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greg
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PostFri Feb 24, 2006 7:36 am 
Whoever he was, wherever he came from, he was one tough SOB. Maybe he was the first nwhiker. By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID AP Science Writer WASHINGTON (AP) – Kennewick Man was laid to rest alongside a river more than 9,000 years ago, buried by other people, a leading forensic scientist says. The skeleton, one of the oldest and most complete ever found in North America, has been under close analysis since courts sided with researchers in a legal battle with Indian tribes in the Northwest who wanted the remains found near the Columbia River reburied without study. Douglas Owsley, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, discussed his findings in remarks he prepared for a Thursday evening meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Seattle. “We know very little about this time period,” Owsley said in a telephone interview. “This is a rare opportunity to try and reconstruct the life story of this man. ... This is his opportunity to tell us what life was like during that time.” Researchers have disagreed over whether Kennewick Man was buried by other people or swept up in a flood and encased in sediment. Owsley concluded the man was deliberately buried, between two and three feet deep, his body placed in the grave, head slightly higher than feet, hands placed at his sides. The location was riverside, with the body parallel to the river and head pointing upstream. Using an industrial CT scanner, Owsley was able to study the skeleton in fine sections and also get a better look at a spear or dart point imbedded in Kennewick Man’s hip. The point has previously been described as a Cascade point, typical of the region, but Owsley said that is not the case. Cascade points tend to have two pointed ends and are sometimes serrated, he said, while the point in Kennewick Man has a pointed end and a stem. The spear or dart entered the man from the front, moving downward at a 77-degree angle, Owsley said. Previous analysis had indicated it might have hit from the back, he noted. The point was not the cause of death, he said, saying, “This is a healed injury.” “There was no clear indication in the skeleton of cause of death,” Owsley said. Kennewick Man had undergone “a lot of injuries, this guy was tough as nails.” There are three types of fractures in the bones, Owsley said, ones the man suffered in his lifetime and which had healed; fractures that occurred after burial from aging of the bones and the ground settling, and breaks that occurred when the skeleton was unearthed. A team of 20 forensic scientists has been studying the skeleton, he said, and have concluded that the skull doesn’t match those of Indian tribes living in the area. “We know very little about this time period. Who the people were that were the earliest people that came to America,” Owsley said. “We are finding out they were coming thousands of years earlier than we had thought,” arriving not just over the Bering Strait but by boats and other means. “This is a very rare discovery. You could count on your fingers the number of relatively complete skeletons from this time period,” Owsley said. Following discovery of the bones in 1996, the Umatilla, Yakama, Nez Perce and Colville tribes urged that the skeleton be reburied without scientific study. They argued that the bones were covered under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Scientists sued for a chance to study the remains and a federal court ruled there was no link between the skeleton and the tribes. ––– On the Net: Smithsonian Natural History Museum: http://www.mnh.si.edu American Academy of Forensic Sciences: http://www.aafs.org

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ree
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PostFri Feb 24, 2006 11:13 am 
Kind of looks like Ben Kingsley to me. Interesting article...!

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Lookout Sue
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PostFri Feb 24, 2006 11:17 am 
He sure fared better than these people. hairy.gif 4 charged in human-tissue scheme Associated Press Michael Mastromarino and 3 others were charged. NEW YORK — The owner of a biomedical supply house was charged along with three other men Thursday with secretly carving up corpses and selling the parts for use in transplants across the country. The case was "like something out of a cheap horror movie," Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes said. Prosecutors said the defendants obtained the bodies from funeral parlors in three states and forged death certificates and organ-donor consent forms to make it look as if the bones, skin and other tissue were legally removed. The defendants made millions of dollars from the scheme, prosecutors said. The indictment was the first set of charges to come out of a widening scandal involving scores of funeral homes and hundreds of bodies, including that of "Masterpiece Theatre" host Alistair Cooke, who died in 2004. The investigation has raised fears that some of the body parts could spread disease to transplant recipients.

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JimK
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PostFri Feb 24, 2006 11:43 am 
Not Ben Kingsley but...

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Tom
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PostFri Feb 24, 2006 11:47 am 
JimK, I was just about to say it looks like Jean Luc Picard. You beat me to it.

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pequod
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PostFri Feb 24, 2006 4:26 pm 
I was thinking Pete Postlethwaite, but the nose is all wrong.

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Stones
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PostFri Feb 24, 2006 10:05 pm 
The waves of migration, patterns of settlement, and the rise and fall of native American civilizations I find endlessly fascinating. I could spend the rest of my life studying and researching this subject. I've had the good fortune to have climbed the pyramids of Teotihuacan and the mounds of Cahokia. I've visited several Anasazi sites. It's thrilling to be among these places and imagine what life was like for these peoples. It's humbling to ponder the causes of their demise. How Kennewick Man fits into this puzzle is going to be very interesting. A series of books is out that I'm sure some of you have read by Michael and Kathleen O'Neal Gear. The books are paleo-historical novels of native American civilizations. I'm currently reading "People of the Moon" about the Anasazi around 1200 AD. "People of the Raven" covers the Pacific Northwest around 7000 BC. The books are a fun read and each has a useful bibliography for further study.

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Malachai Constant
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PostFri Feb 24, 2006 10:39 pm 
Could be this guy

"You do not laugh when you look at the mountains, or when you look at the sea." Lafcadio Hearn
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captain jack
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PostSat Feb 25, 2006 10:49 pm 
JimK wrote:
Not Ben Kingsley but...
shakehead.gif Not Patrick but.......
mr clean
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Somebody stole the earring along time ago, maybe injuns.

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salish
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PostSun Feb 26, 2006 10:18 am 
Stones wrote:
The waves of migration, patterns of settlement, and the rise and fall of native American civilizations I find endlessly fascinating. I could spend the rest of my life studying and researching this subject. I've had the good fortune to have climbed the pyramids of Teotihuacan and the mounds of Cahokia. I've visited several Anasazi sites. It's thrilling to be among these places and imagine what life was like for these peoples. It's humbling to ponder the causes of their demise. How Kennewick Man fits into this puzzle is going to be very interesting. A series of books is out that I'm sure some of you have read by Michael and Kathleen O'Neal Gear. The books are paleo-historical novels of native American civilizations. I'm currently reading "People of the Moon" about the Anasazi around 1200 AD. "People of the Raven" covers the Pacific Northwest around 7000 BC. The books are a fun read and each has a useful bibliography for further study.
Stones, we are cut from the same cloth. I have always been fascinated with physical and cultural anthropology and I was lucky enough in my childhood and youth to travel to many of these places and see them for myself. In the late 1950's to mid 1960's my family would travel to Arizona and the Four Corners area every summer for three weeks and car camp. We'd spend time at places like Mesa Verde, Canyon De Chelly, Shiprock, Chinle, just about everywhere in Navajo land, as well as Hopi & Zuni country. In those days you could simply hike out in the chaparral and find dwellings going back to Anasazi times. Practically every canyon you'd walk down had Kokopelli and other figures on the walls. There was no antiquities law, either, so anyone could pick up a pot shard and walk away with it. It was at Mesa Verde and Canyon De Chelly where I caught the bug as a little kid. Subsequently, I was able to get to the pyramids of Teotihuacan, as well as those in the Yucatan. Those were incredible. I studied physical & cultural anthrology in college, but I never finished with a degree. This was while I was living in southern California in the late 70's. One of my highlights was to travel with one of these classes to Chaco Canyon to go on a "pot dig", with park officials and university grad students. What a thing to see! I had always been interested in this stuff, but Chaco forever cemented that feeling in me. Chaco is magical to me. I've been back to Chaco a couple of times, the last time being in 1990, so I think I'm due a trip soon. One of my coworkers was there just a couple of weeks ago, with his fiance. I'd love to see Chaco in winter. I've also been fascinated in the Mound culture, and Cahokia is high on my list of things to see. My kids live in Iowa and I was on the Iowa/Illinois border area just a few weeks ago. If I had the time I would have liked to have driven into Illinois to see this place. I have a great book on this culture called "Tribes That Slumber". Anyway, I know I'm dragging on way too long here, but I get excited about this stuff. I'll try and check out those books you have mentioned. Thanks, Cliff

My short-term memory is not as sharp as it used to be. Also, my short-term memory's not as sharp as it used to be.
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Stones
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PostSun Feb 26, 2006 1:58 pm 
Salish, thanks for the reminiscences, good stuff. I'm way overdue to get back there myself. I'd love to take the family down for a real adventure so the kids could get a real appreciation for native American culture past and present. If you were in college in SoCal during the late 1970s we might of past each other in the halls (MSAC or Cal Poly Pomona?).

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greg
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PostMon Feb 27, 2006 7:17 am 
Stones, Salish, same here. Two excellent books on these topics are "The Journey Of Man" by Spencer Wells, which traces the peopling of the entire planet through fairly irrefutable genetic data (mitrochondrial DNA and 'Y' chromosome sampling), and "1491; New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles Mann. The latter postulates that native societies in the Americas were more complex than previously believed, that they had the power to make dramatic changes in the landscape and did, and that in some cases this led to their collapse. Covers the Maya, Inca, Aztec, Anasazi, the mound builders and others. Both also examine how people came to the Americas and how the incredibly complex societies in Central and South America developed when the pattern of migration was from the north - and suggest maybe not entirely. It's interesting stuff to think about, its why Kennewick Man and how he fits into the puzzle really piques my curiosity.

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PostMon Feb 27, 2006 9:41 pm 
I just read some of the reviews on 1491. It sounds pretty interesting. Right now I'm reading a book called Letters from Mexico by Anthony Pagden. It contains the letters written by Cortez to the King of Spain. These letters are long. I guess if you don't have a cell phone and your mail deliver is by ship, you don't want to ommit much. up.gif

Touron is a nougat of Arabic origin made with almonds and honey or sugar, without which it would just not be Christmas in Spain.
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greg
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PostTue Feb 28, 2006 4:43 pm 
Thanks Touron -- my favorite book on that guy is "Cortes; The Great Adventurer and the Fate of Aztec Mexico" by Richard Lee Marks. I have one too on Pizarro and his savagery of the Maya, a more recent book and very compelling, but can't find it at the moment.

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ree
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PostTue Feb 28, 2006 5:59 pm 
I've been to Chaco, and you're right: it is magical. There's nothing like it that I've seen in this country. Being there was like stepping back in time. Canyon de Chelley is pretty phenomenal too. I spent some time on the Navajo reservation near Chinle, doing sweat lodges with an old Navajo medicine woman who lived there; I even slept in her hogan. Once she took us to a midnight dance and pow wow set up for healing a sick person. Inside the tent, the Navajo holy men and women were creating a sandpainting to facilitate healing. It was a mystical, adventurous time in my life. Another time, I went to the Hopi res, did the old mesas, and met up with a tribe elder for a conversation about life and philosophy. I commissioned a custom piece of Hopi jewelry from his son, which I still have. Stones, I'm surprised you've been to Cahokia. Not many people know about that place. I've been to a mound settlement in North Carolina... Towne Mound, I think...? It's been so many years ago. Great Serpent Mound in southern Ohio is on my list of places to check out someday. Interesting how similar the mounds of the U.S. resemble some ancient sites in Mexico. A lot of these places I learned about while illustrating the book SACRED SITES - A Traveler's Guide to North America's Most Powerful Mystical Landmarks, by Natasha Peterson. PS - Sorry for drifting a little there. Ancient cultures are fascinating for me also.

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