Nevada held Spirit Cave Man for decades against his tribe, a judge called it arbitrary, and the tribe agreed to DNA to prove he was theirs

In 1940 Georgia and Sydney Wheeler found a man of about 40 in Spirit Cave, wrapped in a rabbit-skin blanket and reed mats and wearing moccasins. They thought he was 1,500 to 2,000 years old. Radiocarbon dating in the 1990s gave about 10,600 years, making him North America's oldest mummy. The Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe, whose reservation is nearby, claimed him as an ancestor for reburial. In 2000 the Bureau of Land Management refused. The tribe sued, and in 2006 a federal judge ruled the refusal "arbitrary and capricious." The tribe had opposed genetic testing. It then agreed, and in October 2015 geneticist Eske Willerslev took bone and tooth samples. Willerslev said he told the tribe there would be no testing without its permission. The genome showed the man was closer to Native Americans than to any other group. The tribe said the result confirmed its oral tradition and that its experience of scientists had been "mostly negative." On 18 November 2016 the Bureau transferred him and his burial goods to the tribe. Anthropologist Douglas Jantz, who co-led an earlier study of the skull, called it "a sad day for science." The tribe reburied him privately in 2018^†.