Kennewick Man was deliberately buried

U.S. scientists studying the 9,200-year-old Kennewick Man say the man was deliberately buried -- not just covered over with sediment.

"This skeleton is so amazing," Doug Owsley, physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, told the Seattle Times. "And this level of analysis has never been done before."

Owsley told the annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences that painstaking examination of the bones showed the body was placed in a shallow grave about 400 yards from where scientists believe the Columbia River was at the time.

Kennewick Man was laid parallel to the river, on his back -- his legs extended, arms at his sides and palms resting on the earth, Owsley said.

The skeleton was discovered in 1996 in the Columbia River.

Copyright 2006 by United Press International