And a legal battle that would span two decades began.

The Shape Of A Skull And A Scientific Controversy

At the center of the legal dispute was a scientific debate that had been gathering momentum through the 1990s — a debate about what the physical characteristics of the earliest known Americans actually revealed about their origins.

When physical anthropologists examined the skull and other skeletal remains of the Spirit Cave individual, they noted something that seemed, at first, to be puzzling.

The skull’s morphology — its shape, its specific proportions, the configuration of its facial features — did not look like what researchers had come to expect from Native American populations.