He sent the bone sample for radiocarbon dating.

He took photographs and made casts.

And then he found the stone point in the hip.

The Cascade point, as it’s technically classified, was removed from the ilium with great care.

It was measured, photographed, and analyzed.

It was identified as belonging to a projectile tradition — a type of spear or dart point — that was common in the Pacific Northwest thousands of years ago, consistent with the age of the skeleton.

But here is what made this discovery particularly extraordinary, beyond the obvious drama of a man walking around for years with a spear point lodged in his pelvis:

The point was made of a fine-grained volcanic rock whose nearest known geological source was more than a hundred miles from where Kennewick Man was found.

This man had been traveling.

This was not a person who had spent his life in a single river valley.