Danny Westneat / Times staff columnist
We all own Kennewick Man's bones

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I'm happy to report that science won. But it's troubling that it took an eight-year, multimillion-dollar legal fight with a government that was bent on siding with religion. On Monday, scientists won the right to study a 9,300-year-old skeleton called Kennewick Man when a group of Northwest Indian tribes and the federal government dropped the last of their legal appeals.

The skeleton, among the oldest in America, bears little physical resemblance to any present-day Americans.

It suggests a new wrinkle in the story of the nation. Who first came here? Was it ancestors of American Indians, as has been believed ? Or people from Japan, Polynesia or even Europe?

"I'm sitting here and I can't help but smile — now we can at least try to answer some of these questions," said Jim Chatters of Bothell, the scientist who first studied the skeleton after it was found on a Columbia River bank in 1996.

The battle over the bones was often described as a collision between scientific inquiry and tribal rights. At its core, though, it was a new front in the ongoing war over the origin of the human species.

The tribes took a faith-based view in arguing the skeleton was ancestral to today's Indians and should be reburied.

As Armand Minthorn of Oregon's Umatilla Tribe said: "We already know what happened 10,000 years ago. We know we have always been there. The scientists cannot accept that."

It is radical that two federal agencies agreed, twice deeding the skeleton to the tribes on the basis of Indian oral histories and spiritual allegories.

This was done out of sensitivity to the tribes. But scientifically it is akin to citing a literal reading of the Bible to block the study of evolution.

At trial, the government even argued that if someone found 150,000-year-old skeletons from the dawn of Homo sapiens — an "Adam and Eve," one attorney said — the remains would automatically be deemed ancestral to today's tribes and reburied.
 
Scientists were flabbergasted that "ownership of all human history had been granted to one group," said Cleone Hawkinson, a Portland anthropologist. "Science was under attack. Someone had to stand up and defend it."

Eight anthropologists sued. Eventually two courts ruled that Kennewick Man isn't definitively ancestral to Indians or anyone else. Until more is learned, he is marooned in time, belonging to no one.

Anthropologists are seeking to search the bones this fall for fragments of DNA that could reveal his lineage. But the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — the agency that has "owned" the skeleton from the beginning — continues to balk at details of the study plan.

It's way past time for agencies like this one to butt out. Because Kennewick Man belongs to no one, he belongs to everyone. He should be sent to the Smithsonian where he can be studied, honored or memorialized by any of his "descendants" — that is, the people of the world.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.