Digging in a way Indy never would

One thing about Indiana Jones is you never see him poking around in a pile of old poop.

He has a new movie coming out next month, though, and I suppose anything's possible in Hollywood.

Still and all, I doubt the plot of this fourth film in the series will mire Indy in any sort of excrement save the figurative kind, which the heroic swashbuckler frequently steps into and then miraculously leaps out of.

With a pretty woman clutching his sweaty biceps, usually.

And, in Indiana Jones' case, him clutching his fedora.

Turns out, though, that actual archaeologists, as opposed to Harrison Ford, sometimes get ancient human waste on their hands.

They do this on purpose.

In fact they get pretty worked up about it.

Of course Indy is always being shot at, or trapped in a room where the walls have spikes in them, or punched on the nose, so maybe the scientists who sift through prehistoric latrines, hoping to latch onto something solid, are sharper than I give them credit for.

They get their names in the paper anyway.

Just this month the media in Oregon and elsewhere have spilled a lot of ink over the, well, fully digested material which a team of archaeologists, led by Dennis Jenkins from the University of Oregon, found in a cave near Paisley, in Lake County.

Their discovery is significant, from what I can gather, because it shows that people were living in Oregon – or defecating here, at least — some 14,300 years ago, which is about 1,000 years earlier than the experts who study such things previously believed.

Of somewhat less importance, the findings of Jenkins' team also afforded alliterative-minded copy editors what must be an unprecedented chance to write clever headlines that incorporate the phrases "petrified poop" and "fossilized feces." Even the most casual reader would need an iron will indeed to avoid perusing at least the first couple paragraphs of a story under those bold words.

I didn't know, until I read about the Paisley cave study, that laboratory clinicians can figure out how old human waste is.

I'm not sure how they do this.

I'm sure I don't want to know.

The labs, to give them full credit, did more than just date the samples.

First the researchers tried to extract DNA from the feces to determine whether the producer was human.

They found DNA. And it is human — specifically, with genetic markers distinct to American Indians.

The presence of human DNA elevated the status of the samples from plain old unidentified dung to what archaeologists call "coprolites."

This proved to me a curiosity I had long suspected: If you let anything lay around long enough it will acquire a scientific term that obscures its humble — and in the case of coprolites, distasteful — origin.

The same process transforms a modest pile of Blitz beer bottles and pork-and-beans cans that someone tossed from a Model A into a "cultural resource" that claims a couple paragraphs in a Forest Service or BLM environmental study.

Despite the inevitable scatological silliness that attended the Oregon archaeologists' report — I grinned myself when I typed "old poop" some paragraphs back — I'm quite intrigued by their work at the Paisley caves.

I've knocked around that sprawling sagebrush country a fair amount, and it fascinates me to imagine that people roamed that inhospitable land more than 140 centuries ago.

It must have been a hard life.

Those original Oregonians survived by forging crude weapons from chunks of basalt and obsidian and the feathers of birds. They endured the pitiless desert wind without any garment made by Gore-tex. They didn't have pizza.

The archaeologists — who, you have to concede, got all they could from those coprolites — said samples contained traces of those ancients' foods: horse, bison, squirrels, lizards, small fish and grains from wild grasses.

I prefer beef jerky and cold soda.

When my dad, my son and I spent a weekend in Southeastern Oregon last August my dad even brought a cooler that plugs into a car cigarette lighter, so we had fresh cheese and roast beef. And a place where the chocolate wouldn't melt.

At least one thing, though, seems not to have changed much around those parts in the past 14,000 years.

You can still travel most of a day and not see a single toilet.

The future supply of coprolites, I think, ought to be a sure thing.

Jayson Jacoby is the editor of the Baker City Herald.