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Hidden away in an obscure notice in a federal register is a throwaway line that could rewrite human history.
It states that San José State University holds human remains of an Ice Age individual from Maui, Hawaii, in its research collection.
If true, it’s nothing short of sensational — because Hawaii is generally thought to have been peopled between 800 and 1000 AD.
The Ice Age, or Pleistocene epoch, ended around 12,000 years ago, making the SJSU remains at least 10,000 years older than the earliest known human presence in Hawaii.
Paleoindians, the oldest human remains in the Americas, have been discovered in the continental US dating as old as 12,000 years ago — but fewer than two dozen of them have ever been found here, including only three Ice Age individuals.
Thus, to find any Paleoindian in Hawaii is groundbreaking, but to find one from the Ice Age is astounding.
Anthropologists all around the world should be fired up by this sensational discovery, clamoring to visit SJSU to get a look at these remains and bombarding the university with questions.
You might assume that every tool available to modern science is being brought to bear on this amazing discovery.
But none of this is happening.
Instead, this potentially priceless anthropological evidence is heading back to Hawaii for “reburial and proper care” — at the hands of an organization that aims to “undo the evils of colonialism.”
The reason is a federal law called NAGPRA, the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act.
Congress passed NAGPRA in 1990 to restore human remains and other significant artifacts to “culturally affiliated” modern tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations.
The law acknowledged that museums and research institutions had not always treated such items respectfully, and sought to make amends when “shared group identity” between an artifact and a present-day tribe could be traced.
It stated that “geographical, kinship, biological, archaeological, anthropological, linguistic, folkloric, oral traditional, [or] historical” evidence was needed before remains or objects could be repatriated.
Yet in December 2023, President Joe Biden’s Interior Department changed its regulatory guidance on NAGPRA repatriations — adding “Native American traditional knowledge” to the list of necessary evidence.
And the updated regulations “require deference to the Native American traditional knowledge of lineal descendants, Indian Tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations.”
In practice, it means that even DNA evidence counts for nothing if a tribe says otherwise.
NAGPRA was meant to be a compromise between indigenous communities and scientists.
It aimed to return clearly connected human remains to their modern descendants, while leaving researchers free to study unaffiliated remains.
About 92% of such identifiably linked remains had been returned before 2022.
But an alliance of indigenous activists and progressive academics has pushed an unstoppable “everything back” movement, overturning NAGPRA’s original intent.
In California, for example, anthropological research has effectively ceased, replaced by a virtue-signaling effort to give tribes anything they ask for — even if there’s clearly no genuine affiliation.
Sometimes the effort is downright farcical: Sparkplugs and alligator feces found at a Florida site have been categorized as grave goods, and repatriated.
It’s not clear how SJSU came to conclude the remains in its possession date back to the Ice Age.
According to the federal notice, “One document associated with the human remains lists their origination from Maui, Hawaii, from the late Pleistocene.”
But that’s all SJSU’s NAGPRA coordinator needed to consult with Native Hawaiian organizations and decide that the remains are “clearly identified” as being connected with modern-day Hawaiians.
This is not science; this is politics.
Now, SJSU plans to repatriate these purported ancient human remains to the Hui Iwi Kuamo’o — an organization established in 2015 for the sole purpose of grabbing artifacts back from what the group calls the “thievery” of Western researchers.
I curated SJSU’s collections of skeletal remains for nearly 20 years. I was not aware of any such material.
Had I known, I certainly would have studied them.
I might have won a Nobel Prize for such game-changing research, if the remains truly date from the Pleistocene.
And now, it’s impossible for us to ever learn the truth.
Did a label get swapped?
Are these genuine Ice Age remains, but originating from somewhere else?
Are these bones of much more recent origin, perhaps only a few hundred years old?
Are they not human at all, but the bones of a bird?
Only scientific research on SJSU’s remains can answer these questions.
But when political goals override scientific curiosity, science loses.
Elizabeth Weiss is a professor emeritus of anthropology at San José State University and author of “On the Warpath: My Battles with Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors.”
