The Associated Press P O R T L A N D (kennewick_abc)

The Associated Press
P O R T L A N D, Ore., Sept. 25 — The U.S. Interior Department has decided that “Kennewick Man,” one of the oldest skeletons ever found in North America, should be given to five American Indian tribes who have claimed him as an ancestor.
    
The decision comes after four years of arguing over whether the 9,000-year-old bones should be turned over to the tribes in the Pacific Northwest or to scientists for research.
     Bruce Babbitt, the secretary of the interior, said that two years of study by his department have persuaded him that the bones should be returned to the five American Indian tribes.

Fight Is Not Over
“After evaluating this complex situation, I believe that it is reasonable to determine that the Kennewick Man remains should be transferred to the Tribes that have jointly claimed him,” Babbitt said in a written statement issued by his office in Washington, D.C.
     However, the saga of the Kennewick Man is still not over.
     Four years ago, eight prominent anthropologists, including one from the Smithsonian Institution, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Portland for the right to study the bones.
     Their lawsuit was temporarily put on hold while the Interior Department looked into the five tribes’ claims on the bones.
     Now that Babbitt has issued his determination, the scientists say they will ask the judge to let their lawsuit go forward. Research on the bones could help rewrite previously held theories about where the original Americans came from.

Bones Are Important, Say Scientists
The skeleton’s skull has features that are dissimilar to those of American Indians. Professors who studied the bones for the Interior Department have said Kennewick Man appears to be most strongly connected to the people of Polynesia and southern Asia.
     The find has helped force researchers to consider the possibility that the continents’ earliest arrivals came not by a land bridge between Russia and Alaska — a long-held theory — but by boat or some other route. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers currently is responsible for the skeletal remains, which are located at the Burke Museum of Natural and Cultural History in Seattle.
     Under an agreement with the Corps, the Interior Department agreed to determine what should happen to the bones under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990.
     Babbitt today gave two reasons for handing over the Kennewick Man to five American tribes living in the region where the bones were found.
     He said his department has concluded that the remains were “culturally affiliated” with the five tribes.
     “Although ambiguities in the data made this a close call, I was persuaded by the geographic data and oral histories of the five tribes that collectively assert they are the descendants of people who have been in the region of the Upper Columbia Plateau for a very long time,” Babbitt said.

DNA Tests Did Not Work
Babbitt said he also concluded that the land adjacent to the river shallows where the bones were had been determined by the Indian Claims Commission to be the aboriginal land of a number of the five tribes.
     The land is federal land managed by county government as Columbia Park in Kennewick, Wash.
     Pieces of the skeleton were sent to three laboratories, but none was able to extract DNA for analysis due to the age and mineralization.
     “Clearly, when dealing with human remains of this antiquity, concrete evidence is often scanty, and the analysis of the data can yield ambiguous, inconclusive or even contradictory results,” Babbitt said.
     He said if the remains had been 3,000 years old, “there would be little debate over whether Kennewick Man was the ancestor of the Upper Plateau Tribes.”
     But “the line back to 9,000 years … made the cultural affiliation determination difficult,” he said.

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