1,500-year-old feces show what indigenous people in the Americas ate

People living in the Caribbean ate corn and peanuts.

– Who would have thought that something we want to avoid seeing would contain so much information? Gary A. Torrensos says in a press release.

He and his colleagues have studied old feces.

Researchers have discovered fossilized feces at an archaeological dig site in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is in the Caribbean Islands of the United States.

DNA was discovered from plants

Researchers have studied what types of DNA are present in feces. DNA is the code for how all living things are built. All animals and plants have their own code.

Researchers have extracted DNA from many plants. It tells about what the indigenous people of the island ate long ago.

– It’s especially incredible that this is possible after thousands of years, says Torrensos about the discovery.

He is a researcher at the University of Puerto Rico.

Sweet potatoes and chilies

By digging up old traces of people in the Americas, researchers can learn more about how people lived there hundreds of years ago.

Long before Columbus reached the Americas, 1,500 years ago, Europeans began to visit.

DNA analyzes of ten stool samples show that people in Puerto Rico ate a very different diet 1,500 years ago.

They ate corn, potatoes, chilies, peanuts, papaya and tomatoes.

Additionally, the researchers found traces of cotton and tobacco.

Maize, squash and beans were among the food plants cultivated by indigenous people in the Americas before Europeans arrived, according to a previous article on forskning.no. People also used nuts, berries and plants that grew in the forest.

Ancient food plants

Corn, chilies, and sweet potatoes are food plants that originated in the Americas.

It also has tomatoes. Finding DNA from tomatoes was somewhat unexpected, the researchers write. But the tomato may have been brought from the Caribbean mainland along with other food plants.

People in Mexico began cultivating chilies 6,500 years ago. Chili can be used both as a flavoring and as a medicine, the researchers write.

Researchers extracted DNA from tobacco plants. Researchers speculate that people may have chewed the plants or used them in powdered form.

It was a bit surprising that people consumed the cotton plant as it was not a food plant. This plant is used to make cloth.

Cottonseed may have been used in food. Or it may have been caused by wetting the cotton thread with the mouth while weaving.

Groups of two

Fossil feces callIt is coproloved In professional language.

The carpolites in the study belong to two groups native to the Americas, called hughoid and saladoid.

The Saladoid group arrived in the Caribbean between 500 and 600 BC. They practiced agriculture, made pottery and had permanent settlements. According to Wikipedia.

Traces of this culture can be found, among others, in the style of pottery they made.

Between 200 and 300 BC the Huecoid group arrived in Puerto Rico.

These groups lived on Puerto Rico’s Vieques Island for about 1,000 years. This was long before Columbus arrived in America in 1492.

Finding answers in the bathroom

This is not the first time that old feces have been studied.

For example, researchers have studied remains in a 500-year-old toilet in Denmark. They discovered that the Danes were already eating rhubarb and cucumber in the 16th century.

Parasites in old toilet waste can tell about the Viking diet, forskning.no previously wrote.

Not only faeces, but also old vomit has been examined. In 2022, scientists wanted to see what a fish ate based on 150-million-year-old vomit.

Note:

Jelisa Reynoso-Garcia, m. fl.: « Edible plants in pre-Columbian Caribbean coprolites: expected and unexpected data”, PLOS One, October 11, 2023.