Scientists Discover 14,000 Year Old Human Crap

[mitsuki lover]

Recently scientists discovered human coprolites in a cave in Oregon.
Coprolites are the technical term for fossilized feces,or in layman's term
poop or crap.
What makes this discovery so interesting is that carbon-14 dating indicates that the samples are around 14,000 years old.
This make them 1,000 years older than the remains of the oldest remains of the New Mexico's Clovis People.
There is some question as to wheter or not the fossils are human,as some dissenting scientists have pointed out the fact that there are indication of canine DNA in the mix.They claim that the feces are actually those of ancient dogs and that the human DNA is the result of humans later going into the cave to urinate.
However this is countered by the fact that apparently the samples also contain human hair.Also dogs in many parts of the world are said to have been
tamed by that point in time.
The probablity is that the cave was used as a rest stop by a group of hunters and their dogs.More than likely man and beast shared the part where the
coprolites were found as a common toilet.This would explain why the canine and human DNA were mixed together.
Of course this also raises the question as to how these hunters or their ancestors got to present day Oregon from the Bering Straights,especially as much of Canada was still covered with glaciers and impassable at the time.

[Technomancer]

It has actually been theorized that some of the early Paleoindian groups arrived by travelling down the coast. While much of that region was under ice, there would have been shelter in the various fjords and other inlets carved out by the glaciers. Unfortunately, with the rise in sea levels at the end of the ice age, these sites would now be several meters under water. This has made confirmation of the idea difficult.

Finds like the one you mention, as well as discoveries of a similar age at Monte Verde in Chile have indicated that Paleoindian arrival in the Americas was earlier than had been supposed under the land-bridge hypothesis. This does not discredit the land bridge notion however, as it is also known from genetic studies that there were at least three separate waves of migration. That most of North America was under ice at the time does not pose a problem either since it is known there was an ice-free corridor running between the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets at the time. The problem for researchers has been the timing of the opening of the land-bridge.

[Slytherine]

That's very...interesting. I learned something new today. Cool.

~Slytherine