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Several thousand years ago, an Iron Age salt miner took a dump in what is now the Hallstatt-Dachstein/Salzkammergut area of Austria. In all likelihood, the pooper never gave their little deposit a second thought, and would be rather surprised to learn that it has now become a scientific artifact, enabling researchers to discover that Europeans ate blue cheese and drank beer 2,700 years ago. Reporting the ancient excrement in the journal Current Biology, the study authors reveal that the paleofeces has remained preserved in the region’s prehistoric salt mines over the past few millennia. Using a range of analytical techniques,...

Human poop can reveal more than you might think, even when it's really, really old. In a new study of a Central American Maya civilization, samples of ancient feces have shown how the size of this community varied significantly in response to contemporary climate change. Researchers identified four distinct periods of population size shift as a reaction to particularly dry or particularly wet periods, which haven't all been documented before: 1350-950 BCE, 400-210 BCE, 90-280 CE, and 730-900 CE. In addition, the flattened poop piles show that the city of Itzan – which in the modern day would be in...

Page Updated: Monday, April 12, 2004 1:28 PM PDT Archaeologist talks about Oregon's early natives Dr. Dennis Jenkins believes the entire Sumner Lake Basin was once filled with water up to state Highway 31. Contributed Photo By Daniel Schreiber, Staff Writer Were humans present 12,000 years ago in the Great Basin region of Oregon when buffalo, non-Spanish horses and even camels roamed the landscape? This, the central question of University of Oregon archaeologist Dennis Jenkins' series of digs, is what researchers have been trying to determine since the 1930s. In 1938, Luther Cressman, the first to explore the region, discovered...

“The discovery of this tool below a layer of undisturbed ash that dates to 15,800 years old means that this tool is likely more than 15,800 years old, which would suggest the oldest human occupation west of the Rockies,” U.S. Bureau of Land Management Burns District archaeologist Scott Thomas said in the release. But! Don’t get too excited, because the Associated Press spoke with Donald K. Grayson, a professor of archaeology at the University of Washington, and he didn’t seem completely sold on the find just yet.

New evidence shows humans lived in North America more than 14,000 years ago, 1,000 years earlier than had previously been known. Discovered in a cave in Oregon, fossil feces yielded DNA indicating these early residents were related to people living in Siberia and East Asia, according to a report in Thursday's online edition of the journal Science. "This is the first time we have been able to get dates that are undeniably human, and they are 1,000 years before Clovis," said Dennis L. Jenkins, a University of Oregon archaeologist, referring to the Clovis culture, well known for its unique spear-points...

Recent scientific findings date their arrival earlier than ever thought, sparking hot debate among archaeologists For much of its length, the slow-moving Aucilla River in northern Florida flows underground, tunneling through bedrock limestone. But here and there it surfaces, and preserved in those inky ponds lie secrets of the first Americans.For years adventurous divers had hunted fossils and artifacts in the sinkholes of the Aucilla about an hour east of Tallahassee. They found stone arrowheads and the bones of extinct mammals such as mammoth, mastodon and the American ice age horse.Then, in the 1980s, archaeologists from the Florida Museum of...

Hold the potty humor, please, but archaeologists digging in a dusty cave in Oregon have unearthed fossilized feces that appear to be oldest biological evidence of humans in North America. The ancient poop dates back 14,300 years. If the results hold up, that means the continent was populated more than 1,000 years before the so-called Clovis culture, long believed to be the first Americans. "This adds to a growing body of evidence that the human presence in the Americas predates Clovis," said Michael Waters, an anthropologist at Texas A&M University who was not involved in the project. DNA analysis of...

Finding Pre-Clovis Humans in the Oregon High Desert An interview with Dennis Jenkins See Interview About Dennis Jenkins In this interview, conducted at Paisley Five Mile Point Caves on June 13, 2007, by Rick Pettigrew of ALI, Dr. Dennis Jenkins describes the remarkable discovery of human DNA in coprolites dated between 14,000 and 15,000 calibrated years ago. This evidence, reported in the 3 April 2008, issue of the journal Science, strongly supports the proposition that human migrants to North America arrived at least 1000 years before the widespread Clovis complex appeared. The data also support the conclusion that the first...

The discovery demonstrates the presence of an ancient human population in America's Far West at the end of the last ice age. It was found that human coprolites were of Siberia-east Asian origins and is between 13,000 and 13,200 years old. The findings also confirmed that these fossilized samples were a thousand years older than the Clovis civilization, Paleo-Indian people who were used to reside in New Mexico around 11,500 years ago. Jenkins's work at the site began in 2002, but archaeologists first began exploring the caves as early as 1938. He said, "As we have used increasingly sophisticated scientific...

For some 85 years, homesteaders, pot hunters and archaeologists have been digging at Paisley Caves, a string of shallow depressions washed out of an ancient lava flow by the waves of a lake that comes and goes with the changing climate. Until now, they have found nothing conclusive-arrowheads, baskets, animal bones and sandals made by people who lived thousands of years ago on the shores of what was then a 40-mile-long lake, but is now a sagebrush desert on the northern edge of the Great Basin. But a few years ago, University of Oregon archaeologist Dennis Jenkins and his students...

Ore. Discovery Challenges Beliefs About First Humans Until recently, most scientists believed that the first humans came to the Americas 13,000 years ago. But new archaeological findings from a cave in Oregon are challenging that assumption. Lee Hochberg of Oregon Public Television reports on the controversial discovery. LEE HOCHBERG, NewsHour correspondent: What archaeologist Dennis Jenkins found in the Paisley Caves in south central Oregon may turn on its head the theory of how and when the first people came to North America. Many scientists believe humans first came to this continent 13,000 years ago across a land bridge from Asia...

Ancient darts also found in possible prehistoric pub The ancient people who have long been thought to be the first humans to colonise North America were actually johnny-come-latelies, according to scientists who have comprehesively analysed the ancient fossilised poo of their predecessor Americans. The new revelations come to us courtesy of Copenhagen university, where some of the investigating boffins are based. The scientists say that their results demonstrate conclusively their somewhat controversial thesis: that the "Clovis" culture dating from around 13,000 years ago - which has long been thought to be the earliest human society in the Americas - was...

Ancient stone projectile points and fossilized feces suggest a previously unknown culture that existed on the West Coast some 13,000 years ago. Ancient stone projectile points discovered in a Central Oregon cave complex have cast new light on the identity of the first Americans. ~~~snip~~~ These stone points, a type known as Western temmed points, are narrower and lack the distinctive flute, or shallow groove, found on Clovis points. Researchers believe the two types of points represent different technologies, produced by different cultures....

<p>Maybe the 1992 movie Brendan Fraser film Encino Man wasn’t too far from the mark?</p> <p>Fossilized human feces and other evidence from a West Coast cave demonstrates the existence of a long-lost, 13,500-year-old American culture, scientists said Thursday.</p> <p>The fossilized feces, known to researchers as a coprolite, from the Paisley Caves in Oregon has turned assumptions about the history of the Americas on its ear.</p>

It's a big surprise for scientists, who had never really looked for evidence of grass in dinosaur diets before. After all, grass fossils aside, those sauropods -- the behemoths with the long necks and tails and small heads -- didn't have the special kind of teeth needed to grind up abrasive blades. "Most people would not have fathomed that they would eat grasses," noted lead researcher Caroline Stromberg of the Swedish Museum of Natural History.

Washington, Nov 18 : Fossilized dinosaur droppings found in central India show sauropod dinosaurs may have fed on grass between 65 million and 71 million years ago, refuting the theory that grasses emerged long after the dinosaur era, a study said Friday. An international team of researchers, including Vandana Prasad of the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeobotany in Lucknow, India, studied the dinosaur coprolites, or fossilized droppings, of 65 million years ago. The researchers sent some photographs and samples to Caroline Stromberg of the Swedish Museum of Natural History, who spotted tiny particles of silica called phytoliths that have come...

Grass existed on Earth at least 10 million years earlier than was known, based on a new discovery in fossilized dinosaur dung. It's also the first solid evidence that some dinosaurs ate grass. While dissecting fossilized droppings, known as coprolites, researchers found tiny silica structures called phytoliths. They are short, rigid cells that provide support to a plant. This type is found exclusively in grasses. The discovery shows that five types of grass related to modern varieties were present in the Gondwana region of the Indian subcontinent during the late Cretaceous period about 71 to 65 million years ago. Museum...

World's largest dino dung T. rex left an ancient calling card, writes Jacob Berkowitz. Jacob Berkowitz The Ottawa Citizen Sunday, September 07, 2003 Mountains, beavers and the Maple leaf. And with a recent paleontological discovery Canada could soon gain international recognition for another natural wonder -- tyrannosaurid turds. A team of Canadian and American scientists recently identified an Albertan fossil as the world's largest dinosaur dropping, stealing the title from a T. rex turd found in Saskatchewan in 1995. While stool size is notable, what's really exciting scientists about this latest find is what it contains: Incredibly well-preserved dinosaur muscle...

News in Science 18/4/2003 Ancient dung reveals a picture of the past [This is the print version of story http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s833847.htm] An arctic mound of soil covering a core of solid ice in northeastern Siberia (Pic: Science) The successful dating of the most ancient genetic material yet may allow scientists to use preserved DNA from sources such as mammoth dung to help paint a picture of past environments. An international research effort led by Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark reports in today?s issue of the journal Science it has extracted well preserved animal and plant DNA from...