But the researchers tried.

And they were working on bones that had, by the time the study was initiated, been in curatorial care for years — carefully controlled conditions that had preserved whatever genetic material remained.

In 2015, a team led by Eske Willerslev — one of the world’s leading ancient DNA researchers, based at the University of Copenhagen — published the results in the journal Nature.

They had succeeded.

They had extracted and sequenced enough of Kennewick Man’s genome to answer the question that had been tearing the scientific and legal world apart for nearly twenty years.

And the answer was not what the morphological analysis had suggested.

SECTION 11: THE DNA BREAKTHROUGH — AND WHAT IT REVEALED

The 2015 paper in Nature was titled: “The ancestry and affiliates of Kennewick Man.”

The findings were unequivocal.

Kennewick Man was most closely related to Native Americans.