NEW YORK — An ancient skeleton found nearly 20 years ago in a river in Washington is related to American Indians, says a DNA study that could help resolve a long-running dispute over its ancestry and custody.
The skeleton, known as Kennewick Man, is about 8,500 years old. The new work argues against earlier suggestions that it wasn’t connected to modern native peoples.
Most scientists trace modern native groups to Siberian ancestors who arrived by way of a land bridge that used to extend to Alaska. But features of Kennewick Man’s skull led some scientists to suggest its ancestors came from elsewhere.
Researchers turned to DNA analysis to try to clarify the skeleton’s ancestry. They recovered DNA from a fragment of hand bone, mapped its genetic code and compared that to modern-day DNA from native peoples of the Americas and populations around the world.
The results showed a greater similarity to DNA from the Americas than from anywhere else, with a close relationship to at least one American Indian population in Washington.
The research, by an international team of scientists, was published online Thursday by the journal Nature.
Kennewick Man isn’t the oldest human remains from North America to have its entire DNA code mapped, and several experts said the new results are no surprise. But Kennewick Man isn’t just any fossil.
One reason is the scientific argument over its ancestry, driven by skull features that looked more like those of Polynesians or other groups. Another is a legal dispute over what should be done with the skeleton.
Some American Indian tribes asked that it be handed over to them for reburial, under a 1990 federal law.
