As we saw in last week’s FFF, Spain has some of the best human fossils. Now it also has some of the shittiest. I mean this literally, not figuratively: archaeologists working at at the ~50 thousand year old site of El Salt have found the oldest known human poop:

Party pooper. Left is a picture of the coprolite, right is the inset blown up. Top is regular color, bottom is under polarized light (Fig. 1D from Sistiaga et al. 2014).

Any nerd worth their el salt has surely seen/read Jurassic Park, and will recall that there’s a lot to be learned from poop. Paleontologists even have a technical term for fossilized feces – “coprolite.”  The coprolite from El Salt was excavated from a hearth (if I’m reading “combustion layer” correctly), meaning that 50,000 years ago some jerk Neandertal ruined the campfire and subsequently the whole camping trip. Analysis of the stool’s sterols and (copro-) stanols (the chemical residuals of digesting plant and animal food) adds to previous findings that Neandertals ate plants and not only meat. However, the stanol profile suggests that the majority of the diet came from meat rather than plants. Because coprostanol is created by gut microbes, this study potentially paves the way to reconstructing Neandertals’ gut microbiome. Like I said, there’s a lot to be learned from poop.

The article, by Sistiaga and colleagues and published in PLoS One, contains lots of interesting information about the digestive process that I for one didn’t know. It’s totally open access, so it’s completely free for all. Go read it now!