Carlton Gover, thanks very much indeed for coming on to Evolution Soup from your home in Colorado. You're an archaeologist specializing in North American archaeology, and in particular, the late prehistoric Central Plains. You were also one of the hosts of the popular A Life in Ruins archaeology podcast, which I was very pleased to have been a guest on recently. Now, the last time I interviewed you is for my Talk Beliefs channel, where you told us all about the beliefs and rituals of the Pawnee. Today, we're going to be talking about the fascinating and often contentious case of the ancient skeleton of a paleo-American man dubbed the Kennewick Man, found 24 years ago this very month.
But before we dive into this amazing story, let's just hear a bit about you, your background, and what you do. Absolutely. Thank you for having me on again, Mark.
I really appreciate it. No problem. It was such a pleasure having you on Life in Ruins. That was one of our favorite episodes. It was a long time coming.
So yeah, thank you for that introduction, everyone. My name is Carlton Shieldsheep-Gover. I am a PhD student in anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder. I specialize, as Mark so eloquently said, Central Plains late prehistoric archaeology, which basically means I study archaeology in Nebraska and Kansas right before European contact. Mainly I'm looking at the adoption of agriculture and then the adoption of Spanish horses.
And so I got my master's in anthropology from the University of Wyoming and my BS in anthropology from Radford University back home in Virginia. And along with everything else, I am also a tribal citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, which is kind of the catalyst for all my work that I do today. Okay, well, I guess the best place to begin is to go back to July 1996 when this all started.
So Carlton. what is the story of Kennewick Man's discovery? Yeah, absolutely. So Kennewick Man is this fascinating incident in North American archaeology, specifically United States archaeology, after the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriations Act in 1990, which we will get to later.
I'm not trying to spoil anything. So we'll get to that in a bit. But what basically back in the summer of 96...
Two either high school or college guys were hanging out in the Columbia River in Washington near present day Kennewick, Washington, when they found a skull eroding out of the riverbank. And they called the police, as one should do when you find human remains. And they thought, originally thought it was a murder victim.
However, after a recovery of the rest of the remains, they basically found the rest of these human remains. I think it was over, I want to say like 60 or 70% of the skeletal assemblage was recovered, whether in that bank or in the water itself. Like this thing had just, it was in the bend of a river. So that river was just eroding that bank away, revealing these human remains.
And they thought it was a modern day or contemporary murder victim until... they found an interesting discovery which proved that otherwise. So the coroner that was assigned to this case, not a forensic anthropologist but an elected coroner, which means you really don't have to have any medical background, this guy Chatters examined the skull and determined it didn't look like an indigenous person's cranial morphology, which has its own problems in its own. He originally thought it was probably Caucasoidal, which doesn't mean Caucasian.
It is a specific cranial morphology. I'm not too sure, but it's different from Caucasian. And so this is kind of what he believed. And before talking to the press about this, what had happened was that they originally thought there was a murder victim until they found like a paleo-Indian spear point, stone spear point lodged. in one of the bones of the skeleton.
Thus confirming that this was definitely prehistoric, but when talking with the press, Chatter says, yeah, the skull looks caucasoidal. And the press took caucasoidal to mean Caucasian, and that's what they ran with. And they started this whole, oh, there's a Caucasian person that's this old with a sphere point, and it just spread like wildfire.
And this already set off this inaccurate perception based on a misunderstanding of the terminology used to describe the morphology, the cranial morphology of this skull. So. It already started off bumpy. Right, so the local coroner set off this perception that the skeleton was of a very early Caucasian slash European visitor to North America. But things started to change when another artifact was found.
Isn't that right? Yeah, so it was really that spear point that was lodged in the remains. And so that really confirmed the antiquity of this individual who's since long past.
And, you know, the coroner, you know, as I said, it wasn't necessarily his fault. He was using the lexicon of the field in that Caucasoidal thing. It was really the press that didn't understand what he was saying and changed it to Caucasian.
And they send the remains off to be dated. And the remains come back like over 9,000. years old, which would make this individual the oldest skeleton, the oldest person that we have in the archaeological record in North America at this point, right? And that is when the world went crazy, as Donald Glover would say, because the combination of the press misrepresenting chatters the forensic or the coroner who examined the skeleton.
And then also the scientific data that shows the antiquity of it. It's like white people were here so old, like so long ago. They were one of the original people.
And so, of course, you had white nationalists claiming to this belief. You had Mormons claiming this as evidence for their religious beliefs. And it started this wildfire.
And, of course, during this time, we also have, you know, the salutary hypothesis is going on coming out of the Smithsonian. And so we have all these two... Combined when you had these these reports and of course this is all going out in the public sphere not in the academic sphere The academic spirit very much like what the hell is the press doing like we understand what this is But just the explosion that the media had is like there's this 9,000 at least 9,000 year old Caucasian that has been recovered out of Kennewick Washington and so the press and those started dubbing this individual as Kennewick man however, and just just kind of as forewarning and the indigenous nations of the surrounding area as well as kind of like in North America in general they don't refer to this individual as Kennewick man we they refer to this as the ancient one so you can see those two depending on what what sources so like I prefer to use the term ancient one um Kennewick man it's just easier to talk to students about um but like in academic circles we usually kind of refer to this as the ancient one that's kind of what we have adopted as well So it really just set off this firestorm. And once again, it is due to the press misrepresenting the coroner and then alongside of that dating evidence. And yeah, that's when things started to get crazy, especially because, I mean, if you think about it, if you see something on the news, it's like, this 9,000-year-old white guy has been found in Washington and is the oldest skeleton that we've collected so far.
Like, you know, your brain starts turning. and probably the ancient aliens people were loving it as well you know that kind of group that like oh look it's a mystery that science are baffled it's basically gossip wasn't it yeah so i mean you know thank gosh that uh ancient aliens hadn't hit history channel quite yet but yeah so i mean this is you know this is mostly uh you know this is really before the internet really took off um you know this was really due to news outlets newspapers your morning radio shows um or not radio shows television shows type of thing they were the ones that really kind of spreading all this out so now we're getting to the legal battle that ensued ken mcmahon's remains sat in the museum for ages and scientists were desperate to study and understand the skeleton but the native american tribes of the area has something to say on the matter too correct yeah absolutely so um Because this was, you know, one of the oldest remains, it kind of, not only in the media with what was going on with the whole Caucasian thing, in academic and museum circles, what was going on was, well, this was clearly a burial and under the native american graves protection repatriations act of 1990 it should have been returned to the local tribes and reburied and so that is of course what they wanted to do the indigenous groups to that area were like well this is ours we need to rebury it the army corps of engineers agreed and so they were going to rebury the skeleton as they should have in my opinion that's just federal law but a couple of uh archaeologists brought it to one of the lower courts and said this these remains do not fall under the Native American Graves Protections Repayment Patriot Act. So they went to court and actually the judges in the lower circuit court and then and then a higher court sided with the archaeologists under NAGPRA um specifically and if I'd like to read a quote here as to get an understanding as to as to why that was okay and this is coming from and this is we teach this at uh this is coming from an archaeology talk that was written by my master's thesis advisor, Bob Kelly and David Hurst Thomas. We teach this in our intro classes about this case and why it's so important. And we really wanted to read the quote because it puts it better in context.
So most people would assume that a skeleton as ancient as Kennewick Man was Native American. In fact, the Department of the Interior concluded that Kennewick Man is Native American. simply because he predates European colonization of the New World.
But recall NAGPRA's definition of Native American, of or relating to a tribe, people, or culture that is indigenous to the United States. This definition, the judge says, means that the age is not sufficient evidence to determine that a burial is Native American under NAGPRA. Consequently, the judge ruled that the Department of the Interior was wrong to use alone to establish that Kenwick Man was Native American. Believe it or not, the judge argued that the key word in the definition is the word is in the phrase that is indigenous.
Although acknowledging that the requirements for establishing Native American status under NAGPRA are not erroneous, the judge also argued that the phrase requires showing a general relationship to present day tribe, people, or culture. Kennewick Man, he pointed out, had no artifacts associated with it, and because it had eroded from a riverbank, the nature of any burial ritual which is called a cultural act is gone thus the judge concluded that the culture of ken wickman is unknown and apparently unknowable and therefore cannot be affiliated with the contemporary tribe so this is the causality for this legal battle um and of course the the the people that wrote nagpra wrote it in um present tense and they they really couldn't have foreseen this to be the case and how the past tense nature was, the present tense nature was brought out in a court saying, well, it's in present tense, therefore, and it was just a nightmare. And so a couple things were going on. One, Nagpur is only six years old.
This has been its major case. And Nagpur was seen as this very big transitional event between museum archaeologists and indigenous communities. And with the first big case, you have a select group of archaeologists. By the way, at the time, it was like me it was maybe a dozen at most archaeologists were the ones suing for these remains the rest were furious and they were on the support of the army corps of engineers they were on support of the indigenous nations they were in support of the department of the interior saying send those back but is this this very minut group who understood the scientific value of having these remains and that's what they wanted they knew i have a firm belief And I'm not the only one that believes in this, that that group had no, they knew this person was indigenous. And because it was so old, they wanted to study it.
And so they fought to do that. And they found, and the judge found causality to give them the skeleton. So the ancient one, Rukanoic man, went back with predominantly an archaeologist named Doug Owsley. and his team they wrote a huge book about it i mean it's like that thick it's like over a hundred dollars to buy and it is everything you could ever want um about uh you know i i think the ancient one is as studied as some of our famous australopithecines like lucy or arty you know some of those classic ancestral hominids same kind of deal Okay, so we have the scientists who wanted the remains to stay in a museum, and the Native American tribes who wanted it reburied in accordance to their customs. Carlton, you've studied and taught about this case for a good while.
What can you tell us about the tribal beliefs and customs that so strongly impacted the fate of these ancient remains? Absolutely. So first thing of course is to bring up between Indigenous communities and Euro-Americans and is that Indigenous peoples in this country are colonized people and especially in the United States and also Canada have not been treated very well and still are not being treated very well and so how you bury your dead and how you treat your dead is a major cultural point in a lot of in all cultures right um and especially in indigenous cultures or not especially but when in indigenous cultures including the amatilla who were one of the nations that um fought for the ancient one to be returned reburied it's like when you bury something that's that's it like you you put someone in the ground and that's showing respect it is all about respect you don't dig people back up it's kind of the same um Descendant communities of Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon are very much against restoration and protection of these ancient pueblos because part of the natural process is for these things to deteriorate and go away. And so for national parks people, they're like, well, we need to preserve this culture. And the people, the descendant communities are like, no, let it fall down.
That's what's supposed to happen. And for the Umatilla and other indigenous nations, once you bury someone, like that's it that's the end of story you're not supposed to dig them back up and it's all about respect and when they're found like you know through archaeology or natural occurrences the the protocol is just to rebury them and there's really no protocol for reburial um from from my pawnee background we have no songs or ceremonies or rituals for reburial because for us there's no such thing as a reburial once something was supposed to be buried that was that was the end of it right and new matilda's the same way And it's just about respect for them like they don't for for indigenous people It's not about what you can find out about their ancestors their ancestors or what can the past tell you like for them? It's like it's gone. It's over it happened and now we just need to move forward and when these things are found That's great, but you need to you need to put them back into the earth So that's kind of what's going on here.
I mean, that's that's what was going on with the case of the ancient one was just like, you need to respect our beliefs, especially under NAGPRA and also the Native American Religious Freedoms Act. It's like, this isn't okay. And it was just seen as a grievous act against the indigenous people on behalf of these select archaeologists that wanted to study this individual. One of the big things that they wanted out of the ancient one was DNA. And tribes in general are very against DNA because to get DNA or to get a radiocarbonate, you have to remove a part of the skeleton or the remains.
And that's seen as sacrilege. It's like you don't disturb remains and you don't especially don't destroy remains. That is not okay.
That is a very taboo practice. So even though in the case of the ancient one that you will see earlier, having DNA ultimately proved. the case of ancestry um the tribes they hate it the nations they hate it and every time that there are human remains and scientists want to date them to be like well this can prove your ancestry like that these are related they're like one that's against our religion two we already know these people are related to us like this is for you not for us because our oral traditions state that we've been here so the matilla and these other groups in in washington and oregon i mean their oral traditions about Their relationship to the landscape. I mean, they say we've been here for a very long time.
Mentions of ice, cold, darkness, all things that you could associate with the Ice Age. And so there, I mean, oral traditions, because a lot of these groups didn't have written record, oral traditions are a very accurate source of information, believe it or not. And from Western views, that's not necessarily seen as correct.
But when your whole culture and storytelling is revolved around an oral you know of an oral account of of your history there are practices and safeguards to maintain the accuracy it's not just like one guy tells another guy and the next guy can make up what he wants i mean as he's talking to the community you best believe that there are people present who remember not only the previous storyteller but the previous previous storyteller and they've all heard these stories and if you're getting it wrong they will let you know so it's there are these safe communal safeguards in place to make sure that stories maintain accuracy and they do not degrade over time So these groups... have oral traditions that state their antiquity to that area. And we see this all throughout indigenous, not even just North and South America, indigenous communities globally that don't have written record. They have highly accurate accounts.
They might not give dates per se, but they can give relative chronologies of events and, and supporting evidence through climate or, or faunal evidence in terms of what kind of animals are running around. So for instance, just, you know, being, Pawnee, I will always go back on Pawnee stories because that's what I'm most familiar with. We have an oral tradition that talks about coming into the plains on the dragon's back. And part of the story is talking about a time of cold, of dark, of monsters, giant animals.
And when you pull back the veil of cultural relativism, And you look at these stories from a scientific and inquisitive standpoint and look at the data. Dragons back cold, like the Rocky Mountains, right? If we're talking about the Ice Age, the tips are barely poking out. You don't see the whole mountain range.
You see the tops. A time of cold, a time of monsters. You know, we're talking about Pleistocene megafauna. The Ice Age, Dark Nights. Like, you start seeing that this is how they were interpreting the world.
They don't have the... the scientific literature that we rely on today that we take for granted to be like oh well yes of course that is a that is a mastodon that's a giant sloth for these people you're looking at how they were interpreting the world around them so you kind of have to remove your own biases in order to understand what they're trying to convey and so we see this with indigenous cultures across the world and how they were trying to do it you just have to peel back your own biases from your own public school education or education wherever that you are standing on the shoulders in the backs of people who've done all this work before you, but if you bring yourself back into antiquity, how are people going to explain their world, right? Maybe monsters aren't literal, or giants isn't necessarily literal. And how do you know what a giant or a monster is to somebody 20,000 years ago, 16,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago?
How are they seeing the world around them, and how are they trying to explain it? So oral traditions have gotten a bad rap in the past. They're seen as inaccurate. But, I mean, if you look at any Western book, or account, you know how much bias is in those things. Or history is written by the winners type of thing.
And oral traditions, they're just as accurate, if not more so, than written down. Well, I suppose accuracy is kind of sacred to them, isn't it? Yes, exactly.
And accuracy and precision, once again, these are all cultural relative. terms and like what's being passed down these are the most important aspects of these stories what needs to be communicated to the next generation of uh of people so and tying this back up in the case of Kennewick man and and why these tribes were against these nations my apologies were against the DNAs because their oral traditions should have already been accurate enough so we can tell you that our people have been here This person is part of us. Like, this is ours.
We need to put the ancient one back into the earth. We don't need DNA testing. Our history should be provided enough. So, yeah, that was kind of the backstory with why they don't want DNA.
And this still happens today with remains that are pulled. It's like tribes don't want it. It goes to court. The court usually sides with the world. American scholars, researchers, whoever, they do the DNA and what does it prove?
It proves ancestry to the groups that are saying this belongs to us. We know it belongs to us. This is in our stories. So the DNA, from my understanding, and someone can correct me wrong, so far hasn't discounted any indigenous stories about relationship.
So like we have these cases in which it's like, it just shows that these stories are, these oral traditions are valid, are valid sources of information that... you know it is honestly a battle of cultures or a clash of cultures it's that euro americans have a different view and understanding of what constitutes um knowledge and the indigenous have have an alternative view so this is really not necessarily them being disrespectful of one another um they're being disrespectful and ignorant of each other's beliefs and what constitutes valuable and useful knowledge In 2015, DNA sequencing techniques had advanced enough that a new analysis of the Kennewick man's bones were completed. So, the scientists expected the result to be one thing, and the local tribes expected another. So, what did the DNA results actually reveal? so I don't think it was necessarily that the DNA had advanced enough I believe the court had allowed it you know this this court case ancient one had gone on for so long that they're finally gonna finish to do it I don't think the archaeologists thought that the DNA was gonna reveal something else I'm firmly rooted in belief they knew exactly what they were dealing with and they wanted the information and what did the DNA true results revealed that the ancient one was indeed related to even 9,000 over 9,000 years related to those Pacific Northwest groups and even some groups out in the plains and also showed genetic affiliation with the Ainu which are the indigenous inhabitants of Japan in the northernmost island as well as some far eastern Asian populations which you know makes sense with their understanding of how people got to North America So that was done, and I remember the first time I taught this class, Intro to Archaeology, my first semester of being a master's student at the University of Wyoming, I was teaching Ken Wickman.
As I was finishing the lecture, I got a text message from one of my cousins, who was very active in the Native American Rights Fund, and he sent me a link. And that very day, President Barack Obama... Then President Barack Obama issued an executive order to return the ancient one back to be reburied.
And so I was just sitting there looking at it in the middle of class and I told my students, I was like, and this is how it resolved. You know, like over 20 years of this court case, this person is finally going back home. So it was 20 years that Doug Owsley and his colleagues, they got a lot of information and that's what they wanted.
At the end of the day, that's what they wanted. They wanted to analyze every aspect of those remains. They wrote a huge book about it.
It's an expensive book. And they seriously, I mean, the Society of American Archaeology, which is the largest organization representing North American archaeologists, at the time, the president, Robert Kelly, my master's advisor, once again, who wrote this book, he... He wrote a letter and it was just like, you need to support these tribes, that this is wrong, that this is illegal. So Doug Owsey and his colleagues further, and this is my opinion.
Okay. They knew what they had and they sacrificed goodwill with the indigenous community so that they can do research and publish that research and make money off of it. There's no doubt any good anthropologists.
in North America if you found 9,600-year-old remains, that it's anything but indigenous and falls under NAGPRA. And that's what 99.99% of archaeologists across the country said. Now, of course, NAGPRA was just passed, and there are still some bad feelings about NAGPRA, really.
We're still waiting for a few of those archaeologists to die, to be quite frank. They hide skeletons. That still happens today. you know maybe owsley was part of that generation that was that hated nagpur what it stood for and thought it was going to empty out museums and it was going to be the death of archaeology and science in this country um and this and with the dna it's the kind of the same deal um the anzac child which was another set of human remains which was recovered it was recovered in the 60s in montana on private property and that is a whole little case in its own i forget how old anzac child is but it's also paleo indian age and um nagpra doesn't apply to that one because it wasn't found on it was found on private property nagpra only applies to federal property and that the location where the ancient one was found ken wickman um was on like department or army corps of engineers property or something like that so it was all found on federal property along the river which is why nagpra would have kicked in um and i they did do dna testing on ansic and it did show genetic relationship to the surrounding tribes which is which is just fascinating in general right like over 9 000 years of people inhabiting this area and and the people are still around now of course what i found with the ancient one is that also showed genetic relationship with the ericara which are a northern plains group and of course like just for the listeners the our genetic library of indigenous peoples in north america It's pretty slim. It doesn't happen very often.
So if you think that it's the end-all, be-all, you'd be mistaken. And we can get into a whole different conversation of what's race, what's culture, what's identity, and that's just a whole other can of worms that we can discuss later. Definitely going to have you back, Carlton.
Yes, please. I love this channel. So the whole point of this whole talking was that the DNA results revealed that the oral traditions were accurate, that they are related to those groups. President Obama had to sign a freaking executive order to send them back.
And the ancient one was reburied near where it was found, full ceremony. And it was reburied in a block of concrete. I mean, not like the whole thing was concrete, but it was encased in a concrete block and capped off with concrete. so people can't touch it again like that's how serious they got with this reburial wasn't like let's just rebury it and then someone's going to dig it up like no they made a concrete casket wow um and is there some sort of plaque there or something saying you know the ancient one is here you know leave it alone i doubt that um i i don't know for certain but my understanding of indigenous reburial practices is they're unmarked interesting so it could happen again I mean, it'll be difficult, but someone might one day in the future stumble across this casket. Yeah, possibly.
Here we go again. And at that point, it's like, well, this person must have been an elite if their coffin was made out of concrete so no one can touch it. Yeah, that in itself would be fascinating and how it would be perceived in the future. Right.
Carlton, what can we now say with some certainty about this ancient person? What did... kenuk man look like how tall was he how old was he at the time of death and do we know what his life was actually like so we do know a lot of these things um i do not know the specifics of many of those questions um i do know and something that i my serious and serious apologies not mentioning before um there's been some facial reconstruction of kenwick man um which was pretty pivotal in the beginning when all this caucasoidal nonsense was going out They did do a facial reconstruction. And as this next picture will show, it ended up looking a lot like Patrick Stewart from Star Trek.
And that just kind of fueled that debate. Now, I have my doubts about facial reconstruction, especially with something so far in the past, because it primarily relies on muscle attachments, muscle groups. And you really need modern day populations to base it off of.
And the person who actually did the reconstruction admitted before doing it, watched Star Trek. So there's kind of these cognitive biases that went into play. Like a marathon or something, wasn't it? Yeah, he watched a lot of Star Trek The Next Generation.
And I know there's been some current ones. And that look, they give them darker skin and some of these other things. But when it comes to facial reconstruction, especially so far in the past, it's like... You really don't know what these people look like. You're basing it off of modern day populations.
And anytime, and this is just from my anthropological background and science background, like you just don't, it's always hard because you really don't know what things look like in the past. So it's, you know, it's just a best guess. For me, it's fun to see and show people like this is what the original looked like in 1996. This is what a contemporary one looks like.
And they will always change. It depends on the artist. The radiocarbon date stated the skeleton to run 9,400 years ago. I don't know if there was isotopic analysis done, but I imagine there was. I've never bought or read Doug Owsley's book.
I refuse. I do not want to support him financially, and I'm not alone in that. I believe the skeleton was under six feet tall, you know, hunting, gathering, diet, local. If there's any isotopic data done, I believe it was, I mean, it would have shown this person lived in that area for a long time.
And you can do that. I mean, at least not a long time within the past three years, based on kind of the elements that are found in the skeleton, because what you eat, what you drink is indicative of the environment and that's what gets absorbed into your skeleton. So we can do that. That's done with pretty much with pretty, with a lot of frequency.
Now I'm part of a project right now that's looking at. the spread of Spanish horses into the Americas. And we're finding that some of these horses, where they were found is not where they were from. So I can't go into too much detail until that paper is published, which hopefully it's soon. But yeah, we can trace back a person, animal, based on isotopic analysis where they were living the past couple years.
And we have a good understanding of the mineral and isotopic content of the geomorphology of the United States, so we can track on where you would expect to find these values. As I mentioned earlier, kind of what we expect when the genetic evidence revealed relationships to the Ainu in Japan. or the Siberian populations. It's that we now, our understanding of the settlement and colonization of the Western Hemisphere by prehistoric populations, Ice Age, you got to go back to these times, you're going to the Ice Age, 15, 14, 12,000 years ago.
Sea levels were much lower because everything was locked up in ice and that there was a land bridge connected. connecting uh russia what we now know as russia with what we now know as alaska um earlier investigations or beliefs that people cross the land bridge that's how they populated um the growing evidence shows that there was uh people first got here um via what we call the coastal highway hypothesis that people had boats at this time maybe sophisticated boats but they basically along the coast, which is rich in marine biodiversity, and you can survive. And it also explains how quickly people got down the western coast. And also, like, even during the Ice Age, even though there might have been a land bridge and there was an opening in the glaciers, between these two glacial ice sheets in Canada and the Rocky Mountains, even when they split, it actually takes a long time for their vegetation growth.
So basically, and I'm not exact on the science. I know, like, at least the first couple hundred years or maybe a couple thousand, Nothing is growing in between those ice sheets. It is loud.
It's just cold. There's ice breaking all the time. And without, you know, this is a huge corridor which stretches from present day, you know, Alaska to present day Colorado.
You know, you can't really walk that and survive if there's no animals in between. So even though there might have been a gap in those two glacial sheets. It's going to take a while for vegetation to come back and animals to come back. And if we kind of see like what we call Clovis first theory, that a lot of the earliest Clovis points, which we assigned to culture, that's a whole nother bag of worms, is in the plains. It's in the southeast.
What we believe is that there was one population that used the coastal highway. So they're along the western coast of North and South America. And the dates and the stem point traditions, they kind of match up. There's growing evidence. Clovis first people hate it.
These people could have been pre-Clovis and these are fiery debates in archaeology. For all my archaeology friends, I'm just explaining what's going on, what's being taught. So you have the coastal highway guys, they're coming in through boats, really relying on the marine biodiversity.
to get around and then you have some other populations that are coming in through the land bridge through the glacial sheets when they can um and there's there's multiple migrations there's a couple of groups coming in um and then and once the ice age ends and the land bridge is gone you still are getting people coming across to be a boat uh you know like inuit populations they're both on you know in alaska and also in siberia like they're looking at each other across so there's still people kind of doing that So it's the earliest colonizations. It's maybe a couple hundred people, maybe a couple thousand. And that's what leads to the indigenous populations today. You know, so that's how people are first getting in.
And so with like Washington, especially, and being near the coast, you know, you're really talking about a 9,400 year skeleton is one of the earliest. It's like, that's pretty important. That's.
Are people related to the Siberians? It's like, yes. And then the Ainu is fascinating. For people that don't know, like the Japanese that you know of today, you know, they're colonized people as well.
But that northernmost island, they have an indigenous group called the Ainu. They're not treated so hot as most indigenous populations are, but they do exist. And there are some of the, their relationship to Japan is very deep.
So seeing that these groups are related to Siberia and Native Americans, this makes sense with the understanding that people came across. They came in from Asia. They didn't come in from Europe or France or anything. The genetics don't support a European or, you know, what we think of today as European or groups coming in from Europe.
They're coming in from Asia. So these are the genetic evidence is important to understand. Like, yes, our theories about migration into the Americas are correct.
This helps our understanding. Carlton, you have Native American ancestry and you're also a scientist, so perhaps you can sympathize with both sides of the coin here, as a scientist who wants to uncover data and as someone with indigenous blood who can understand and respect traditions. So, what are your personal feelings on the matter? Yeah, so I mean, just to start off, I'm going to mention this before. I'm a tribal citizen of the Pawnee Nation, meaning that's like I'm not sitting out here claiming that I have a great, great Indian princess as an ancestor.
It's I have a certificate of Indian blood. I grew up as a Pawnee person. I didn't know I was what what you get this blue eyes and white skin wasn't.
I didn't realize that was controversial until I was maybe in high school or middle school when I moved to Virginia. So I always grew up with it. So it's not like I learned about it in some like a diary of my dead grandmother. It's like I was born Pawnee. I was raised Pawnee.
I always knew I was Pawnee. My family is very active in the nation. We're active in many nations due to marriages. So, I mean, like if we want to get deep here, you know, I loved history.
That's how I got into archaeology because I saw it as applied history. When I was at a master's program at Wyoming, they're very much data driven. And we're trained that to not to be biased and that it's about the data. And so like I kind of trained myself to pull myself back from being Pawnee, also trying to not be American. Like I just wanted to look at data.
I wanted to look at the facts and the facts were what was important. It really wasn't until I was starting to get more involved with my tribal community and then I went to a PhD program that I realized there was no such thing as non-bias. That even though you might be data driven. as anthropologists we're supposed to respect the cultures like you know that's the whole point you want to you want to learn more about someone else to better understand yourself and you need to respect be respectful of the people that you study it's not your data it is not you know your conclusions they're not your discoveries that as archaeologists it is my firm belief that you should serve the culture that you're studying? And I don't mean to throw some of my colleagues under the bus, but if there's any archaeologists watching now, how many of you who work in North America actually work with the indigenous communities or descendant communities of the cultures you work with?
What do they gain out of your research? And if the answer is nothing, you need to re-evaluate yourself as an anthropologist because you're doing it for yourself. I know a lot of archaeologists, they basically find archaeology cool and they want to do it. And it's basically a hobby that pays them. and they're not helping or serving or assisting or collaborating most importantly with descendant communities and descendant communities i mean the people that have ants that are related ancestrally or culturally to some of these archaeological groups um so like as an indigenous person now in a phd program i serve the pawnee nation of oklahoma um i do the research that they ask and you know they i'm very I'm fortunate to be in a tribal nation that's very open to archaeology and they let me do what I want.
And, you know, they're very open to what I have to say, but I'm also respectful of our beliefs and their practices. You know, for those that don't know, the last show that I did with you, Mark, that you're aware of, you know, we had that approved by the Cultural Resources Division. You know, we had to do two takes because I said some things in our first take that I was not allowed to say. And.
And, you know, Mark, it was amazing that you were like, no, sweet. Yeah, let's redo it. You know, and that's just kind of how it goes. And so, like, I know a lot of people, colleagues, you know, they work in paleo-Indian times. And they don't feel it necessary to collaborate with descendant communities.
Like, well, it's so old in the past. They basically hide behind the antiquity, kind of like what the archaeologist with Kennewick Man did. Like, they can't be affiliated. So, for me, I don't have a hard time. Being a scientist and being Pawnee, they're the same thing to me.
That's just my job, but I'm Pawnee. I'm Pawnee first. And I kind of see through the BS of how, like, we need to be unbiased.
Like, there's no being unbiased in science. And if we want to dig further, if we look at like kind of how higher education in North America, universities discourages lower people of lower economic status or people other than white from getting in it's like most archaeologists in the country today are still white they're still male we're having a hard time breaking that and there's a lot of factors that go into it and there's still a lot of resentment against nagpra and still archaeologists aren't necessarily taught how to collaborate with indigenous communities i'm fortunate here at university of colorado boulder to have professors who not only encourage it but they teach classes on a cloud to collaborate and stress the importance of collaboration that like you're This isn't archaeology and anthropology is not about you. It's not about your research.
It's not about your findings It's about collaborating with the people who created that culture that you like you know and that's kind of um if owsley and those and those those archaeologists had that same perspective in working with those uh northwest coast indigenous nations it could have gone a lot differently um you know and it's it's a whole issue can of worms about colonization colonialism and and higher education today so you know my my aspect is like i fully embrace that i'm not only white i'm very proud of my or you know it's hard to say proud of your white heritage but like i recognize that i'm of european descent um and i you know i'm very much attuned with my cultural i'm culturally more pawnee than i am euro-american that's for sure and that's how i was raised um and it took me a while my masters was a weird period of like me trying to wipe away my identity to be a better scientist but i realized having that identity made me a better archaeologist um and gave me a different lens and so I'm very thankful that I have colleagues, my close colleagues, David, Connor, other archaeologists that respect and have these really good conversations about a lot of various topics when it revolves around indigenous archaeology that not many other archaeologists get. And so it's not there. It's, you know, it's, it's a, it's an issue with the field rather than with the person. And we are moving in a direction that embraces collaboration with indigenous peoples.
That's the trend. That's realizing our archaeological research is made better with descendant communities being involved in the entire process of that research. Well, the controversy still goes on today. Even now, many tribes are still claiming rights to the remains, which of course have now been reburied, as you've said. But what happens if, say, I don't know, a new skeleton is found that's even older than the oldest oral tradition say 20 000 years or older and what if what is found is clearly a hominid other than homo sapiens how about that there's gonna be a lot of argument um it would be fascinating i mean you know the whole part of science it's like You incorporate new knowledge and you give it the rigmarole of the scientific method.
You know, before we found Clovis points, the oldest points were Folsom points, and they were found in the ribs of extinct bison species. So, like, we're always kind of pushing back how long people have been here. Now, you know, you have the Cerruti mastodon site, which is supposedly a 120,000-year-old mastodon kill in California. that one has issues because there's no human remains and there's a lot of questionable rocks that might be lithic chatter but if we were to find a skeleton like a 20 000 year old skeleton that was a hominid other than homo sapien and it was like confirmed like this this is from here the soil matches this like confirmed 20 000 years old that would be phenomenal that would rewrite paleoanthropology And it's like, well, because the whole concept of like, you know, you see people that are, that talked about Neanderthals or something being in North America. It's like, well, we're the Neanderthal skeletons between Europe and North America.
You know, it's not just as archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, people that study antiquity, it's not just looking at your little sector. Like when I look at the central plains, I'm looking at Nebraska and Kansas. I am aware of what's going on in the surrounding regions.
I'm aware of what's going on in North America. I'm aware of what's going on globally. so these are the perspectives we have and so if we were to find like let's for for example say like a 20 000 year old neanderthal in alaska confirmed like that's the age there's no question that this is a neanderthal skeleton there's no question that this is not a plant by somebody the field would go nuts at first i mean it's going to hit skepticism as all new theories always do then the search is on for more. It's like, is this a population of Neanderthals? Where did they go?
Are there oral traditions of indigenous people that talk about maybe an other? And that gets into the whole thing of are Neanderthals a separate species or not. And it'd just be, bones are important. Anytime, if you have bones confirmed human remains, That's a jackpot, a scientific jackpot, if you will.
That's a T-shirt right there. Bones are important. Bones are important because that's unequivocal doubt, or not unequivocal doubt. That is unequivocal evidence. You can find, like, spear points are another one.
Those are good. who held them that you know if you don't have bones you don't you don't know but if you found like a neanderthal skull homo erectus skull or different hominid skull and their whole bones i mean it'd be nice if they had like you know a sign that didn't degrade that said this is who i am this is my name this is how old i was and this is what i want to be when i grow up but we never get that in archaeology um so gosh you know of course since this is a hypothetical question it's like And I don't think we've ever uncovered something like this before, something like a new species. The Leakeys in, I think, like the 70s or something tried to say they found, like, evidence of australopithecines or something in California, but that was just for funding. So we did kind of have some precedent. Once again, there was no bones.
But, yeah, if there was a skeleton, the debate doesn't become the first part of that is what's the validity? is did some is this a plant did someone make this put this here once it succeeds that test and it's like no this is legit there is actually an anterotol found in alaska that is 20 000 years old the next question is where the hell are the rest of them and then it becomes basically like a race almost like it would kick start a lot of paleo indian archaeologists especially in alaska to start looking for more it's like what is the context the skeleton was found in can we use GIS to predictive model where we can find more. It's like, well, where are they between Alaska and Europe where most of the Neanderthal population is?
How did this get here? And that's where that conversation would go. It'd be the search for more and understanding how this got here.
And then there'd probably be a call for DNA samples to be taken from indigenous peoples in the Americas. Like, can we find sequences of Neanderthal DNA? Did these Neanderthal populations actively... Contribute to contemporary indigenous peoples genetic pools if not it's like clearly these one extinct So these are the kind of questions that we begin to ask but most importantly it's like you have a skeleton And then it's like once it's confirmed then it's a whole whole new set of questions that we can ask and it changed our understanding of Paleoanthropology, it's like well the endotols aren't just in Europe. They got over to North America somehow and then Maybe there'd be some questions over people like, well, if Neanderthals were here first, technically Europeans were here first, and that's just a whole other crazy conversation that could occur.
What's the space, huh? Yeah, right. Wow, that was so fascinating.
And thanks so much, Carlton, for going into so much detail about this case. Hopefully it will clear up a lot of confusion about everything that went down since the discovery of Kenwood Man. As always, I'll leave links to your social media and the A Life in Ruins Archaeology podcast in the description below.
And all that's left to say is thank you, Carlton, for coming on to Evolution Soup. Yeah, absolutely, Mark. Thank you so much for having me on today's show.
I look forward to seeing it released. And then, yeah, it's been great being on Talk Beliefs and now Evolution Soup, and I'm really excited for your future content. I'm a huge fan of both channels, so keep it going, man.