He would later describe his initial impression in a way that would ignite one of the most controversial debates in modern American anthropology.

He thought the skull looked European.

That word — European — would echo through the next nine years like a stone thrown into still water.

It would be repeated, distorted, seized upon, weaponized, and ultimately, carefully, scientifically dismantled.

But in those first days beside the Columbia River, as James Chatters looked at the bones of a man who had died thousands of years ago, that impression — right or wrong, well-founded or not — set the entire story in motion.

Because if this man was truly ancient, and if he truly didn’t fit the expected profile of the region’s Indigenous populations, then what did that mean?

Who was he?

Where had he come from?

And how had he gotten here — to this riverbank, in the center of North America, more than eight millennia before the modern world?

The questions multiplied before anyone had time to think clearly about the answers.