“The coprolites were found in a far corner of the cave site, collected together beneath a horizontally-positioned, oval-shaped rock formation with a large hole in its center that appeared to have been worn smooth, possibly by human interaction, though determination of the cause of the wear was beyond the scope of this research project. This horizontally-positioned oval-shaped formation with the hole in its center was connected at its base to a similarly shaped, vertically-positioned rock formation that had no hole. It appears that at one time the vertically-positioned formation could have pivoted at its connecting point to cover the opening of the horizontally-positioned formation. However, after thousands of years of resting in the vertical position, the covering rock formation could not be moved and appears to be permanently ‘up.’”

I always read or hear the word “coprolites” and imagine them being some rank of soldier similar to hoplites.

“Sir! We have bested the hoplites!”
“Indeed, Publius! But yet we must face our worst foes yet – the coprolites!”
*gasp* “Sir! Let us rally the troops at once!”

I wonder why they crapped inside.

That said, in order to selflessly help future generations and archaeologist understand life in the 21st Century, I will now pledge to crap only outdoors in dry, protected areas from now on.

Fossils (from Latin fossus, literally “having been dug up”) are the mineralized or otherwise preserved remains or traces (such as footprints) of animals, plants, and other organisms.

A) for crap to fossilize in as little as 14,000 years?

B) to extract DNA from the minerals that replace organic matter during the fossilization process?

Maybe someone with more knowledge can chime in with answers, but I think that the use of the term “fossilized” throughout the article is just crappy journalism.

So really what we may be looking at is poop from dogs that eat humans, not necessarily humans themselves pooping.

“I wonder why they crapped inside.”

I wondered about that as well Mitch. Even if they didn’t know about the relationship between crap and disease, you would have thought crapping in your living space would be a no-no (unless it was going to be wheeked away by a flush)

Maybe it was the Scat Cave :)

Well, of course they were.

Ooops, gotta go. I need to clean up some canine coprolites in my backyard.

Also, “first” these people probably aren’t.

Figure it this way. Let’s say people started coming to the Americas 50,000 years ago. Population growth curves tend to be exponential, which means pretty flat at the beginning and then swooping up faster as time goes on. So we can be pretty sure there were very, very few people in the Americas for the first 30,000 years or so. Also, only a tiny fraction of any evidence will happen to get preserved, and that will tend to be from relatively recent times rather than more ancient ones.

On this basis the odds of the earliest evidence we happen to have being anywhere close to the first people are pretty much nil. Expect in future to see reports of evidence of human occupation that dates much earlier than this.

This is a big problem in all areas of paleontology, and it means that those nicely reconstructed trees of life for dinosaurs and whatnot should all be taken with a very large grain of probablistic salt.