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Loring Brace
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Claims for the Remains
C. Loring Brace
Curator
of Biological Anthropology
and Professor of Anthropology,
University of Michigan
The questions "Why do scientists want to study Kennewick Man" and "What would I
personally hope to learn from the study of Kennewick Man" are essentially the
same from my point of view.
The Kennewick skeleton is one of the oldest and most complete human specimens
found in the Western Hemisphere and the only one from the northwest edge of the
continent, which was almost certainly close to the route taken by the earliest
humans to enter the continent. All the archeological and biological evidence
points to a Northeast Asian origin for the original human occupants of the
Western Hemisphere, but there is increasing reason to believe that different
entrants came at different times and derived from different Asian sources. Who
were those sources? When did their offshoots come to the Americas? And which
Native Americans are derived from which of those sources? Only by studying the
remains of the earliest Americans and comparing them to recent and living
Native Americans and to recent Asians can we ever provide answers to these
questions.
While Cohanim priests can
trace their male lineage back several thousand years using Y-chromosome
analysis, no one alive today can trace his or her heritage back as far as the
9,000-year-old Kennewick Man.
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Just because some government officials claim that any ancient skeleton is
Native American by their definition does not justify turning it over to one or
more groups of modern Native Americans, who may have no close relationship (or
any at all) to the skeleton. The old European-American assumption that "if
you've seen one Indian, you've seen them all" is a gross misrepresentation of
reality. Although both the Navajo and the Hopi are Native American groups in
the American Southwest, when Harvard University returned the burials from Pecos
Pueblo that had been in the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it did
not turn those skeletons over to the Navajo but only to Pueblo groups related
to the Hopi, because in that particular case, the historical knowledge of who
was related to whom was known. In the case of Kennewick, however, such
information is not known.
In Polynesia, oral traditions preserve a general knowledge of population
relationships going back some 2,000 years. Where written records are kept, one
can trace actual relationships back even further than that, as with the
descendants of Confucius. Y-chromosome records have shown the continuity of the
Cohanim, the Jewish priesthood, via the founding priests of migrant Jewish
settlements. But none of these forms of evidence goes back as far in time as
the date of Kennewick Man or the roots of the initial settlers in the New
World. If we simply bury the evidence, we will never be able to answer the
questions of origins and relationships.
Does Race Exist? |
Meet Kennewick Man
Claims for the Remains |
The Dating Game |
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