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Kennewick Man

Since the aftermath of the First World War, anthropologists wrestled with the question, “Who were the first to colonize the western world?” Although many years of schooling and world history will tell us of Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ America to the known world in 1492—Anthropologists obviously couldn’t get away with that answer with the fact that the natives to the Americas were simply discovered. Where did they come from? How did they get from our remote ‘birthplace’ in the middle of Africa all the way across one of our vast oceans? And the most important question, when did they settle the land? In the early 1930’s, Anthropologists thought they had the fundamentally true answer, citing a single culture migration around 12,000 B.P. called the Clovis; based on stone projectiles found across the American Southwest, and extensively in Clovis, New Mexico.
Fifty years later, cracks began to emerge in the theories, but were not sufficiently studied until 1996, when a skeleton which became known as Kennewick Man was discovered near the banks of the Colombia River. After a political struggle to examine the remains, which ended in 2005—Kennewick Man was exposed to scientific scrutiny and opened wide the debate thought to have been settled in the early 1930s. Who were the first humans to enter onto the American continent? Assessing new finds and the final analysis of Kennewick Man only proved that the debate was not over, but many former hypothesis laid to rest about the migration could indeed, be correct—if not plausible.
The broken hypothesis of the Clovis states that at around 12,000 B.P., the Clovis culture crossed through dry land opened up via the Ice Age and walked from Northern Russia over a land bridge into Alaska—Then finally down through the coast of Canada and settling into North and South America.   The hypothesis was quite narrow, as although glaciers and frozen ice would have been adequate to walk on—it was only between approximately 12,000 B.P and...