8,500-Year-Old ‘Kennewick Man’ Is Native American http://t.co/qdVeetA5uB #anthropology #race #politics

— felicia jean (@felicianista) June 21, 2015

At a news conference [in 1996] researchers studying the skeleton said the ancient man was “Caucasoid,” an archaic, 19th-century term that includes a wide swath of people with origins in Africa, Western Asia and Europe. Reporters heard the word “Caucasian,” and all of a sudden people were wondering how a European showed up in North America and was shot thousands of years before Europeans set foot on the continent, Meltzer said.

“That was the moment when all the wheels fell off and this became quite the mess,” Meltzer told Live Science.