Prehistoric man found in Washington

The man himself lived sometime between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago, and whatever level of popularity he achieved then could not have possibly equaled the amount of interest he drew from both archaeologists who wanted to study him and native tribes who insisted on his immediate return to the ground from whence he came. To make things even more interesting, the man to most thoroughly examine the bones at first thought they were of a 19th century explorer — such was their shape — but began to change his mind when he uncovered a fragment of a prehistoric weapon lodged in his hip bone.

On this day, July 28, in 1996, two men who came out to see a hydroplane race on the Columbia River at Kennewick, Washington, discovered a human skull. They contacted the police, who contacted the coroner, who in turn realized the remains may not be modern at all and contacted archaeologist and paleontologist James C Chatters.

As Chatters later noted in an article for the Smithsonian magazine “We either had an ancient individual with physical characteristics unlike later native peoples’ or  a  trapper/explorer who’d had difficulties with ‘stone-age’ peoples during his travels.” The implication was that perhaps the ancient people were not as primitive as we believe. Meanwhie local tribes, who claimed the remains were of one of their people, were unwilling to let him or anyone else perform extensive tests to find out, and for a while the matter was the subject of a lawsuit finally resolved by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The matter was finally settled when the court ruled the Indian tribes could not show proof of kinship with the man, and therefore the studies could continue.