First DNA Tests Say Kennewick Man Was Native American
Nearly two decades after the ancient skeleton called Kennewick Man was discovered on the banks of the Columbia River, the mystery of his origins appears to be nearing resolution.
Genetic analysis is still under way in Denmark, but documents obtained through the federal Freedom of Information Act say preliminary results point to a Native-American heritage.
The researchers performing the DNA analysis “feel that Kennewick has normal, standard Native-American genetics,” according to a 2013 email to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for the care and management of the bones. “At present there is no indication he has a different origin than North American Native American.”
If that conclusion holds up, it would be a dramatic end to a debate that polarized the field of anthropology and set off a legal battle between scientists who sought to study the 9,500-year-old skeleton and Northwest tribes that sought to rebury it as an honored ancestor.
In response to The Seattle Times’ records request, geochemist Thomas Stafford Jr., who is involved in the DNA analysis, cautioned that the early conclusions could “change to some degree” with more detailed analysis. The results of those studies are expected to be published soon in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Stafford and Danish geneticist Eske Willerslev, who is leading the project at the University of Copenhagen, declined to discuss the work until then.
But other experts said deeper genetic sequencing is unlikely to overturn the basic determination that Kennewick Man’s closest relatives are Native Americans.
The result comes as no surprise to scientists who study the genetics of ancient people, said Brian Kemp, a molecular anthropologist at Washington State University. DNA has been recovered from only a handful of so-called Paleoamericans — those whose remains are older than 9,000 years — but almost all of them have shown strong genetic ties with modern Native Americans, he pointed out.
“This should settle the debate about Kennewick,” Kemp said.
Establishing a Native-American pedigree for Kennewick Man would also add to growing evidence that ancestors of the New World’s indigenous people originated in Siberia and migrated across a land mass that spanned the Bering Strait during the last ice age. And it would undermine alternative theories that some early migrants arrived from Southeast Asia or even Europe.
It’s not clear, though, whether the upcoming study will provide tribes the legal ammunition they need to reclaim what they call “The Ancient One.”
Controversy flared over the skeleton almost from the moment in 1996 when two students stumbled across human bones near the Southeastern Washington town of Kennewick.
Bothell archaeologist James Chatters, the first scientist to examine the skeleton, said the skull looked “Caucasoid,” not Native American. A facial reconstruction that bore a striking resemblance to Capt. Jean-Luc Picard (actor Patrick Stewart) of the television series “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” further inflamed members of local tribes, who argued that the remains were rightfully theirs under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
After eight years of litigation, a federal appeals court ruled in 2004 that Kennewick Man’s extreme age made it impossible to establish a clear link to any existing Northwest tribes.
A scientific team led by Douglas Owsley, a physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, won the right to study the skeleton, which is stored at the University of Washington’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.
The results, including a new facial reconstruction based on more thorough analysis of the skull, were published last year in a 669-page book. Owsley, the lead author, told Northwest tribal members in 2012 that he remains convinced Kennewick Man was not Native American.
In an interview last week, Owsley explained that he bases that conclusion on the shape of the skull, which doesn’t look anything like the skulls of modern Native Americans. Its narrow brain case and prominent forehead more closely resemble Japan’s earliest inhabitants and people whose genetic roots are in Southeast Asia, not Siberia and other parts of Northeast Asia.
“His origins are going to go back to coastal Asia,” Owsley said.
That wouldn’t preclude the possibility of some distant, shared ancestry with Native Americans, he added. But chemical analysis of the bones suggests Kennewick Man ate a lot of marine mammals, which means he probably spent most of his life along the coast of Alaska or British Columbia, not on the Columbia Plateau where his bones were discovered, Owsley said.
With its ability to settle questions about lineage, DNA analysis has become one of the most powerful tools for the study of the ancient world, said Peter Lape, curator of archaeology at the Burke Museum. “This is yet another case where genetics are really revolutionizing the way we think about ancestry and calling into question older scientific methods that rely on looking at the shape of bones,” he said.
Nevertheless, the majority of visitors he encounters at the museum still have the impression that Kennewick Man is Caucasian. “That initial media storm from 1996 just kind of stuck,” Lape said.
Chatters, the man who kicked up that storm, changed his mind after studying the 13,000-year-old skeleton of a young girl discovered in an underwater cave in Mexico. As with Kennewick Man and other remains of the earliest prehistoric Americans, the shape of the girl’s skull was unusual. But DNA analysis proved that she shared a common ancestry with modern Native Americans, originating with the people who migrated into the land mass called Beringia beginning about 15,000 years ago.
“The result from Kennewick is the same one we’re getting from the other early individuals,” Chatters said. “It’s what I expected.”
Attempts to extract DNA from Kennewick Man’s bones in the late 1990s failed. But the technology has advanced so much since then that researchers recently succeeded in analyzing the genome of a 130,000-year-old Neanderthal from a single toe bone.
Willerslev’s Danish lab is a world leader in ancient DNA analysis. Last year, he and his colleagues reported the genome of the so-called Anzick boy, an infant buried 12,600 years ago in Montana. He, too, was a direct ancestor of modern Native Americans and a descendant of people from Beringia.
Until details of the Kennewick analysis are published, there’s no way to know what other relationships his genes will reveal, Kemp said. It may never be possible to link him to specific tribes, partly because so few Native Americans in the United States have had their genomes sequenced for comparison.
“My feeling is once you get the Kennewick genome, there are going to be people lining up to find out if they’re related to him,” he said.
Members of Northwest tribes visit the Burke Museum regularly to pay their respects to The Ancient One, and continue to press for his reburial.
Willerslev met with tribal representatives in Montana before analyzing the Anzick boy’s DNA. Last summer, after those studies were done, he joined tribal members — including several Northwest veterans of the Kennewick Man wars — as they reinterred the boy’s bones on a sagebrush-covered slope near the spot where he was discovered. - Seattle Times
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The World Needs To Know About MIB
I reported two sightings and one abduction and never even got an interview. Now I am a published author who {5th amendment censored) the (blank) and (blank) buildings as well as several (blank) agencies with a clever (blank) I wrote that made it impossible for me to be detected by the (blank) and MJ-12 attention. That being said, I have been abducted at least seven times that I am aware of since age 12 (possibly much younger) and I have an implant that is self aware enough to move away whenever I try to rip it out with something. Every x-ray I have requested of my arm has mysteriously not made it into my hands as hard evidence despite multiple attempts at ordering said screenings at my local hospitals or my PCP and even my chiropractor agreed to zoom out one x-ray to reveal whats in my arm and when the pics came in the mail, they were all there accepts the one I has asked for and a double print was sent instead.
On the morning of November 27th I was visited by two men who looked nearly identical other than one had a gotee and one did not. Neither of them had distinguishing facial features such as wrinkle or signs of aging or even expressions for the most part as well as being dressed I suits that look like they just came fresh from the drycleaner and pressed, immaculate beyond normal parameters. One referred to the other as E-E-7 at one point during our brief conversation. Their behavior was peculiar in an eccentric way, like a bad black and white alien invasion film, just not quite Human. They kind of pulled the good cop/bad cop cliché but the one without the gotee was clearly in charge and asked me several questions about my manuscript and the publishers that were interested in it as well as when or if I was planning to publish it. Then the other came out of left field angrily (which was odd since they displayed no real emotions or normal body language of any type) and raising his voice said, "It's not right to steal things from corporations!" to which I responded, "It is when corruption of such threatens the security of the American public." That's when the lead agent calmed his partner and then he showed me a penny, heads up, 1983 (my birth year coincidentally) and it disintegrated in his palm to ash and scattered to the wind and then he said, "That could happen to your heart or your liver or a kidney Mr. Murphy. People get sick all the time with ailments that baffle modern doctors." I told him I was done with this conversation and he said "We'll be seeing you real soon Mr. Murphy." and I quickly went inside. They had originally asked to come in to which I refused and lit a cigarette and told them I have children (who were at school) and didn't smoke inside. There was no way I was letting them in. I'd of ended up suicided like poor Phil Schneider. Anyway, after I had gone in, I soon realized I was still smoking so I stepped back outside after all of maybe three seconds had elapsed and they were gone. I live on the second floor and you always hear the railway and staircase rattle with even the softest steps and these two men were no where to be seen like they vanished. The other thing is, I have company quite often, children and a fiancé and we are usually never out of the house and almost always have company or neighbors about. How did they know the exact moment to show up where it just happened that none of my usual busy home activities were going on and there were literally no witnesses to corroborate my story. Peculiar indeed. I live in one of the trashiest, ghetto areas of my town where all the junkies, hookers and drugs are and this government plate black 1972 Mercedes Benz in cherry condition with tinted windows rolls down my alley one day while I'm smoking downstairs and stops for thirty seconds while I smoked and it was a rainy, muddy day and the alley is full of potholes and there was not a single blemish on that car. Physically impossible right? So I'm smoking and looking at them stopped there through my peripheral trying not to look like I was looking and then they just pulled off. A car like that has no earthly business in my ghetto neighborhood and I watched it drive out the alley back to the main street so they weren't there for drugs or prostitutes, etc. Since and before that incident, I and several neighbors of mine have noticed black unmarked SUVs and other Mercedes unblemished as always parked in strange places at all hours throughout the area. We also witnessed some very low flying black unmarked helicopters flying about as usual. As I reported twice before, we all saw many UFOs and even photographed one and I made several MUFON reports and was more or less ignored. I have just recently published the book of which these MIB were so concerned about and plan to investigate the Grand Canyon and Dulce, NM this late spring as I plan and plot my next book. I think it's about time that MUFON took my case seriously and the agent assigned to interview me blew me off three times and I request that you reassign someone more seriously sincere to the MUFON cause to my case as well as considering the facts that I have had seven known abductions, an implant, every symptom of abductee behavior, one threatening encounter with the 'ants' (hive minded hybrids of the Draco-Orion collectivists) and later on, threatened by the actually Men in Black of Project Delta. I have also made telepathic contact with a Pleiadian named Azhuril who I came to find out was my half sister by blood. She died in the Andro-Pleiadian war effort against the Draco-Orionite collectivists recently but not before revealing to me that I was a hybrid myself allowed live birth by my mother who was an abductee (who refuses to come to grips with reality) and that I am in fact 50% Pleiadian and 50% Homo Sapien Indigo which makes me an even larger threat to their agenda but they can't suicide me now. I'm published and any unusual death I were to suffer would blow up my book and to quote my favorite 1990's tv series, "Turn one man's quest into a crusade." The truth is out there and I stole some of it from them and their mad but they can't touch me now. My book says it all. I did not reveal all of my (blank) files in the book because Azhuril had wished me to keep something bsck as collateral to ensure they won't kill me. I gave it to a secret friend we'll call Mr. Saintly and should anything happen to me, the information including video recording from within the Dulce NM base itself will go viral on the internet. Call it my life insurance policy. Is MUFON ready to take my situation seriously yet? Because I have a lot to say and need only an ear to hear it. I believe that Hangar 1 could benefit from what I have to offer so send an agent of MUFON who is truly committed to the cause to interview me because the guy you got in Oregon is a little flaky and I have patiently waited since April to talk to you guys. I want to help as well. I want to become a field investigator. Hell, I'm in college for anthropology already and I have been a UFO hunter forever. I must speak with someone who takes my case seriously and I must speak with them soon. Please consider meeting with me in Eugene OR. If possible, I believe my case is worthy of a more 'ranking' or 'senior' member's attention so that my story doesn't continue to go untold. The content of my book does not discuss my abduction or contactee experiences, only my research and evidence so please come and interview me as soon as your earliest convenience. The future is changing soon and the world needs to know. - MUFON CMS
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Mystery Cosmic Radio Burst Caught in Real-Time For the First Time Ever
Astronomers have been picking up strange unexplained radio bursts from the depths of space.
The mysterious bursts, which last only a fraction of a second but give out more energy than the sun does in a million years, were previously picked up only in historical data.
Now however scientists at Swinburne University in Melbourne have been able to catch one of these bursts, known as 'blitzers', in the act using the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales.Other astronomers attempted to pick up an afterglow from the event but were unable to detect any signs of one.
It isn't clear exactly what might be causing the bursts but scientists have speculated that it would have to be some kind of cataclysmic event occuring up to 5.5 billion light years away.
"Nobody knows what to make of it," said astronomer Keith Bannister of CSIRO, Australia's national science agency. "All the ideas are very exotic so ruling them out is all you can do at the moment."
It is hoped that the data retrieved from this latest observation will help to piece together the true source of these unexplained bursts and solve this long running cosmic mystery once and for all. Read more at Gizmodo
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2014 May Have Been Warmest Year In Last 2,000
Last week NASA and NOAA released a preliminary analysis claiming that last year was the warmest since record-keeping began in 1880, based on globally averaged temperature data collected from a network of land and water surface sensors. The reaction to the news has been fairly predictable, with some skeptics nit-picking around the margin of error and most climate scientists pointing to 2014′ s heat as further evidence of a long-term warming trend, often noting that the ten hottest years on record have all occurred since 1997.
“The global warmth of 2014 is just another reminder that the planet is warming and warming fast. Perhaps most remarkable is that this level of warmth was achieved without the expected large El Niño,” said Jonathan Overpeck, co-director of Arizona State University’s Institute of the Environment and one of 21 climate scientists polled about the new report by the Washington Post. ”2014 was one for the record books in many ways, and it serves as a great illustration of what global warming is all about.”
While most scientists acknowledge that a single record-breaking year is actually less significant than it may seem to the layman because longer-term trends are more important when talking about climate, a minority of researchers say the real story is that warming patterns have not kept pace with what was predicted in earlier models. Continue reading at Forbes
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