Ancient genome stirs ethics debate

Robert L. Walker

Humans from the Clovis culture used characteristic stone points (brown) and rod-shaped bone tools.

The remains of a young boy, ceremonially buried some 12,600years ago in Montana, have revealed the ancestry of one of the earliest populations in the Americas, known as the Clovis culture.

Published in this issue of Nature, the boys genome sequence shows that todays indigenous groups spanning North and South America are all descended from a single population that trekked across the Bering land bridge from Asia (M.Rasmussen et al. Nature 506, 225229; 2014). The analysis also points to an early split between the ancestors of the Clovis people and a second group, whose DNA lives on in populations in Canada and Greenland (see page162).

But the research underscores the ethical minefield of studying ancient Native American remains, and rekindles memories of a bruising legal fight over a different human skeleton in the 1990s.

To avoid such a controversy, Eske Willerslev, a palaeobiologist at the University of Copenhagen who led the latest study, attempted to involve Native American communities. And so he embarked on a tour of Montanas Indian reservations last year, talking to community members to explain his work and seek their support. I didnt want a situation where the first time they heard about this study was when its published, he says.

Source: Montana Office of Public Instruction

Construction workers discovered the Clovis burial site on a private ranch near the small town of Wilsall in May 1968 (see Ancient origins). About 100 stone and bone artefacts, as well as bone fragments from a male child aged under two, were subsequently recovered.

The boys bones were found to date to the end of the Clovis culture, which flourished in the central and western United States between about 13,000 and 12,600 years ago. Carved elk bones found with the boys remains were hundreds of years older, suggesting that they were heirlooms. The ranch, owned by Melvyn and Helen Anzick, is the only site yet discovered at which Clovis objects exist alongside human bones. Most of the artefacts now reside in a museum, but researchers returned the human remains to the Anzick family in the late 1990s.

At that time, the Anzicks daughter, Sarah, was conducting cancer and genome research at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and thought about sequencing genetic material from the bones. But she was wary of stoking a similar debate to the one surrounding Kennewick Man, a human skeleton found on the banks of the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington, in July 1996. Its discovery sparked an eight-year legal battle between Native American tribes, who claimed that they were culturally connected to the individual, and researchers, who said that the roughly 9,000-year-old remains pre-dated the tribes.

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Ancient genome stirs ethics debate