No Bone Unturned: The Adventures of a Top Smithsonian Forensic Scientist and the Legal Battle for America's Oldest Skeletons

I’m married to a bioarchaeologist, so while I’m useless with bones myself, I know that you can learn a lot about them. No Bone Unturned is a biography of Doug Owsley, Head of Physical Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institute. This book tells the story of his career, repatriating the remains of Americans murdered in Guatemala, identifying the victims of mass crime scenes like the Waco Massacre and 9/11, correcting the historical record at Jamestown, and in the centerpiece of the book, going up against the government to study Kennewick Man, a 9000 year old skeleton unearthed on the banks of the Columbia River.

This book is a lot of fun to read, but it uncritically presents Owsley as a scientific hero in the face of obstructionism from the Army Corps of Engineers and the superstitions of the Colville tribes. And reality is much more complicated. Kennewick Man is a unique scientific treasure, but he’s also a person. At the time, Owsley believed based on skull morphology that Kennewick Man and the similarly aged Spirit Cave Mummy did not resemble contemporary Native Americans. This was evidence that human migration to the Americas did not solely occur over the Bering Land Bridge.

Except of course, skull morphology isn’t scientific. Subsequent DNA tests showed that Kennewick Man and the Spirit Cave Mummy are closely related to current Native American populations. The long lawsuit may have enabled scientific study of the bones, but Owsley’s adversarial tactics feel like a strategic loss. Tribes have to be partners in American archaeological work, and despite protestations that Owsley’s career has been full of respect for them, I didn’t see it here. That, plus changes in scientific knowledge in the 17 years since, make this a book that has not aged well.