The connections between skeletal morphology, genetic ancestry, and what we call “race” are far more complicated, and far less fixed, than nineteenth-century racial science believed.

Modern genomics has repeatedly confirmed that human populations are not the bounded, distinct groups that older anthropological frameworks assumed.

But in 1996, when Chatters described Kennewick Man’s skull, the older framework was still influential.

And when his observations began to circulate — in news reports, in scientific discussions, in the swirling online conversations that were just beginning to be possible — they were simplified, distorted, and amplified in ways that Chatters himself would later say he found troubling.

The story that spread was this: Scientists had found an ancient skeleton beside the Columbia River that didn’t look Native American.

Maybe it was European.

Maybe it proved that Europeans had arrived in North America thousands of years before Columbus.

Maybe it even proved that Native Americans weren’t really the first people here at all.

This was the match that lit the fire.

SECTION 4: THE ANCIENT WORLD HE CAME FROM