It’s true. I usually write about local crap. But not like this.
Last week a team of international scientists, including UO Museum of Natural and Cultural History senior archeologist Dennis Jenkins, published findings about some crap they found in the Paisley Caves in Central Oregon. In a way this is just ordinary crap that we flush every day – some human took a dump in a cave.
Looking at it from another perspective, however, this team of academics studied the six pieces of poop – also known as coprolites – and determined that these feces-cum-artifacts are actually 14,300-year-old evidence of human inhabitance of the Americas. Radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis provides the basis for the team to make claims that this is the oldest DNA evidence found in the “New World,” and that its genetic path leads back to Siberia or Asia. This in itself may be just another load of crap to some researchers.
A DNA study published in mid-March on the online journal PLoS One claims that most Native Americans can trace their ancestry to six women, and that those six “apparently did not live in Asia because the DNA signatures they left behind aren’t found there.” Instead the researchers claim that they probably migrated 20,000 years ago from “Beringia,” which is now under the waters of the Bering Strait.
So this story of local crap found in a cave may be the evidence of what humans were eating and doing here in what we call Oregon; or it may be a story of what we as contemporary people are wondering about ourselves. The connection of our existence and our DNA to humans of one or two millennia past may belie the facts of who we are, or the ways in which we ask where we came from.
My students and I are carrying on a three-week discussion about origins in the composition class I teach at the University. On Monday I asked my students whether or not there is a direct connection between our individual bodies and the terrestrial body of Earth, in the context of whether actions we take that impact the Earth results in impacts upon ourselves.
There was a general silence.
I don’t know if this was a result of the 9 a.m. class time, general disinterest, or if the question came across as rhetorical. After another prompt they voiced a concurrence on the reality of the concept that our world and existence is not a compartmentalization of human and nonhuman, unnatural and natural, but one continuous interwoven chain of reactions.
We went on to discuss, in short form, the idea that testing nuclear weapons in Utah and Nevada could result in parallel effects in both Earth’s environment and Earth’s self-righteous inhabitants; or if humans could cause the release of radiation yet remain insulated from atmospheric fallout and resultant cancer. If a team of scientists 14,000 years from now finds some crap from the 1950s, they will probably try to ask the same questions about origin, continuity and the relevance of what is present in the coprolite, be it digested plant matter, DNA or radiation.
In a world in which truth of human origin and existence is claimed and determined by science as a way to address our own contemporary situations, we may be overlooking more mundane universalities. Despite all the time that has passed since the theorized land mass of Beringia, we still do so many of the same things. We eat, we look for shelter, we exist between our origin and our destination and we poop.
So, if so much has stayed the same, what is the core of what has changed? The implied and touted progress of modernity has been promoting egalitarian society, humanity free from poverty and injustice of other humans, and nature at work for humans, human nature in tune with itself.
However, we seem to be stuck with the paradox that human nature is perhaps the most unnatural “thing” of all, as we consider the anonymous cave pooper of 12,292 BCE more natural than the hypothetical Utah pooper of 1950 with Uranium 238 in his crap. Both are leaving evidence of their world, evidence of themselves, and as such the pooper of 1950 leaves evidence of humankind’s attempt to dominate the “nature” of the atomic structure.
In the tale of these two poops there is no physical separation between humans and “nature,” because the concept of humans being apart from the rest of existence is a cognitive invention. We are evidence of our environment as much as we are evidence of our actions.
That is why the coprolite team can determine what that human ate and what grew in that environment before it became the desert it is today. And that is also why, as we examine that old crap, we should consider the questions we assume we’re asking, and see if there is evidence of what we are in the fresh crap we flush every day. We will never definitively determine our origin, but in asking, we need to consider why it is more interesting – and safer perhaps – to wonder where we came from than where we are.
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