SLOWLY but surely, one of the Americas’ oldest and most famous founding fathers is giving up his secrets.
Kennewick Man, named after Kennewick in Washington state, was discovered in July 1996 after more than 9000 years buried in the banks of the nearby Columbia river. His skeleton, some of the earliest and best preserved human remains in North America, caused a sensation.
Scientists hoped he would reveal who first settled the Americas, while Native American tribes claimed he was an ancient ancestor whose remains should be respected and reburied. The ensuing battle over rights to the skeleton was only resolved two years ago when a federal appeals court ruled that scientists could study the remains (91av, 14 February 2004, p 10).
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The first results of that investigation are in, and it is clear that Kennewick Man lived a rough, tough life, surviving an impaling, two skull fractures and a broken rib before succumbing to unknown causes. Yet he was buried with dignity, according to anthropologist Doug Owsley at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. He reported the post-mortem findings last week at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences’ meeting in Seattle.
The skeleton was found in around 350 fragments. The first step was to reconstruct his skull, and his right hip, which showed signs of wounds. Because the caretakers of the bones, the US Army Corp of Engineers, would not allow them to be glued together, the researchers took CT scans of the remains and used these to generate 3D plastic models of the 11 pieces of the skull and nine pieces of the hip.
Reconstructing the skull showed two sets of compression fractures, while the rebuilt hip revealed that Kennewick man had been speared in the pelvis by a dart from an atlatl weapon. However, the dart entered not from the back as originally suspected, but from the front, descending at an angle of 77 degrees to the horizontal. Most of the stone tip of the dart remained embedded in the bone after the wooden dart was broken off, but the wound healed so Kennewick Man could have walked normally again, Owsley told 91av.
Calcium carbonate encrusted on the bones revealed he had been buried on his back, with his head pointing upstream, his arms by his side, and his legs extended. “It was a formal burial, with no evidence of animal scavenging, and the bones fully articulated,” Owsley says. The body was laid 65 to 86 centimetres below the top of the bank, and the limb bones remained intact until disturbed and exposed by erosion.
While the post-mortem has told us much about Kennewick Man as a person, scientists now hope to find out more about his origins. One priority will be ascertaining the precise size and shape of his skull, which may help pinpoint who Kennewick Man’s ancestors were.
