Bones of contention

Research has tied modern Native American mtDNA to several basic lineage groups known as A, B, C, D and, in later samples, X, a type of mtDNA that so far remains undetected in modern central Asian populations. Dewar takes the fact that X is not found in Asia these days as confirmation that at least some ancestral Native Americans had to have come from somewhere other than Asia. But mtDNA mutates fairly quickly, and lineages can die out easily, since they require unbroken lines of female descent. If a few women carrying the X marker crossed into the New World and reproduced there while the women of that lineage left behind in Asia (if any) had few or no daughters, it is perfectly possible that Asian populations would not demonstrate that marker today.

But in any case, investigation of Kennewick Man's mtDNA was one of the casualties of the Corps of Engineers' abrupt termination of the scientific examination of his remains. The laboratory that was attempting to tease out his genetic profile was ordered to cease and desist when the Army seized the skeleton, and later attempts to extract mtDNA from the limited amount of bone the Army permitted scientists to analyze were unsuccessful.

Before mtDNA became a favored method of researching lineages, the most common way scientists attempted to demonstrate the affiliation of prehistoric remains to a modern population was to compare the measurements of the bones of the old skull to those of modern human beings. Scientists assumed a genetic link where characteristics matched and a discontinuity of lineage when they didn't. This method assumes that it is possible to differentiate genetic lineages precisely enough, working just from the characteristics of bones, to be able to say that a given skeleton was a definitely a member of a particular "race," or could only have come from a particular part of the prehistoric world. That's a tricky and possibly invidious proposition.

Among careful scientists, such measurements and comparisons can be very useful in assembling "big picture" concepts of migration and descent, but they also offer laymen a golden opportunity to distort the scientific stories to serve their own ends. So the leader of the Asatru Folk Assembly can use the legitimate idea that certain facial features "cluster" in particular geographic areas to claim that the characteristics of the Kennewick skeleton are too "European" for him to have been related to modern Native Americans.

The science of skeletons doesn't support such a simple conclusion, of course. For example, it's not necessarily true that a "Mongoloid" kind of bone structure was dominant in the first prehistoric groups to cross into to the New World. In fact, C. Loring Brace, a craniofacial expert at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, has shown that the faces and skulls of many New World skeletons are closer in configuration to those found in Europeans than they are to faces and skulls found in central Asians. But that's not because the first Americans paddled over directly from Europe, as the Asatru Folk Assembly prefers to believe, but because the genes of the earliest European inhabitants apparently spread eastward across northern Asia hundreds of thousands of years ago.

According to Brace, the "Mongolian" component of Native American inheritance might have been a later adaptation or it may have been an admixture to the people who first crossed into the New World, people he thinks are more properly called "Eurasian." So the fact that Kennewick Man's cheekbones are unlike the cheekbones of pre-historic skeletons found in Lower Mongolia doesn't prove that Kennewick Man's ancestors didn't come over the Bering land bridge. Neither are the facts that his face is narrow and that his jaw curves like some Europeans' any proof that he is completely unrelated to the Native Americans who live in the Kennewick area today. Nevertheless, the lack of mtDNA and the disconnects between Kennewick Man's appearance and the physical characteristics of the modern tribes in the area has been significant in the political and legal struggle that is still going on regarding the remains.

Soon after the Corps of Engineers snatched Kennewick Man and put him under lock and key with the announced intention of immediately repatriating him to the Native American tribes who claimed him as an ancestor, a coalition of scientists (including Loring Brace) sued the government for the right to keep studying him. So the supposedly imminent repatriation was put on hold. Ironically, the Department of the Interior then hired a team to comprehensively study the skeleton in an effort to make a more precise scientific determination of its relationship, if any, to the local tribes, so they would know who to give him to when the time came. That was their story, anyway, and they were sticking to it.

Next Page: What the Army Corps of Engineers really wanted

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