We know that early Europeans and many other cultures reached the United States -Irish, Welsh, English and even it seems, later Romans stranded there. These mainly hit Central America, seemingly, South America but also the now Southern US -the main route seems to have been via the now Florida area.
Archival photo
of an Ainu coastal man may resemble what Kennewick man looked like when
he was alive. Photo credit: CBS Evening News broadcast Oct. 7, 2014.
Tales of tall, red-haired and bearded giants and others that seem to be Europeans exist in Native American lore. So, when this skull was found "experts" declared that it was European and had no signs of being Native American. Above: Kennewick Man based on facial reconstruction -Ainu like?
There are a number of documentaries on the subject:
Elaine Thompson—APA plastic casting of a controversial
9,200-year-old skull sits in the basement of archaeologist James
Chatter's home July 24, 1997 in Richland, Wash.
He may have
lived a simple life back then, but Kennewick Man’s remains have sparked
controversy and legal battles that the latest scientific investigation
may finally put to rest
Finding a human skull doesn’t happen often, but the skull that two
college students stumbled upon in the Columbia River in 1996 proved
rarer still. It happened to belong to an ancestor that roamed North
America nearly 8500 years ago. Near the skull were remains of
practically an entire skeleton belonging to a male who was likely buried
along the riverbank by his people in Kennewick, Washington.
Kennewick Man, as he is known, quickly became the subject of a custody battle
between scientists eager to study his remains, which are among the
oldest and most complete of a human ancestor in North America, and a
group of five Native American tribes who claimed the bones as the
Ancient One, one of their own forebears. The U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers, which manages the land on which the remains were found,
intended to return the ancient bones to the Native Americans. The
archeologists sued for the right to study them, and in 2004, a judge
ruled that the fossils should be studied further.
The results of that analysis were published in a popular book that
detailed the lifestyle that Kennewick Man likely led, but since then,
advances in genetic sequencing made it possible to do a complete genome
study of his DNA. And those results, published in the journalNature,
resolve a long-standing dispute over where Kennewick Man came from —
Europe or Asia, or whether he was, as the Native American tribes
claimed, an early ancestor who gave rise to some of the Native American
populations that subsequently resided in North America.
His genes show that Kennewick Man was more closely related to Native
Americans than to European or Asian populations. “It’s very clear the
genome sequence shows that he is most closely related to contemporary
Native Americans,” says Eske Willerslev, from the Center for GeoGenetics
at the University of Copenhagen, who led the analysis.
Hints of these results first leaked in January, when emails obtained
from a Freedom of Information Act request by reporters at the Seattle
Times revealed that Willerslev’s group shared some of their early
findings with the Army Corps of Engineers to update them on the genetic
analysis, which was done in Copenhagen. And presumably, it puts to rest
any lingering questions about Kennewick Man’s origins.
Those began when the first archeologist to evaluate the skull’s
anatomical features declared it to be more Caucasian than Native
American, and continued when Douglas Owsley, a physical anthropologist
at the Smithsonian Institution who is considered the expert on North
American human remains, agreed with that conclusion. Owsley pointed out
that the prominent forehead of Kennewick Man and thinner brain case made
him more like Japanese Ainu or Polynesians rather than Native
Americans.
His genes tell a different story, however, and when Willerslev’s
group also compared Kennewick Man’s DNA to that of the Ainu, Polynesians
and Europeans, they found that it did not share the same similarities
as it did with those of the contemporary Colville, a Native American
tribe from the Columbia River area that agreed to provide DNA samples.
No other Native American groups provided genetic material, so it’s
possible that other tribes have an even closer connection to the ancient
remains than the Colville.
The results do not show that Kennewick Man was a direct ancestor of
any tribe living today, says Willerslev. It’s not known whether, for
example, an older population of Native Americans living in North America
then split into a branch that led to Kennewick Man, and another to the
contemporary tribes such as the Colville, or whether Kennewick Man is
the ancestor of the Colville and other modern Native Americans.
The genetic analysis does little to change archeologists’ current
theories about the first North Americans. The first people to spread
into the Americas likely came 5,000 to 6,000 years before Kennewick
Man’s time, probably from Siberia via a now non-existent land bridge
that allowed them to traverse the Bering Strait.
As for Kennewick Man’s future, Willerslev says that he has been in
contact with several members of the Colville throughout the analysis and
says that “To me, they seemed pretty excited, and found it
interesting.” Whether the remains will now go back to the Native
American groups under the Native American Graves Protection and
Repatriation Act isn’t clear. But Willerslev acknowledges the irony in
the findings. “The reason why we came to this conclusion scientifically
speaking is because the remains were almost kept out of science,” he
says.
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Now, no more time wasting let's get back to searching for the real mysteries in America!
