In the mid-1990’s a 9,000-year-old skeleton was discovered in Kennewick, Washington. The finding triggered a massive cultural, political and scientific storm that would take two decades to dissipate. This was the now infamous Kennewick Man, one of the few human paleontological remains that might elicit recognition in the average person on the street, like the Australopithecus Lucy. Though the original reconstruction of Kennewick Man looked suspiciously like Patrick Stewart, Captain Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek The Next Generation fame, the physical anthropologists working on the skull later concluded that Kennewick Man’s morphology was most similar to that of the Ainu, the indigenous people of Japan. But Kennewick Man was not fated to remain just a scientific curiosity. Controversy soon swirled over whether the native people of the region, like the Umatilla Indians, should have a veto over access to the remains as per the “Native American Grave Protection Act.” Bizarrely, Norse Neo-Pagans asserted a rival claim to Kennewick Man as an ancestor, due to the forensic reconstruction, which implied to them that this individual may have been related to European peoples. Though the debate died down over time, in 2015 DNA from the remains confirmed that Kennewick man was of Native-American genetic heritage. After this analysis was done, in 2017 he was finally reinterred, as per the wishes of the native tribes of the region.
For me, as a teen in the Pacific Northwest at the time, Kennewick Man was the only real North American archaeology story I was aware of. The news media loved it, reveling in the bizarre controversies and highlighting the numerous political and scientific conflicts, as well as the hijinks of the eccentric Neo-Pagans. What I did not know then was that away from the media circus, a revolution in our understanding of the origins and spread of humans across North America was coming to a simmer. A model called “Clovis First” was being overturned by new results, and awareness was dawning among paleoanthropologists that their longstanding framework no longer adequately explained the data coming in. By 2020, the generation-long transition from the old orthodoxy has finally been completed. We are now in a more nuanced, and yet still uncertain, understanding of the human arrival in North America.
Archaeology now tells us with a high degree of confidence that humans were in North America more than 20,000 years ago. And genetics now suggests those first peoples may not have been the ancestors of contemporary Native Americans. In the last few years, new data and methods have uncovered tantalizing and previously hidden strands of ancestry connecting tribes and ethnicities in the Amazon rainforest to the indigenous people of Australia and Papua New Guinea, ancestry totally lacking in modern indigenous North Americans or Siberians.