Lab Notes
Kennewick Man continues to tease with tales of a puzzling age

Eleven thousand years ago, well before the flooding sea-level rise at the end of the last ice age, the Korean peninsula and the islands of Japan were part of a large land mass called the Sunda shelf. Here lived the Jomon people, who were the world's very first makers of pottery. Little else is known about them, except that they also made rope, which they sometimes used to impress patterns on their wet clay. Not much else survives of them; most of their other tools, like many of ours, would have been made of organic materials which have long since rotted away.

Still, rope and pottery--technologies which are still in daily use today--make these folks extremely badass by ice-age standards. They could, for example, boil and steam foods which were otherwise inedible, such as acorns and shellfish. They could also store--and probably ferment--grains and liquids. We can guess they were sophisticated in other areas as well. And since the Jomon were apparently related to other peoples in Russia and Mongolia, it seems that in a world of mammoths and saber-toothed tigers, they really got around--perhaps even across the swelling Sea of Japan.

Around this same time, retreating polar ice sheets created, for a while, a narrow land bridge across the Bering Strait, connecting Alaska with eastern Siberia. It is known that Asian peoples--not the Jomon, but the so-called Clovis culture famous for its exquisite stone knives and spearpoints--crossed this land bridge into North America, and finding it uninhabited, settled there. In fact, tracing back the evidence of Native American languages and artifacts, it seems this migration took place in three distinct waves, identified as the Na-Dene, Amerind and Eskimo-Aleut cultures.

Before Columbus, before the wheel

Of these, the Amerind were by far the swiftest, racing to all corners of North and South America within a few thousand years. In fact, to reach the oldest known settlements in extreme South America, they would have had to travel determinedly from Anchorage to Tiera del Fuego at something like 10 kilometers per day. On foot? It doesn't take a genius to figure out that boats were involved, particularly since the wheel wasn't adopted in North America until the arrival of Columbus. Boats were a pretty badass invention too, though. Like pottery, knives and leather coats, they represent "stone age" technology we've improved on but never outgrown.

It pays not to be too provincial: despite the sharp resource limitations of their environment, many modern-day stone-age cultures, such as Polynesia, were highly sophisticated, with trade and communication networks, advanced navigation techniques and large-scale social organization. Nutrition and logical formalism aside, stone agers were and are every bit as intelligent as we are. Arguably more so, given the greater range of problems facing them in daily life.

Here's a stone-age problem for us, though; the Na-Dene, Amerind and Eskimo-Aleut were all Mongoloid people, with the straight black hair, flat faces, and epicanthic folds above the eyes which are still visible in the Native Americans of today. But there is a 9,000-year-old skeleton, found near Kennewick, Washington, which does not possess these features. A controversial facial reconstruction performed by Central Washington Univerity's Tom McClelland and Jim Chatters reveals the protruding nose, sharp jawline and rounded features of a Caucasian male who looks rather like Star Trek's Patrick Stewart, a result so striking and improbable that many have refused to believe it.

DNA tests on the ancient skeleton have so far proved unsuccessful, but measurements of key skeletal features indicate that Kennewick Man was probably not European, but may well be a relative of eastern Russians and/or the Ainu people of Japan. These folks are a hairy, pale-skinned, roughly Caucasian hunter-gatherer-trader society who once controlled and fiercely defended the islands of Japan, but were gradually overtaken by the Mongoloid Yamato people. Now a minority of only a few hundred thousand, they retain their own language and culture in isolated pockets of northern Japan. The interesting thing here is that the Ainu are almost certainly the descendents of the badass Jomon people, who, as we've already noted, got around.

Was Kennewick Man a Jomon? Washington's Umatilla tribe denies it, claiming him instead as one of their own ancestors, and has sued for custody of the remains to prevent further scientific study. Desecration of ancestral corpses is a strong taboo in many Native American societies, not to mention a crime under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. In fact, the Umatilla's legal claim on the skeleton may stand even if he isn't their ancestor; the act covers "all tribes, peoples, and cultures that were residents ... prior to historically documented European exploration." This of course infuriates the anthropologists who consider poor K.M. to be perhaps the most enigmatic, demanding-of-study dead person they've ever met. They have countersued, and the legal wrangling is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

But.

An ancient anomaly speaks volumes

So far no there is no evidence of actual Jomon settlement in North America. No other Ainu-like skeletons have ever been found, although in studying the mitochondrial DNA of pre-Columbian Native American remains, Douglas Wallace of Atlanta's Emory University has found some distinctive Caucasoid (literally: Russian-like) markers in the Great Lakes region, indicating kinship or intermarriage between Amerinds in that area and a previously unsuspected population of ancient Caucasians. Or at least their women; mitochondrial DNA is passed down from the female side only.

The genetic drift of this same evidence, along with some newer analyses of linguistic drift, actually point to a much earlier origin for the Amerind people, who may have entered North America as early as 30,000 years ago. There are no undisputed American archaeological sites anywhere near this old, but interestingly, another Bering land bridge was briefly open around this time. And remember, stone agers leave little behind, so absence of their evidence is not evidence of their absence.

Time will tell if these proposed dates are accurate or not. Still, it's clear that somewhere, sometime, somehow, at least one other North American migration took place, most likely from eastern Russia or northern Japan. The most enduring mystery may be where the rest of Kennewick Man's people have gone; pessimists will note the (nonfatal) spear injury in his pelvis. But perhaps old K.M. is exactly what he appears to be: a man alone, far from his natural place in the world. A migration of one? Most of the great travelers of his age would have been traders or migratory hunters, but it's hard to imagine there weren't a few adventurers as well, equipping themselves with the most advanced technologies available and setting out, as Patrick Stewart himself might say, where no man had gone before.

Like Columbus after him, such an explorer would miss that goal, stumbling instead on a North America already long inhabited. And dying there, yeah, but in the stone age, as in the modern one, it's the going boldly that counts.