The scientific record confirms this deep habitation.

Archaeological sites throughout the Columbia Plateau show evidence of human presence going back at least twelve thousand years — to the very edge of the period when the great ice sheets that had covered much of North America were finally retreating.

People were here early, and they stayed.

They built cultures suited to the land: fishing societies organized around the seasonal salmon runs, hunter-gatherer communities that moved through the landscape with precision, following the rhythms of plant and animal life that made the high desert habitable and even abundant.

The Columbia River was their highway, their pantry, and their spiritual center.

It was into this landscape — this deeply inhabited, deeply storied, deeply sacred land — that Kennewick Man had been buried, more than eight thousand years ago.

And it was from this landscape that his bones emerged in 1996, carrying the weight of questions that neither science nor Indigenous communities were fully prepared to answer together.

The morning after the bones were identified as potentially very ancient, James Chatters sent a small section of bone — a piece of metacarpal, one of the hand bones — to the University of California at Riverside for radiocarbon dating.

Radiocarbon dating works by measuring the decay of a specific carbon isotope, Carbon-14, that is absorbed by living organisms throughout their lives and begins to decay at a known rate after death.

By measuring how much Carbon-14 remains in a sample, scientists can calculate with reasonable precision how long ago the organism died.