The Kennewick Man Debate Controversy

The Kennewick Man controversy started in 1996 when two students found the remains of a man along the Columbia River in Washington (Zimmerman). They believed the remains to be those of a murder victim, but in fact, subsequent carbon dating found that the skeleton was over 9,000 years old (Zimmerman). The first anthropologist to examine the skeleton, James Chatters, was startled to find that Kennewick Man's features were distinctively Caucasian, a finding that suggested they belonged to a European settler and prompting a reevaluation of theories about how the Americas were originally populated (Zimmerman). Moreover, Chatters believed that scientific study of Kennewick Man might enable scientists to learn more about diseases that affect Native Americans such as type 2 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis (Zimmerman). The controversy arose because Native Americans view remains such as Kennewick Man as sacred and believe that they should not be removed from their burial site, while scientists are eager to dig them up and perform extensive testing on them for the purposes of science (Zimmerman). Native Americans assert that "human remains are connected to the spirit of the deceased. Therefore, respect for the body is equivalent to respect for the dead individual" (Zimmerman). Thus, unnecessarily keeping the body out of the ground and experimenting on it by removing or destroying tissue is a breach of the Native American cultural mores, and they believe that the dead pers

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Category: History - T