"We know a human made this turd, whereas we don't know if that was a campfire."
The items pictured above are coprolites, or fossilized shit, found in desert caves in the Paisley 5 Mile Ridge in South-central Oregon. Coprolites are part of a larger group of animal remains called ichnotaxa, including also gastroliths, regurgitaliths, nests, cocoons and pupal cases. One of these has maybe finally laid to rest the much-challenged date of first human colonization of North America, or the "Clovis-first" theory. The Clovis date (based on a particular kind of stone tool found in the '30s in Clovis, New Mexico and subsequently elsewhere), which has been challenged before, is now most strongly threatened by the hard evidence of ancient turds. After a new DNA extraction technique found unmistakable human DNA in samples from the Paisley coprolites (as well as certain genetic markers found only in Native American populations), the archaeologist whose students found them, Dennis Jenkins from the University of Oregon, sent samples to two different labs for radio carbon dating, and the results were identical: the excretion moment of these turds was 14,300 years ago, making them the oldest remains-based evidence of modern humans ever found in North America.
I emailed Dr. Jenkins, because I was concerned about the proximity of the shit to possible food-prep areas. He wrote back to say that feces were usually deposited in certain areas of a cave, such as cracks, pits, etc., or just outside. These were caches for later use in case of emergency, since many seeds would pass through the digestive tracts of the cave-dwellers un-digested. These could be recovered, cleaned and reconsumed. He also mentioned that the Seri indians of Sonora, Mexico refer to this practice as the second harvest.
read more
