"Battle of the Bones" by Robson Bonnichsen and Alan L. Schneider, in The Sciences (July–Aug. 2000), New York Academy of Sciences, 2 E. 63rd St., New York, N.Y. 10021. "Coping with Crowding" Frans B. M. de Waal, Filippo Aureli, and Peter G.Judge, in Scientific American (...
Recent archaeological discoveries have opened up the startling possibility that modern-day Native Americans are not descended from the first Americans. Yet, thanks mainly to a decade-old federal law that sought—with archaeologists’ consent—to recognize tribes’ rights to their ancestors’ remains, scientists are being hindered in their efforts to learn more.
“Biological knowledge of the earliest humans in the Americas is amazingly thin,” write Bonnichsen, an archeologist at Oregon State University, in Corvallis, and his co-author. Fewer than 10 “relatively complete, securely dated skeletons more than 8,000 years old have been unearthed in North America”—and some may not be the remains of Native American ancestors. But federal and state officials, bowing to their reading of the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, have been handing skeletons over to tribes for reburial.