Professor Hank Greely is quoted in this Scientific American article on why it’s in the best interest for “scientists, the government and of Native Americans” to give back the remains of an 8,500-year-old North American skeleton, known as Kennewick Man, to the Native American tribes. 

The genome of a famous 8,500-year-old North American skeleton, known as Kennewick Man, shows that he is closely related to Native American tribes that have for decades been seeking to bury his bones. The finding, reported today in Nature, seems likely to rekindle a legal dispute between the tribes and the researchers who want to keep studying the skeleton. Yet it comes at a time when many scientists—including those studying Kennewick Man—are trying to move past such controversies by inviting Native Americans to take part in their research.

“The controversy has been painful for lots of people; tribal members and scientists as well,” says Dennis O’Rourke, a biological anthropologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. “I think the results will add weight to repatriation claims because now claims of ancestry can at least to some degree be clarified,” he says.

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“I think this would have been useful evidence in the original NAGPRA decision and might have led to a different result,” says Hank Greely, a legal scholar at Stanford University in California.

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Yet Greely notes that the purpose of the suit was to give scientists time to study Kennewick Man. Last year, a researcher who was part of the suit published a 688-page tome on the remains2. With a genome sequence analysed, “it’s in the best interest of the scientists, of the government, and of Native Americans to think seriously about giving Kennewick Man’s remains back to the tribes,” Greely says.