And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 10:57:25 -0400
From: Gwen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sunday, April 18, 1999
Bones of Contention Controversy surrounds the
skeleton of
Kennewick Man, and a UNM paleontologist is trying to
sort it out
By John Fleck
Of the Journal
When the 9,000-year-old Kennewick Man'sancestors came to this
continent, and where his descendantsare now, remains a mystery. But
slowly, the ancient skeleton is giving uphis secrets. In the process, the
bones found along the banks of the Columbia River near Kennewick, Wash., in
1996could help scientists sort out who the first Americans were,where they
came from, and when.
Scientists say humans have been in the Americas for at least
12,500 years, and a recent study suggests one skeleton from California
might be as much as 13,000 years old.
But much about the first humans' arrival remains controversial.
In February, University of New Mexico paleontologist Joe Powell
led a team of scientists that performed the first detailed analysis of the
ancient bones from Kennewick. They painstakingly measured them, trying to
sort out the subtle differences that distinguish groups of humans.
Their primary goal is to help federal officials determine whether
the ancient man is related to modern Native Americans, and therefore,
whether the skeleton should be reburied by one of the tribes living near
where it was found.
It's a difficult task.
Where does he belong?
Powell's specialty is categorizing groups of people based on the
characteristic shapes of their skulls, things like their cheekbones or the
bridge of their nose. Sitting in a UNM classroom discussing his work,
Powell moved his hands over casts of skulls, explaining the difference
between the long European nose, adapted for cold weather, and the broader
African nose.
It's that skill that prompted the federal government to bring Powell
into the Kennewick Man case, to try to resolve a dilemma.
Federal law requires repatriation of ancient human remains to the
Native American tribes, with the idea that descendants should be allowed to
bury their dead. But Kennewick Man has confounded the government's efforts.
Initial reports, based on Kennewick Man's bone structure, suggested
he might have been of European origin. That complicated the idea of
repatriating the remains to the Umatilla Tribe or other area Native
American groups. If true, it also would have radically changed
scientists' ideas
of who the first Americans were, and where they might have come from,
because conventional scientific wisdom said Native Americans' ancestors
were Asian.
Analysis of the skull shows Kennewick Man is not European, Powell said.
The skull shares features of a number of different modern groups,
something commonly found in the analysis of ancient remains, he said.
That's because evolution and the movement of populations means modern
humans are different than their ancestors.
Over the past 10,000 years, he said, people have changed.
But regardless of whether Kennewick Man's family tree can be
reconstructed, he remains an important piece of a puzzle that has become
jumbled in recent years as old ideas about what scientists call "the
peopling of the Americas" are thrown out and a new, more complex picture
begins to emerge.
Shaking things up
Scientific evidence suggests humans are recent arrivals in the
Americas. Evolving several hundred thousand years ago, possibly in
Africa, humans spread across Europe and Asia, where fossils of human
ancestors have been found spanning the last100,000 years. But no evidence
of human presence is found in the record of the Americas until a little
more than 10,000 years ago.
Where did they come from?
How did they get here?
Until recently, the dominant theory was built
around discoveries made in the 1930s at a place called Blackwater Draw
near Clovis in eastern New Mexico. Evidence of the so-called "Clovis
culture," characterized by distinctive spear points and dated from 10,900
to 11,500 years, was soon found throughout North America.
It appeared to show up suddenly, and led
anthropologists to theorize that the first Americans crossed a land bridge
from Asia and then headed south as the last ice age
was ending, about 12,000 years ago. Facing open land with abundant food,
the theory suggested, the first Americans rapidly colonized the Americas.
"We were pretty sure we knew when humans got here," Powell said.
But over the last several decades, cracks began
appearing in the Clovis model. Archaeological sites were found that seemed
older than Clovis, and evidence from genetics and
studies of modern Native American languages seemed to suggest humans came
to the Americas much earlier.
The clinching evidence came together in 1997, when a group of
archaeologists visited a site in Chile called Monte Verde, and agreed that
it had been occupied by humans 12,500 years ago -- a thousand years before
Clovis.
That changed everything. To get to Chile would have taken time. How
much time is unclear, but it clearly required humans to have arrived long
before the age of Clovis culture.
"Somebody was here before Clovis," said University of Arizona
anthropologist Stephen Zegura. "We know that. We've got Monte Verde."
"They (early Americans) had to have been in the land bridge at 15,000
to 20,000 years ago," Powell said.
Preliminary results of a recent study suggest a skeleton found
40 years ago on an island off California's coast could be 13,000 years old.
While the date hasn't been confirmed by other researchers as Monte
Verde has, it's consistent with the theory that humans crossed the Bering
Strait sometime before and migrated south along the coast to get to Monte
Verde, said David Meltzer of Southern Methodist University in
Dallas.
Common ancestors
The other thing that has changed in our ideas of the peopling of
the Americas, based on the work of Powell and others, is our idea of what
the first Americans looked like.
They don't look like modern Native Americans, said Powell, who has
studied most of the more than 30 ancient American skeletons that have been
found.
Based on bone and tooth structure, the closest modern group resembling
the ancient American skeletons is Polynesian.
"This looks very much like the Kennewick skull,"
Powell said recently, holding up a plastic cast of a modern human skull of
a person who was Polynesian. It doesn't appear they could have come here
from Polynesia, Powell said, because there's no evidence of human culture
in Polynesia until about 3,000 years ago.
But it does suggest ancient Native Americans and Polynesians might
have had a common Asian ancestor, he said.
Pinning down when the first Americans came and who they were remains a
problem, in large measure because the Americas are so large, and there
must have been so few in the first groups of immigrants, Meltzer said.
"We're talking about a relatively small population coming into a
continent the size of the western
hemisphere," the anthropologist said.
Pressed for time
Estimates based on studying today's Native American languages
and trying to determine how long it would have taken their differences to
evolve have put the date of the first Americans' arrival at more than
30,000 years ago. But those studies are in dispute, because they are based on
inferences about the speed and nature of language evolution.
"The linguistics contains too many uncertainties to give a date in
itself," said Daniel Nettle of Merton College in Oxford, England.
Studying the genetic material of modern Native Americans has been
used in a similar way to try to date the timing and pace of migration into
the Americas, but that, too, has been surrounded in scientific controversy.
Kennewick Man will not resolve the scientific debate, Powell said.
But as pressure mounts to rebury ancient remains, Powell and other
scientists feel pressed to work quickly and try to
collect as much data as they can to try to resolve the question.
It's a delicate task, Powell said, as they try to juggle their desire
to do research with what Powell sees as legitimate Native American concerns
about respecting the remains of what might be their ancestors.
"I understand where they're coming from," he said. Still, he
understands that time for the work
that he must do is fleeting. "I'm sort of racing the clock," Powell said.
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Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
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