Next Kennewick Man Will Need Protection

Tri-city Herald ^ | 11-7-2007

[blam]

Next Kennewick Man will need protection

Published Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

The court decision to allow scientists to study the ancient skeleton known as Kennewick Man has aided humankind's quest for knowledge.

Unfortunately, it also spawned a congressional effort to change federal law to keep science from learning anything about the next Kennewick Man.

U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings is trying to thwart the move with proposed legislation of his own. Good for him.

With so many unanswered questions about man's future, we've never had a greater need to understand our past.

The Kennewick Man ruling, upheld by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2004, went against Northwest Indian tribes, which hoped the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act would prevent scientific examination of the skeleton.

The court ruled Congress had intended NAGPRA to apply to remains only if a significant relationship could be shown to present-day tribes.

That's an appropriate interpretation of the law, one that protects the interests of science and still respects Indian culture.

Good riddance to archaeologists robbing the graves where the grandparents of contemporary Indians were buried.

And thank goodness for efforts to get human remains and cultural artifacts back to their original tribes.

But the Indians' claim to the 9,300-year-old Kennewick Man is based on the belief that no one other than tribal ancestors could have been in the Columbia Basin back then.

That can't be proved and may not be true.

Congress shouldn't base law on unproven assumptions about the ancient world. Too much is at stake.

Hastings' efforts to clarify that NAGPRA doesn't apply to human remains that can't be tied to modern tribes shouldn't be necessary.

In the past, Congress has ignored any efforts to change the act.

But now it's starting to look as if efforts to stop study of the next Kennewick Man will never go away.

Congress should adopt Hastings' proposal and clarify NAGPRA's limits.

[muawiyah]

The "mass slaughters" of the post-538AD period involve dozens of survivors of a rather massive natural die-off of the Northern and Western European populations.

Even those that occurred before that time usually highly little more than the killing of other nobles with the broad masses being fairly immune from battlefield deaths. That comes later after massproduction of steel becomes possible, and increases at a tremendous pace with the arrival of firearms. You can imagine what we can do with nukes.

[YHAOS]

"Congress should adopt Hastings' proposal and clarify NAGPRA's limits."

Ain't gonna happen cous; too many political interests are at risk. Politicians don't care about anything except their own backsides.

[YHAOS]

Yeah. That guy.

[Wallace T.]

Certainly better technology made mass killing more efficient, but there were acts of genocide in earlier times. The Romans killed one million Jews in their destruction of Jerusalem and expulsion of that nation from modern day Israel in 70 AD. Genghis Khan was also guilty of mass murder in Central Asia, reportedly killing 700,000 people in the destruction of one city. The Muslim invasion of North Africa in the 7th Century resulted in mass murder of Christians.

[muawiyah]

The Romans and the Mongols were NOT barbarians ~ they were civilized people. I thought I was quite specific about what barbarians actually did.

BTW, the city the Mongols destroyed was BAGHDAD. Razed it to the ground. Killed everybody. The government in Baghdad had rejected the entreaties of the Mongol ambassadorial mission and then murdered them.

Yes, AlQaida in Iraq existed even then.

But not for long!