 9,000 years ago and was found on the bank of the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington, in 1996. One of the oldest and most complete human skeletons ever discovered in North America, he became the centre of a bitter legal fight between scientists and tribes over who controlled ancient remains. The case ended in 2017, when DNA evidence linked him to Native Americans and he was reburied.

The discovery in 1996

On 28 July 1996 two young spectators at a hydroplane race in Columbia Park, Kennewick, waded into the shallows of the Columbia River and came upon a human skull. Police and the county coroner called in the local forensic anthropologist James Chatters, who recovered some 350 bones and fragments from the riverbank over the following weeks.

Chatters first assumed the remains belonged to an early European settler, partly because of the shape of the skull. But a stone spear point was lodged in the right side of the pelvis, partly healed over, and its leaf-shaped Cascade style suggested great age. A radiocarbon test on a bone sample produced a date of more than 8,000 radiocarbon years, roughly 9,000 calendar years.

Who was he?

Later study showed that the man stood about 170 centimetres tall and died at around 40 years of age. He had survived several injuries during his life, including the spear wound in his hip, broken ribs and damage to his shoulder. Chemical analysis of his bones pointed to a diet rich in marine foods such as salmon, and the position of the skeleton suggested a deliberate burial.

Chatters’ early remark that the skull had “Caucasoid-like” features was widely reported, and some commentators claimed the man was of European descent. Physical anthropologists later stressed that skull shape is a poor indicator of ancestry, and that early Americans often differ in appearance from their modern descendants.

The legal battle

The bones were found on land managed by the US Army Corps of Engineers, so the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990 applied. This law requires Native American remains on federal land to be returned to culturally affiliated tribes. A coalition including the Umatilla, Yakama, Nez Perce and Colville tribes, together with the Wanapum band, claimed the remains as an ancestor and asked for reburial.

The Corps agreed to repatriate them. In October 1996, however, eight scientists, among them Robson Bonnichsen, Douglas Owsley, Dennis Stanford and C. Vance Haynes, sued to stop the transfer and to be allowed to study the skeleton. In April 1998 the Corps covered the discovery site with tonnes of rock and soil to stabilise the eroding bank, a move critics said destroyed evidence. Later that year the remains were moved to the Burke Museum in Seattle for safekeeping.

In 2000 the Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt, decided that the remains were culturally affiliated with the claimant tribes. In 2002 Magistrate Judge John Jelderks of the US District Court in Portland, Oregon, overturned that decision, and in February 2004 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld his ruling in Bonnichsen v. United States. The court found that the government had not shown a link to any present-day tribe, so NAGPRA did not apply and scientific study could go ahead.

Scientific study and the DNA results

Owsley and a team of specialists examined the skeleton in 2005 and 2006, publishing their findings in a large volume in 2014. Their craniometric analysis suggested a closer resemblance to Polynesians and the Ainu of Japan than to modern Native Americans.

Ancient DNA told a different story. In June 2015 a team led by Morten Rasmussen and Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen published his genome in the journal Nature. They found that Kennewick Man was more closely related to modern Native Americans than to any other population worldwide, and that the Colville, whose members contributed DNA samples, were among his closest living relatives. The study underlined the limits of using skull shape to trace ancestry. Like the Clovis-era Anzick child, he belonged to the population descended from the people who entered the Americas from northeast Asia.

Repatriation and reburial

In April 2016 the Corps of Engineers accepted that the remains were Native American under the law. In December 2016 Congress passed, and President Barack Obama signed, the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act, which included a provision transferring the remains to the Washington State Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation for return to the tribes.

On 18 February 2017 members of the Colville, Yakama, Umatilla, Nez Perce and Wanapum communities reburied the Ancient One at an undisclosed location in the Columbia Basin, in a private ceremony attended by around 200 people.

Timeline

• c. 7000 BC: The man known as Kennewick Man lives and dies in the Columbia Plateau region.
• 1996, 28 July: The skull is found in the Columbia River at Columbia Park, Kennewick.
• 1996, October: Eight scientists file suit to block repatriation under NAGPRA.
• 1998, April: The Army Corps of Engineers buries the discovery site under rock and fill.
• 2000, September: Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt rules the remains culturally affiliated with the tribes.
• 2002, August: Judge John Jelderks rules in favour of the scientists.
• 2004, February: The Ninth Circuit upholds the ruling in Bonnichsen v. United States.
• 2015, June: A genome study in Nature links Kennewick Man to Native Americans.
• 2016, December: Congress passes a law returning the remains to the tribes.
• 2017, 18 February: The Ancient One is reburied by Columbia Plateau tribes.

Why it matters

Kennewick Man is a key piece of evidence for the peopling of the Americas and the early inhabitants of the Pacific Northwest. His case became a landmark in the debate over NAGPRA, scientific access and Native American rights, and it showed how ancient DNA can resolve questions that skeletal measurements alone could not. For the tribes, his return marked the end of a 20-year struggle to bring an ancestor home.