The Origin Of The Feces

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Many water-based sewage systems we use today continuously over-enrich waterways, contributing to toxic algal blooms and coastal marshes’ decay.

Harhangi, HR; Le Roy, M; van Alen, T; Hu, BL; Groen, J; Kartal, B; Tringe, SG; Quan, ZX; Jetten, MS; Op; den Camp, HJ (2012). "Hydrazine synthase, a unique phylomarker with which to study the presence and biodiversity of anammox bacteria". Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 78 (3): 752–8. Bibcode: 2012ApEnM..78..752H. doi: 10.1128/AEM.07113-11. PMC 3264106. PMID 22138989. Some fans say this is a fake live album and don't consider it their second studio album, instead they say that their next album, Bloody Kisses, is their second studio album (instead of their third), October Rust is their third (instead of their fourth), etc. CHRISTINA WARINNER: Exactly. They almost always come from some sort of context that’s extremely dry or frozen. So places like dry caves in the American southwest or in northern Mexico, or salty deposits in mountainous areas. Those are typically where we find coprolites. The health of soil ecosystems has always depended on their having sufficient concentrations of nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, and carbon, as well as some other nutrients like iron, magnesium, and sulfur. Without these elements, the plants can’t build their cell walls or convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. The richest soils, coveted by farmers and gardeners worldwide, have always been high in these basic nutrients. By contrast, aquatic and marine environments have evolved to be low on these elements. And that’s fine. For aquatic ecosystems, an overabundance of these elements isn’t a good thing. Many water-based sewage systems we use today continuously over-enrich waterways, contributing to toxic algal blooms and coastal marshes’ decay. The Palace at Knossos, Crete via Wikimedia Commons So part of this study was coming up with a systematic way of separating those so that we could focus on the human feces and understand this evolutionary process. But then, it also gave us a new window into dogs, which are some of our oldest friends. And how they have adapted and lived alongside us over the same period of time.pure". Oxford English Dictionary (Onlineed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.) n., 6

KATHLEEN DAVIS: You recently studied a problem that apparently plagues coprolite researchers. Human coprolites can be confused with those from other species. How does that happen?

But for the Minoans and those who came after them, water was what kept the city clean. They built the first ever, simple yet functioning, version of a flushing toilet and a sewage system. Four thousand years ago, the Palace of Minos in Knossos had a cleaning system in which rainwater from the roof was gathered and used to flush the sewage from three bathrooms in the east wing. A sophisticated water system directed different sources of wastewater into pipes underneath the floors, which then joined together to form a large underground channel that also disposed of toilet contents. The Minoans commonly used ceramic pipes, shaping the pipe ends so that the pieces fit tightly into each other. The pipes’ upper parts had openings covered by ceramic lids, allowing for cleaning. Just like our modern plumbing, the Minoan pipes occasionally clogged, so the underground sewers came equipped with manholes for cleaning, maintenance, and ventilation and were built large enough for service workers to enter them. There are many synonyms in informal registers for feces, just like there are for urine. Many are euphemistic, colloquial, or both; some are profane (such as shit), whereas most belong chiefly to child-directed speech (such as poo or the palindromic word poop) or to crude humor (such as crap, dump, load and turd.). IRA FLATOW: That was sci-fi producer Kathleen Davis speaking with Dr. Christina Warriner, assistant professor of anthropology at Harvard University. So the smells of CAFOs are smells of modern industrial agriculture, different from manure in both quality and significance. They’re still organic, manifestations of the basic workings of living things, but they’re the smells of a rupture in the system that in nature and traditional agriculture returned matter and energy from the soil to the soil. They’re the smells of organic matter and energy isolated and withheld from the broad cycle of life on Earth. Dittmar, Heinrich; Drach, Manfred; Vosskamp, Ralf; Trenkel, Martin E.; Gutser, Reinhold; Steffens, Günter (2009). "Fertilizers, 2. Types". Ullmann's Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry. Weinheim: Wiley-VCH. doi: 10.1002/14356007.n10_n01.

Stromberg, Joseph (22 January 2015). "Everybody poops. But here are 9 surprising facts about feces you may not know". Vox. Archived from the original on 17 November 2019 . Retrieved 3 December 2019. And then, of course, we also have dietary DNA that’s present. And this can provide a real important window into what people eat in the past.a b c Tortora, Gerard J.; Anagnostakos, Nicholas P. (1987). Principles of anatomy and physiology (Fifthed.). New York: Harper & Row, Publishers. p. 624. ISBN 978-0-06-350729-6. Elephants, hippos, koalas and pandas are born with sterile intestines, and require bacteria obtained from eating the feces of their mothers to digest vegetation. CHRISTINA WARINNER: So that is the focus of a study that we’re still doing. I mean, we found some basic information. So, for example, from the human feces, we’re able to reconstruct aspects of information about those individuals. We could tell if they were male or female. We could reconstruct their ancestry profile and show that it matched the region of the world that they came from. And in those cases, they still retain the original bacteria the original human DNA and the original dietary DNA. Those are the ones we’re trying to focus on.

Immediately annoying as they are, the smells of animal excrement are also tokens of an otherwise largely insensible but existential crisis for much of life on Earth. They’re a reminder of the inescapable reshuffling of matter and energy that keeps the great game of complexity going. The stench of the modern feedlot signals the fateful move by which Hero Carbon, the most gregarious and constructive of chemical elements, has managed to vault to new levels of invention, but at the price of devastating much of its achievement to date. That move was the arrangement of carbon chains into Homo sapiens, animals capable of mobilizing matter and energy on an unprecedented scale, and thereby damaging intricate ecosystems across the planet. Langley, Leroy Lester; Cheraskin, Emmanuel (1958). The Physiology of Man. McGraw-Hill. Archived from the original on 1 August 2020 . Retrieved 3 December 2019. The white, polished marble bench seats with a row of holes in them, foricae remains may look beautiful and clean to us today, but that was hardly the case when these facilities were operational, Koloski-Ostrow says. They had low roofs and tiny windows that let in little light. People sometimes missed the holes, so the floors and seats were often soiled and the air surely stunk. Overall Koloski-Ostrow thinks the facilities were so unwelcoming that the Roman elite would use them only under great duress. The upper-class Romans, who sometimes paid for the foricae to be erected, generally wouldn’t set foot in these places. The appearance of human fecal matter varies according to diet and health. [11] Normally it is semisolid, with a mucus coating. A combination of bile and bilirubin, which comes from dead red blood cells, gives feces the typical brown color. [1] [2] Curtis V, Aunger R, Rabie T (May 2004). "Evidence that disgust evolved to protect from risk of disease". Proc. Biol. Sci. 271 (Suppl 4): S131–3. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2003.0144. PMC 1810028. PMID 15252963.The ability to accurately identify the source of archaeological feces enables the direct investigation of changes in the structure and function of the human gut microbiome throughout time, which researchers hope will provide insights into food intolerances and a host of other issues in human health. "Identifying human coprolites should be the first step for ancient human microbiome analysis," says the study's first author, Maxime Borry. Editors’ Note: This article has been updated to reflect the fact that the city of Harappa is located in Pakistan, not India. So part of what we were trying to do was to look for human feces from different points in time and try to understand how it had changed in response to different new human social behaviors. What we found along the way was also all the dog poop mixed in.