Nor does the government have any business promulgating public policy on the basis of anyone's religious belief. Yet that's exactly what the Park Service's flawed interpretation of the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act has led to. The Park Service says, in effect, that any human who died here, no matter how long ago, had to be Indian. The only survivors of ancient inhabitants, present-day Native Americans, believe they were the continent's first and only people. That belief is grounded in religious faith.
Many tribes strenuously object to scientific examination of ancient remains.
They say they don't need science to tell them who these ancient beings were. But the rest of us do. Indians have every legal and moral right to rebury remains that clearly are their ancestors. But they have no right to human remains that are so old that claims to them have to be taken on religious faith. For 60 years, U.S. archaeologists steadfastly have clung to the rubric that humans didn't arrive on American soil until about 11,000 to 13,000 years ago.