Most ancient remains that surface near rivers are fragmentary, scattered by water and time.

But this person had been buried deep enough, and the sediment stable enough, that they had survived nearly intact.

What Chatters found when he examined those bones made him stop cold.

The skull didn’t look like what he expected.

He had assumed, given the location and the apparent age of the remains, that this would be a Native American burial — the Columbia Plateau had been home to Indigenous peoples for thousands of years, and ancient remains in the region typically showed the skeletal characteristics associated with those populations.

But when Chatters looked at the skull’s facial structure, he saw something that surprised him deeply.

The features were long and narrow.

The face was narrow and projecting.

The braincase was high and elongated.

These were morphological characteristics — the technical term for the shape and structure of bones — that Chatters, in that first examination, associated not with Native American populations, but with something else entirely.