The Kennewick Man, the Ancient One, and the Twenty-Year Dispute

On July twenty-eighth, nineteen ninety-six, two college students wading at the edge of the Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington, found a human skull eroding out of the riverbank. The local coroner called in a forensic anthropologist. What the anthropologist found was not a recent death. Radiocarbon dating would later establish that the skeletal remains were approximately nine thousand years old, among the oldest and most complete human remains ever found in North America.

Scientists identified the discovery as a landmark for paleoanthropology. The bones could answer questions about how and when the first humans reached the Americas. They wanted to study them.

Five Columbia Plateau tribes, led by the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, with the Yakama Nation, the Colville Confederated Tribes, and the Wanapum people, identified the remains as an ancestor and invoked the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Under that law, Native American remains must be returned to lineal descendants or culturally affiliated tribes for reburial. The tribes named the Ancient One.

Scientists and the Army Corps of Engineers, which controlled the land where the bones were found, went to federal court. The case worked its way through the system for nearly a decade. In two thousand four, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the scientists, holding that the tribes had not established cultural affiliation under the statute. Scientific study of the remains continued.

In two thousand fifteen, new DNA analysis confirmed that the Ancient One's genetic profile is most closely related to contemporary Native American populations, including those of the Columbia Plateau. The Army Corps of Engineers changed its position. On February eighteenth, two thousand seventeen, the remains were repatriated to the coalition of tribes and reburied in a private ceremony in an undisclosed location.

The case changed federal law and practice around ancient human remains in ways that are still playing out at sites across North America.