Native Americans

It was clear from the moment Jim Chatters first saw the partial skeleton that no crime had been committed--none recent enough to be prosecutable, anyway. Chatters, a forensic anthropologist, had been called in by the coroner of Benton County, Wash., to consult on some bones found by two college students on the banks of the Columbia River, near the town of Kennewick.The bones were obviously old, and when the coroner asked for an opinion, Chatters' off-the-cuff guess, based on the skull's superficially Caucasoid features, was that they probably belonged to a settler from the late 1800s.Then a CT scan revealed a stone spear point embedded in the skeleton's pelvis, so Chatters sent a bit of finger bone off to theUniversity of California at Riverside for radiocarbon dating.

When the results came back, it was clear that his estimate was dramatically off the mark. The bones weren't 100 or even 1,000 years old. They belonged to a man who had walked the banks of the Columbia more than 9,000 years ago. In short, the remains that came to be known as Kennewick Man were almost twice as old as the celebrated Iceman discovered in 1991 in an Alpine glacier, and among the oldest and most complete skeletons ever found in the Americas. Plenty of archaeological sites date back that far, or nearly so, but scientists have found only about 50 skeletons of such antiquity, most of them fragmentary. Any new find can thus add crucial insight into the ongoing mystery of who first colonized the New World--the last corner of the globe to be populated by humans. Kennewick Man couldcast some much needed light on the murky questions of when that epochal migration took place, where the first Americans originally came from and how they got here. U.S. government researchers examined the bones, but it would take almost a decade for independent scientists to get a good look at the skeleton. Although it was found in the summer of 1996, the local Umatilla Indians and four other Columbia Basin tribes almost immediately claimed it as ancestral remains under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (see box), demanding that the skeleton be reburied without the desecration of scientific study. A group of researchers sued, starting a legal tug-of-war and negotiations that ended only last summer, with the scientists getting their first extensive access to the bones. And now, for the first time, we know the results of thatexamination. ......

Long ago, according to Indian legends of the inland Pacific Northwest, the twin sons of the Chief Spirit, Wyeast and Pahto, dwelt on opposite sides of the river now known as the Columbia. Mostly, they lived in peace, but occasionally they fought for the attention of a beautiful maiden known as Tah-one-lat-clah.In the heat of combat, they hurled rocks and fire at each other, scorching the land and frightening its residents until the Chief Spirit came back to restore order. As a sign of truce between the brothers,the Chief Spirit built a beautiful stone bridge across the river, not far below the site of today's Bonneville Dam near Portland.Then he went away again, and soon enough, the brothers resumed their quarrel. Tah-one-lat-clah tried to intervene but was severely burned in the fray.

The bridge was destroyed, and the brothers, chagrined, withdrew to the locations where they remain today, as the mountains white explorers later called Adams and Hood. Tah-one-lat-clah, now known as Mount St. Helens, also moved away, far from the other mountains. There she nursed her wounds, and there she remained, even after the Chief Spirit returned to heal her disfigurement. It's a great story (probably somewhat Paul Bunyanized by white missionaries who collected it in the 19th century), but it's just a myth, right? Atale to entertain children and maybe teach a lesson about sibling rivalry? Maybe not, say geologists. Such myths were once discounted, but these days scientists are paying more attention. There's even a new field called “geomythology” that draws on everything from Aztec legend to Biblical lore in an effort to better understand the Earth's turbulent history by correlating old stories to actual geological events. As far back as 1805, Lewis and Clark knew there was something odd about the Bridge of the Gods region. Approaching from upstream, they found the Columbia River to be curiously sluggish, with deep, calm waters in which the boles of dead firs rose from 20 feet below the surface. Aware that the water couldn't have been that high when the trees were alive, Clark figured that something must haved......

A scientist who found deep grooves chiselled into the teeth of dozens of 1,000-year-old Viking skeletons unearthed in Sweden believes the strange custom might have been learned from aboriginal tribes during ancient Norse voyages to North America -- a finding that would represent an unprecedented case of transatlantic, cross-cultural exchange during the age of Leif Ericsson. The marks are believed to be decorations meant to enhance a man's appearance, or badges of honour for a group of great warriors or successful tradesmen. They are the first historical examples of ceremonial dental modification ever found in Europe, and although similar customs were practised in Asia and Africa over the centuries, the Swedish anthropologist who studied the Viking teeth is exploring thepossibility that trips to Newfoundland and other parts of the New World a millennium ago introduced the Norsemen to tooth-carving styles being carried out at that time in the Americas."The cases from the North American continent are from the time period," Caroline Arcini, a researcher with the National Heritage Board in Lund, Sweden, told CanWest News Service.

"So it is within the same timespace as the Swedish ones that are dated from 800-1050 A.D."In a paper published by the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Ms. Arcini details the horizontal etchings across the front teeth of about 25 young men whose remains were found at several Viking Age burial sites in Sweden and Denmark. The "furrows" -- some teeth have several parallel grooves -- "are so well made that it is most likely they were filed by a person of great skill," Ms. Arciniwrites.But "the reason for, and importance of, the furrows are obscure. The affected individuals may have belonged to a certain occupational group, or the furrows could have been pure decoration."Examples of tooth modification have been found at archeological sites around the world -- with the exception, until now, of Europe.The study notes a similarity in style between the Scandinavian specimens and dental markings common about 1,000 years ago in parts of North America, including Mexico and the present-day United States as far north as Illinois.

View: Full Article | Source: National Post

The European settlers who were present at the first Thanksgiving in 1621 thought the Native Americans were wild Israelites who had lost their "civilized" ways after living in the New World wilderness, according to a U.S. historian.The theory, which is outlined in a recent press release and is supported by several other American colonial history scholars, suggests one reason why tensions often mounted between the Native Americans and the Europeans.It also foreshadows the later missionary work by other Europeans, many of whom felt they were turning the Native Americans back to their former beliefs. "The Europeans thought the NativeAmericans were a lost Israeli tribe that had been blown off course and landed in America," said Mark Miller, a history professor at Roanoke College in Virginia who specializes in American history from the colonial and Civil War periods.

"They thought the tribe arrived as civilized men and women, but became savages after living in the wilderness." Miller added, "For fear of contact with the savages, laws were enacted which forbade European settlers to touch or look at the Indians." According to the Web site of The Nahum Goldmann Museum of the Jewish Diaspora in Tel Aviv, Israel, the European settlers believed in the lost "Ten Tribes of Israel," and likely thought that one of these missing tribes wound up in America. These tribes were said to be part of the original twelve 12 that conquered Canaan, believed to be "the PromisedLand." The Assyrians, in turn, conquered the Kingdom of Israel in 721 B.C. This resulted in either the assimilation or deportation of the tribes of Israel. The tribes' fate was never fully documented, so the Pilgrims thought anything was possible. According to the site, the supposed Israelite-Native American link remained popular through the late 18th century, during which time European exploration of the continent increased, as did necessary trade with Native Americans. Carolyn Travers, research manager at Plimoth Plantation, a Plymouth, Mass. living history museum that recreates Pilgrim-era life, told Discovery News that she agreed some, if not all, of the Pilgrims thought the Native Americans hailed from Israel. "They had to come from somewhere, and the lost tribe origin struck them as being very plausible and authoritative," said Travers. "You must tryto i......