Posted on 07/11/2005 11:48:33 AM PDT by jazzo
SEATTLE - Cloistered around padded tables, scientists from around the country have been peering through microscopes and measuring bone fragments trying to unearth the history of an ancient skeleton found along the Columbia River.
Researchers on Sunday offered details of their first comprehensive study of the 9,000-year-old Kennewick Man, one of the oldest and most complete skeletons ever found in North America.
The team of anthropologists, geochemists and data analysts have been busy assembling the skeleton's more than 300 bones and bone fragments at the University of Washington's Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, where the remains have been since 1998.
"This individual's biography is written in his bones," said Dr. Hugh Berryman, a forensic anthropologist from Middle Tennessee State University. "This is a window into the past."
Scientists have been cataloguing some previously unidentified pieces and reevaluating others. They've also been measuring remains, examining cracks and breaks in the bones and studying various discoloration in an attempt to put Kennewick Man's past together.
Likening it to a Rembrandt, Berryman said scientists early on knew the skeleton had much to offer because of its age and completeness.
"I'm very interested in that skull," Berryman said as he pointed to ice-blue translucent plastic models of a skull and pelvis, sitting atop a boardroom table at the University Towers hotel near the university.
"There appears to be some European-type facial features." That, he said, could suggest there were other migrations of people other than those strictly out of Asia.
Certain skull measurements, including the shorter face and less width across the cheekbones, don't match that traditionally associated with Native American characteristics, said Dr. Douglas W. Owsley, a forensic anthropologist with the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
Those observations have been part of the nine-year legal battle between researchers and Northwest Indian tribes.
After the skeleton was found by two college students along the banks of the Columbia in 1996, the Umatilla, Yakama, Nez Perce and Colville tribes wanted the bones reburied without scientific study. They claimed they were entitled to the bones under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers owned the land where the remains were found and was set to relinquish the bones. But scientists sued for a chance to study the remains.
Last year a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, agreeing with an earlier decision by a federal judge in Portland, Ore., ruled there was no link between the skeleton and the tribes.
The taphonomic, or forensic, study scientists will perform during their 10-day examination will help determine the effects that weather and animals had on Kennewick Man's remains after death. Ultimately, they'll focus on identifying his origins, and how he lived and died.
Models of the skull and pelvis, which has a projectile — perhaps a spearhead — embedded in a hip, will be used to construct permanent cast to be used for additional research and to minimize impact to the actual skeleton.
Later, researchers will be analyzing samples taken from fragments of the leg during government studies in 1999 and 2000.
No public viewing of the remains is yet planned by the Army Corps.
Guess I don't agree that it's a private conversation. My responses were to public posts with my thoughts related thereto.
Yeah, happy you are against the liberals.
It's still a private conversation, although the public can look in if they wish. Last time I looked the Government didn't own this site.
I can sort of imagine your perspective.
Doesn't happen to be mine.
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Same posts have talked of civilizations and complex societies before 'we' came and everyone got sick.
Other than the Anasazi (SP?) and the known centers in more latin America....how did this vast population manage without leaving large numbers of cities, engineering, or records other than burial mounds and oral history?
It simply does not appear to me, not greatly immersed in it, that civilization of any sort extended beyond a few - most gone before the white man came - centers. That does not indicate (to me) a huge population.
Mexico and Yucatan are filled to the brim with stone cities.
The Ohio Valley and the central part of the Mississippi Valley have immense pyramids built of earth.
South America now appears to have some of the oldest cities on Earth ~ older than those in Egypt or Mesopotamia in fact.
BTW, ancient Old World civilizations have only come to light in recent years. The Sumerians, for instance, who invented civilization, were unknown 200 years ago outside of the Bible, and then we didn't really recognize them (See the parts about Noah for example).
They are just now figuring out how many millions of people the Midwest and the Mid-Atlantic could support in late neolithic conditions, but it's in the millions.
Remember, when the Europeans began exploring the interior of what is now the United States in the mid 1500s (See: DeSoto) it was not heavily forested. The Indians kept the trees burned out to foster deer, other game, and agriculture. After they died from Old World diseases (circa 1648+) the forests returned in 50 years, and had yet another 120 years to grow!
Although the earliest pioneers thougth they were dealing primaeval forest, it was just overgrown farmland and pasture for nearly domesticated deer and wild buffalo.
My sense of meso (south) american history is one of a series of ascendant & descendant cultures, rarely close in proximity in time and geography, seldom peaceful, and generally disappearing without clear cause (to us).
Yes there was trade but in North America it appears mostly between separated groups or by way of pillage and ritualized theft.
I doubt that burning off land was intended to 'foster deer...". Rather to allow short term planting/residence and to drive game. It's also my understanding that those who practiced clearing by burning did not stay in that place too many years before they'd used up the ground or game or both.
Note that until quite recently, forest fires were a bad thing in our own culture and only recently have they been seen as beneficial by the masses OR government.
Next question, what caused the disappearance of the Anasazi, Olmec, Toltec, and various other pyramid or citadel builders that I believe went away before "our"diseases could touch them?
They could also determine his "place of origin" by analysis of the oxygen isotopes in the teeth.
Now, concerning dirt mounds ~ such structures are indicative of a high degree of social cooperation which, in turn, is always suggestive of religion and governmental forms far in advance of what you might find in the Paleolithic.
The various "figures" created in large mound structures are equal to the best of similar structures built in what is now the United Kingdom, Japan, China, and the Middle East, and far superior to anything similar built in Subsaharan Africa.
As far as "pullies" and "wheels" are concerned, the block and tackle had been known since the early Paleolithic. All you need are chunks of wood and rope ~ which can be made from various kinds of vines, natural wood fibers, cotton, and so forth.
As you know the advantage is gained through what amounts to a flexible lever, and not simply as a consequence of having a wheel.
Now, speaking of high technology, just about everything you eat today had its origins in the science of agronomy as applied in the Americas. Whether you are talking about giant strawberries and popcorn (both attributed to the Iriquois), squash, corn, beans, chocolate, tomatoes, potatoes or hundreds of other farm products, the American Indians made people in the Old World look like they had been stuck in early Paleolithic times.
BTW, you should bother sometime to learn Plains Indians sign language. It's closest congnate is the Chinese written language found in the Shang Dynasty materials. Most likely it is Chinese, and probably brought here by people who settled along the Mississippi. The Plains Indians are, of course, descendants of the tribes living roughly in the vicinity of Cahokia from roughly 1000 BCE to the 1500s when DeSoto visited them.
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