But his genes were Native American.

Both things were true simultaneously.

The apparent contradiction dissolved as soon as you understood that ancient populations didn’t have to look exactly like their modern descendants.

Eske Willerslev, who led the DNA study, was direct about what the findings meant: “Kennewick Man is an ancestor of Native Americans.

He is not some separate branch.

He is on the same branch.”

For the scientific community, this was a landmark.

It demonstrated, with the power of genomic evidence, that the morphological analysis of ancient skulls was an unreliable tool for determining population ancestry — a finding with implications far beyond the Kennewick case, reaching into every corner of physical anthropology where skull shape had been used to make claims about identity and origin.

For the tribal communities who had spent nearly two decades fighting for their ancestor’s return, the DNA findings were something else entirely.

They were not surprise.