Artificial Intelligence Gives Researchers the Scoop on Ancient Poop

Everybody poops--and after a few thousand years underground, these droppings often start to look the same. That stool-based similarity poses something of a puzzle for archaeologists investigating sites where dogs and humans once cohabited, as it isn't always easy to deduce which species left behind specific feces. But as a team of researchers writes in the journal PeerJ, a newly developed artificial intelligence system may end these troubles once and for all. Called corpoID--an homage to "coprolite," the formal term for fossilized feces--the program is able to distinguish the subtle differences between ancient samples of human and canine excrement based on DNA data alone, reports David Grimm for Science magazine. Applied to feces unearthed from sites around the world, the new method could help researchers unveil a trove of valuable information about a defecator's diet, health, and perhaps--if the excretion contains enough usable DNA--identity.