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PRE-CLOVIS BREAKTHROUGH: Coprolites Yield Surprisingly Early Date - UPDATE

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Bianca
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« on: April 06, 2008, 05:08:03 pm »









This unlikely story starts in 2002, when Jenkins was leading a field-school excavation of Paisley
Caves, a row of eight shallow basalt holes overlooking a prehistoric lakebed.

Six feet below the cave floor, Jenkins and his 26 students uncovered fragments of prehistoric life: camel and horse bones, sage grouse, mountain sheep and antelope bones with cut marks on them,
tiny fragments of sewing thread, a handful of what looked like stone tools and more than a dozen
oval, organic items that were exactly what they looked like: dried-up feces. (Polite archaeologists
like to call them "coprolites" when writing up excavation reports and grant applications.)

By themselves, coprolites are nothing unusual. So when Jenkins got a call from a contact at the
Bureau of Land Management saying an Oxford University graduate student was interested in experimenting on coprolites with a new DNA extraction technique, Jenkins was willing to give him
a shot--but extremely skeptical anything would come of it.

"I didn't know this guy from Adam," Jenkins says. "I'm open to new science, but not open to being labeled some kind of fringe scientist."

The grad student--Willerslev, an enthusiastic Dane known among his colleagues for his friendly personality, foul mouth and outstanding research--flew to Oregon in 2004 to take samples. "I was positively surprised. Some of the animal bones still had soft tissue on them, which indicated it was
a really good preservation environment," Willerslev says. "And I'm not a morphologist, but some of
the coprolites looked pretty human."
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