A curious affair

About 30,000 years ago Native Asians started on their quest to be Native Americans, heading out of Asia into the low lying region, now under the sea, marked in bright green in the map left. The story seems to be that while the sea was very low because of the large amount of ice lying around on the land, this particular region was, nevertheless, habitable.

But then, about 15,000 years ago, there was some global warming and the ice started to melt, opening the way for the Native Asians to push on down the Pacific coast of what is now North America, thus becoming Native Americans.

In the course of this pushing, about 10,000 years ago, a chap now called the Kennewick Man died and was buried near the Columbia River, to be found about 20 years ago by the US army corps of engineers, the people who love to build dams (USACE, see reference 1).

As it happens, just after something called the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was enacted (NAGPRA, see reference 2). A sort of act of reparation for all the bad things done to Native Americans in the course of the occupation of the North American continent by Europeans. Also known as Native West Asians, to distinguish them from the Native East Asians knocking about in what is now Siberia and who got to North America the other way.

As a result of all this, various different Native American groups put in claims for the Kennewick remains, held for the time being in frozen escrow by the USACE. Another group put in a counter claim on behalf of the Pacific peoples, claiming on the basis of cranial measurements that Kennewick was more Polynesian than Red Indian.

The latest twist in the story comes in the form of a joint letter to 'Nature' by Morten Rasmussen, Martin Sikora, Anders Albrechtsen, Thorfinn Sand Korneliussen, J. Víctor Moreno-Mayar, G. David Poznik, Christoph P. E. Zollikofer, Marcia S. Ponce de León, Morten E. Allentoft, Ida Moltke, Hákon Jónsson, Cristina Valdiosera, Ripan S. Malhi, Ludovic Orlando, Carlos D. Bustamante, Thomas W. Stafford Jr, David J. Meltzer, Rasmus Nielsen and Eske Willerslev. They claim - and their article is freely available at the Nature web site - that the Kennewick DNA is more Native American than anything else, but not closely connected to anything around now.

It is not clear where this leaves the claim of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, one of the stronger claimants amongst those mentioned above, other than that the whole fascinating business will continue to fee lawyers for a good while yet.

I wonder if I could interest the Irish in mounting claims for ancient remains that turn up in England? On the basis that they were the Native English and we were the maurading West Asians, riding in from the Aryan plains of Persia a paltry 5,000 years ago?

Reference 1: http://nid.usace.army.mil/cm_apex/f?p=838:12.

Reference 2: http://www.nps.gov/nagpra/.