Who do those casinos really belong to????

Did the First Americans Come From, Er, Australia?

Anthropologists stepped into a hornets' nest on Monday, revealing research that suggests the original inhabitants of America may in fact have come from what is now known as Australia.

The claim will be extremely unwelcome to today's native Americans who came overland from Siberia and say they were there first.

They were not the first.

[ Silvia Gonzalez from John Moores University in Liverpool] said there was very strong evidence that the first migration came from Australia via Japan and Polynesia and down the Pacific Coast of America.

Skulls of a people with distinctively long and narrow heads discovered in Mexico and California predated by several thousand years the more rounded features of the skulls of native Americans.

This is related to the controversy surrounding the Kennewick Man, a nearly complete skeleton found on the shores of the Columbia River in 1996 and thought to be 9000 years old.

"The man lacks definitive characteristics of the classic mongoloid stock to which modern Native Americans belong. The skull is dolichocranic (cranial index 73.8) rather than brachycranic, the face narrow and prognathous rather than broad and flat. Cheek bones recede slightly and lack an inferior zygomatic projection; the lower rim of the orbit is even with the upper. Other features are a long, broad nose that projects markedly from the face and high, round orbits. The mandible is v-shaped,with a pronounced, deep chin. Many of these characteristics are definitive of modern-day caucasoid peoples, while others, such as the orbits are typical of neither race. Dental characteristics fit Turner's (1983) Sundadont pattern, indicating possible relationship to south Asian peoples."

After it's discovery local Native Americans tried to take possession of the remains under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). It was recently decided by the court that the Kennewick Man had no cultural ties to Native Americans currently living in the area so they had no rights under NAGPRA. The Native Americans seem to fear challenges to the rights given them based on the fact that they were here first.