Modern Native Americans seeking the right to rebury an ancient skeleton known as the Kennewick Man may have cleared an important hurdle in gaining the legal right to do so.
According to BBC News, authors of a study published in the journal Nature found the man the skeleton belonged to was more closely related to the Native Americans than to anyone else. The skeleton gained scientific prominence for being mostly complete, offering evidence of how the earliest Americans lived.
"Using ancient DNA, we were able to show that Kennewick Man is more closely related to Native Americans than any other population," study lead author Morten Rasmussen, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Copenhagen, said in a press release. "Due to the massive controversy surrounding the origins of this sample, the ability to address this will be of interest to both scientists and tribal members."
The Kennewick Man skeleton was first discovered in 1996 near the Columbia River in Washington State, BBC News reported. Native Americans claimed the 9,000-year-old skeleton was one of their own and wanted to bury it in their way, but a team of anthropologists believed its characteristics told a different story.
The Native Americans sued to try to stop from the skeleton being studied, a battle the anthropologists won in 2004. The Kennewick Man has physical resemblances to Europeans, BBC News noted, but its DNA suggests he was more Native American than anything else.
"Advances in DNA sequencing technology have given us important new tools for studying the great human diasporas and the history of indigenous populations," study co-author Carlos Bustamante, a geneticist at Stanford University, said in the release. "Now we are seeing its adoption in new areas, including forensics and archeology. The case of Kennewick Man is particularly interesting given the debates surrounding the origins of Native American populations. Morten's work aligns beautifully with the oral history of native peoples and lends strong support for their claims.
"I believe that ancient DNA analysis could become standard practice in these types of cases since it can provide objective means of assessing both genetic ancestry and relatedness to living individuals and present-day populations."
