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  [Main_dog_1280p.jpg?itok=rd6Ns9HV]

  Dogs—like this ancient Roman pooch—may have left their “mark” in the
  archaeological record.
  Paul Williams/Alamy Stock Photo

The archaeological record is full of dog poop

  By [11]David GrimmApr. 17, 2020 , 7:00 AM

  In 1981, then–graduate student Melinda Zeder was sorting through animal
  bones from a Paleolithic cave in southwestern Iran when she came upon a
  fragment she couldn’t identify. “When you can’t tell stone from bone,
  you place your tongue on it,” says Zeder, now an archaeozoologist at
  the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. “If
  it’s bone, it will stick.”

  The object didn’t stick. In fact, it began to dissolve on Zeder’s
  tongue. Puzzled, she turned to her more experienced colleague and asked
  what he thought it was. “Oh,” he smiled. “That’s hyena poop.”

  Such ancient feces can hang around for thousands of years, even
  retaining their original shape and color. And archaeologists can
  typically differentiate human from animal poop, based on size and other
  attributes. But doggy dung, it turns out, is remarkably hard to
  distinguish from the human kind—something that can stump researchers
  trying to reconstruct what ancient people ate.

  “When I give talks, I ask audiences to guess,” says Christina Warinner,
  a molecular archaeologist at Harvard University. “They always guess
  wrong.”

  Now, Warinner and colleagues have developed a tool based on artificial
  intelligence that they claim can accurately tell human and dog
  “paleofeces” apart. And after analyzing more than a dozen samples
  spanning thousands of years, they’ve come to a surprising conclusion:
  The archaeological record is full of dog poop.

  “There’s a lot of really great things you can do with this,” says
  Zeder, who calls the new work a “leap forward.” If refined, she says,
  the method could help reveal key milestones in dog domestication.

  None of that was on Warinner’s mind when she started to
  ask archaeologists around the world for samples of ancient human feces.
  She studies how the [12]human microbiome—the vast populations of
  bacteria that inhabit our intestines—has changed over time. Such
  changes are influenced by where we live and what we eat and have been
  linked to diseases including arthritis and obesity. They also leave
  traces in our feces.

  The samples Warinner received baffled her, however. “We thought all of
  them were human,” she says. “But the data we got back were really
  strange.”
  [internal_MaxPlankPressRelease__1280p.jpg?itok=TqDuQUqy]

  Dog feces recovered from a 7000-year-old Chinese farming village.
  Jada Ko/Anhui Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology

  Human paleofeces can contain traces of canine genetic material because
  some people ate dogs. And dog excrement can contain traces of human
  DNA, because dogs sometimes eat human poop. But when Warinner’s team
  analyzed genetic material from the excrement—some of it in a fossilized
  form known as a coprolite—a few of the samples contained so much canine
  DNA that they could only have come from dogs.

  Seeking a better way to distinguish the two, Warinner turned to one of
  her graduate students, Maxime Borry, who’s working toward a Ph.D. in
  bioinformatics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human
  History. Borry amassed all the DNA from the fecal samples, which
  included not only human and dog genetic material, but sequences from
  microbes, plants, and anything else in the owner’s intestines. He then
  trained a [13]machine learning program—which learns to make
  correlations among massive amounts of data—on modern samples of human
  and dog excrement.

  The researchers applied the resulting program—christened coproID—to 13
  samples, ranging from dung recovered from a 7000-year-old Chinese
  farming village to a 400-year-old home in southern England. They also
  tested seven control samples: sediments that did not contain feces but
  were from places feces might be found, including ancient garbage piles
  and the pelvic cavities of human skeletons.

  The program classified all the control samples as unlikely to be feces.
  It also confidently identified seven of the ancient poops—[14]five as
  human, two as canine—the team reports today in PeerJ. The genetic
  profiles of three other samples suggest they came from canines as well,
  Warinner says.

  One of the most surprising finds was from the 17th century British
  home. During a renovation in the 1980s, workers had come across a
  chamber pot—complete with its “deposit”—near the original roof. They
  sent it to a local museum, where it sat for decades with the label
  “Three Human Coprolites.” But coproID reported that the feces came from
  a dog.

  “How it got there, who can tell,” laughs Kate Britton, an archaeologist
  at the University of Aberdeen, who sent the chamber pot specimen to
  Warinner. She suspects that either some postmedieval owner was too lazy
  to take their dog for a walk, or the renovators were playing a prank.

  Zeder hopes the new approach will offer insight into the evolution of
  the human-dog relationship. We domesticated dogs more than 15,000 years
  ago, but exactly when, where, and how this happened [15]remains a
  mystery. At some point, she says, our canine pals evolved from
  carnivorous wolves to omnivorous dogs as humans began to feed them
  table scraps. Using feces to mark how the dog microbiome—and then
  genome—evolved to process these new foods could reveal milestones in
  the human-canine relationship. “The ability to track this through time
  is really exciting,” she says.

  Still, Ainara Sistiaga, a molecular geoarchaeologist at the University
  of Copenhagen, says the approach isn’t quite ready for prime time.
  Sistiaga, who has studied the feces of everything from dinosaurs to
  Neanderthals, notes that the canine data used to train coproID came
  exclusively from Western dogs that ate pet food—hardly a diet of
  ancient times. That may be why the program struggled to identify some
  of the dog excrement. “The more data we put in, the more useful this
  tool will be,” she says.

  In the meantime, Borry is getting used to his new identity as “the guy
  working on dog poop.” At a recent departmental retreat, he says,
  Warinner gave everyone a pop quiz, and Borry’s team lost. His
  consolation prize: a plastic dog that poops Play-Doh. “I don’t really
  think it was a prize for losers,” he says. “She just really wanted to
  give it to me.”

  Posted in:
    * [16]Archaeology
    * [17]Plants & Animals

  doi:10.1126/science.abc2721
  [18][Grimm_David_PF1.jpg?itok=LBiF4-On]

[19]David Grimm

  David is the Online News Editor of Science.
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