On Jun. 18, 2015, a study, “The Ancestry and Affiliations of Kennewick Man” in the journal Nature, based on genome sequence shows that Kennewick Man is in fact more closely related to modern Native Americans, than to any other population worldwide and, further, that the earlier craniometrics analyses cannot be supported.

An 8,500-year-old male skeleton discovered by two teenagers in 1996 in the Columbia River during the annual hydroplane races in Washington State has been the focus of a bitter dispute between Native Americans and American scientists, and even within the American scientific community.

Radiocarbon dating of the bones revealed an age of about 8,000-9,000 years Before the Present making him pre-Columbian in age. This sparked a legal battle over the disposition of the skeletal remains.

Craniometric analysis showed that Kennewick Man, as the skeleton was named, resembled populations in Japan, Polynesia or even Europe, suggesting he was not ancestral to Native Americans, a finding that helped block Native Americans’ request for a repatriation of the skeleton. The study was led by the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen  – a center funded by the Danish National Research Foundation.

“Comparing the genome sequence of Kennewick Man to genome wide data of contemporary human populations across the world clearly shows that Native Americans of today are his closest living relatives. Our study further shows that members of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation that belongs to the Claimant Plateau tribes of the Pacific Northwest, who originally claimed him as their ancestor, is one of the groups showing close affinities to Kennewick Man or at least to the population to which he belonged” said Eske Willerslev from the Centre for GeoGenetics.