for National Geographic News It's no load of crap: Scientists
have discovered the earliest evidence of humans in North
America—in 14,300-year-old fossilized feces. The discovery of
the preserved scat fragments, known as coprolites, levels a
major blow against the popular Clovis-first theory of how people
first came to the Americas. Since the summer of 2002, University
of Oregon archaeologist Dennis Jenkins and his research team
have uncovered about 700 coprolite samples from a group of bone-
dry caves in the desert of central Oregon, including several
from humans. After repeated radiocarbon dating and DNA analyses,
the scientists concluded that the oldest of the human-produced
material was deposited at least a thousand years before the so-
called Clovis culture, according to a paper appearing in this
week's issue of the journal Science. "Clearly Older Than Clovis"
The popular Clovis-first model (named for the New Mexico town
where artifacts of a certain type were first found) holds that
humans arrived in North