Genome Analysis Links Kennewick Man to Native Americans
Source: Smithsonian.com
Genome Analysis Links Kennewick Man to Native Americans
By Helen Thompson
smithsonian.com
37 minutes ago
For about 9,000 years, his bones lay entombed in earth, an unknown record of early life in the Americas. But since a chance find in the 1990s, the remains have been at the nexus of a scientific and political firestorm over the ancestry of this ancient individual. Now, the first genome analysis of Kennewick Man, or “the wise one”, is adding fresh fuel to the flame
Contrary to previous results based on the size and shape of the skeleton, the DNA analysis, published today in Nature, suggests that Kennewick Man is more closely related to modern Native Americans than any other population of modern humans. While the researchers were not able to link the skeleton to a specific contemporary Native American group, the study could have implications for the fierce debate over who should be its modern caretakers.
“We will never be able to say what population, what individual in the Americas, is most closely related to [Kennewick Man] simply because most Native Americans haven’t been sequenced,” says Eske Willerslev, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen and a co-author on the study. “What we can say is that Kennewick Man is more closely related to some Native American groups than others.”
The modern saga of Kennewick Man began in 1996, when college students stumbled upon some bones along the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington, and called the police. Radiocarbon dating put the skeleton at about 9,000 years old. The remains consist of roughly 300 bone fragments, making it one of the most complete ancient skeletons unearthed in the Americas.
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Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/genome-analysis-links-kennewick-man-native-americans-180955638
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Oh, but wait, how can that be when the earth is only 5,000 years old?!
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