Word: skeletonized
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...guaranteed that it would be beset by legal maneuvering. Soon after the find was announced in 1996, the Umatilla tribes of Oregon and Washington claimed it. Eight anthropologists immediately sued for the right to study it, and archaeologists for the National Park Service were called in to study the skeleton and help settle the dispute. They found in favor of the Umatillas, but a federal district court disagreed, as did a circuit court, citing a lack of cultural and genetic evidence to link the bones to the claimants...
...clear from the moment Jim Chatters first saw the partial skeleton that no crime had been committed - none recent enough to be prosecutable, anyway. Chatters, a forensic anthropologist, had been called in by the coroner of Benton County, Wash., to consult on some bones found by two college students on the banks of the Columbia River, near the town of Kennewick. The bones were obviously old, and when the coroner asked for an opinion, Chatters' off-the-cuff guess, based on the skull's superficially Caucasoid features, was that they probably belonged to a settler from the late 1800s...
Then a CT scan revealed a stone spear point embedded in the skeleton's pelvis, so Chatters sent a bit of finger bone off to the University of California at Riverside for radiocarbon dating. When the results came back, it was clear that his estimate was dramatically off the mark. The bones weren't 100 or even 1,000 years old. They belonged to a man who had walked the banks of the Columbia more than 9,000 years ago. (See pictures of ancient skeletons...
...government researchers examined the bones, but it would take almost a decade for independent scientists to get a good look at the skeleton. Although it was found in the summer of 1996, the local Umatilla Indians and four other Columbia Basin tribes almost immediately claimed it as ancestral remains under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, demanding that the skeleton be reburied without the desecration of scientific study. A group of researchers sued, starting a legal tug-of-war and negotiations that ended only last summer, with the scientists getting their first extensive access to the bones...
...Canadians are good at sliding stones but, as CanWest sportswriter Cam Cole noted, they are pretty great at sliding headfirst on cafeteria trays. Canada is now a skeleton superpower, finishing 1-2-4 in the men's event and adding a bronze in the women's. What did the face-first sliders do right? "Even though skeleton is an individual sport, the athletes learned to work together and trust each other," says skeleton team manager Teresa Schlachter. There was a support team--coaches, sport scientists, massage therapists, video experts and nutritionists--"passionate about what they do, who worked together...