Who would have thought a load of radiocarboned feces found in central Oregon would be key to laying a foundation of when humans first arrived in North America?

But it was indeed feces, of the fossilized variety, that leads to new evidence that North American’s arrived at least some 14,300 years ago—dispelling the common textbook date of origin of around 13,500 years ago.

Several weeks ago an article in Science magazine entitled “The Late Pleistocene Dispersal of Modern Humans in the Americas,” relayed evidence supporting the arrival of American thousands of years earlier as well.

With that and this latest evidence, scientists may have to rewrite those textbook theories of the migration people through the Beringia land bridge, where people were thought to have traveled through ice-free corridors as glaciers broke up.

In the latest findings by archaeologist Dennis Jenkins and team from the University of Oregon, some 700 samplings of fossilized feces found in caves points to the earliest human biological evidence known. They support an earlier migration to a time where the corridors were not yet open.

On top of the carbon dating of the feces, DNA snapshots indicate the people from the cave had a similar genetic makeup closely related to modern Native Americans.

For a very interesting read, check out the below embedded article from Sandi Doughton of The Seattle Times.