American Indians 'ousted native whites'

Stand up Christopher Columbus, all may soon be forgiven - or at least some of it. The American Indians, redesignated recently in politically correct parlance as "native American", may not be quite so "native" after all. European-type Caucasians may have reached America first.

Anthropologists in the United States, the Washington Post reported yesterday, are considering evidence that "Caucasoids" may have been the earliest inhabitants of north America, and not - as previously accepted - Mongoloid Indians. The evidence is provided by a number of skeletons discovered in different parts of the US, from Washington State in the north west to Texas in the south.

The shape of the skulls - elongated and sharp-featured - the scientists say, means that they are Caucasoid. Their age - the latest carbon-dating techniques show them to be more than 9,000 years old - indicates they would pre-date the American Indians. The skeletons have been unearthed over a number of years, but it was the discovery of a particularly well- preserved one, in Washington State last summer, that suggested a reassessment was in order.

Among those excited by the hypothesis is Dennis Stafford, a recognised authority on American pre-history at the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of Natural History, who said: "I think we're going to see the whole complexion of north American pre-history change real fast."

The findings, if they gain acceptance, have ramifications that are as political as they are scientific. The trend in the US in recent years has been towards fulsome official acknowledgement that American Indians were the original "Americans" and they were gravely wronged by the much later European settlers, beginning with Columbus.

Encyclopaedia entries have been rewritten and museum displays have been revised to accommodate the new orthodoxy and show due respect to the Indians as "native Americans". Celebrations for Columbus Day, which traditionally honoured the explorer who discovered America, have been played down in deference to the Indian objection that "we weren't discovered, we were already here".

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the "native Americans" appear not to have taken too kindly to the possibility that they were not actually native Americans.

Two of the skeletons in question were claimed as "ancestors" by the tribes on whose land they were found, and duly buried.

However, the crucial Washington State skeleton is currently in a vault pending the outcome of a court battle between the local Umatilla Indians who want to bury it and the anthropologists who want to study it.