13 thoughts on “Kennewick Man”

  1. Scariest line in the piece:

    But no institution wanted anything to do with the lawsuit, which promised to attract negative attention and be hugely expensive. They would have to litigate as private citizens. “These were people,” Schneider said to me later, “who had to be strong enough to stand the heat, knowing that efforts might be made to destroy their careers. And efforts were made.”

    Our statist friends tighten the noose on our liberties all the time, always with moral certitude and the belief that they are furthering the public good. If anyone is outraged by what happened here, they’d better not vote for statist politicians.

  2. It is fascinating. The more we dig, the more we learn that we don’t know much about human history. IIRC, the Denisovans have some DNA that comes from unknown human species. As in, they were mating with a form of human that we have not discovered yet.

    In the case of Kennewick Man, it shouldn’t be surprising that he took a different migration path than South Americans and that there isn’t la raza. There were many different waves that came from many different directions.

    During the next ice age, if Archaeologists exist, there should be some interesting finds as the seas retreat.

    1. During the next ice age, if Archaeologists exist, there should be some interesting finds as the seas retreat.

      That’s for sure. I’ll bet there are well-preserved Ice Age settlements on the continental shelves all over the world.

      There’s a fascinating National Geographic documentary about Doggerland, an area that was above water in the English Channel during the last Ice Age. It’s in seven parts on YouTube, and here is Part 1.

      I’ve also read that there is increasing evidence that Europeans migrated to North America during the last Ice Age, presumably by following seals and other game along the edge of the icecap. Apparently stone tools have been found on the East Coast that are nearly identical to those being made in France during that period. Perhaps there was migration to North America from both west and east more or less simultaneously.

      Then there were the remains found in the western Chinese desert a few years ago, which were light-skinned people with red hair. I think they were 5000 years old.

      I’ve also seen Central American stone carvings whose facial features looked mighty African. I suspect that travel and trade during prehistoric times may have been much more extensive than we realize.

      1. I forgot to mention that it is well-known that the Vikings made it to North America around the year 1000, and also set up colonies in Greenland. The last one died out in the early 1400s due to the cooling climate.

        I’ll bet that there were people still alive in 1492 who were born before the last Viking colony went extinct.

        1. Those Norse people might have made it as far as South Dakota. And I’ve recently learned that though everyone else called them Vikings, that’s not what they called themselves. That’s what they called what they were doing: “viking” means “raiding”.

      2. That is known as the Solutrean hypothesis. Main stream has not really embraced it and the genetics are not really panning out to support it. Personally, I would think it very possible, moving along the sea ice, pulling your boats up at night, seals and fish diet for a month.

        “The Solutrean hypothesis, first proposed in 1998, is a hypothesis about the settlement of the Americas that claims Europeans may have been among the earliest settlers of the Americas.[1][2] Among its more notable proponents are Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution and Bruce Bradley of the University of Exeter.[3] This is in contrast with accepted theories that the North American continent was first populated by people from Asia, either by the Bering land bridge (i.e. Beringia), by maritime travel along the Pacific coast or by both.

        According to the Solutrean hypothesis, people of the Solutrean culture in Ice Age Europe migrated to North America, bringing their methods of making stone tools with them and providing the basis for the later Clovis technology that spread throughout North America. The hypothesis is based on proposed similarities between European Solutrean and Early American Clovis lithic technology.”

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solutrean_hypothesis

        I have seen a lot of flint knappers that support this though….

  3. Anyone here give credence to Thor Heyerdahl’s “Kon Tiki” hypothesis?

    The generally accepted hypothesis of Polynesian origins is that their ancestors sailed eastward on small boats from Southeast Asia. After spending time in Tahiti, Heyerdahl observed that this went against the westerly ocean currents. Ethnographically, the Tahitians are supposed to be closer to Southeast Asians than South Americans, but navigation-wise, that doesn’t seem to work. Hence his building the balsa Kon-Tiki raft and he and his Norwegian adventurer buds riding the ocean currents and winds from the West Coast of South America all the way to Tahiti.

    I guess this Kon-Tiki experiment captured the attention of National Geographic and the community of adventurers, the sort of people after the “firsts” of North and South Pole, Mt Everest, round-the-world trips, etc., but it was not persuasive in any way of the academic/scholarly community who regarded it as one step removed from the Erik von Daniken “Ancient Astronauts” claims?

    On the other hand, Heyerdahl’s navigation arguments make a certain practical sense whereas the Ancient Astronauts claims might get some mileage out of the Fermi question of “where are they”, but we are more in the extraordinary claims needing better evidence territory?

    From the standpoint of ocean currents allowing long voyages with simple vessels, the currents take you from Siberia over to Alasksa, down the coast of North and South America, and then back out to sea again to populate Polynesia. Seems to make sense to me and fit into the Kennewick Man evidence of other races of migrants (snark aside about the Indians not being the true First Nations in the Americas). Heyerdahl goes into South American as well as Polynesian legends regarding more Caucasian-like founders or predecessors, which he ties into his ocean current navigation hypothesis.

    1. I think it’s been conclusively shown that there was contact between Polynesia and South America in ancient times. I don’t have an opinion on which direction the contact was in, but that there was contact seems indisputable due to chickens and sweet potatoes.

      Chickens were supposedly unknown in the Americas before Columbus. Yet, chicken bones have been found on an island in southern Chile that predate Columbus. (the Polynesians, on the other hand, had chickens).

      Then there’s the sweet potato or yam, long a staple of the Polynesian diet. How did they get it? (It originated in South America).

      As for Kennewik Man, let’s please bear in mind that with a date of 9000 years ago, he was not among the first humans in the Americas. We have human remains from at least 12,500 years ago, and archeological sites (even in South America) older than 13,000 years.

      I’ve followed the Keniwick Man saga since it began, and I’ve been utterly disgusted and appalled by the sheer ignorance, arrogance, and outright barbarity displayed by the government, and also the Indian tribe the government was kissing the ass of. The very idea of reburying the bones and making further study impossible is downright medieval and barbaric.

      I applaud those who had the dedication and guts to sue, and I’m disgusted (but not surprised) that they were subject to outrageous and illegal abuse as a result. This is what “cultural sensitivity” combined with a power-mad bureaucracy and political correctness gets us.

      As interesting as I find the bone structure analysis, it’s worth bearing in mind that correlation is not causation; those are clues of ancestry, not hard facts. What’s needed is DNA analysis plus origin-analysis of that stone point in the hip bone. (and I note that the government is standing in the way of the latter.).

      We have so much to learn, in this case and in so many others, yet once again, it’s the government standing foursquare in the path of science.

      There is indeed a war on science, and this is what it looks like.

    2. Heyerdahl theorized more than one wave of immigration both to the America’s (and Kennewick Man fits perfectly into that part) and into Polynesia. Personally, I think he was onto something even if he wasn’t 100% correct (nowhere close to that). I’d thought he was an interesting character and adventurer, but didn’t really think much of his theories based on what respected anthropologists said about them. Then I actually read one his books (The Tigris Expedition, where he and his team built a reed boat on the Tigris River in Iraq, sailed it down to Bahrain, then out the Straits of Hormuz with a stop in Oman on the way to Pakistan, then back across the Arabian Sea to Djibouti in Africa). Then I read the earlier and more well-known Kon-Tiki (excellent adventure story, but the theory behind it not discussed in great detail, plus it was from 1949) and Ra Expeditions, before finding Early Man and the Ocean. That’s when I really noticed there was often quite a gap between his ideas, and what a lot of respected others said his ideas were, and I started becoming a bit less accepting and a bit more skeptical.

      Early man got around more extensively than most have given them credit for. There’s Jomon-style pottery and other artifacts in Panama many thousands of years ago, for example. With pre-land bridge sites now being accepted, the purely Siberian-American hypothesis is turning to ash. It’s no longer a question of, “Did anybody make it here before Clovis, but how many, how early, and from where”. It’s about time. Given the long-standing, at times vicious resistance to pre-Clovis sites, the reaction with Kennewick Man doesn’t surprise me a bit.

  6. Why are we so worried about the native Americans? They lost. They would have been a lot better off if they would have tried to assimilate instead of crawling in the bottle.

    1. A bunch of them did try to integrate. Look up “Trail of Tears”:-(. Not one of our more shining moments.

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