It is not primitive thinking.

It is a recognition, encoded in cultural practice, of something deeply true: that the dead were people, that they mattered, that their dignity extends beyond the moment of death.

For the tribes of the Columbia Plateau, burying Kennewick Man — the Ancient One, their ancestor — was not a symbolic gesture.

It was the fulfillment of an obligation that had been delayed for twenty-one years by a legal system that had difficulty recognizing their right to perform it.

It was also, in the deepest sense, an act of continuity.

The same community that had been living beside this river for thousands of years, the descendants of the people who might have buried this man nine millennia ago, returned him to the earth.

The circle was closed.

There is something moving about that — something that cuts through all the legal arguments and scientific debates and political controversies to touch something essential about what it means to be human, to belong to a community, to honor those who came before us.

Kennewick Man’s story is, among many other things, a story about what it costs to deny people the right to honor their dead.

It is a story about what it costs to treat ancient bones as scientific specimens rather than as human beings.