And that’s when the scientists intervened.

In October 1996, a group of eight prominent anthropologists and archaeologists filed a lawsuit in federal court to block the repatriation.

Their argument was that the bones were too old, and too significant, to be transferred to tribal custody without first being subjected to comprehensive scientific study.

The skeleton, they argued, was a scientific resource of extraordinary value — one of the most complete ancient human skeletons ever found in North America — and its reburial without adequate study would represent an irreversible loss to human knowledge.

The lead plaintiffs included some of the most respected researchers in American physical anthropology.

Among them was Douglas Owsley of the Smithsonian Institution, who would eventually become the principal scientific investigator of the Kennewick Man case and one of its most publicly visible — and most controversial — figures.

The lawsuit set up a confrontation that cut to the heart of one of the deepest tensions in American life: the conflict between the rights of Indigenous communities to their ancestors, their dead, and their sacred traditions, and the claims of Western science to study and interpret the human past.

It was not a new conflict.

It was, in many ways, the same conflict that had been playing out since European colonizers first began digging up Native American burial grounds in the name of science, centuries before NAGPRA existed.

The same conflict that had placed thousands of Native human remains in museum basements without the consent of their descendants.