A trace of the oldest people to inhabit America has been discovered in a deposit of fossilised excrement.
The fossilised excrement has been dated at 14,300-years-old
An analysis of the dung, deposited more than 14,000 years ago, will change our picture of the first Americans and mean the history books will have to be rewritten.
Now the oldest evidence has come from DNA extracted from dried human excrement recovered from Oregon's Paisley Caves - dating to 14,300 years ago, some 1,200 years before Clovis culture - and the study provides apparent genetic ties to Siberia or Asia, according to an international team of 13 scientists.
According to the standard accepted theory, the Clovis people crossed a land bridge over the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska during the period of lowered sea levels during the ice age, then made their way southward through an ice-free corridor east of the Rocky Mountains in present-day western Canada as the glaciers retreated.
The Paisley Caves are located in the Summer Lake basin near Paisley, about 220 miles southeast of Eugene on the eastern side of the Cascade Range. The series of eight caves are westward-facing, on the highest shoreline of Lake Chewaucan, which have stable dry conditions that preserve their contents.
Working in four of the caves, the team retrieved manufactured threads of sinew and plant fibres, hide, basketry, cordage, rope, wooden pegs, animal bones, and two forms of projectile point fragments. They found 14 coprolites that yielded mitochondrial DNA - genetic material passed on maternally - the team reports
source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/04/03/scipoo103.xml
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