Kennewick Man

Simon Worrall:

Physical anthropologists use the term osteobiography, meaning “biography of the bones.” Who was Kennewick Man? Where and how did he live and die?

Kennewick Man is not what I’d have expected before we began the analysis and before I’d seen him. He was found on the banks of theColumbia River in 1996. He’s about five feet seven and a half. His weight is right around 161 pounds. He’s very wide-bodied, very strong. Age of death is around 40.

From there we started looking at his injuries. He clearly had a pretty difficult life. He has a couple of depression fractures in the head and six different broken ribs, five of which had not healed correctly. That’s a reflection of his lifestyle. He was probably on the move, and when that incident happened, he didn’t have sufficient time to recover.

He also had a fracture in his shoulder joint, the type of fracture you’ll sometimes see in high-end baseball pitchers, where you’re throwing so hard and so fast and you fracture the posterior rim of the scapula. We can surmise from this that he was a javelin thrower, a spear thrower.

From this time period, we also know he would’ve often been using anatlatl. It’s like an extension of the arm that allows you to throw harder, faster, farther. Most dramatically, he has a spear point embedded in his pelvis.