Update on Kennewick Man
Kennewick Man yielded a few tantalizing clues to his past yesterday as the team of scientists studying him wrapped up the first phase of its investigation.
The skull of the skeleton found on the bank of the Columbia River nine years ago shares common characteristics with other “paleo-Indians” of North America, said David Hunt, physical anthropologist with the Smithsonian Institution, who pieced together the skull for the first time.
“You can tell when it fits exactly,” he said of the ancient three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. “I could just feel it.”
But that finding alone raises more questions about various theories of how the Americas were populated, said Douglas Owsley, also a forensic anthropologist with the Smithsonian and leader of the scientific team.
“He’s of a line we weren’t expecting,” he said. “What was a simple model is not right. He shows the complexity.”
At this point, scientists aren’t prepared to say more than that.
“He could be somebody locally born and raised, or he could be an immigrant himself,” Owsley said.
Kennewick Man, who was found with a spearhead embedded in his hip, has been at the center of a mystery about his origins and a controversy over what to do with him since his discovery in 1996. Several Northwest tribes, including the Yakama, Umatilla, Nez Perce and Colville, claimed him as an ancestor and asked to rebury the bones under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
A few months later, scientists sued to block the reburial and petitioned for the right to study the rare skeleton.
In 2002, a federal court ruled that the bones could be studied, a decision that was upheld two years later.
So far, the long-sought investigation has raised more questions than it’s answered. Even Kennewick Man’s age — both biological and archaeological — are up in the air. He was originally believed to have been in his mid-40s when he died about 9,300 years ago. Scientists are now hedging that.
The bones have been judged to be 8,400 radiocarbon years (which are not the same as calendar years), but with a range of 2,600, which Owsley said was unacceptably broad. Scientists plan to redate the bones to narrow the age.
And regarding his chronological age at the time of his death from undisclosed causes, Owsley was circumspect.
“We may be inclined to modify that,” he said, but wouldn’t elaborate.
There are a few things they know for sure, however. A sophisticated CT scan used to measure and reconstruct models of the bone fragments helped show which way the spearhead entered the man’s hip bone.
But they’re not telling — yet.
The spearhead lodged in his hip appeared to be a healed injury, Owsley said, although there is still debate over whether it was an active site of infection.
“I do know when (the spear) hit he knew it,” Owsley said. “It was sheared off at the tip, and you can see the base is broken where he grabbed it and twisted it off.”
And the man likely had other misadventures.
Hugh Berryman, a consulting forensic anthropologist who works for crime labs in Tennessee, is an expert on bone fractures caused by everything from gunshots to gravity.
His job was to sort out which fractures in the skeleton came from the pressure of being buried in the earth and then eroding out of the bank of the river, and which happened during Kennewick Man’s life.
There do appear to be some fractures that occurred when he was alive, Berryman said.
The team, which has spent nearly every waking hour at the Burke Museum in Seattle looking at, analyzing and talking about the bones for the past two weeks, was elated over the details that were emerging.
Dozens of variables, from the pattern of algae deposits to fine water abrasion, rodent nibbling and sediment deposits, were duly noted and factored into the story of the bones.
“We have had our days where we spent the whole day on a single bone,” Owsley said.
“Our primary goal was to have a very exact inventory of the bones,” he said. The decomposing skeleton, broken into nearly 400 pieces, had many fragments that hadn’t yet been described and cataloged.
All the data from the first phase of the inquiry will be compiled into a report this fall and passed along to a second team of scientists who will begin their examination of the bones early next year.
The second phase will try to determine finer details such as whether he was intentionally buried or died accidentally and was covered in silt where he fell.
A third phase of study will try to determine characteristics such as “robusticity,” physical size and where and how the Kennewick Man was “muscled up,” Owsley said. That information could lead to clues about his lifestyle and activities.
“The bone records its own history,” Berryman said. “This is like a rare book. We’re reading a page at a time.”