Feces is the new gold—at least in archaeology. Not only does ancient scat contain 10 times more DNA than bones, it reveals culture with its window into diet and disease. Once ignored, fossilized feces (“coprolites”) are now casting an entirely new light on history.

10Rome’s Dirty Secret

Ancient Rome was known for its sanitation. However, all their hygiene was not enough to stop a plague of parasites. Researchers from the University of Cambridge discovered that Romans suffered from whipworm, roundworm, and even a fish tapeworm. Earlier periods like the Neolithic or the Bronze Age. Romans suffered from ecto-parasites like fleas, lice, and bedbugs at the same rate as Vikings and Medieval Europeans.

Some of Rome’s sanitation practices may have curbed infection, while others increased the spread of parasites. Public bath water was infrequently changed and may have provided a perfect vector for infections. Romans also used human feces to fertilize crops. While it increases yield, fecal fertilization also spreads intestinal parasites. The presence of fish tapeworm is a testament to Rome’s love of raw fish and an uncooked fermented fish sauce known as “garum.”

9Cannibals Of Cowboy Wash

At a Pueblo site in Cowboy Wash, Colorado, researchers discovered human remains in ancient feces. For decades, archaeologists in the area have unearthed bones that appear to be butchered and boiled. However, there has never been definitive proof of the man-eating—until recently. Analysis of these Colorado coprolites revealed the presence of human muscle tissue. The only way it could have gotten there: cannibalism.

The Hopi and Zuni tribes of the region reject the researchers’ findings. Accusations of cannibalism have been used as a pretext for genocide against indigenous people for centuries.

Researchers do not believe that cannibalism was a common practice. They suspect that it was resorted to during a severe drought between 900 and 1150. The brutality reflected in the skeletons went far beyond what was necessary. One of the cannibals even defecated into the victims’ fireplace—the ultimate insult.

8Neanderthal Diet

Ancient feces found at El Salt in Southern Spain casts a new light on Neanderthals. Dating back 50,000, these are the oldest known human coprolites. For decades, Neanderthal sites have been found littered with animal bones. Researchers have long believed they consumed an all-meat diet. However, we now know they balanced their red meat with vegetable intake.

Without DNA analysis, the coprolites cannot be definitively proven human. Some claim they might belong to a large omnivore like a bear. The researchers stand by their analysis, citing the cholesterol levels are human. They theorize that the mastery of fire around 2 million years ago radically altered the human diet in favor of massive meat consumption.

7Hidden Cargo

The Silk Road once transported goods, technology, and religions between China and Europe. Now we know one more thing was traded along the Silk Road: parasites.

Researchers analyzed hygiene sticks from an ancient outpost along the road in Xuanquanzhi and discovered that they contained eggs from Chinese liver fluke. This intestinal parasite requires marshy habitats to live and reproduce.

For decades, epidemiologists have speculated that other diseases, like anthrax, leprosy, and black plague spread along the Silk Road. Evidence started to mount in 2013, when researchers discovered clusters of a genetic autoimmune disease called Behcet’s disease along the route. The Chinese liver fluke discovery was the first definitive evidence that disease was spread along the Silk Road.

6Hannibal’s Crossing

Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps to attack Rome with 30,000 troops, 15,000 horses, and 37 elephants made him one of the most celebrated generals in history. For millennia, no one has been certain of his route. In the narrow mountain pass of Col de la Traversette, southwest of Turin, Italy, recent discoveries in the form of feces prove Hannibal took this road.

Researchers realized that if they dug down to a sediment level dating back to the Punic Wars, they should find a massive amount of horse manure if Hannibal had traveled this way. When they arrived at the layer dating back 2,200 years ago, they discovered the earth had been churned as if many animals had walked over it. Chemical analysis revealed organic material typical in a horse gut, and DNA testing indicated the presence of microbes associated with horse manure. Hannibal’s route was finally unearthed.

5Viking Turd

In 1972, archaeologists at Jorvik Viking site in England unearthed the largest human coprolite. The prodigious specimen measured 18 centimeters (7 in) and provided a window into Viking diet and their parasites. The diet of the Viking consisted almost entirely of meat and grain. The coprolite was full of the eggs of Ascaris lumbricoides, a parasite with a reputation for savagery on par with its host. This worm is known to bore through tissue and can emerge from any orifice—even the corner of your eye.

The investigation into the Viking turd paints a picture of a parasite-plagued world. Ancient people tolerated a level of filth that seems incomprehensible to us today. Based on the amount of eggs in the specimen, experts determine the Viking’s stomach seethed with worms. Unfortunately, in 2003, the prized piece of crap shattered when its display stand slipped from the hands of a teacher.

4Earliest Americans

Coprolites discovered in Oregon’s Paisley Caves are rewriting the history of the earliest Americans. Experts now believe that the Americas were settled 1,000 years before previously thought.

Human DNA extracted from a specimen dates back 12,300 years, challenging the orthodox notion that Clovis people were the first settlers in North America. Radiocarbon dating has revealed spearheads younger than the coprolites but contemporary with the oldest Clovis technology.

Some contested the findings, claiming human DNA contaminated the specimens during the collection process. They also found that the diet of the Paisley Caves inhabitants lacked a human cholesterol signature and contained an herbivore’s level of vegetation. However, the original team repeated their experiment with new samples and got the same result. The findings suggest multiple waves of settlement with the possibility of a coastal migration becoming more likely.

3Crusader Crap

Parasites have been discovered in 800-year-old feces of a crusader castle in Cyprus. In 1192, King Richard the Lionheart of England sold the island to Guy de Lusignan. The new Frankish owner built Saranda Kolones to protect his investment. In 1222, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake rocked Cyprus, destroying most of the fortress. However, the latrines remained intact. Curved to the human form with half-moon openings, the toilets may have appeared elegant, but they were chock full of intestinal invaders.

The ancient feces contained whipworms and giant round worms. A light load of these hangers-on can be little more than a nuisance. However, they can become downright deadly in large quantities. Crusaders were just as likely to die from disease and malnutrition as they were in battle. A heavy parasite load would drastically increase the risk of starvation in periods of scarcity—like sieges and long expeditions.

2Mystery Of Vieques Island

The Pre-Columbian inhabitants of Vieques Island have long been a mystery. This small island off eastern Puerto Rico held two indigenous groups: the Saladoids and the Huecoids. Anthropologists have long debated whether these represented two cultures. Experts believed the Saladoids came from Venezuela, and the Huecoids were from the Bolivian Andes. These theories were speculative and based on craftsmanship. Recent research into coprolites on Vieques Island has finally solved the mystery.

Huecoid feces contained maize and a yeast known for brewing chica, an Andean alcoholic beverage. Experts have long wondered how maize came to the island. They now believe these ancient Bolivian immigrants brought it. Saladoid coprolites contained no maize. They also bore a parasite that affects freshwater fish. The Huecoids were plagued by a marine parasite. These reflect major cultural differences, indicating two distinct people with unique origins. Both groups contributed to the modern Taino Indians.

1Cold Case

Cangrande della Scala was the most powerful man in Verona and the patron of Dante Alighieri. In 1329, just days after winning control of the city of Treviso, he mysteriously fell ill and died. According to contemporary accounts, the sickness came after drinking from a polluted spring. Others suspected murder. In 2004, a team exhumed the warlord’s body to determine the cause of death. X-ray and CT scans revealed arthritis, tuberculosis, and evidence of cirrhosis. However, the breakthrough in the investigation came from a bit of mummified feces.

The nobleman’s dried-out scat contained chamomile, mulberry, and foxglove—a deadly poison. Foxglove—or Digitalis—poisoning exhibits the same ferocious diarrhea, drooling, and seizures della Scala experienced in his final hours. Following the mysterious death, his nephew and successor Mastino II hanged the physician. Della Scala had many enemies. Mastino II might have been one. Researchers are now exploring how fecal analysis could solve more ancient cold cases.

Abraham Rinquist is the executive director of the Winooski, Vermont, branch of the Helen Hartness Flanders Folklore Society. He is the coauthor of Codex Exotica and Song-Catcher: The Adventures of Blackwater Jukebox.

Feces are waste—so they must not be valuable. We just dump it and forget all about it. This is even though some pieces of excrement out there are worth hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. And yet people actually pay sewer and water bills to get rid of their poop.

It’s not just human feces that are valuable, though. Animal excreta actually top the list. Most of the time, this is because their poop contains some material that can be used to make valuable products. In other cases, the poop itself is considered raw material or a valuable piece of history.

10 Ambergris

Ambergris is fecal gold. It’s rare enough that finding a big enough hunk of it can make you an instant millionaire. In 2016, three fishermen from Oman found a 80-kilogram (176 lb) piece of ambergris valued at $3 million. The same year, a UK couple found a 1.57-kilogram (3.46 lb) lump that sold for $70,000.^[1]

Humans have been using ambergris for over 1,000 years. Today, it is considered an important ingredient in the manufacture of perfumes. Centuries ago, people thought it was hardened sea foam or the poop of some large bird. We only got our answers in the 1800s, when whaling ships started hunting sperm whales for their valuable oils.

Sailors discovered that ambergris is produced by sperm whales. It is made of the beaks and other hard parts of squid and cuttlefish that the whales eat. Sperm whales cannot digest these hard parts and vomit them out instead. However, some manage to get into their intestines, where they get covered in ambergris.

The ambergris mass can remain inside the whale for several years until the animal either vomits or poops it out. Some also think that ambergris lumps occasionally become so large that they destroy the whale’s intestine, killing it. There are speculations that ambergris could also be produced by pygmy and dwarf sperm whales because of their similar diet.

9 Piero Manzoni’s Feces

Sometime in 1961, Italian artist Piero Manzoni decided to create some strange artwork with his feces. He pooped in 90 cans, sealed them shut, and put them on sale. He called them Merda d’Artista (Artist’s S–t) and labeled each can “Artist’s S–t, Freshly Preserved, Produced and Tinned in May 1961.” The price was determined by the cost of the same weight in gold.

Manzoni died in 1963, but his poop sells like hotcakes today. Tate art gallery in London acquired one for £22,350 ($30,000) in 2007. The same year, a second can auctioned for £81,000 ($108,000) in Milan. Another one sold for £182,500 ($242,000) in 2016. By 2017, they were worth around $300,000 and will cost millions of dollars within a few years.

Interestingly, Agostino Bonalumi, who worked with Manzoni at the time he canned his feces, said the cans actually contain plaster and not poop. Bonalumi added that Manzoni only called them canned poop because he wanted to prove that art collectors would buy any expensive item labeled as art, even if it is poop.

These claims could be true, considering that Manzoni had an eccentric habit of creating unusual artworks. He exhibited plain white sheets, boiled eggs, and a balloon as art during his life. He also sealed some papers inside a box and called it a work of art. He added that the sealed box should no longer be considered art the moment the seal is broken.

Bonalumi has dared buyers to open the cans to see if they really contain plaster. However, buyers are not interested in opening their cans over concerns that the value would tank.^[2] At least one can was opened in 1989. Its contents were wrapped, however, and the opener of the can did not unwrap them.

8 Elvis Presley

In 2012, light blue underwear worn by Elvis Presley went on auction. One account simply mentions that the underwear was stained around the crotch area, while another explicitly states that it was stained with poop. Elvis Presley wore the underwear under a jumpsuit he donned for a 1977 show.

The auction ended with the briefs unsold after several buyers offered to buy it for £5,000, which was £2,000 less than the £7,000 reserve price.^[3] The auctioneers had hoped it would sell for £10,000.

Other items owned by Elvis Presley were successfully sold at the auction. One was a Bible he had used since 1957. Elvis wrote notes in the Bible and underlined statements he found of interest. The Bible sold for £59,000, way above the expected £25,000.

7 Meter-Long Fossilized Poop

In 2012, an unnamed man dug up a 102-centimeter-long (40 in), brownish-yellow coprolite belonging to an unidentified animal that lived in what is now Toledo, Washington, millions of years ago (between six and 33 million, depending on the source). A coprolite is fossilized fecal matter.

The ancient poop sold at auction for $10,370 in 2014. However, some critics say the coprolite is actually a pseudo-coprolite. Pseudo-coprolites are materials that look like dung but are really something else. Critics think this one was made from volcanic ash that entered a swamp and turned into clay.

Skeptics reached this conclusion because the so-called coprolite did not contain anything that appeared to be digested matter. There was, however, a large amount of siderite, a mineral primarily made of iron. This indicates that it’s just a rock and not a coprolite.^[4]

6 Elephant Dung

The dung of elephants living in Thailand’s Golden Triangle is used to make one of the world’s most expensive coffees. The coffee is called Black Ivory and is made with coffee beans picked from the dung of elephants. The Golden Triangle itself is the area where the Thailand meets with the borders of Laos and Myanmar.

A pound of Black Ivory coffee sold for $500 as of 2012. A cup cost $50. The manufacturer says the coffee has a distinct, non-bitter taste because the beans have been processed by acids in the stomach of the elephant. Their taste has also been altered by the flavor of the sugarcane, banana, and whatever else the elephants consume.

A beer was also been made from elephant poop in 2013. It was called Un, Kono Kuro and was bottled by the Japan-based Sankt Gallen brewery, which marketed it as a chocolate stout, even though it does not contain chocolate but, again, coffee beans picked from the feces of elephants living in the Golden Triangle.

Un, Kono Kuro was quite pricey because the coffee beans are expensive. 35 grams of the elephant-refined coffee beans cost $100. The elephants produce just 1 kilogram of usable coffee beans for every 33 kilograms they consume.^[5] Nevertheless, Un, Kono Kuro sold out within minutes when put up for sale online. Sankt Gallen said they had plans to offer it on tap at their then-new Tokyo location.

5 Guano

Guano is the excreta of seabirds and bats and is used as fertilizer. It was a big deal in the 19th century, when the United States and other Europeans nations did almost anything to get their hands on it. Guano was so valuable that Peru, a major producer, funded most of its budget with the money it made from exporting it.

The United States was so interested in accessing guano that it passed the Guano Islands Act of 1856. The act allows US citizens to seize unclaimed guano-rich islands in the name of the United States. The US president can choose to include the island as a part of US territory and even defend it with military force. The law is still in the books and has never been repealed.^[6]

Peru and Spain also went to war after Spain seized Peru’s guano-rich Chincha Islands in 1864. The two-year-long Chincha Islands War ended with the defeat of Spain by the combined militaries of Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, and Peru. Guano was also an indirect cause of the War of the Pacific (1879–1883) between Peru and Chile.

Peru still mines guano today, even though it no longer funds most of its budget with the money it makes from it. Most of the guano is used by local farmers, while a smaller portion is exported abroad as organic fertilizer.

4 Panda Dung

An Shi was a professor at Sichuan University in China. He was also the inventor of a process that allows farmers to use panda feces as fertilizer for their tea plants, for which he was awarded a patent in 2011. An said that tea made from the panda poop-fertilized plants could prevent cancer. There was a catch, though. He expected a kilogram of the tea to cost $69,000, making it possibly the world’s most expensive tea.^[7]

An said the panda dung fertilizer would work because bamboo prevents cancer. Bamboo is the primary diet of pandas. However, pandas only process 30 percent of the bamboo they consume. They pass the remaining 70 percent out of their bodies in their poop. An maintained that their dung will transfer its cancer-preventing properties to the tea when used as fertilizer.

Scientists were skeptical about An’s claims, though. There is no research to prove that tea grown with panda dung fertilizer can prevent cancer. They also didn’t understand how he arrived at a price for the tea before it was even produced.

3 Civet Cat Poop

Kopi luwak is also one of the world’s most expensive coffees. A cup sold for up to $90 in the US in 2015. In this case, the coffee is made with partially digested coffee beans picked from the feces of the civet cat. The civet cat is not a cat but a close relative of the mongoose.

These days, kopi luwak is made with coffee beans picked from the dung of civet cats reared under inhumane conditions in farms in Indonesia and Philippines. The civets are locked in cages that don’t provide enough room for them to roam around. They are fed with only coffee beans, even though they eat a variety of foods in the wild. The confinement takes its toll on the civets, causing them to behave abnormally. They run around in circles and inflict injuries on themselves.

Most kopi luwak sellers deny knowledge of these claims and insist that their coffee is only made with the poop of wild civets. However, skeptics say that would be impossible because the sellers cannot sustain their businesses with beans picked from the dung of wild civets.

Others say the supposedly smooth taste of kopi luwak is hype and nothing else. Four coffee tasters indicated this during a blind taste test involving six types of coffee, including kopi luwak. The tasters put kopi luwak in fourth place. The first-place coffee was ten times cheaper than the kopi luwak.^[8]

2 Jacu Bird Dung

Jacu bird coffee is yet another expensive coffee made from animal dung. As the name implies, it is made from the poop of the wild jacu bird that lives in Brazil.

Brazilian farmer Henrique Sloper de Araujo invented jacu bird coffee after he noticed jacus from the nearby national park were eating coffee beans in his 740-acre farm in Pedra Azul. Araujo already knew about kopi luwak and thought he could make something similar from the bird. He tracked the birds and checked their poop for undigested coffee beans.

In 2006, he first released jacu bird coffee. Currently, a kilogram of it costs £700. Araujo says the coffee is among the best in the world because the birds only consume the ripest coffee beans. He added that the birds also eat apricots, truffles, and berries, giving the coffee a distinct nut-like taste.^[9]

1 Lloyds Bank Coprolite

In 1972, construction workers discovered a 20-centimeter-long and 5-centimeter-wide (8 x 2 in) piece of human excrement while excavating in order to build a new branch of Lloyds Bank in York, England. Historians say the poop was passed by someone living in the Viking-ruled York sometime in the ninth century.

Historians added that the producer of the feces had intestinal problems and had been unable to poop for several days before dropping this. Tests revealed that he consumed a diet heavy on meat and bread. The poop is valued at $39,000. However, it is not currently for sale and is held at the Jorvic Viking Centre in York.^[10]