Kennewick Man, the Ancient One: Who He Was and Why He Was Reburied

On July 28, 1996, two men attending a boat race at Columbia Park in Kennewick came across part of a human skull in shallow water near the Columbia River bank. Searches of the area recovered a nearly complete male skeleton. The ground belonged to the federal government and was managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a detail that shaped everything that followed, because remains on federal land fall under federal law.

One detail stood out from the start. A stone projectile point was lodged in his right hip. Twenty years later, that point was named in the federal law that described his remains, as the Congressional Record shows.

James Chatters, who examined the skeleton early on, sent a piece of bone for radiocarbon dating, and the answer reached back thousands of years.

The first radiocarbon result placed the remains at more than 9,000 years old, which made him one of the oldest and most complete skeletons ever recovered in North America. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in its later opinion, gave a radiocarbon range of 8,340 to 9,200 years before present. Later study narrowed the estimate to 8,400 to 8,690 years before present, the figure the Burke Museum gives today.

The two ranges overlap, and both put him on the Columbia Plateau close to nine thousand years ago. If you want to know how bones are dated in the first place, our story on how old these bones are walks through the methods.

"Kennewick Man" is the common scientific name, taken from the town where he was found. The people whose homeland includes that stretch of river have their own name for him: the Ancient One.

Five tribes and bands came forward as claimants: the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, the Nez Perce Tribe, and the Wanapum Band of Priest Rapids. They identified him as an ancestor, and their published statements spoke of the long spiritual, cultural and historical relationship between the Columbia Plateau peoples and that land.

Their words carry the heart of the story. Armand Minthorn, a Umatilla religious leader, said their oral histories placed their people in the region since the beginning of time, and he rejected the idea that their ancestors had recently migrated from another continent. Yakama representatives described the continued study of the remains as an interruption of a human being's passage, and said he needed to return to Mother Earth. Umatilla board member Aaron Ashley put it simply, as HistoryLink records: "We always knew the Ancient One to be Indian." He tied that knowledge to the tribes' oral histories.

What the tribes asked for was consistent across all twenty years. They wanted a respectful reburial and no more testing.

The tribes made their claim under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, known as NAGPRA, a 1990 federal law that provides for the return of Native American remains and cultural items to tribes and descendants. The federal government first agreed with them. It determined that the remains were Native American and should be returned.

Eight scientists, led by Smithsonian physical anthropologist Douglas Owsley, sued to stop the transfer and to win access to study the skeleton. In 1998, while the case moved through the courts, the remains went to the Burke Museum for secure care under Army Corps custody, where they stayed until 2017.

In 2002 a federal district court ruled that NAGPRA did not apply, because the government had not established a cultural affiliation between the remains and a present-day tribe. On April 19, 2004, the Ninth Circuit upheld that decision in Bonnichsen v. United States. The ruling cleared the way for scientific study, and for the tribes it meant the Ancient One stayed out of the ground.

Owsley and his colleagues studied the remains at the Burke Museum from 2004 through 2006. Their work looked closely at the shape of the skull and skeleton. Based on that skeletal shape, they described affinities with Circum-Pacific populations, including Ainu and Polynesian groups, and reported no demonstrated relationship to modern Native Americans.

That reading came from comparing bone shapes, and it was contested. The question of who his relatives were had been argued from measurements of a skull. Within a decade, a different kind of evidence would answer it more directly. Our story on what bones tell archaeologists covers what skeletal study can and cannot show about a person's life.

In June 2015 Rasmussen and colleagues published the Ancient One's genome in *Nature*. They had extracted genome-wide DNA from a hand bone and compared it with genetic data from around the world.

The result was clear on the main question. He was more closely related to living Native Americans than to any other population tested, including Europeans, Ainu and Polynesians. Members of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation took part in the comparison.

The authors were also careful about what the result did not settle. Their comparison panel of modern Native American groups was too limited to identify one specific modern tribe as his descendants, or to prove that he was a direct ancestor of the Colville people. What it did support was a close relationship between the Ancient One and Native American populations, the same relationship the tribes had described all along.

So, when people ask what his DNA says, the answer has two parts: he belongs to the ancestry of Native Americans, and the genetic data available in 2015 could not tie him to a single named tribe.

The DNA result changed the government's position. After the 2015 study and an independent validation in 2016, the Army Corps of Engineers determined that the remains were Native American for NAGPRA purposes.

Congress then settled the matter in law. A Kennewick Man provision went into the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act, which President Barack Obama signed on December 16, 2016. The provision named the remains as Kennewick Man or the Ancient One. It required the Corps to transfer them within 90 days to the Washington State Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, which would return them to the five claimant tribes, and it required the tribes to agree on a burial place in Washington.

On February 17, 2017, the remains were transferred at the Burke Museum to the tribes' representatives. The next day, February 18, 2017, the five tribes laid the Ancient One to rest in a private ceremony at an undisclosed place on the Columbia Plateau, near the Columbia River.

The location is private by the tribes' choice, and there is no grave or exhibit to visit. The skull photograph most often shared online, on Wikimedia Commons, shows a resin cast. The Ancient One himself rests in the land the tribes say their people have lived in since the beginning of time.

The Ancient One's return is one of the best-known cases in a much wider movement, and our story on the repatriation of human remains follows how museums and communities handle these returns today. For another of the oldest people known in the Americas, read about Naia of Hoyo Negro, the teenage girl from a flooded cave in Mexico, and for the deepest roots of all, see the story of the oldest human skull.