Federal archaeologists are investigating a jawbone that was discovered recently along the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington State. The human remains were found a short distance from where Kennewick Man was discovered in 1996 and sparked a decade-long legal conflict.
The jawbone with six worn teeth was spotted in shallow water by a jail ‘work crew’ carrying out a routine park cleanup. Kennewick Police and the Benton County coroner quickly determined the bone belonged to an adult human, but was too old to connect to any modern crime.
Archaeologists from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took jurisdiction as the landowners.
Army Corps spokeswoman Gina Baltrusch says it is pure “speculation” to connect the single bone to any era or people at this point, or to Kennewick Man.
“Basically, it is too soon to know. We’ll follow the law and we are treating these remains with respect,” she said.
A retired archaeologist who investigated the ancient Kennewick Man fears the Army Corps will quickly turn the bone over to a local tribe for reburial without sufficient study. But Jim Chatters says it’s not worth it to him to do battle over one bone.
Tribal leaders argue strenuously that their spiritual traditions demand such remains be put back to rest as soon as possible.
A pair of college students discovered the skeletal remains of Kennewick Man in the summer of 1996, while watching hydroplane races. The existence of these bones sparked controversy over scientific conventional wisdom about early humans in the Americas and over who had rightful claim to the bones, the U.S. government or the local Umatilla Indians of the Columbia plateau.
Radiocarbon testing indicates the remains of Kennewick Man are about 9,300 years old, making the individual among the oldest humans identified so far on this continent. The date of these bones questioned the conventional wisdom of how and when early humans arrived to American continents.
The Kennewick Man is one of a growing number of ancient skeletons that some scientists say are so unlike ancestors of modern-day Native Americans that they may represent an entirely new branch on the human family tree.
The remains of these Paleo-Americans, according to some archeologists, closely resemble people who lived in southern and central Asia, while modern Native Americans more closely resemble people from Northeast Asia.
This leads to a few possibilities. Paleo-Americans could be an earlier wave of migrants from Asia, a single wave of migrants who settled down and changed over time, or a group totally unrelated to modern-day Native Americans.
The discovery of these skeletons has furthered scientific debate over the exact origin and history of early Native American people.
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