Ancient feces indicates earlier American origins

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - DNA from ancient human feces found in a cave in Oregon provides biological verification that people were in North America 14,000 years ago, researchers said on Thursday.

The findings, published in the journal Science, add to growing evidence that people were living in the Americas earlier than the once widely accepted date of 13,000 years ago, based on bones from the so-called Clovis culture in the southwestern United States.

"The dates of the coprolites are more than 1,000 years earlier than currently accepted dates for the Clovis-complex," the researchers wrote.

Dennis Jenkins, a senior archaeologist at the University of Oregon, found the dried-out samples in caves known as the Paisley Caves, about 220 miles southeast of Eugene, Oregon, on the eastern side of the Cascade mountain range.

In with the dried-out samples of excrement, known as coprolites, are sinew and plant fiber threads, hide, basketry, cords, rope, wooden pegs and animal bones.

Jenkins got an international team of experts to sample and date the excrement. Two different teams carbon-dated the feces, and others examined the DNA in them.

"The Paisley Cave material represents, to the best of my knowledge, the oldest human DNA obtained from the Americas," said Eske Willerslev, director of the Centre for Ancient Genetics at Denmark's University of Copenhagen, who helped analyze the DNA.

"This is actually, in our view, the first well-supported evidence humans were there," her colleague Thomas Gilbert agreed in a telephone interview. "We have got enough information to say they are from native Americans."