When archaeologist Bill Lipe returned from a dig in Utah’s redrock canyon country in 1972, he brought with him several bags of treasure. It wasn’t something most people would recognize as valuable; no fine pottery or knapped flints or bone whistles.
Lipe brought back trash filled with hundreds of dried turkey poops.
What caught Lipe’s attention was that turkeys had clearly lived at the site long before Pueblo times. The poops were in layers laid down by Basketmaker II people between 100 BC and 500 AD.
The bulk of the material sat in storage at WSU until 2007, when Brian Kemp joined the faculty. The enthusiastic, fast-talking Kemp specializes in extracting and analyzing DNA from ancient materials.
But Kemp had never worked with non-human DNA before, and when Lipe suggested the turkey poops might be worth a look, he hesitated.
“I have to say, I wasn’t particularly interested in it – until it worked,” Kemp said. “But once it worked, and it worked well, it was like, ohh, this coulg be big.”
Read more from Washington State Magazine about how the story extracted from the trash should give you a new appreciation of your holiday turkey.
