Category: Ancient One

Eske Willeslev: Listening to science; listening with science

Eske Willeslev, the Danish geneticist who led the team that explored the DNA of the Ancient One, aka Kennewick Man, is the director of the Center for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen.  Dr. Willerslev and the Center are using ancient DNA to reconstruct the past 50,000 or 70,000 years of human history. His career and mission is outlined in a recent NYT article– http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/17/science/eske-willerslev-ancient-dna-scientist.html?ribbon-ad-idx=3&rref=science&module=ArrowsNav&contentCollection=U.S.&action=click&region=FixedLeft&pgtype=article&_r=0

To remind, the Ancient One was found along the Columbia River in 1996, and the remains, or how to handle the remains, was contested by tribes and some members of the academic community for years. Early attending academics thought that Kennewick man looked, in skull shape particularly, more European than Native American, which brought a rush of theorizing about pre-Bering corridor, European or even Pacific Island, arrivals to the Americas. Northwest American tribal leaders—Umatilla, Colville, Nez Perce, Yakima, and others—argued ancestry and advocated reburial. After much wrangling, the academics won a legal victory and instructions to the Corps of Engineers, which held the bones, to proceed with DNA testing.

I’ve not followed the process at every step, but know from a good source, then Oregon U.S. Attorney Kris Olson, that the wrangling was tough and the Indians were patient. And I understand that initial DNA testing done in this country was too crude to make determinations. And that Willeslev and colleagues at the University of Copenhagen recently stepped in with newer and better techniques and made the determination that the Ancient One’s near relatives were American Indians, not Europeans.

Willeslev’s personal history, as outlined in the NYT article, is fascinating, but what is more fascinating is his philosophical conversion from a scientist whose view was “that human history belongs to all of us because we’re all connected, and no people have a right to stop our understanding of human history” to a scientist-humanist willing to listen to contemporary relatives of ancient peoples with their own histories and concerns about scientific inquiry.

He once proudly showed off a collection of ancient Danish skulls to Native American visitors, only to find them upset by the sight. ‘How can you treat your ancestors like that, so disrespectfully?” he recalls them asking.

But the philosophical conversion actually occurred when he was working with ancient Australian DNA. On discovering that there was resistance from some of the aboriginal people, Willeslev decided to travel to Australia to meet with them. He was shocked to learn of the history of “scientific” research on aboriginal Australians. Victorian anatomists—not unlike their US Smithsonian counterparts—had plundered burial grounds and carried off bones to put in museums. Years of such exploitation had left many aboriginal Australians suspicious of scientists. In The US, it led to passage of the “The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)” in 1990.

In Denmark, it led to a rethinking on Eske Willeslev’s part. He’s still the scientist. And the Australians were delighted to learn of links from the continent’s dwellers of 70,000 years ago to them today—this is certainly one of the longest continuous DNA records constructed by scientists to date.

In America, as things played out with the Ancient One, only one tribe stepped forward to provide DNA to the Danish researchers; other tribes clung to their beliefs that the bones were theirs and should be put in the ground without the new DNA science. The one tribe was enough for Willerslev and colleagues—and for the critics—and in the end, I am sure that our Plateau tribal people were glad to have “scientific confirmation” that the Ancient One is related to them.  Like the Australian aborigines are proud of “scientific truth” linking them to 70,000 year-old ancestors.

But the story also tells us that science—and scientists—come and go. That there is always something provisional about even the “best” science. Willeslev’s good work does not make up for past abuses. This is what I take not only from the Indians, the Australian aborigines, and their experiences, but from Dr. Willerslev. A chastened scientist, he says now of the Ancient One, “it means I regret that important material is getting reburied… But when you find that these remains are genetically Native Americans, it’s not our call anymore.”

He’s working now with some Crow Indians, and suggesting that genetic work might help with the tremendous diabetes problem on their reservation. They are interested; Willeslev is listening to them and his science is at their service.

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The Ancient One

That is what Tribal people called the skeletal remains that white anthropologists dubbed “Kennewick Man” when he was unearthed along the Columbia in 1996, and quick carbon dating suggested he was 7,500—9,000 years in the ground. They argued that the remains were theirs, and that they should be allowed to rebury them properly.

Some scientists argued otherwise—the archaeologist James Chatters initially described the skull as Caucasian, and produced a reconstruction of his face suggesting that Kennewick Man looked a bit like the actor Patrick Stewart. The scientists mounted a vigorous campaign for more testing and against the Indians favoring reburial. (To be fair, Chatters subsequently changed his mind on the Caucasian idea.)

It all helped fuel a movement suggesting that Indians—Native Americans with Asian genetic connections who had crossed the land bridge tens of thousands of years ago—might not have been alone here. Or even first? Advocates of the “Solutrean hypothesis” held that during the Ice Age anatomically modern humans from Europe crossed via an ice bridge or over open water to North America, and the Solutrean high hunting culture of present-day Europe (roughly 20,000 years ago) became known as the Clovis culture in North America.

Others have argued about later, but still early arrivals of European peoples. Kennewick man was a marker in the scientific quiver of all such early European influence advocates, and eventually the courts backed the non-Tribals, and the Ancient One was measured and shared, to some extent, across the scientific world.

On Thursday, 21 years later, Danish scientists published an analysis of DNA obtained from the skeleton. Kennewick Man’s genome clearly does not belong to a European, the scientists said:

“It’s very clear that Kennewick Man is most closely related to contemporary Native Americans,” said Eske Willerslev, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen and lead author of the study, which was published in the journal Nature: (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vnfv/ncurrent/full/nature14625.html).
According to the team of Danish scientists, who examined DNA from across the world, the Ancient one apparently has a close relationship with the Colvilles in north central Washington State.

So the Indians were right, they have the closest relationship to the Ancient One, and I imagine that a ceremonial reburial will eventually happen somewhere in the Northwest.  But what does the whole episode tell us about advocacy and science in the service of certain belief patterns.

I’ve wondered from the beginning how much we can tell about a skeleton by the shape of a skull? Think about the variation in skull shape among your neighbors and friends, maybe even within your own extended family. I immediately thought about that period when nineteenth century “scientists” thought that skull shape said something about personality—phrenology, wasn’t it? Apparently some in the scientific community came to a similar conclusion before the Danish DNA analysis.  It might have been why Chatters abandoned the Caucasian skull hypothesis.

But given that, what drives science—and lay students—to look for a European explanation for New World development? It is now pretty certain that outliers from Europe have made landfall from time to time over the eons. We know that the Norse found Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland over 1000 years ago,, during the Great Warming, built communities, and then were frozen out of the last two by the little ice age.

But all evidence is that the major developments in what would become known as North and South America—the mound cities and Mississippian Culture, the Mayans, Aztec, pre-Inca and Inca cultures, the domestication of over half of the world’s major agricultural products, Tlingit art, and Makah whaling owed nothing to Europe and Europeans. Whatever Asian migrations and interactions of different migrations occurred, what developed here before 1492 was indigenous to those ancient peoples who share more DNA with Siberian nomads than they do with German burghers or English sailors.

As far as we know now, all human DNA weaves back to an African beginning. And following the journeys out of that continent and across the world is exciting stuff.  But I think we’ve had enough of putting white Europeans at the center of all important movements—we have as much to learn from the stories that the Ancient One passed on in his time and to his progeny, which might now be scattered across the two continents, mixed with other threads and carried in the thousands of stories of creation and migration that were here when Columbus first set foot at Hispanola.

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For the NYT account of the Danish scientists’ findings:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/science/new-dna-results-show-kennewick-man-was-native-american.html?emc=edit_th_20150619&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=66175474&_r=0