The Ancient One
Washington
On July twenty-eighth, nineteen ninety-six, two college students wading in the shallows of the Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington, stumbled onto a human skull. What followed was one of the most contentious archaeological and legal disputes in American history.
The remains turned out to be nearly complete, roughly three hundred and fifty separate pieces, belonging to a person who had lived approximately eighty-five hundred years ago. Radiocarbon dating and the skeleton's remarkable preservation made it one of the oldest and most complete ancient human skeletons ever found in North America. Scientists named him Kennewick Man.
Five Columbia Basin tribes immediately sought repatriation under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, knowing him by a different name: the Ancient One, a revered ancestor to be returned to the earth. Eight anthropologists and archaeologists sued for the right to study him, arguing that his skull's features did not closely match any modern indigenous population. A federal court sided with the scientists in two thousand four, and the skeleton spent years at the Burke Museum in Seattle, becoming the subject of intense scientific study.
The legal and moral battle turned decisively in two thousand fifteen when a team at the University of Copenhagen published a comprehensive DNA analysis. The Ancient One's genome was closest to that of modern Native Americans, particularly people of the Columbia Plateau. The morphological differences that had fueled a decade of litigation turned out to be poor predictors of ancestry. DNA told a clearer story.
Congress passed legislation in two thousand sixteen directing that the remains be returned. On February eighteenth, two thousand seventeen, two hundred members of five Columbia Basin tribes gathered at an undisclosed location and performed traditional burial rites for a man their communities had claimed as family from the beginning.
The site here along the Columbia where he surfaced is unremarkable to look at, just a riverbank below a reservation. But it became the location where American law, indigenous sovereignty, and the science of ancient human migration all collided at once.
