K-Man

For going on two years now, the most intriguing new evidence for the early history of humankind in the Americas has been lying in a box behind a locked storeroom door in Building Sigma V of the Pacific Northwest Laboratories Battelle runs for the Energy Department in North Richland, Washington: lying unexamined by science—but not undisturbed (see chronology below).

This week, a federal judge in Portland, Oregon, may finally cut through 18 months of recrimination, obfuscation, and litigation, and bring to a close one of the most ludicrous—but instructive—episodes in the history of science since the state of Tennessee put the theory of evolution on trial. Only in America would anthropologists have to go to court to try to protect vital scientific evidence from a bunch of uniformed bulldozer jockeys determined to yield it up to religious fundamentalists to bury it in the earth it came from.

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"Kennewick man"—the more or less complete skeleton of a fiftyish male inhabitant of the Columbia River basin of 9,000 years ago—is far from the only find shaking up the long-logy field of North American archeology these days, but he's the one who's most caught the attention of the media and the general public. It's not every day a major scientific discovery is made in the middle of a hydroplane race; nor every collection of ancient bones that precipitates a battle royal between Odin worshippers and Native Americans, federal bureaucrats and federal politicians, scientist and scientist, all against all and devil take the hindmost.

The fight over Kennewick man began the day his discovery was announced; the day that Richland anthropologist James C. Chatters told the Tri-Cities media that the remains turned over to him a month before for forensic examination were not only ancient but also exhibited distinct "Caucasoid characteristics."

These days cautious anthropologists avoid terms like "Caucasoid," with their overtones of classification (and ranking) by race. Students of North American prehistory have to be particularly cautious. The peoples European explorers and settlers found in residence when they arrived were and are a biometrically diverse lot, but "Caucasoid" they certainly were not. Suggesting that one of the oldest human specimens ever found in North America was significantly different from Native American norms was also to suggest, in the crudest possible terms, that Whitey got here first.

"For a scientist, this is the most counterproductive kind of language imaginable," says anthropology prof Laurence Straus of the University of New Mexico. "Instead of trying to forge a mutual interest with Native Americans in discovering who these ancestors of us all were, we throw it in their faces that they are not the original Americans after all, when that is the one thing they have in their cultures to hang onto in the face of the overwhelming dominance of ours."

Whatever Chatters meant by the term in question (as recently as this March addressing a scientific body he disclaimed it, then immediately used it again), it had the predictable effect. Members of five tribes of Northwest Native Americans immediately demanded that the remains be turned over to them for reburial according to their custom. And for once they had the law on their side: The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), passed by Congress and signed by President George Bush in 1990, makes it clear that Native American remains and artifacts "belong" to the tribe that can demonstrate the closest affiliation to them (in this case, presumably the Umatilla nation, though the neighboring Yakama, Nez Perce, Colville, and Wanapum have also shown an interest).

Of course, having the law on their side has often done Native Americans little good when their interests turn out to conflict with the white man's. But in this particular case they had one powerful ally: the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Because it's in charge of the great majority of the federal government's public works, the Army Corps administers a great deal of federal property, including dams, levees, and the riverbanks adjoining them. Columbia Park in Kennewick, where the bones in question turned up, is such a site.

When the five Native American tribes demanded repatriation of the bones in late August 1996, it was the corps that asked the Benton County coroner for them, who in turn took possession back from Chatters, who'd had them stored in the basement of his split-level North Richland home—all, that is, but some tiny fragments he'd sent with the coroner's permission for radiocarbon and DNA analysis to specialists in Southern California. (Chatters had also, apparently without the coroner's permission, made meticulous casts of the most significant bones, but that fact didn't emerge until Eastsideweek broke the story last March.)

Tiny as the bones were that Chatters sent for analysis—about a gram and a half of material from a finger joint—they were essential for scientific study because they held both the secret of the date when Kennewick man roamed the earth and his most likely genetic affiliation to other humans, of his own day and ours. They were also the main cause of Native American concern, because both radiocarbon and DNA analysis are "destructive," requiring the breaking down of the tissue in question by heat or chemical action to release the essential contents for measurement. According to contemporary Native American conservatives, doing anything with ancestral remains but putting them in the ground is sacrilegious. As for the genetic affiliation of the remains, the Native Americans were not just indifferent but actively hostile: They already "knew" the bones' affiliation, just as they "knew" that the ancestors of Native Americans, far from being Johnny-come-latelies to the American scene, sprang fully formed from Mother Earth at the beginning of time.