What can be learned by studying prehistoric feces?
Most obviously, if you know what people were excreting, you can get a pretty good idea of what they were eating. If you find thorny-headed worms, you know they were eating insects. If you see roundworms, you know there was meat. It’s all part of establishing the relationships between human behavior and environment and the diseases they had. We didn’t end up with all the diseases we have around now by chance. They evolved with us, and we want to know how that happened. So how does that coevolution happen? Diseases change with the environment; there are a couple of historical milestones that illustrate when that relationship is especially evident. One is the move towards urbanization. The Anasazi, a Pueblo group in the American Southwest, began forming villages in caves about 10,000 years ago. When they did, the level of pinworm infection hit about 100 percent. Then when networks of villages appeared along rivers, all of a sudden there were fecal-borne parasites, whipworms, roundworms, a
