High winds howled through the gorge. They came hot and fierce in the summer, scouring skin under the cloudless skies, and icy cold in the winter, channeling the chill that wrored south from the North Pacific and the Arctic beyond. It was autumn now, and the winds carried the last hopes of summer with them, the last gasp of warmth before the day is shortened and bitter winter descended. The salmon swam upstream from the ocean toward their spawning grounds. Bald eagles soared high above the river, watching for the telltale signs of easy prey. Bears picked spots in river shallows where they could grab unsuspecting salmon and gorge on the dead creatures that had fulfilled their life's mission of reproduction. People as well were everywhere along the banks of what would one day be known as the Columbia River. Some suspended themselves over the falls on wooden platforms, spearing salmon trying to make the jump. Others preferred the rapids, where the salmon struggled to make headway against the currents, interrupting the river's steady movement toward the sea. The man in the boat had spent plenty of time netting and spearing salmon over his four decades of life. Like the salmon, he too was headed upriver, but not in search of a spawning ground. Another three-day's journey to the east lay the confluence of three rivers, a great gateway to the interior of this vast land. He had been a stranger here until not long ago, having spent his youth on the rain-lashed shores of the Pacific, hunting seals and sea lions and paddling through the deep blue waters in long canoes. No longer. The dry brown hills and basalt cliffs flanking the Columbia were a familiar sight to him now, as were the river's currents and its moves. He knew where the people living along the waterway were friendly, and more importantly, where they weren't. A few more days' travel would see him to the place where the three rivers met. He coughed, his ribs aching, and swiped a hand across his forehead. He was sweated. Odd for this time of year. Another cough wrapped him, and then another. A few more days, and then he could rest. Many millennia ago, a well-traveled man died along the Columbia River. His people, whoever they were, buried him along the riverbank. After he stayed, until a chance discovery unearthed him more than 8,000 years later. His discoverers called him Kennewick Man, but others know him as the Ancient One. And his skeleton is a repository of unimaginably valuable information about the world he once inhabited. A world that was once ours. I'm Patrick Wyman. Welcome to Past Lives. On July 28, 1996, two young men were watching a hydroplane race along the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington. While watching the boats scream up and down the wide expanse of the river from their vantage point along its banks, they spotted something unusual in the mud. A piece of human skull. When the races were over, they called the police, who returned with a full team of search and rescue personnel to investigate what could well have been the remains of a murder victim. Over the next several weeks, searchers, now including archaeologists, discovered the almost complete skeleton of a man. But this was no recent burial. Initial radiocarbon testing showed that the man had lived not in the recent past, or even the centuries of recorded history in the region, but more than 8,000 years ago. Kennewick Man, as he was quickly named, was in fact an ancient human who had lived among the vast rivers, mountains, forests, and surprisingly arid inland basins of the Pacific Northwest. In a past so distant, we can barely imagine it. I was 11 years old on that day in July, and at the time lived exactly 82.8 miles away, a little over an hour's drive down I-82 from where Kennewick Man was discovered. Not a lot happened in Yakima when I was growing up, and the discovery of the complete skeleton of an ancient human was precisely the kind of thing to capture the attention of a board 11-year-old with an active imagination and a few weeks of summer left to ruminate on it. That was 30 years ago, but I've never forgotten the thrill. The idea that a person whose face we can reconstruct, who lived a life we can understand, met the end of his days in a place I knew well. Kennewick Man, or the ancient one as local indigenous groups know him, is one of the best understood individuals from any time or anywhere in prehistory. Decades of scientific studies have revealed everything from his diet to his activity patterns, to his geographic origin, to his genetic relations over thousands of years. Today, we'll explore all those details of a life lived more than 8,000 years ago. Since the discovery of his remains, the ancient one has been the subject of an intense and acrimonious legal battle. That's a story in its own right, but the controversy and debate over who would retain custody of the skeleton is deeply important. It's a flashpoint in a decades-long conflict over the respectful treatment of indigenous people's remains, the rights of present-day indigenous groups to those remains, and the scientific importance of rare, precious source materials. The potted version goes like this. For much of the history of the study of indigenous people in America, non-indigenous scholars conducted the research. Their treatment of the human remains they found and collected in the course of that research was entirely antithetical to how indigenous people wanted those remains to be treated. Even when there were ongoing requests for the repatriation of remains for reburial, they wouldn't be returned, instead sitting in museum collections or on display. In 1990, Congress passed detailed legislation, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, governing how human remains and cultural artifacts are to be handed over to indigenous groups that claim them. Kennewick Mann, known as the ancient one among the Umatilla, Yakima, and Nez Perce people, who for years fought for custody of his remains, was the first high-profile clash between the scientists who wanted to study the remains and the communities that claimed kinship with the deceased and wanted to reinter him properly. While the scientific study of human remains is important, it can't come at the cost of present-day people who feel a connection to the remains, and it definitely can't rely on bad science. The most egregious aspect of the scientists' attempt to head off repatriation of Kennewick Mann's remains was their reliance on arguments about the shape of his skull. I'm not kidding. A lot of anthropologists in the 19th and 20th centuries spent a significant amount of time measuring human skulls, drawing a great many conclusions about genetic relationships, ancestry, and other big picture issues from the data they collected. If this sounds like racist pseudoscience to you, you are not wrong. The researchers in this case claimed that the ancient one, who was discovered on native land that had been inhabited by people indigenous to the region going back thousands of years, was more closely related to Polynesian or Southeast Asian populations, a conclusion drawn purely on the basis of the shape of his skull. This is, to put it bluntly, nonsense. It was already deeply questionable by the late 1990s when the scholars involved made those claims in an attempt to evade NAGPRA. It's since been thoroughly debunked. It turns out that morphology, the visual appearance of human skeletons, is constantly changing under what's called selection pressure. Basically, there's no straightforward reason to believe that your descendants, 30 generations or so down the line, will look much like you, let alone 8,000 plus years in the future. The sheer absurdity of these arguments and the ranker they generated made for an incredibly fraught legal battle between indigenous groups and scientists. But the intense scrutiny around the case meant that researchers felt compelled to prove just how much humanity stood to learn from the ancient one's remains. The result is one of the most comprehensive investigations of a human skeleton ever undertaken. The sheer extent of what we can know about a person who lived more than 8,000 years ago is mind-boggling. Where he grew up, what he ate, the injuries he sustained, his relationship to other populations before and after his death, and a thousand other aspects of life in the ancient Americas we could never otherwise hope to know, let alone understand. Leaving aside the issues of skull morphology and denigrating indigenous groups' claims to the ancient one's remains, the studies of his body firmly demonstrate the centrality of this kind of work to making sense of the distant past. Once the final study, an ancient DNA analysis, was conducted and their results proved beyond doubt that he was ancestral to later indigenous peoples, the remains were returned to a coalition of Columbia Basin tribes, including the Umatilla, Yakima, and Nez Perce. More than 20 years after those first scattered bones were found along the river, the ancient one was reburied as an honored tribal member. I am not an expert on this issue and I don't claim to be. What's clear is that the indigenous groups in the region have a rightful claim to the remains and also that public interest in the scientific study of those remains is considerable. This doesn't have to be an antagonistic relationship and there are plenty of scholars who move between the worlds of science and indigenous rights and practices with real sensitivity. My sincere hope is that positive relationships can benefit everyone, but it is and will be a fraught issue. In the meantime, however, we are lucky to have the fruits of decades of research to tell the ancient one's story. On that note, throughout today's episode, I'm relying on the product of the researcher's investigation, an enormous volume edited by Douglas Ousley and Richard Jantz entitled Kennewick Man, the scientific investigation of an ancient American skeleton. We know how this man's story ended. Somewhere along the edge of the Columbia River, narrower and faster flowing then compared to now after the construction of numerous dams along its length. The circumstances of his end are impossible for us to reconstruct now. The constant eroding action of the water, millennia of floods, and finally the expansion of the river from damming literally erased the original circumstances in which his body was buried. Skeletal remains were scattered along roughly 130 feet of riverbank, with the smaller lighter bones being pushed further or disappeared entirely. Nothing else that we can plausibly associate with the ancient one's remains has ever been found. It's the skeleton itself, with one minor exception I'll come back to later. We don't know the manner in which he was buried. If he was interred with honor and given all the accoutrements he might need for his next journey, the original grave washed away long ago. He may have been dumped in a shallow depression and then covered, or he may even have fallen into a patch of stagnant or slow-moving water and slowly been covered by silt. All of those are possible, though it's unlikely his corpse was simply left on the surface since the bones show no signs of being scavenged by the coyotes and other animals that inhabit the region. The most likely scenario is that he was intentionally buried face up on his back, with his feet toward the river on the terrace overlooking the Columbia. As the riverbank eroded away, especially after the river was dammed in the 1950s, his bones simply fell in. What we can say with certainty is that the ancient one probably died near where his body remained for the next 8,500 years. This part of the region has a harsh, dry beauty to it. Long ridges running east from the Cascade Mountains divide the landscape into arid valleys with rich rivers at their hearts, like the Yakima and the Snake, which eventually join up with the Columbia near the spot where the ancient one was buried. Sam and Spawn in these rivers, millions upon millions of them. Elk wander the higher reaches of the Cascade foothills. Deer make their homes among the cottonwoods that line the riverbanks. More than 8,000 years ago, a man paddled a canoe along these rivers, traveling east from the Pacific Coast. His long journey ended on that Columbia River overlook. But before that day came, he lived a great deal. Thanks to his skeleton, we can reconstruct that journey and the life he led in extraordinary detail. At the time of his death, the ancient one was probably around 40 years old. Unfortunately, skeletons found in archaeological contexts don't come with a neat tag telling us their age. We have to estimate it from a series of markers on the bones, which sometimes contradict each other. While he had lived a hard life, sustaining many healed injuries, his teeth weren't particularly worn down as they tend to be among older people in archaeological samples. He stood 5'7 or 5'8 inches tall and probably weighed around 160 pounds. We see a great deal of wear on his bones, especially around the joints, which point to evidence of hard, repetitive physical activity. The combination of those activity patterns and the large muscle attachments suggests that he was strongly built. We can picture him as a tough, weathered man, brown eyed and dark-haired, aged prematurely to our eyes by the difficult circumstances of his existence, with strength and endurance in his stocky limbs. His hands knew the shaft of a spear and the handle of a canoe paddle. He may have walked with a bit of a limp, the product of an old wound to his hip, where a projectile point was still embedded in his bone, the only artifact that we can associate with his remains. It was one of many hurts he'd suffered, but they had all healed and he had survived. It's somewhat ironic, considering the amount of healed trauma on his skeleton that we have no indication of how the ancient one died. No obvious trauma at the time of death, harem-or-dom trauma, as it's called, or obvious signs of long-term illness. So far as we can tell from his skeleton, he was healthy until shortly before the end. The ancient one's place of burial lies close to the confluence of three rivers, the mighty Columbia, which drains into the Pacific at the border between Oregon and Washington States, the Yakima, which reaches into the peaks of the Cascade Mountains to the west, and the Snake, which, as its name suggests, takes a long, winding course east into southern Idaho and then western Wyoming, all the way to its source in Yellowstone National Park. For people living before the very recent past, rivers were the lifelines of their worlds, the highways that carried goods, people, and ideas quickly and efficiently through difficult landscapes. In the mountainous and heavily forested Pacific Northwest, rivers weren't just the best option for long-distance travel, they were essentially the only option to reach the continent's rich interior from the coast. This is the exact journey the ancient one once took. We know this because of the isotopes locked inside his bones, which provide hints to his geographic locations and his diet at various stages of his life. It's clear that he hadn't grown up in the vicinity of his burial place. The isotopic signatures in his teeth, which are set down during childhood, don't match a person who consumed either rainwater or glacial meltwater in the vicinity of Kennewick. Nor did his rib collagen, which fully turns over and remodels itself in the last decade or so prior to death, reflect time spent in that region. When we look at his diet, the data only reinforces the impression that the ancient one wasn't from the area, but had arrived at some point in the years immediately before he died. His bones contain high levels of carbon-13 and nitrogen-15, which suggests that his diet consisted mostly of salmon and things that fed on salmon. Plenty of people who live well inland relied on salmon, which migrate hundreds of miles up the rivers that drain into the Pacific every year to spawn. The ancient one, however, had also consumed a great deal of marine mammals, including pinnipeds like seal and sea lion. It's hundreds of miles from Kennewick to the Pacific. There are no seals or sea lions there today, and none lived there more than 8,000 years ago either. Moreover, the isotopic data suggests that he consumed almost no terrestrial protein like deer or elk. He either didn't know how to hunt those animals, or lived in places where other prey was so much more readily available that he preferred not to. Even compared to other ancient indigenous people in the region for whom we have data, this is unusual. Salmon fishers living along the Fraser River of British Columbia a little bit later were perfectly content to hunt deer and other terrestrial prey along the river. The most logical conclusion from all this is that the ancient one had lived somewhere along the Pacific coast for most of his life, where he and presumably his people survived as specialized ocean hunters and fishers. We know he spent a lot of time on and in the water. His skull shows clear features called auditory exostoses, which are excessive bone growths in the ear canals, the result of repeated exposure to cold water and wind. They're common today among cold water surfers, for example. That's more consistent with life by the ocean than a lifestyle spent in, on, and around rivers. Later in life, he traveled inland along the Columbia, eventually dying near where it joined the Yakobar and the Snake. Perhaps he, as others had done before and would do for millennia, followed the salmon upstream toward their spawning ground in search of a new life. This is migration at its most intimate scale, a single individual whose journey we can track through time and space. What we don't know is why the ancient one embarked on that journey or whom he traveled with. The fact that he seems to have been buried suggests that he wasn't a complete outcast, but that's a low bar. The evidence of his skeleton strongly implies that the ancient one had gotten himself into trouble on more than one occasion. And it's entirely possible that that trouble is what pushed him inland. Whether the trouble was other people or simply the difficult lifestyle and landscape in which he and his people lived is impossible to say, it was probably a bit of both. The ancient one's bones show ample signs of struggle. He at some point suffered a depressed fracture to the left front side of his skull, a common location for injuries sustained during a violent confrontation with another right-handed person. But we can't prove that that was the case here. Broken ribs were a repeated feature of his life, and he even had several healing fractures there at the time of death. While there are many ways to break one's ribs, getting kicked or bashed there is one proven and effective method. The projectile point that hit the ancient one in the hip and stayed there, stuck in the bone for the rest of his life, is somewhat less ambiguous. Sometime during his life, probably in late adolescence or early adulthood, someone used an atlottle, a spear thrower, to hurl a dart tipped with a razor sharp stone point at him. It hit the ancient one and lodged in the bone of his right iliac crest. When he tried to pull the dart out of his hip, he succeeded only in breaking off the tip and a few bits along the edge of the flint point. It was stuck too deeply, and the bone healed around the injury. Perhaps he had a little bit of a limp or back pain, but by and large, the wound didn't seem to hinder him over the long run. Again, we can't prove that the ancient one suffered that injury in a violent confrontation. It could have been a mistake during a hunt, or even an accident during a game, in which young men proved their bravery by hurling darts at one another, which is something we can see in the ethnographic record of later hunter-gatherer societies. But when we stack up the projectile point, the rib fractures, and the skull fracture together, it strongly indicates that the ancient one was familiar with interpersonal violence. If not, he had lived a truly unlucky and punishing life. It wasn't just serious trauma that left its marks on the ancient one's bones. It was also the mundane actions of a difficult existence repeated over and over and over again that shaped his skeleton. We can tell that he was right-handed and tended to use his left hand to hold objects, while he was working them with his right, like flaking stone tools. When we look at his whole body, however, we see telltale signs of another specific repetitive movement. Explosive, overhand throwing, which involved bringing the arm up and then cocking the body, accelerating as rapidly as possible through the throw, and then decelerating with equal rapidity. Because this is such a demanding movement pattern, it leaves highly specific markers, not just in the shoulder, elbow, and wrist, but also in the legs, which generate force in the body's acceleration phase and counteract that force when decelerating. The ancient one's body shows all of these signs to a significant degree, and we can infer that he spent a lot of time hurling spears and harpoons at his prey, particularly the seals and sea lions we know he consumed. The indicators are less pronounced for other activities, but the general bilateral development of his limbs also suggests that he pulled or paddled boats with some regularity, and perhaps fished with a net as well. With all of this information, we can construct a capsule biography of the ancient one. He was probably born somewhere on the Pacific coast between the mouth of the Columbia River and Southern Alaska. Most of his life passed in that coastal world. Decades spent throwing spears at seals and fishing for salmon with a net, getting wet and chilled by the wind more often than he probably preferred, traveling by boat along the rivers, and perhaps getting into trouble with other people from time to time. This was a difficult way to live, but the ancient one managed, surviving his injuries and growing into a big, strong, experienced hunter and fisherman. Sometime toward the end of his days, the coast ceased to be his home. Maybe he wanted a change. Maybe new migrants were moving into his traditional hunting and fishing grounds. Maybe he was part of a warband raiding deep into the Columbia Plateau. He died, cause unknown, somewhere not far from where the Columbia, Snake and Yakima rivers meet, and was buried on the earthen terrace overlooking the mighty Columbia. More than 8,000 years later, when the river had been dammed by some of the larger engineering projects in human history, the eroding waters wore away the bank in which his remains had lain forgotten and undisturbed for so long. A couple of guys watching a hydroplane race found his skull, setting off an acrimonious legal confrontation that lasted for two decades before local indigenous groups were able to reclaim the ancient one's bones and rebury them, according to their own traditions. There he will stay, hopefully for millennium war, an eternal resident of the land he found so far from his original home. Before his reburial, however, we learned practically everything we could from the ancient one's remains. Thanks to him, we know more about the possibilities of life in the early Holocene than we ever thought possible. He's a window into a world that we otherwise know only through shell middens and stone tools. And thanks to ancient DNA, we know that his people were closely related to the ancestors of most later indigenous people living in North America, including the groups Yakima, Umatilla, and Nez Perce among them, who fought so hard for custody of his bones. In the end, they were right. He was one of their ancestors, or so close to them that any differences are irrelevant. I'm happy that, in the end, the inhabitants and stewards of the land that first held him in death got him back, and that he'll remain with them, not locked away in a storage facility for the rest of time. Next time on Past Lives, we'll move across the Atlantic to Europe, where we'll meet someone who lived around the same time as the ancient one. We know her as the Shaman of Bad Durenburg. Thanks so much for joining me today. Be sure to subscribe to our Patreon. It's linked in the description here. The Patreon is only $7 a month, and you get tons of great bonus content, like Q&As, interviews with scholars, and much more. It's thanks to subscribers like you that we can make this show. If you're already a subscriber, you rule and thanks so much. You can follow me on Instagram at Wyman underscore Patrick or on Blue Sky at Patrick Wyman. Past Lives is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. The producer is Morgan Jaffe. The music and sound design is by Gabriel Gould. The story editor is Rachel Camburi. This has been Past Lives.
