Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas

Chapter 9
On July 28, 1996, just 24 days after Shuká Káa was found, two young
men stumbled upon the remains of a person eroding out of a riverbank near
the city of Kennewick, Washington. The coroner who investigated the
remains asked archaeologist Jim Chatters for help in recovering them and
determining as much as possible about the individual. Chatters’s initial
examination of the skeleton’s cranium led him to believe that the remains
were of a middle-aged man of European descent, although, oddly, he had a
stone projectile point embedded in his hip. A sample of bone was sent off
for radiocarbon dating, and like the one from Shuká Káa, the sample
returned a shocking age: around 9,000 years old. Unlike Shuká Káa,
however, this is not a tale of a productive collaboration between scientists
and living descendants to learn about the past (1).
The man’s original name is not known to us, but some of his present-day
descendants, members of the Umatilla tribe in Oregon, call him Oid-p’ma
Natitayt or the Ancient One (2). To most archaeologists he is known by
another name, Kennewick Man, after the present-day city of Kennewick,
Washington, near where his body was found.
Oid-p’ma Natitayt might well have been surprised at how bitterly, 9,000
years after his death, anthropologists have argued about the shape of his
head and what it did or did not say about his own ancestry. When his
skeleton was first found, he was assumed to be a man of European descent
because of the way his skull was shaped. When it became clear that he
predated European contact by several thousand years, his long, narrow, and
tall skull became the focal point of a controversy. At a press conference,
Chatters described him as belonging to the “Caucasoid type,” very
distinctive from the “Mongoloid type” that “Amerindians” belonged to.
Chatters insisted later that he did not mean to imply that Kennewick
Man was “white,” but unfortunately the press and the public heard