Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Kennewick Man
Summary
Kennewick Man and Ancient One are the names given to the skeletal remains of a prehistoric Paleoamerican man found on a bank of the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington, on July 28, 1996. It is one of the most complete ancient skeletons ever found. Radiocarbon tests on bone have shown it to date from 8,900 to 9,000 calibrated years before present, but it was not until 2013 that ancient DNA analysis techniques had improved enough to shed light on the remains.
The discovery led to controversy among scientists as well as Native American tribes for more than a decade. The Umatilla people and other tribes demanded that the remains be returned for reburial under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). The law was designed to return human remains and cultural objects which had long been unlawfully obtained or taken from them, and to refuse scientific study on said remains. In this case, the archaeologists who studied the bones, James Chatters and Douglas Owsley, the latter with the Smithsonian Institution, both asserted that the bones were only distantly related to today's Native Americans. They also said that the remains had features which more closely resembled Polynesian or Southeast Asian peoples, a finding that would exempt the bones from NAGPRA.
Kennewick Man became the subject of a controversial nine-year court case between the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), scientists, and Native American tribes who claimed ownership of the remains. In June 2015, it was made public that scientists at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark determined through DNA from 8,500‐year-old bones that Kennewick Man is, in fact, related to modern Native Americans, including the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation from the region in which his bones were found.
Analysis showed that several tribes for which public genome data were available, including the Colville tribe, were descended from ancient populations closely related to Kennewick Man.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.