After nearly 30 years in a museum vault, the Ancient One is finally home

For almost three decades, the remains of a man who lived some 8,400 years ago sat in contention — studied, litigated and stored far from the Columbia River country where he was found in 1996. This month, the Ancient One, known in headlines as Kennewick Man, was returned to the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and reburied on ancestral land, in a private ceremony. Genetic research had confirmed what tribal leaders had said from the beginning: he was an ancestor. The return closes one of the longest-running disputes between science and Indigenous communities in the USA — and it closes it the way the tribes asked for all along: with him home, and at rest.

SDG 10 · Reduced inequalities — Mechanism: legal ruling