Kennewick Man
The remains of the so-called Kennewick Man ( Kennewick Man) were found on July 28, 1996 on the banks of the Columbia River in the south of the U.S. state of Washington, near the town of Kennewick. The bones were ( 8410 ± 60 uncal. BP ) with the radiocarbon dating to 7300 BC dated, but had characteristics that do not match those of the Indian remains of the era.
Find circumstances
First, they found only the skull. Later, the archaeologist James Chatters also found a pelvic bone, where a broken and overgrown spearhead stuck in stone, which is typical of the Archaic period. However, he seems to have not died from this injury, because the injury site in the right hip has Verheilungsanzeichen, so that the initially assumed chronic inflammation could be excluded. We now know that a spear must have met the man from the front, the stone top with a diameter of 79 mm was stuck. Overall, they found about 350 bone fragments. They were washed out by the rain and would have been nearly washed into the river. It may well have been 170 cm tall and had the time of death estimated at nearly 40 years old.
His remains were originally about 75 cm of soil covered, but this was perhaps originally Erdlage lower. The burial place, a shallow pit was about 130 m from the river. He lay parallel to the river on his back, legs spread, arms beside the body, with the palms to the ground.
The remains lie in the Burke Museum in Seattle.
Ethnic mapping
For a long time the Clovis culture than American culture first stage, and as descendants of people who immigrated to today's indigenous peoples during the last ice age across the Bering Strait gradually. Among other finds in South America and Central America, it was mainly the Kennewick - Fund, which has partially initiated a paradigm shift in the population debate in the Americas.
In many cases, it is assumed that the Kennewick Man was related to the Ainu, the Japanese natives who might have settled on one of the waves of immigration also North America across the Bering Strait or the Bering Sea. But Genetic analysis of the bone material brought as a result of the bad state of preservation of DNA so far (2012 ) no results. He is generally seen as an itinerant hunters; the stone spearhead and other violations indicate conflicts.
Dispute over the rights
In addition to new scientific theses of the Fund nudged also disputes the handling of the remains. So complained the present inhabitants of the area, the Yakama, Umatilla, Nez Perce and Colville, in court, because they wanted to bury the man complained as their ancestor. The legal basis for this since 1990, provides a law ( Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act; acronym NAGPRA ), in which the return of cultural legacies of the American Indians is regulated to their descendants. Several anthropologists, including Grover Krantz, of the opinion that the remains were not protected by the NAGPRA because they could not be treated as the ancestors of today's Indians due to anatomical differences. The dispute in 2010 was not yet come to a clarification, since the modification of a paragraph has been postponed again in the NAGPRA law.
The same applies to the approximately 8600 BC, originating Fund of Nevada, which is called Spirit Cave Man, which also has different characteristics and is claimed as the ancestor of today's Indian tribes. Finally, as Buhl Woman designated ( according to Buhl, Idaho ) female corpse belongs to this series, which is even more than 10,000 years old, but has for First Nations typical traits. She was buried after scientific analysis.
All these findings may point to people from the Pacific, but at the same time also to those from North Asia, or to genetic changes within the groups of people.
2010 said to the government, all human remains - a total of about 40,000 individuals - to be returned to the tribes. The provisions relate not to the detection of a genetic relationship, but only for the fact on which tribal area the finds were made. This could, if requested by a tribe, the Kennewick Man to be buried.