A reburial ceremony in June 2014 for a 12,600-year-old Native boy in Montana. Photo by Helen Anzick via Center for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen
A scientist in Denmark is employing cutting-edge techniques to show how Native people are linked genetically to their ancestors in the Americas. Eske Willerslev, the director of the Center for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, helped show that the 9,000-year-old Kennewick Man is related to present-day members of the Colville Tribes. He also confirmed that a 12,600-year-old boy in Montana is linked to present-day Native peoples. “He has been great through all of this,” Jackie M. Cook, who handles Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act issues for the Colville Tribes, told The New York Times. But Willerslev admits that his thinking about DNA studies has "evolved" over the years. After being confronted with the mistreatment of Aboriginals in Australia, he's been welcoming Native representatives to his lab in Denmark and has formed relationships with scholars like Shane Doyle, a member of the Crow Tribe who helped rebury the remains of the boy that was discovered in Montana. “I’m a scientist, and it means I regret that important material is getting reburied,” Willerslev, who was adopted by the Crow Tribe and given the name "Well-known Wolf" during the reburial, told the Times. “But when you find that these remains are genetically Native Americans, it’s not our call anymore.” Willerslev's work even revealed a genetic connection between Native people and a 24,000-year-old boy who died in Siberia. The results showed that some Native people share DNA in common with certain European populations long before the arrival of Europeans to the Americas. Another one of his studies showed how a distinct group of Native people lived in Greenland for thousands of years without contributing genetic material to the present-day Inuit population, whose language already included a term for the distinct group. Get the Story:
Eske Willerslev Is Rewriting History With DNA (The New York Times 5/17)
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