--- title: Kennewick Man: Origins Solved Thanks to DNA description: He may have lived a simple life back then, but Kennewick Man’s remains have sparked controversy and legal battles that the latest scientific investigation may finally put to rest canonical: https://time.com/3924972/kennewich-skeleton-oldest-native-american/ author: Alice Park article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-06-18T19:46:33.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:41:15.548Z article:section: Health og:title: Mystery of 8000 Year Old Kennewick Man’s Origins Solved og:description: He may have lived a simple life back then, but Kennewick Man’s remains have sparked controversy and legal battles that the latest scientific investigation may finally put to rest og:url: https://time.com/3924972/kennewich-skeleton-oldest-native-american/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd1512da546a1805f/698854f4e53aba7cc94de380/kennewick-man.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1968 og:image:height: 1107 og:image:alt: KENNEWICK MAN SKULL og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Mystery of 8000 Year Old Kennewick Man’s Origins Solved twitter:description: He may have lived a simple life back then, but Kennewick Man’s remains have sparked controversy and legal battles that the latest scientific investigation may finally put to rest twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd1512da546a1805f/698854f4e53aba7cc94de380/kennewick-man.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The Mystery of a 8,000-Year-Old Skeleton Has Been Solved > Sponsored content. 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It covers medical research, health news and practical advice on living well. #### Where can I get reliable health news by email? Health Matters is TIME's daily health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free daily newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ## Video: New Bone Suggests Lucy Walked Like Us [Watch (HLS stream): New Bone Suggests Lucy Walked Like Us](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/WsjliKpO.m3u8) (2:43)  _Published 2011-02-19. A new bone from the foot of the same species as the famous Lucy skeleton is a clue to when human ancestors started walking like people, not apes_  by [Alice Park](https://time.com/author/alice-park/)  ## Alice Park Senior Correspondent Jun 18, 2015 7:46 PM UTC  A plastic casting of a controversial 9,200-year-old skull sits in the basement of archaeologist James Chatter's home July 24, 1997 in Richland, Wash. A plastic casting of a controversial 9,200-year-old skull sits in the basement of archaeologist James Chatter's home July 24, 1997 in Richland, Wash. Elaine Thompson—AP  by [Alice Park](https://time.com/author/alice-park/)  ## Alice Park Senior Correspondent Jun 18, 2015 7:46 PM UTC Finding a human skull doesn’t happen often, but the skull that two college students stumbled upon in the Columbia River in 1996 proved rarer still. It happened to belong to an ancestor that roamed North America nearly 8500 years ago. Near the skull were remains of practically an entire skeleton belonging to a male who was likely buried along the riverbank by his people in Kennewick, Washington. Kennewick Man, as he is known, quickly became the subject of a [custody battle](http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,985306,00.html) between scientists eager to study his remains, which are among the oldest and most complete of a human ancestor in North America, and a group of five Native American tribes who claimed the bones as the Ancient One, one of their own forebears. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which manages the land on which the remains were found, intended to return the ancient bones to the Native Americans. The archeologists sued for the right to study them, and in 2004, a judge ruled that the fossils should be studied further. **MORE:** [Ice Age Infant’s Genes Show That Native Americans First Came From Asia](http://science.time.com/2014/02/13/archaeological-dig-shows-native-american-history/) The results of that analysis were published in a popular book that detailed the lifestyle that Kennewick Man likely led, but since then, advances in genetic sequencing made it possible to do a complete genome study of his DNA. And those [results, published in the journal](http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature14625) _Nature_, resolve a long-standing dispute over where Kennewick Man came from — Europe or Asia, or whether he was, as the Native American tribes claimed, an early ancestor who gave rise to some of the Native American populations that subsequently resided in North America. His genes show that Kennewick Man was more closely related to Native Americans than to European or Asian populations. “It’s very clear the genome sequence shows that he is most closely related to contemporary Native Americans,” says Eske Willerslev, from the Center for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, who led the analysis. **MORE:** [A Tale Told by Ancient Bones](http://content.time.com/time/interactive/0,31813,2025011,00.html) Hints of these results first leaked in January, when emails obtained from a Freedom of Information Act request by reporters at the Seattle Times revealed that Willerslev’s group shared some of their early findings with the Army Corps of Engineers to update them on the genetic analysis, which was done in Copenhagen. And presumably, it puts to rest any lingering questions about Kennewick Man’s origins. Those began when the first archeologist to evaluate the skull’s anatomical features declared it to be more Caucasian than Native American, and continued when Douglas Owsley, a physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution who is considered the expert on North American human remains, agreed with that conclusion. Owsley pointed out that the prominent forehead of Kennewick Man and thinner brain case made him more like Japanese Ainu or Polynesians rather than Native Americans. His genes tell a different story, however, and when Willerslev’s group also compared Kennewick Man’s DNA to that of the Ainu, Polynesians and Europeans, they found that it did not share the same similarities as it did with those of the contemporary Colville, a Native American tribe from the Columbia River area that agreed to provide DNA samples. No other Native American groups provided genetic material, so it’s possible that other tribes have an even closer connection to the ancient remains than the Colville. The results do not show that Kennewick Man was a direct ancestor of any tribe living today, says Willerslev. It’s not known whether, for example, an older population of Native Americans living in North America then split into a branch that led to Kennewick Man, and another to the contemporary tribes such as the Colville, or whether Kennewick Man is the ancestor of the Colville and other modern Native Americans. The genetic analysis does little to change archeologists’ current theories about the first North Americans. The first people to spread into the Americas likely came 5,000 to 6,000 years before Kennewick Man’s time, probably from Siberia via a now non-existent land bridge that allowed them to traverse the Bering Strait. As for Kennewick Man’s future, Willerslev says that he has been in contact with several members of the Colville throughout the analysis and says that “To me, they seemed pretty excited, and found it interesting.” Whether the remains will now go back to the Native American groups under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act isn’t clear. But Willerslev acknowledges the irony in the findings. “The reason why we came to this conclusion scientifically speaking is because the remains were almost kept out of science,” he says. ### See The Best Biology Photos Of The Year  Two Bisons on the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park, Wyo. Lukas Gawenda  A spider at sunset in Predel, Bulgaria. Krasimir Matarov  Parasitoid wasps building clay pots in Borneo, Brunei. Thomas Endlein  Siblings watering newly planted seedlings in Rizal, The Philippines. Ysabel M Victoriano  A leopard in its natural habitat in Karantaka, India. Nagarjun Ram  A farmer protects his family and animals from mosquitos in Gujarat, India. Dimple Pancholi  A tarsier in its natural habitat in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Wolfgang Weinhardt  A plant takes advantage of the available shelter in a dilapidated house in Kolmanskop, Namibia. Kelsey Green  A female blackbird holding a dried mealworm in her mouth in Lincolnshire, United Kingdom. Billy Clapham  A chick embryo in a hardened eggshell is sustained until full development in Rizal, The Philippines. Robert Cabagnot  An adult female Italian crested newt stationed below the fresh water surface in Piedmont, Italy. Matteo Riccardo Di Nicola  A sea turtle eating a jellyfish in The Maldives. Boris Barath ## Transcript >> Paleoanthropologists have long suspected that Australopithecus afarensis, which lived more than 3. 2 million years ago, was among the first species to walk upright. But the problem was, the most complete skeleton we have of the species, one called Lucy, was missing key bones in the foot that could have confirmed how afarensis carried itself. Lucy's hip and pelvic bones certainly supported the idea that she spent most of her day upright. But the true evidence lay in her feet. >> When we look at particular bones in her foot, they can help tell us whether it was optional. And of course, humans are the only primates that live today that have an [ unk ]. It reflects the fact that they walk in two legs. >> Now, some of the same researchers who discovered Lucy have found a critical bone from one of her contemporaries in Hadar, Ethiopia. The researchers based at University of Missouri and the Institute of Human Origins in Arizona have found a metatarsal bone, which connects the toes to the ankle, and reveals a lot about the body it supports. We visited William Harcourt- Smith, an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History, to learn more about how important this find is. >> The bone that we're talking about that was found a short while ago and described last week is from here. It's called the fourth metatarsal. And it tells you a little bit about arching on this side. But it's not much arching on this side. If you turn the foot around to the inside of the foot, those kind of bones will tell you about the really significant portion of the arch that helps during running. And it's really a hallmark of being a modern human. So, a lot more would help us understand it. >> While Harcout- Smith and others are still hoping to find more bones from man's early ancestors, he says this afarensis fossil still reveals a lot about human evolution. >> There's a number of modifications in the afarensis' foot that are more human- like and indicate bipedal locomotion. However, there are other features in the afarensis' foot, including the lack of an arch on the inside and curved finger bones that indicate climbing behavior, that indicate that it's not fully human- like. So, I would say it has a combination of human- like features and ape- like features. It's definitely the foot of a biped, but not a biped like us, and not a creature that would have been bipedal all of the time. >> Just like there are many bones missing in Lucy's skeleton, there are still many gaps in our understanding of how we got from afarensis to modern man. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3924972/kennewich-skeleton-oldest-native-american/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3924972/kennewich-skeleton-oldest-native-american/"},"headline":"The Mystery of a 8,000-Year-Old Skeleton Has Been Solved","datePublished":"2015-06-18T19:46:33.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:41:15.548Z","description":"He may have lived a simple life back then, but Kennewick Man’s remains have sparked controversy and legal battles that the latest scientific investigation may finally put to rest","url":"https://time.com/3924972/kennewich-skeleton-oldest-native-american/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd1512da546a1805f/698854f4e53aba7cc94de380/kennewick-man.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Alice Park","jobTitle":"Senior Correspondent","url":"https://time.com/author/alice-park/"}],"articleSection":"Health","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd1512da546a1805f/698854f4e53aba7cc94de380/kennewick-man.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"KENNEWICK MAN SKULL","caption":"KENNEWICK MAN SKULL","creditText":"Elaine Thompson—AP","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/health/","name":"Health"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3924972/kennewich-skeleton-oldest-native-american/","name":"The Mystery of a 8,000-Year-Old Skeleton Has Been Solved"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"New Bone Suggests Lucy Walked Like Us","description":"A new bone from the foot of the same species as the famous Lucy skeleton is a clue to when human ancestors started walking like people, not apes","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/WsjliKpO/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2011-02-19T03:05:24.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/WsjliKpO.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/3924972/kennewich-skeleton-oldest-native-american/","duration":"PT2M43S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/3924972/kennewich-skeleton-oldest-native-american/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```