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Tribes may no longer have to prove a direct cultural link to Kennewick Man to claim his bones. Credit: E. THOMPSON/AP

If passed, a bill speeding though Congress could end much research on ancient human remains in the United States. The legislation would alter the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), a 1990 federal law that defines how human specimens can be handled, to make it much easier for Native American tribes to claim remains and prevent studies.

The bill was triggered by the legal battle over Kennewick Man, a 9,200-year-old skeleton found in 1996 by the Columbia River in Oregon. Scientists were keen to study it, but tribes in Oregon and Washington wanted to secure the remains so that they could be buried in accordance with traditional beliefs.

Last year, eight scientists working with Oregon-based Friends of America's Past won a long-running legal battle to conduct a comprehensive study of the skeleton. A federal judge ruled that the tribes couldn't show ‘cultural affiliation’ to Kennewick Man, so they couldn't claim the remains.

The new law is being championed by Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona and chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, and is designed to sidestep this requirement. His office did not respond to Nature's requests for an interview.

The US Senate may vote on the legislation as soon as this week after the measure sailed through the Committee on Indian Affairs on 9 March. If it is passed as expected, the bill will be considered by the House of Representatives.

Anthropologists are horrified. Cleone Hawkinson, a physical anthropologist who runs Friends of America's Past, said that under the new law, “our prehistory will go behind a black curtain”.

Alan Schneider, the scientists' Portland attorney in the Kennewick Man case, explains that the proposed change to the NAGPRA alters the definition of Native Americans from “a tribe, people, or culture that is indigenous to the United States” by adding two words: “or was”. That would permit tribes to claim a much wider range of remains even without a direct cultural link to them, he says.

If the bill wins Congressional approval later this year and is signed into law by President George Bush, Schneider says a new legal challenge could be mounted to allow Kennewick Man to be studied. The law would apply to other stored remains, which could be claimed back from museums, as well as newly found specimens. “Even Adam and Eve's remains, if found in this country, would be subject to claims by tribes,” he says.

But not all archaeologists agree that the new law will have a major impact. The Society for American Archaeology, whose members primarily focus on artefacts rather than human remains, is not opposing the measure. “This won't disastrously affect research,” says Keith Kintigh, an archaeologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, who advises the society on such issues.