What if, thousands of years from now, all
that was left of you…was your poop?
I’m Anna Rothschild, and this is Gross Science.
Every poop is a nugget of information.
Poop records what we eat, where we live, even
how we died.
So when archaeologists find the fossilized
poop of ancient humans, they get kind of excited.
These poop fossils are called coprolites,
and they’re pretty rare.
Although we make a lot of them, feces are
tough to preserve.
But there are a few ways poop manages to stick
around for posterity.
It can dry out—in caves or in a mummy’s
desiccated intestines.
Particularly impressive poops can leave dents
in the earth that get filled in—creating
a cast and mold of the ancient bowel movement.
And a turd can also turn to stone, when minerals
in water slowly permeate and replace the molecules
in the turd.
Whatever else was in the poop gets mineralized
as well.
Take this nearly 8-inch, 1000-year-old Viking
monstrosity discovered in England.
The poor Viking who created this treasure
was infested with tons of intestinal parasites
like whipworms, which were preserved along
with the giant poo, illustrating just how
squalid everyday life was back then.
And this guy wasn’t an anomaly—archaeologists
have also found cesspits (essentially Viking
sewers) that were filled with parasite eggs.
Poop can also tell us who was living where.
In Puerto Rico, the contents of 1-2 millennia-old
coprolites backed up the archaeological evidence
that native populations on the island at the
time were two distinct cultural groups, with
different diets, and different parasites.
Fossilized turds can even shed light on ancient
murder mysteries.
In Medieval Verona, the warlord Cangrande
della Scala—patron of the poet Dante Alighieri—died
at the age of 38 after a severe bout of vomiting
and diarrhea.
Rumors of foul-play spread, though at the
time no one could prove it.
But nearly 700 years later, researchers dug
up the body and analyzed the feces that were
preserved in the corpse’s rectum.
They found out that he had ingested a poisonous
plant before he died.
And from the chamomile and mulberry pollen
preserved in the poop as well, the researchers
surmised that he drank a poisoned tea that
killed him.
So the next time you grab your newspaper and
head to the bathroom, think about it not so
much as going number 2, but as contributing
to the archaeological record.
Ew.
