The landscapes were quieter without them.

The people who lived in this world — including, presumably, the people among whom Kennewick Man lived — were not primitive.

This point cannot be made strongly enough.

The popular image of prehistoric humans as crude cave-dwellers, barely distinguishable from the animals around them, has been thoroughly and repeatedly dismantled by modern archaeology.

The people of the early Holocene — the geological epoch that began with the end of the last Ice Age — were cognitively modern humans, exactly like us in their capacity for language, abstract thought, social complexity, and technological innovation.

They built boats capable of ocean travel.

They maintained trade networks that moved materials and ideas across hundreds of miles.

They developed sophisticated fishing technologies — nets, weirs, hooks, harpoons — that allowed them to harvest the Pacific’s extraordinary abundance.

They built social structures, maintained oral traditions, held ceremonies, made art, buried their dead with care and intention.

When we look at Kennewick Man’s bones, we are not looking at the remains of a primitive.