You have all most likely heard of the Kennewick Man:
In 1996, there was a boat race on the Columbia River, near Kennewick, in Washington State, in the extreme northwestern United States. Two fans pulled ashore to get a good viewpoint of the race, and, in the shallow water at the edge of the bank, they found a human skull. They took the skull to the county coroner, who passed it to archaeologist James Chatters. Chatters and others went to the Columbia and retrieved a nearly complete human skeleton, with a long, narrow face suggestive of a person of European descent. But the skeleton was confusing to Chatters; he noticed that the teeth had no cavities and for a 40-50 year old man (the most recent studies suggest he was in his thirties), the teeth were extremely ground down. Cavities are the result of a corn-based (or sugar-enhanced) diet; grinding damage usually results from grit in the diet. Most modern people don’t have grit in their food, but do consume sugar in some form and so do have cavities. And Chatters spotted a projectile point embedded in his right pelvis, a Cascade point, normally dated between 5,000 and 9,000 years before the present. It was clear that the point had been there while the individual was alive; the lesion in the bone had partially healed. Chatters sent off a bit of the bone to be radiocarbon dated. Imagine his astonishment when he received the radiocarbon date as over 9,000 years ago. [Link]
The cover of Time Magazine this week is dedicated to new discoveries about the Kennewick Man reported inside. For many years his remains were the subject of a heated court battle. Native Americans claimed that they had the right to reclaim and bury his remains (thereby preventing scientific study) because he was one of their own. The Time Magazine article (subscription currently required) explains how forensics reveals that the Kennewick Man was not racially what we would consider Native American, but rather Polynesian or Ainu. He therefore predates existing Native American tribes. Indolink.com takes it a step further and includes speculation that he may have been from South Asia. It gets tricky because some people use “South Asia” when they really mean “Southeast Asia”:
Now it appears that analysis of Kennewick Man, places him “closer to southern Asians and nearly equidistant to modern Native Americans and Polynesians.”
That’s because the skull “appears to have strongest morphological affinities with populations in southern Asia, and not with American Indians or Europeans in the reference samples” according to one study.
The interpretations by anthropologists Joseph F. Powell and Jerome C. Rose are based on a scientific technique called craniofacial morphometric analysis. It involves detailed study of the shape of the skull and face, using a sophisticated method called multivariate analysis. In some cases, more than 60 different dimensions of a skull are measured and compared with comparable dimensions considered typical of specific racial groups. [Link]
I think it is a bit of a leap to suggest that the Kennewick man may have been part of a group that originated in South Asia (as opposed to Polynesian), but it is still a tantalizing possibility to think of how capable humans were millenia before Columbus.
Early descriptions of the Kennewick skull led to reports that the man was Caucasoid and possibly European. After a more careful analysis, the skull appeared to be longer and narrower than those of Native Americans. Dr. Joseph Powell of the University of New Mexico reports that its physical affinities appeared to be closer to those of South Asians or Polynesians than either Europeans or American Indians…Dr. Douglas Owsley of the Smithsonian Institution and Dr. Richard Jantz of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville reported…”[Other similar remains] do not have the broad faces, they do not have the big, prominent cheekbones that you think of as the more traditional features of the Chinese and American Indians.” Instead they looked more like the inhabitants of, say, Indonesia, or even Europe. [Link]
