As two bitter disputes over long-dead bodies rekindle the interest in early American settlers, Bob Rickard steps into the arena and asks: "Who were the first Americans?" Once upon a time, the prehistory of the North American continent was sewn-up. There were no people in the Americas before the ancestors of the Amerindians migrated over the Bering Straits from Siberia, settled into different regions and developed distinct cultures. Nothing much else happening until white folks arrived. Now all that has given way to bitter disputes. The first skirmish came in April last year, over the famous Spirit Cave mummy. Discovered in 1940, in a cave east of Carson City, Nevada, the mummified burial of a 40-year-old man was thought to be about 3,000 years old. New dating methods, carried out at the University of California Riverside, put his death at 9,415 years before the present (BP). It is now claimed to be the oldest naturally mummified body in North America ­ by comparison, the Alpine 'Ice Man' dates to about 5,300 years BP and there is a Peruvian mummy at least 10,000 years old. Although features of the burial accord with what is known of Amerindian culture of the period, the original report describes the man's features as "different from modern American Indians". In particular he had a small face and a long cranium. He appears to be "more closely related to Southeast Asian peoples," said Amy Dansie of the Nevada State Museum and current custodian of the remains. The Paiute Indians, whose lands are close to Spirit Cave, have demanded the body for burial. "We believe this is an ancestor of the Northern Paiutes," said a spokesman for that tribe; however, the Fallon Paiute Shoshone tribe also lay claim to the body. "There is no practical possibility that he is the lineal genetic ancestor of any contemporary Great Basin group," Dr James Adovasio, excavator of the Meadowcroft rock shelter (see panel), told the Washington Post. The case may well be referred to the courts to decide whether anthropologists have "the right to defy Native Americans' desire not to allow us to study people that are not demonstrably their ancestors," said Dansie. Hot on the tail of the Spirit Cave affair, an eerily similar dispute erupted further northwest. It began when James Chatters was asked by the sheriff of Kennewick, in Washington State, to examine a half-buried skeleton on a bank of the Columbia River. The remains had been found in July 1996 by two college students, apparently washed out of the ground by subsurface irrigation. Chatters ­ a consultant anthropologist based nearby in Richland who is reconstructing the post-Ice Age ecology of the Columbia River basin ­ soon determined that the intact bones were not Amerindian. "I thought we had a pioneer," he told Timothy Egan of the New York Times. There was one curiosity: embedded in the man's pelvis was a worked stone point which Chatters recognised as a spear tip. The man had obviously survived a potentially fatal wounding ­ bone had regrown around the embedded tip ­ to die in middle-age of something else much later. What really jolted Chatters was that the type of spear was in use not a few hundred years ago but thousands of years ago. He sent a bone fragment to the University of California at Riverse for radiocarbon dating. The results determined that the man had died 9,300 years ago ­ which puts him in the same timeframe as the Spirit Cave mummy ­ and the implications are dividing academic and cultural communities. For traditional anthropologists, the discovery of a Caucasoid-type man in that time and place contradicts the usual view that only the descendants of the original Mongoloid (or northern Asian) migrants had settled there. "This was not a Caucasian as some papers reported," Chatters explained to me. "He has more in common with Southeast Asian types, possibly even southern Indian or Ainu." Chatters is one of the few people who have had the opportunity to see both Kennewick Man and the Spirit Cave mummy and he has noted their similarities. Other anthropologists, too, have noted, from time to time, anomalous bones with Caucasoid or southern Asian characteristics. "It's easy to overlook the fact that modern racial types did not necessarily exist ten thousand years ago. They were still forming," he said. Only DNA analysis could tell if these two skeletons were related in some way as their dates could well be contemporary within the margin of error for carbon dating. Perhaps these Caucasoid people had a loose culture that extended from Nevada to the Columbia River (perhaps 600 miles) that was overwhelmed by the newcomers? That territory would include Idaho, where, says Chatters, remains found at Buhl and dated to around 10,700 BP are almost a female version of the Kennewick body. Perhaps they came along with the Mongoloids? A similar 16,000-year-old Caucasoid was found near Lake Baikal, he says, which would place it close to the origins of the migrations across Beringia (as the land bridge is sometimes called). "These discoveries will change the way we look at the prehistory of the Americas," Chatters told me. Bright Star