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FEW people would be pleased to receive a poo in the post, but archaeologist . 鈥淚 receive samples from all around the world,鈥� he says.

Luckily for postal workers, this human excrement is not fresh, but was deposited thousands of years ago. For Mitchell and others, these ancient faeces record some of the key moments in humanity鈥檚 history, revealing aspects of lifestyles that traditional archaeology cannot. From hygiene habits to the emergence of farming, our lives are logged 鈥� if you鈥檒l pardon the pun 鈥� in our poo.

In the past, archaeologists were inclined to ignore the contents of ancient latrines or mummified bowels, but the application of modern chemical analysis has begun to change that. The , for example, suggests that ancient humans were burning fires and clearing forests.

Yet most lifestyle insights are coming from the critters inside preserved poo 鈥� specifically, the eggs of parasitic worms that once wriggled around in the gut. 鈥淲orms were an everyday reality in the past,鈥� says Andrew Jones, a bio-archaeologist from the University of York, UK. And the results were often grim. 鈥淚n the worst cases they became very obvious, with 30-centimetre-long worms migrating out of every orifice in the body 鈥� even the corner of the eye.鈥�

Take the bladder fluke. The parasite lives inside freshwater snails but, once matured, can burrow under a person鈥檚 skin if they are in the water too. Hunter-gatherers and early farmers appear not to have been bothered by the bladder fluke, but then suddenly people became more susceptible. What changed?

Mitchell, who is at the University of Cambridge, has studied what may be the earliest known case of bladder-fluke infection, in the bowel remnants of a 6500-year-old skeleton from Tell Zeidan, an ancient settlement in Syria. 鈥淲e think it could be associated with the first irrigation systems,鈥� he says. 鈥淥nly people who wade in warm, slow moving fresh water can contract the bladder fluke.鈥� If true, this would push back the earliest evidence for irrigation by a millennium.

To be sure, there are reasons why Mitchell could be wrong in his irrigation interpretation. People could simply have got the worm from, say, fishing in natural ponds. And while all archaeological evidence is scant from this period, if irrigation had been developed so early, it seems odd that nobody has found signs of irrigation channels. Indeed, Mitchell remains cautious until he has more samples. The point is, he says, the poo has raised a tantalising lead for investigation.

Going back further in poo history, archaeologists have spotted a significant change that occurred when people began to farm the land. Samples of ancient hunter-gatherer excrement have very few parasites in them 鈥� less than 1 per cent were infected. But by 7000 years ago, faecal worms such as roundworm and whipworm had proliferated. Both parasites inhabit the gut and lay eggs, which surf down the intestines on a brown tide. In the outside world, the eggs remain viable for up to 10 years, waiting for an unsuspecting animal to eat them. Inside a cosy new gut the eggs hatch and the cycle continues.

So what changed with agriculture? 鈥淩oundworm and whipworm are indicators of filth,鈥� says . Around this period, people began to huddle in communities. Taking a dump wherever you chose was no longer an option, so pits were established. With no one washing their hands, both roundworm and whipworm eggs didn鈥檛 have to wait long to hitch a ride back inside the human gut.

As if this wasn鈥檛 bad enough, farmers gave the worms a boost. 鈥淪preading human and animal waste on fields predisposed entire cities to faecal worm infection, with the parasitic eggs being consumed on unwashed and uncooked vegetables,鈥� says Reinhard.

Not everyone buys into the filth-and-farming theory. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 think the parasite evidence is strong enough to draw these lifestyle conclusions,鈥� says Jones. He argues that hunter-gatherer faecal samples are rare, and their parasites might be absent because they have decayed. 鈥淭oday we see that great apes, living a 鈥榟unter-gatherer鈥� lifestyle, suffer from infestations of the same species of faecal parasites as humans. I鈥檓 convinced that our natural condition is to be colonised by whipworm and roundworm,鈥� he says.

Reinhard and his colleagues disagree, arguing that they have well-preserved samples from all eras. However, they have been puzzled by a vast number of .

Since the 1980s, Reinhard and his colleagues have scoured ancient poo samples from early farmers in Chile, Peru, Brazil, Mexico and North America, but none have turned up the vast quantities of roundworm and whipworm eggs seen in ancient European faeces.

Bowel movements

At first they wondered if the parasites had failed to reach the Americas, but that changed after the discovery of the occasional whipworm in 7000-year-old American faecal samples. Instead, Reinhard and his colleagues think that the New World farmers protected themselves from infection. 鈥淲e think the sanitary conditions and lifestyle of the early farmers in the Americas was quite different to the Europeans,鈥� says Reinhard鈥檚 colleague Adauto Araujo, who is based at the National School for Public 午夜福利1000集合 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

So what did the first American farmers do differently? For starters, population density was lower than in Europe. The American faeces also contained signs of medicinal plants, which were effective in treating parasite infections, says Reinhard. But perhaps most important of all, it appears early American farmers didn鈥檛 spread excrement over their fields.

Unfortunately, this more sanitary way of life was not to last. During the 15th century, Europeans began to colonise the Americas, imposing their filthy ways. Cesspit samples from towns, such as Albany in New York, show a rapid increase in whipworm and roundworm infections soon after the colonists arrived.

It took until the 19th and early 20th century before faecal parasites were brought under control in Europe and the Americas, with the introduction of sewer systems and a greater awareness of hygiene.

Parasite-free modern poo, then, is unlikely to offer archaeologists in the future the same route to lifestyle insights about our habits. Still, they would be able to glean valuable information through chemical analysis. 鈥淭hey will be intrigued by the diversity of foods eaten in our diet, astonished by the amount of meat consumed and astounded at how little fibre we ate,鈥� says Jones. 鈥淭hey will probably correctly conclude that Western people were generally constipated and obese.鈥�

These future archaeologists, then, may well frown upon our unhealthy ways in the same way we do about our filthy ancestors. It鈥檚 a good bet, though, that they would still be delighted to receive a poo in the post.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淭he early turd鈥︹��