The reporting about this over the years has been very confusing, because a lot of the reporters who were making best efforts to report on this story are confuse

The reporting about this over the years has been very confusing, because a lot of the reporters who were making best efforts to report on this story are confused by the methods of anthropologists who ascribe population relatedness to skulls or the methods of genetics who ascribe population relatedness to DNA samples. The key finding in the article is "We conclude that the currently available number of independent phenetic markers is too small, and within-population craniometric variation too large, to permit reliable reconstruction of the biological population affinities of Kennewick Man." In other words, we don't have a good enough data set about skull measurement variation in human populations to assign the Kennewick skull reliably to any population that has been sampled. The genetic findings are consistent with those of other studies, for example the landmark review article "Toward a new history and geography of human genes informed by ancient DNA" Pickrell, Joseph K. et al. Trends in Genetics , Volume 30 , Issue 9 , 377 - 389 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tig.2014.07.007 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tig.2014.07.007 which found that every very ancient human DNA samples show patterns of movement of human beings across long distances and much genetic admixture between supposedly separated geographic populations. The chapter about human biodiversity in a general handbook on biodiversity says it well: "The massive efforts to study the human genome in detail have produced extraordinary amounts of genetic data. Although we still fail to understand the molecular bases of most complex traits, including many common diseases, we now have a clearer idea of the degree of genetic resemblance between humans and other primate species. We also know that humans are genetically very close to each other, indeed more than any other primates, that most of our genetic diversity is accounted for by individual differences within populations, and that only a small fraction of the species’ genetic variance falls between populations and geographic groups thereof." Barbujani, Guido, and Vincenza Colonna. "Genetic basis of human biodiversity: an update." In Biodiversity Hotspots, pp. 97-119. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2011.