Paris - An ancient human skeleton discovered in the west of the United States that unleashed a legal tug-of-war, is genetically linked to Native Americans who claim it as an ancestor, scientists said on Thursday.
The dispute dates to 1996, when two men in Kennewick, Washington state, came across a human skull on the shoreline of the Columbia River.
Further finds reconstructed a 90-percent-complete skeleton of a male who lived about 8 500 years ago.
It is called the “Kennewick Man” by scientists but the “Ancient One” by tribes of the Pacific Northwest, who laid claim to ancestral ties and sought the remains' repatriation under a law protecting Native American graves.
A court ruling in 2004, based on scientific opinion prevailing at the time, determined the remains could not be defined as Native American.
That opinion was based on the shape and features of the skull, which anthropologists said was more akin to Polynesian and Ainu islanders from the central and northwestern Pacific than modern Native Americans.
But, in a letter published on Thursday by the journal Nature, Danish-led researchers opened up a new front in the dispute - an investigation on the lines of genetic heritage.
A team led by Eske Willerslev and Morten Rasmussen at the Natural History Museum of Denmark gently extracted a 200-milligram sample of DNA from a metacarpal bone in the hand.
They sequenced the code and compared it to a genomic databank of samples taken from volunteers around the world.
“We find that Kennewick Man is closer to modern Native Americans than to any other population worldwide,” they said.
“Among the Native American groups for whom genome-wide data are available for comparison, several seem to be descended from a population closely related to that of Kennewick Man, including the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, one of the five tribes claiming Kennewick Man.”
They added: “Kennewick Man shows continuity with Native North Americans over at least the last eight millennia.”
The remains, comprising about 300 pieces of bone, cannot be “owned” under US law.
They are under the control of the US Army Corps of Engineers, as they were found in a federally-owned area.
They are kept, but not displayed, in a secure location at the Burke Museum in Seattle.
AFP