Bitter 'Kennewick Man' Feud Finally Settled: DNA Proves His Native American Brothers Were Right

DNA analysis has helped researchers in Denmark solve one of America's greatest scientific mysteries.

The remains of the Kennewick Man, found in 1996 near the town of Kennewick in Washington, have been at the heart of a bitter legal dispute between scientists and Native Americans. Native American tribes from around the area where the skull and other remains were discovered claimed it belonged to an ancestor and demanded the remains be handed over for a ritual burial. Scientists however insisted that skull had European features and cannot be linked to modern Native American populations.

Dating of the remains put them at 8,500 years.

The legal battle ended in 2004 with a ruling calling for a more detailed study to examine the remains. The results of the study published in 2014 claimed that the remains belonged to a man with features found in Japanese Ainu and Polynesian populations, and it also had certain European-like morphological traits. It concluded that the Kennewick Man was distinct from modern Native Americans.

However, the new study published by researchers from University of Copenhagen claims that DNA from remains squarely places the man in the ancestry of modern Native Americans.

"Comparing the genome sequence of Kennewick Man to genome wide data of contemporary human populations across the world clearly shows that Native Americans of today are his closest living relatives. Our study further shows that members of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation that belongs to the Claimant Plateau tribes of the Pacific Northwest, who originally claimed him as their ancestor, is one of the groups showing close affinities to Kennewick Man or at least to the population to which he belonged," said Professor Eske Willerslev at university's Centre for GeoGenetics.

Researchers also noted that cranial analysis that was done in the past, does not work well for connecting individuals to a particular population as there are large variations within populations.