Fossilized human poop — some 14,000 years old — found in Oregon caves is evidence of the first people in North America, according to an analysis published in the journal Science this week.
The discovery supports the once-controversial idea that people were living in North America at least 1,000 years before the “Clovis” culture, according to the paper’s authors, including Linda Scott Cummings at the Paleo Research Institute in Golden.
The Clovis — who were thought to be the continent’s first people — lived about 13,000 years ago.
They chased mammoths with stone-tipped spears and are thought to have crossed from northeastern Asia into North America across the Bering land bridge about 13,500 years ago.
Evidence has been accumulating during the past few years that the Clovis people may have wandered onto a continent already inhabited.
“The hypothesis is that the Clovis people . . . were the first in the Americas, that’s dead,” said Eske Willerslev, co-author of the new paper and a scientist at the University of Copenhagen, in a podcast interview with Science.
Dennis Jenkins, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon, led the research team that found 14 piles of ancient poop — known as coprolites — in Oregon’s Paisley Caves, on the eastern side of the Cascade Range.
Jenkins and his colleagues analyzed the feces — doing radiocarbon dating, DNA analysis and microscopic studies and trying to eliminate the chance that contemporary human DNA from researchers had contaminated the samples.
The tests showed that the feces was from ancient humans who shared genetic information with American Indians.
“At this point, we know they most likely came from Siberia or eastern Asia,” Jenkins wrote, “and we know something about what they were eating.”
That’s where Golden researchers came in.
After identifying the masses as likely human, they dissected three of the Oregon coprolites, identifying the tiny bits of seed, leaf, feather and bone from the animals and plants the ancient people ate.
“We do this kind of analysis all the time,” said Kathy Puseman, a macrofloral analyst with the Paleo Research Institute.
The analysis suggested the people were eating borage greens in the spring, Puseman said. They ate grass grains and bitterbrush plants, water parsnip or one of its relatives, birds and something like bison.
The new paper follows one published last year by Tom Stafford, who runs a private research laboratory in Lafayette, and Mike Waters, an anthropologist at Texas A&M University in College Station.
Stafford and Waters re-dated Clovis sites from Washington state to the southern tip of Chile and concluded that the Clovis people spanned only a few hundred years in North America.
That was not enough time for a population of people to spread across two continents but plenty of time for Clovis stone point technology to be adopted by existing people.