FOSSILISED faeces from a cave in Oregon have turned out to be the oldest firmly dated evidence yet of humans in North America. The sample contains DNA linked to early Native Americans of east-Asian ancestry, supporting the idea that people from this area were the first to reach North America.
Carbon dating puts the age of the fossils, or coprolites, at 14,300 years, suggesting that humans reached the Americas some 1200 years before the famous Clovis culture, which spread across North America between 13,100 and 12,900 years ago.
Archaeologists have sought pre-Clovis cultures for decades, and only…
