Stephen McNallen the Importance of the Kennewick Man (1)
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Summary
Stephen McNallan is a man of many talents. He is a journalist, a writer, an author, a scientist, a linguist, an archaeologist, a philosopher, a historian, and a man who is a friend to many. In this episode, he talks about the pre-Christian religion known as Asatru, the ancient religion of Northern Europe, and the discovery of a skeleton discovered in the state of Washington.
Transcript
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our speaker hails from the Lone Star State of Texas originally he has a career that started
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off in university he graduated to the United States military did did saw some service he had
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originally intended to go to Vietnam but ended up in in Germany after that he found himself in a
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number of occupations, including that of a journalist. He ended up in South Africa. He's
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been in Bosnia. He's been up on the Angolan border. So he's a man of very eclectic experience.
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But the area, two areas that perhaps call himself to our attention and cause us to invite him here
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tonight is a religious area, the area that he will explain a little bit called Asatru,
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which is the pre-Christian religion of Northern Europe and what values that might have to offer us.
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And secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, a discovery made a few years ago in the state of Washington called Kennewick Man.
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And this discovery turned out to be extremely important.
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And although it's not the only one, it is one of a series that will eventually have
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to reshape the way we look at who it was that was first on this North American continent.
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And I know the cynics would say, well, you know, it's only money that matters.
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But as you all know, one of the big games being played up here in Canada today is the
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And who was here first seems to be very important as to who is going to get what.
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Anyway, I don't want to intrude on the political message, and without any further ado, and
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thanking you all for braving it through the rabble, our friend now from the slowly being
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occupied state of California, Stephen McNallan.
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Having just passed the 50 mark and sort of, you know, being determined not to be on the downhill slope, you know, I've been thinking a lot about, you know, life and, quote, what it means, unquote, and it's dawned on me that none of us really know just what impact our lives will have had.
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you know we know that we get up every morning and we go to bed every night
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and in between presumably we do something that we hope matters
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but the days go by and the weeks go by and the months and the years and the decades
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and before you know it you're as old as Paul and I
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and you're still wondering you know have I done anything that's going to matter
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so in a way that the message that I've got or a part of the message that I've got tonight
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is one of hope because I want to tell you about a man
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in what someday was to be the state of Washington
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dying. And he was about my age. Yours too, Paul. And he had had a rough life. He had
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broken a number of ribs, for example. We know that the breakage on those ribs was severe
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enough that it partially disabled one arm and caused him quite a lot of atrophy and
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difficulties in the later years of his life. We know that he had all of the usual sorts
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of aches and pains and arthritis and one thing or another that sets in to people as they
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go through this life that we lead. But the real reason that he was dying had nothing
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to do with broken ribs, nothing to do with arthritis. It dealt rather with a spear point
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lodged in his pelvis. Now he had beaten the wound. We know that he had survived the initial
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damage. But what was killing him, of course, was the infection.
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And he lay there on the banks of what was eventually to become
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call. And the phone call was from a friend down in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the people
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who kind of stays in touch with him. And he says, Steve, Steve, the most astounding thing has just
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happened. They found a skeleton up in Washington. It's ancient, and it's a white guy. And I say,
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come on, you got to be kidding. You know, don't tell me about Atlantis or Lemuria or, you know,
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what, you know, are we talking fringe archaeology? What is this? I was a little skeptical.
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But as the days went by, the story started coming together and it wasn't just from people
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who follow fringe archaeology, it was from people who are really serious about science,
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people that understand that science is essentially a conservative, a cautious endeavor, a discipline.
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And the facts began to come in and the story was something like this.
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Some while back, about two and a half years before the time that we're in right now, a
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couple of college students were trying to sneak into the hydroplane races on the Columbia
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They were going in the back way, which meant kind of coming along the banks of the river
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One does these sort of things when there's something important at stake, like the hydroplane
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And one of them decided to play a trick on the other one, because over here in the water
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was this sort of rounded thing you know it looked just like a skull
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he says hey hey tom look look there's a skull in the water well it was it was a skull in the water
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so yeah obviously they were a little excited so they they call the police who in turn call
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the coroner and the coroner comes out and out comes all the guys in their scuba gear and you
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know they get to strut their technology you know they they come out and the water's only this deep
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but they come out and they dive down and they look for fragments i mean hey you know i've played
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that game you got to have the toys you know and they pulled out all of these fragments of a human
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being coroner looks at it looks at the skull in particular he says hmm white male okay
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coroner whose name was floyd johnson takes these these remains in a plastic bucket over to a friend
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of his who sometimes works with the coroner's office. This is a fellow named Chatters, Dr. James
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Chatters, who's been very involved in the case since. He says, hey, Jim, what do you think of
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these? Dr. Chatters picks them up. Hmm, white male. Well, okay, that's kind of interesting,
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but Chatters also points out that there's little encrustations on the bones, and these are not
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bones that were there last week or, you know, three weeks ago or, you know, last Christmas or
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something. These bones have been there for a while. So he says, well, it's probably a
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pioneer from the 1800s. But just to check, he takes him up to another anthropologist,
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a third individual, a third professional now, who takes the remains, looks at him. And this
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was a female anthropologist named Macmillan who runs her own business on forensics. She
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looks at it and she says, hmm, white male. So, so far starting to look kind of consistent.
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That was exciting enough because Jim remarked that, well, okay, this doesn't happen every day.
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Usually all I get are just ordinary murders and stuff.
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But this time we've got somebody who's got a little bit of history.
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And as he's cleaning up the pelvis, he notices, there's a little something in here.
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either there's some really retro Indians out there
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we got to crank up the high tech so they took a bit of a finger bone
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did the carbon 14 dating thing with it and they came back with a date of
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now Chatters knows right away he's got a problem
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because if word of this leaks out and of course it does
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the local Indians are going to really press him for
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because they have to interface with them on an almost daily basis on a wide array of issues.
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And the Indians really want this set of remains.
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Now, this is not necessarily characteristic behavior on their part
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because, as Chatters pointed out, he's got a locker full of remains,
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some of which stay there for as long as four or five years with no one coming to claim them.
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They don't really care about some of these remains, much more mundane remains, but this set they really want back in the ground right away, right now, no further study, give us the bones, please.
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a little bit you know we've got some pretty bright
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people scattered around the country over at the
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who was very concerned, a lot of other really top people in their field were saying, wait
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a minute. Stop what you're doing. There's something else that's going on here. We need
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to take a much closer look at these remains. And so a group of about seven or eight scientists
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got together and filed suit in federal court to stop the so-called repatriation of Kennewick
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Well, now the scientists, of course, had their end of it.
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And their end of it is simply that this individual is really, really old, almost certainly is
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not related to any existing tribe, certainly not any existing tribe in this area.
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And he's sort of, you know, common property of humankind, you know, and should be studied
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And I hear that argument and I sympathize with that argument.
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At the same time, our emphasis, and by our, I mean our organization, which is the Alsatru Folk Assembly,
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we had sort of a different take on it, a different approach on it.
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And that was simply that this person was a kinsman.
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And at this point, I must digress for just a moment and kind of give you a sort of the theological perspective
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or the spiritual perspective of where we were coming from.
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that is not diminished by distance, by years, and by the petty politics of the 20th or even
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It is a bond of blood, a bond of heredity, a bond of spirit, a bond of rebirth down through
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the millennia within our family lines and across the continents and around the world.
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So for us, it was very important that this individual,
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who certainly seemed to be more nearly related to us than to the Indian tribes,
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that he be associated with us rather than with them,
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that he be buried in the ground by the rights of his own people
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well needless to say this was not a very politically popular or acceptable sort of
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standpoint but nonetheless it's where we were coming from and so we also filed suit in federal
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court and a suit parallel with but separate from that of the scientists to keep the government
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from giving these remains back to the indians well right away politics came into action i'd
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mentioned that you know the corps of engineers has got kind of a sweetheart relationship with
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the Indians. And it rapidly went from a sweetheart relationship to something that was virtually
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incestuous. The bias was scandalous. We found out that on approximately five separate occasions,
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had been allowed access to the bones completely sub rosa completely in secret word came out to us
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only because there was a security leak within the system there that called up one of our people and
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said look you need to know what's happening you know they're letting the representatives of the
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Indian tribes in to have the remains we found out that they had actually handled the remains which
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of course contaminates them from the standpoint of DNA to the point that one specialist down
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in California feels that this particular set of remains is hopelessly compromised scientifically
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They let them place objects in the box where the remains were being stored, but more details
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And all of this done despite the fact that these remains were supposed to be strictly
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off limits to all parties. Being basically naive and basically trusting and basically
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assuming that the system is really fair and will really work all right for us, we had
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no problem with that. And then we find out that the Corps of Engineers is going behind
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our back, behind the judge's back, behind the backs of all concerned basically to play
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This policy of, there's no other word for it, discrimination, bigotry, we might even
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say, continued and intensified as the months went by.
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On one occasion, a fragment of Kennewick man was accidentally given to the Indians.
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You know, nobody really knows quite how it happened.
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Somehow it got into the wrong box and well, and this box got given to the Indians and
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yes, it got buried and no, we can't get it back and gee, we're sorry about that.
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The location, the portion of the riverbank where Kennewick man was found, suddenly had
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And so the government brought in helicopters and dropped feet of dirt, layers of stone,
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planted trees on top of the entire mess and just for added good measure placed artificial
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logs made of coconut fiber in and amongst all of this. Now coconut fiber of course is
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organic. It will degrade over time and sift its way in very small particles down through
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layers of soil, thoroughly contaminating anything else that might possibly be found there.
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And from the standpoint of the scientists concerned, would greatly complicate any attempt to make
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further carbon-14 dating evaluations of these strata.
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An inventory was done on the bones last October, and again, more on that in a bit.
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And they found that some pieces were missing, in addition to the piece that was accidentally given to the Indians.
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This is significant because next to the skull, the femurs are the most important part for determining what they would politely call affiliation,
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i.e., to whom this individual is most closely related, because, of course, it determines things like height.
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which is now something that will have to be based on Dr. Chatter's original notes.
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So there was one abuse after another after another.
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I strongly suspect it was not Dr. Chatter's.
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at the time that the Army Corps of Engineers was in charge of the remains
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was permission to go in and do our own ritual over the remains.
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and of course there were all the usual news people
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and there was all of the usual Indian representatives
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probably a third or a fourth of the size of this one
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because interlaced amongst all the baggies of bones
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We found out that not only had the tribes been allowed access to the remains, but in
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fact they had been allowed to put things inside the box.
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When this came out and was revealed to the scientists, they were most agitated because
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the things that were placed in there affect things like moisture content, chemical content,
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various rosins, things that are in the various cedar fronds and so forth.
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The scientists complained about this most strenuously and I think that this ultimately
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led to something that was to happen some months later where the bones, thank goodness, were
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finally taken out of the custody of the Corps of Engineers and turned over to academia,
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where in fact they are supposedly being studied this week.
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We shall hope that some sort of results are published.
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Those are mummies that are more or less contemporary with Kennewick man, that is to say anything
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before about 8,000 years old or anything about that old or older, they seem to be associated
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with a number of remains that are curiously Caucasoid.
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Of the perhaps five, six, seven, depending on where you want to draw the horizon set
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of remains that we have from that time period. Almost all of them to one degree or another
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exhibit these Caucasoid traits. So Kennewick man was not a lone wanderer. He was not somebody
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who decided that Norway or the British Isles or God's nowhere was too dull so he was going
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to take a long hike. He was a part of a set of people. He was a part of a culture. He
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He has a context, he was not just a sole anomaly,
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In fact, scientists have noted that as this very old group,
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so did the material artifacts associated with these people change.
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So apparently what we have is an actual change of population
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and not merely people deciding to start using a new kind of flint work or something of that sort.
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There was an actual displacement of population that took place back, you know, many thousands of years ago.
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This led some scientists, in particular Dennis Stamford over at the Smithsonian,
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to note that what would they call the Solutrean culture or the Solutrean style of making projectile points
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over in ancient Spain and France, is actually very, i.e. strikingly similar to what we call Clovis culture here in North America.
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Now, one could say that, hey, you know, how many ways are there to make an arrowhead or a spear point?
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flint knapping stonework be it clovis be it salutary and be it whatever is actually a rather
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deep technology there are many different points of decision there's many different
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points in making say for example a spear point at which you have to say well i'm going to make it
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like this i'm going to make it like that and that decision will affect all the other decisions that
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So if you add up all of those left, right, yes, no
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kinds of decisions that have to be made to produce
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get a very large number of possible combinations.
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And so the chance that Solutrean and Clovis just
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sort of accidentally happen to resemble each other
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becomes mathematically rather small rather quickly.
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So what we have is a set of artifacts in North America,
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which might be an argument in favor of a European origin.
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We note that there is very little, if anything, coming across from East Asia down across the Bering Strait and down,
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There's really no artifact chain to indicate anything coming across from that direction,
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but we do have it coming from the other direction across Europe.
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One might be tempted to draw at least tentative conclusions from that.
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So what we've got is a most remarkable material culture that may in fact be a common culture
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And this is most significant because Dr. Chatters, like most people who do forensic
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anthropology in your coroner departments and university departments across the country,
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And on this checklist, there's a descriptor of, you know, various characteristics that,
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Everything from the length of the skull, the height of the jaw at this point compared
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to the height of the jaw at that point, the breadth through here, factor after factor
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And essentially, you know, is this an Indian trait or is this not an Indian trait?
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And going down Kennewick man's skull, this list of traits was rather unanimously non-Indian.
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There were no traits or virtually no traits that indicated kinship with the people that
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we perhaps mistakenly call Native Americans in the United States and who I have now resolutely
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We've got the morphology of the remains themselves.
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But science, of course, can only be carried a certain distance because the apologists
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are very quick to point out to us, well, you have to consider American Indian oral tradition.
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And at this point, science breaks down because there are some American Indians, by no means
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all of them, but a sizable number who seem to have a sort of creationism going on in
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regards with the origin of their people our people were always here we didn't
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come from Asia we've been here forever and ever and at that point we're all
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supposed to say oh yes thank you for your wisdom your insight