For Kennewick Man, it's something to diet for

Meat or veggies - expert seeks answer to culinary questions

Jim Erickson, Rocky Mountain News

Published February 25, 2006 at midnight

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Was Kennewick Man a vegetarian or a carnivore?

That's one of the questions Lafayette geochemist Thomas Stafford hopes to answer in coming months, using tiny bits of rib and shin bone taken from the celebrated ancient skeleton, possibly up to 9,200 years old, found near the Columbia River in 1996.

Stafford and more than 20 other scientists gathered at a Seattle museum this week to examine the skeleton and collect samples. Kennewick Man is one of the oldest and best preserved human skeletons ever found in North America.

The bones likely hold clues about some of the continent's early human inhabitants.

This week's meeting had a celebratory mood, said Stafford, a radiocarbon-dating expert who began studying the bones two weeks after they were found.

"This is the culmination of 10 years of legal wrangling," Stafford said Friday from Seattle. "I have to pinch myself because I'm given total access to this skeleton, and it's an opportunity that is just so incredible.

"This is the Library of Congress in a skeleton," he said. "Even though we've worked 10 years on this, we've still barely touched what this skeleton will tell us."

After the bones were uncovered, several Pacific Northwest tribes argued they should be reburied without scientific study. Scientists sued for a chance to analyze the remains, and a federal court sided with the researchers, ruling there was no link between the skeleton and the tribes.

"He looks totally unlike any American Indian today, which implies that there must have been another group or groups that colonized the New World 9,000, 10,000, 11,000 or 12,000 years ago," Stafford said. "What happened to those people?"

This week's meeting at the University of Washington's Burke Museum marked the "the last major study we'll be doing for a few years," Stafford said.

In the coming months and years, team members will analyze the samples they've collected, then report their findings in research articles.

Stafford will measure the ratios of various forms, or isotopes, of carbon and nitrogen in bone fragments to determine Kennewick Man's diet. The isotope ratios can reveal if he ate mostly plants, fish such as salmon, or land animals such as deer.

Stafford will use radiocarbon dating to get a better fix on the skeleton's age. Five different ages, ranging from 5,800 years before present to 9,200 years before present, have been reported.

Radiocarbon techniques date the collagen protein in bone. The wide range in reported Kennewick Man ages is likely due to varying levels of contaminants in the bone, Stafford said.

During the past year, Stafford worked with Smithsonian anthropologist Douglas Owsley and Seattle-based archaeologist Jim Chatters to determine whether Kennewick Man's corpse was buried by other people or swept up in a flood and encased in sediment.

At a meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Seattle on Thursday, Owsley reported that the body was deliberately buried, between two and three feet deep. Kennewick Man was placed on his back with his arms at his sides, palms down.

"We know very little about this time period. Who the people were that were the earliest people that came to America," Owsley told The Associated Press this week. "We are finding out they were coming thousands of years earlier than we had thought," possibly arriving by boat as well as walking from Siberia.

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