Bones at CWU are telling an ancient story

ELLENSBURG – Behind two locked doors at Central Washington University, what might be called Son of Kennewick Man sits inside a cardboard box.

The faceless skull dates back 9,000 years – just 400 years younger than the superstar skeleton unearthed from the banks of the Columbia River. While Kennewick Man ignited a legal battle over the control of ancient bones, the skull at CWU has barely raised a ripple.

Nicknamed “Stickman” for the mythical beings some tribes believe once inhabited the Columbia plateau, the skull ranks among the continent’s most-ancient human remains.

About 40 sets of these remains from the distant past dot the map, mostly concentrated in the western United States.

Some, like Stickman, have been largely overlooked or are the subject of custody battles with tribes who view the remains as ancestors. But in at least two cases, scientists and tribes have cooperated to learn from the oldest Americans.

These success stories haven’t hogged headlines like Kennewick Man. But they are, in some ways, proving more influential in reshaping ideas about the peopling of the continent.

“In the case of Kennewick Man, I think its significance has been somewhat overblown because of the conflict and controversy,” University of Oregon archaeologist Jon Erlandson said. “These other finds are equally important.”

Arlington Springs Woman, the oldest documented human remains from North America, also supports the once-ridiculed notion that some people arrived by boat, rather than walking across a Bering Strait land bridge near the end of the last ice age about 14,000 years ago.

A set of ancient bones found on an Alaska island has yielded some of the strongest evidence yet that people who originated in Asia could have sailed or paddled to North America, then migrated south down the coast.

A human jawbone and other fragments were discovered in 1996 in On Your Knees Cave, at the tip of Prince of Wales Island, off Ketchikan. Scientists speculate the remains, which date back 10,300 years, might have been dragged into the grotto by bears or other predators.

Kennewick Man was discovered the same summer in Eastern Washington. Detailed studies on the 9,400-year-old skeleton began only last year, after nine years of legal battles with tribes who claimed “the Ancient One” as a cherished forebear.

In Alaska, there was no such delay – and no antagonism. Local Tlingit and Haida tribes were notified immediately of the discovery, said University of Colorado anthropologist James Dixon, who works with the remains. Rather than objecting to scientific study, the tribes embraced it.

“The way we interpreted this find was that an ancestor was offering himself to us to give us knowledge,” said Tlingit tribal member Rosita Worl, a Harvard-trained anthropologist and president of the Sealaska Heritage Institute. Several tribal members worked on the excavation, and the community has been eagerly following the results.

Isotopic analysis of the bones showed the man ate mainly seafood, even though the cave is deep in the island interior. And tools made of volcanic glass and quartz crystals from the mainland and nearby islands show people were using boats to get around the area, Dixon said.

That doesn’t prove the first Americans arrived from Asia via water, but it hints at a people with deep maritime roots.

Even more exciting were DNA results from the remains. Brian Kemp, a doctoral student at the University of California, Davis, succeeded where others had failed by extracting genetic material from a tooth.

Kemp compared the material to a database containing DNA sequences from more than 3,500 modern and prehistoric Native Americans. He found matches in several distinct locations, mostly along the Pacific coastline from California to Chile.