They were confirmation.

They had always known who he was.

SECTION 12: THE AFTERMATH OF THE DNA FINDINGS — SCIENCE RECKONS WITH ITSELF

The 2015 DNA paper did not resolve every question.

Science rarely works that way — each answer opens new doors, and the story of Kennewick Man’s ancestry was no exception.

Some researchers accepted the findings fully and immediately revised their understanding.

The morphological differences between Kennewick Man’s skull and modern Native American skulls, they concluded, reflected the natural evolutionary change that occurs in any population over thousands of years.

Ancient skulls and modern skulls from the same genetic lineage don’t have to match, any more than an ancient oak tree has to look exactly like a modern one that descended from it.

Others were more cautious.

They acknowledged the DNA findings but raised questions about the completeness of the genome recovered, the statistical methods used to determine population affinity, and the possibility that the ancient population from which Kennewick Man descended had contributed genetically to modern Native Americans while not being directly ancestral to any specific modern group.