Anthropreneur

A cup of civet cat coffee costs some $100 at the Peter Jones department store in London. These mislabeled Southeast Asian felines (in reality a species close to the mangoose) serve as wild connoisseurs. They sniff those rare berries out, eat them and then discharge unprocessed beans for human coffee-lovers to prey on. One could argue that defecation here is only a necessary evil and has no cultural value in its own right.

But look at another example. Nomadic and cattle-breeding peoples use/used dry cow dung (pasture patty, wilson pie, country pancake) and buffalo dung (bufalo chip, meadow muffin, niknik) as fuel, as fertilizer and as a component in adobe bricks. It’s noteworthy that so many verbal metaphors and visual resemblances relate dung to bakery products and fast food.

But my most favorite example comes from the world of scientific discoveries. A team of archaeologists working in South-central Oregon has recently found coprolites (fossilized poop) dated at 12,300 BP (see Gilbert et al. DNA from pre-Clovis Human Coprolites in Oregon, North America, Scientific Express, April 3, 2008). It’s of human origin and contained two different mtDNA genetic sequences identical with some of the modern Native Americans. It’s the major discovery in North American archaeology since Clovis and Folsom projectile points were unearthed by a lucky cowboy in 1926. For decades, archaeologists have waged a war regarding the timing of the settlement of the Americans. Since no securely dated and unmistakably human artifacts and bones were found beyond the 11,500 YPB threshold, many respectable archaeologists have developed a profound scepticism for any claims for the greater antiquity of human presence in the Americas. The old paradigm is now being overturned by the most unlikely find - a piece of old poop. Scholars will continue to debate the reasons as to why there’re so few lithic tools in the earliest American assemblages as well as why fairly complete skeletons continue to emerge in the African Paleolithic but not in the Americas, but it seems to be clear that a holistic approach to life in and out of the marketplace and in and out of the human species, in which nothing is left out or biased against, contains a tremedous potential to move cultures forward.

For the coverage of this piece of news on The Onion see here. I was amazed at how accurate one of their “interviewees” reflects the way Clovis proponents dismiss any pre-Clovis finds: “How can we be sure that some ancient nerd didn’t just carry an already thousand-year-old petrified turd with him when he crossed over the land bridge from Asia?”