The hydroplane races that drew Will Thomas and David Deacy to its banks in the summer of 1996 still happen.

Children still wade in the shallows.

People still fish its banks.

The spot where Kennewick Man was found — a specific stretch of riverbank near Columbia Park — looks much as it did on that July afternoon nearly three decades ago.

The water moves past it constantly, carrying sediment and memory.

What lies beneath the river now, in addition to the ordinary sediment and stone, is unknowable.

The Columbia Plateau has been home to humans for more than twelve thousand years.

The soil and rock contain the evidence of all that time — tools, bones, ash from ancient fires, the physical traces of ten thousand generations of human life.

Kennewick Man was one of those traces, surfacing briefly into the light of modern attention before being returned to the earth by the people who are his descendants.

He carried questions that science could not initially answer.