PWAC Victoria: Sid Tafler, Writing Sample

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Old Man in the New World

by Sid Tafler ©

A battle erupts over a very old skeleton as the search for the first human beings in North America points to the west coast. This article was published in Monday Magazine, June 1, 2000 and won the 2001 Western Magazine Award, Science, Technology and Medicine category.

He never fully recovered from the stabbing wound in his right hip. And there were other old injuries--a slash to the chest, a chipped right elbow, another wound in the shoulder blade. The hip wound was infected, which brought on a fever. But there was no stopping Kennewick when he decided to fish for salmon in his beloved river. He left at dawn, before other members of his family were awake, and walked to the river with a painful limp. Within an hour, his breath became laboured and he collapsed by the riverbank. Images of the great spiritual powers flashed into his mind's eye as his body shook with chills. Kennewick, age 52, died within sight and sound of the sacred rushing river that sustained his tribe. The next day, in a storm, before his family could find him, the bank of the river collapsed and buried his body.

Fast-forward nine thousand years. Two college students were walking along the Columbia River in the summer of 1996 when they stumbled across a skull. They reported the discovery to the police, who called in Jim Chatters, a forensic anthropologist in the town of Richland in southeast Washington state. Chatters combed over the site by the river and--piece by piece--recovered the rest of the skeleton. Only a few minor bones were missing.

Within a few weeks, Chatters, a compact, soft-spoken man with a white-flecked beard and a gold earring, reached two conclusions about the person whose bones were spread out on his laboratory table: first, that he was a middle-aged male Caucasoid, five feet nine inches, with a long, narrow skull, receding cheekbones, a high chin--all features of a person of European origin. The second, from a radiocarbon dating of one small bone, indicated the man lived about 9,400 years ago.

These findings were so blatantly contradictory, they left Chatters baffled and astounded. What was a Caucasoid male doing wandering around the Columbia River nine thousand years before Europeans "discovered" America? To add to the mystery, a broken spear point, similar to those used by early natives, was found embedded in the skeleton's pelvis--not a fatal attack, it seemed, as the bone had fused around it.

The four-kilogram skeleton was named Kennewick man, after the town where he was found along the snaking Columbia River.

Chatter's conclusions were nothing less than explosive in the field of study known as the early peopling of the Americas. It's long been held that all early migrants to this continent, the forebears of modern natives, came from Asia. Physical and genetic comparisons between Asians and New World natives tend to confirm these links. If Chatters was right, that Caucasoids walked these lands nearly 10,000 years ago, it could shatter the basic origin myth of the Americas, and possibly even weaken some of the moral authority and entitlements of modern natives as the first inhabitants of these lands.

At about the same time early-peopling experts were puzzling over Kennewick, another long-held belief was crumbling before their eyes--this one centred around the "when" of the earliest-people story, rather than the "who." For most of the twentieth century, the commonly-held theory has been that humans were very late arrivals to the Americas, after millions of years spent wandering around first Africa, and eventually, Asia and Europe. This part of the human origins story has the first migrants to North America walking across a frozen land bridge called Beringia, now the Bering Sea, at the end of the last Ice Age 11,500 years ago. You can find reference to Stone Age humans populating the New World after the Ice Age in dozens of textbooks, articles and museum exhibits across the continent--including a display case around the corner from the woolly mammoth at the Royal B.C. Museum.

But in recent years, archaeological sites older than 11,500 years have been discovered throughout the Americas, basically melting the Beringia theory of the first migration. The most significant of these is Monte Verde, a site in south central Chile. Monte Verde was excavated by a tall, imposing Kentuckian named Tom Dillehay--who could pass for a sidekick to Indiana Jones--and was acknowledged in recent years by top authorities in the field to be at least 12,500 years old--ten centuries earlier than the time of the Beringia crossing. Dillehay himself believes the Monte Verde site is closer to 30,000 years old.

Kennewick has to fit somewhere in this shifting, prehistoric puzzle. But exactly where was a mystery to Jim Chatters and a handful of other "old bones" specialists who studied his remains. And it's still a mystery today, nearly four years after he was found, due to a legal tug-of-war between native traditionalists and American "early-peopling" scientists.

Chatters had been studying Kennewick for only a month when U.S. government authorities, under pressure from local natives, suddenly seized the skeleton and locked it in a laboratory vault. Led by the Umatilla Indians based in northern Oregon, five native bands formally claimed Kennewick under a U.S. law that requires aboriginal remains to be repatriated to local tribes.

When the natives announced they would bury the bones in a secret location, a wave of outrage swept through the scientific community. To the scientists, Kennewick, regardless of his lineage, was a rare archaeological treasure, one of only three intact skeletons of this antiquity known to science in North America. Many were skeptical of Chatters' finding of Kennewick's Caucasoid origin, but deplored the idea that the skeleton would be lost to science before detailed studies of his remains could be conducted.

Just a week before Kennewick was to be handed over to the natives, eight eminent early-peopling scientists launched a suit against the U.S. government, demanding the bones be released for further study. Today, the suit remains tied up in Federal District Court and the skeleton held in a museum vault in Seattle pending a resolution. Meanwhile, the U.S. government has hired a team of scientists to study Kennewick and his origins, their evidence to be presented in court when the trail resumes in September.

The dispute is a textbook case of a clash of world views: scientific research digging at the very roots of humanity in North America, versus a native belief system that sees this research as a sacrilege to their traditions.

"Our religion we've followed since time immemorial says once someone is put in the ground, he should be left there," said Armand Minthorn, an Umatilla religious leader. "We shouldn't desecrate this individual so these scientists can do their research." The Umatilla insist Kennewick belongs to them despite differing physical traits, citing oral tradition that early native peoples looked different from modern Indians.

Natives are understandably protective of old bones--for centuries, their burial grounds were dug up by souvenir hunters and scientists. But wouldn't further study of Kennewick uncover new information about the history of the Umatilla? "We already know our history," said Minthorn flatly. Members of his band have embraced the old religion, called Seven Drums, and according to their beliefs, the Umatilla have been on these lands "since the beginning of time."

But Jim Chatters challenges that contention. "It's not true anywhere in the world, it's definitely not true here." Chatters say there's no proof Kennewick is linked to the Umatilla and their claim on his remains is a political issue, not a cultural one. Native groups are afraid that further study of Kennewick man will prove that modern tribes were not first in the area, he says. "They have a desire to be seen as the first people--there's very strong political power attached to it. They see a risk of losing their rights, that's why they're fighting so hard."

The discovery of early humans anywhere in the world causes a rush of excitement that spills through the scientific community and into the public through the media: the 5,000-year old Ice Man with his tools and leather clothes, well-preserved in a block of ice in the mountains of Italy; or the three-million-year-old skeletal remains of Lucy, a child-sized prehuman woman found in Ethiopia.

Like people everywhere, North Americans yearn to know the history of the place they inhabit, which includes the history of the early peoples who occupied these lands long before the rest of us arrived. And they bestow special recognition on those who arrived first--such as the title of First Nations granted to natives in this country. Being here first and being uprooted by newcomers in historic times confers a special status and moral authority--witness the treaty talks and cash and resource settlements being granted to native peoples in B.C. and the north.

If Kennewick had Caucasian origins--which is by no means proven at this point--his ancestors still may have come from Asia, after an overland migration from the Near East or Europe. This leads us to the "how" part of the question: how did the earliest peoples get to the Americas, a crucial question now that the Bering Strait crossing has been cast in doubt.

The most credible alternative being discussed in scientific circles is that the early arrivals came by watercraft rather than overland. They may have picked their way down the Pacific in a fairly direct route from northern Asia, hugging the shore and stopping at various islands and landfalls along the west coast.

The coastal theory was first developed 20 years ago by Knut Fladmark, an archaeology professor at Simon Fraser University. Fladmark notes that while most of the northern part of the world was frozen during the last Ice Age, a few remote areas remained ice-free. Today, they're called refugia--mysterious places where unique species, believed to be remnants of the Ice Age, are still being identified.

Two prominent refugia in B.C. are parts of the Queen Charlotte Islands and the windswept, wild and mysterious Brooks Peninsula that sticks out like a thumb off the west coast of Vancouver Island. Fladmark believes people migrating down the coast of the continent could have stopped or settled at these ice-free oases to find food, fresh water and shelter--many thousands of years before the Bering Strait crossing.

This new coastal route option is tantalizing to the handful of Canadian researchers who are looking for clues to early human settlement on the B.C. coast--or offshore on the ocean floor. At the time of the Ice Age and as it began receding 12,000 years ago, parts of the coast that are now deep ocean were dry land, where plants and animals thrived and people roamed and settled. These areas were later covered with water when the sea levels gradually rose to their current height.

If you put the refugia and the coastal route together, the origin of our species in this hemisphere points to the Alaska Panhandle and the coast of B.C. Somewhere on or near Vancouver Island or the Queen Charlottes, the Stone Age Adams and Eves of North America may have landed their small craft on beaches never seen before by our species--at a time when our ancestors in Europe lived lives just as primitive and perilous.

My quest for answers about these ancient migrants takes me to the Victoria office of Daryl Fedje, a Parks Canada archaeologist who researches ancient human sites in the Queen Charlottes. Tall and thin, with a shock of curly brown hair, Fedje looks like a natural outdoorsman, anxious to get out from behind his computer and back into the field. In the midst of our interview, he slips a thin rock out of a padded brown envelope and places it on the desk between us. The black rock is small and smooth, fitting neatly in the palm of my hand. This is a basalt knife blade, flaked off from a larger rock by a hunter 10,200 years ago. He tells me the blade holds its edge well when sharpened. As I test it with my thumb, I can imagine using it to skin an animal or gut a fish.

Fedje and his research team found this blade on the ocean floor in water 54 metres deep off the coast of the Charlottes, using a clamshell bucket lowered over the side of a ship. To Fedje, this blade provides clear and exciting evidence of the theory that people lived at the time of the receding Ice Age in areas that are now under water. The shift from dry land back to seabed happened very quickly, he says. At the time the owner of this black blade was living in the area, the ice that covered the coast was rapidly receding and sea levels were rising by the height of your ankle every year. Some of us think we live in dynamic times--imagine the town you were born in disappearing under water as you reached middle age.

Further groundbreaking research into early peoples on the west coast is underway on Prince of Wales Island in the Alaska Panhandle just north of the Charlottes. In a remote shallow cave known descriptively as On Your Knees, U.S. scientists have recently found bear bones 40,000 years old, a tool crafted from bone 10,300 years ago and human bones dated between 9,200 and 9,800 years--the oldest human remains ever found in Alaska or Canada.

These early occupants must have been adept sea-going people, as Prince of Wales was an island back then as it is today. "They must have had watercraft, they were well-adapted to a marine environment, to intercoastal navigation," said James Dixon, curator of archaeology at the Denver Museum of Natural History and a researcher in the Alaska Panhandle. So this person whose bones were found in the shallow cave--or his ancestors--arrived on this island by boat or raft, perhaps migrating directly by sea from north Asia.

Fedje's blade and Dixon's bone tool don't predate the supposed passage over the Bering ice bridge. But the search for the earliest humans on the west coast is still a recent activity, and it may only be a matter of time before some artifacts older than 11,500 years are found.

But whether researchers will ever find the ultimate answer is another question. It's a little like looking for a needle--not in a haystack, but at the bottom of the ocean. Knut Fladmark, the father of the theory of west coast migration, is skeptical whether we'll ever track down evidence of the very first peoples. "All the major sites are underwater," he says. "The likelihood of finding a few stone artifacts left behind by a few people is remote."

When the story of Kennewick first broke in the media, it immediately caught the attention of Loring Brace, one of the continent's leading scholars in early-peoples research. Brace has devoted much of his 40-year career to the study of ancient peoples in both North America and Asia, carefully examining and comparing human remains on both sides of the Pacific. As he read the article about Kennewick in the New York Times, he focused on the photo showing Jim Chatters holding a magnified slide of the skull. "I took one look at this thing and said, 'I know who that is,'" said Brace. He didn't know Chatters, but his skeletal partner Kennewick was as familiar as an old friend. "He's a Jomon Japanese, one of the aboriginal people of Japan," said Brace.

This makes perfect sense to Brace, who is one of the eight scientists who are suing the U.S. government to keep Kennewick above ground. The Jomon people, who are still represented in Japan by a dwindling aboriginal population of Ainu, have some physical characteristics in common with Caucasians. But, says Brace, they're a separate genetic stock, not a branch of the Caucasoid family. Brace, curator at the University of Michigan's Museum of Anthropology, knows this subject matter well: he has examined every Jomon skeleton available for study in Japan in the course of a dozen research trips to Asia.

Brace says a Jomon wandering around the Columbia River 9,400 years ago would fit into the still-developing set of theories about the early peopling of the Americas, which indicate four waves of arrivals of ancient Asian peoples. The Paleo-Indians, the earliest migrants, place of origin unknown, may have come 15,000 years ago, though that time frame is "purely a hunch." The Jomon Japanese, adept at marine technology and forebears of many of B.C.'s coastal natives, may have arrived 10,000 years ago. The Inuit-Aleut of the north date back 4,000 years and may be an offshoot of the Jomon. And the Athabaskans, whose known presence goes back about 1,000 years, are linked to early populations in China.

Brace says Jim Chatters had little experience in dating early peoples, and he jumped to the conclusion Kennewick was a Caucasoid even before he knew how old he was. But if Kennewick is Jomon, he has little in common with the Umatilla or other native peoples of the Columbia River--who are Athabaskan in origin, according to Brace. Brace's theory collides head-on with the Umatilla belief system that they are the original people of the area. And it also refutes the idea that Kennewick was Caucasian, an early "white man" in ancient America.

Brace says the study of Kennewick has barely begun and further research is essential to uncover the truth. Even his assumption that Kennewick is Jomon will remain a theory, "until I get my calipers on it." Brace is appalled at the idea of turning over bones of this age to native bands for burial--a precedent that could destroy the study of early peoples. "If that thing gets buried by people who don't look anything like it, we'll never find out who it was."

If who Kennewick was remains a mystery, who he looked like may be easier to resolve. Using a cast of his skull and with the help of artist Tom McClelland, Chatters produced a facial reconstruction of Kennewick out of clay. He says the life-sized bust looks like Patrick Stewart, Captain Picard of Star Trek. To my eyes, it looks more like a middle-aged merchant in Istanbul's Grand Bazaar. And what of the broken spear point in his hip? Is this the oldest tangible remnant of interracial warfare in the new world, a prehistoric, interracial battle over territory?

Kennewick may have been a Jomon interloper, attacked on the banks of the Columbia by Paleo-Indians for fishing in waters the Paleos considered their own. That would fit into Brace's estimated arrival time of the Jomon of 10,000 years ago. So quite possibly, the arrival of Europeans in the Americas was just the latest of a series of conquests and uprootings that marked human migration on these lands in the last ten or fifteen thousand years.

Two other veterans of the search for the earliest peoples, husband and wife team Alan Bryan and Ruth Gruhn of Edmonton, feel there is already enough evidence to confirm the west coastal migration route--and a much earlier date of entry than most scientists accept. Bryan and Gruhn have long rejected the widely-held theory that the peopling of the Americas took place at the end of the last big freeze, which extended from 30,000 to 12,000 years ago. They look back much further--to before the Ice Age. They suggest the first peoples arrived around 40,000 years ago, which puts these two anthropologists at the far historic edge of early-peopling theory.

Bryan and Gruhn, both retired professors at the University of Alberta but still active in research, have studied sites in North, Central and South America--including recent excavations along the Bow River in Calgary. They point out the divergence in dating among scientists is split along continental lines: many researchers in North America stick to the 12,000- to 15,000-year range for early migration; in South America, 40,000-plus years is generally accepted.

If recent new discoveries like Kennewick man and the north coast sites serve to rewrite the ancient prehistory of our continent, they may carry a lesson for modern humanity as well. The story of Kennewick and the region where he lived suggests a pattern of racial and tribal encounter and displacement over a hundred centuries. If Kennewick was Jomon, he may have come up against Paleo-Indians, and his descendants may have competed with Athabaskans.

Some of these groups probably blended with each other--making love instead of war--but there must also have been rivalry, conflict, and ancient ethnic cleansing--Kennewick's spear point may be evidence of that. This saga extends to the last few hundred years, when modern natives like the Umatilla and many B.C. tribes were largely displaced from their lands by white settlers. This pattern of blending of racial stock and conquest by warfare or culture has been repeated throughout history and prehistory all over the world.

The discovery of Kennewick has highlighted the differences in world view of natives and mostly white researchers, pitting the two sides in the dispute along political and racial grounds. Jim Chatters feels the ancient fisherman has a far different message for modern humans. The quest for Kennewick's identity, he says, "is about humanity's origins and patterns of movement, about how we're related to each other."

As he talks about the pile of bones, he sounds like a man who misses an old friend. "We didn't go looking for him, he just fell into our lap. I think he has something to teach us--that we're all one kind of people and we need to treat each other more that way." Perhaps as much at the loss of Kennewick, Chatters is disappointed that his discovery hasn't served to bring people of different backgrounds and races together--to this point anyway, as the story is still unfolding. If an early aboriginal man has skeletal features that resemble modern Europeans, there may be no greater symbol of the common ancestry of the widely divergent peoples of the Americas--and the world. For Jim Chatters, that's good enough reason to resume the study of Kennewick man, to get to know a very old man's bones.

Sid Tafler
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Last updated: June 26, 2001 http://www.islandnet.com/pwacvic/tafler07.html