Oldest Human Hair Found in Hyena Poop

By Queuebot in Science & Tech on Feb 12, 2009 at 8:15 pm

Paleontologist Lucinda Blackwell and her colleagues at the University of Witwatersrand were digging in Gladysvale cave, South Africa, when they came upon a sensational find.

In the fossilized hyena waste they collected they found the remains of human hair dated 195,000 to 257,000 years ago! This predates the earliest known sample of human hair by 200,000 years.

She and her team removed a 9.8-inch block of calcified hyena waste from a brown hyena latrine found in the cave. Such latrines are only used by one animal and are typically demarcated areas that measure about 6 feet round in size.

The researchers then extracted 40 hairs from a single coprolite using fine tweezers. Although amino acid analysis detected no protein, and DNA sampling was not possible, very high magnification revealed that the size and shape of the hairs, along with their distinct cuticular scale patterns, best matched those of human hair.

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Geekazoid.

Tags: Fossil, hair, hyena

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Frau
Feb 12th, 2009 at 8:15 pm
I voted neat, because I just learned somethig about hyenas.
R
Feb 13th, 2009 at 2:35 am
Evolution is a farce. Really search it our for yourself. Don’t let the majority rule your life and mind.

One other thing the numbers don’t quite match up.
Doesn’t surprise me, all their dating techniques are seriously flawed and unreliable.
Wok
Feb 13th, 2009 at 3:18 am
@ R:

Yes R. And Aliens are real, 9/11 was a hoax, Jesus and Elvis live together in Area 51, and we never landed on the moon.

Quiet, the Illuminati will hear you.
DOJ
Feb 13th, 2009 at 3:56 am
195,000 > 200,000
darlzwik
Feb 13th, 2009 at 5:52 am
“Yes R. And Aliens are real, 9/11 was a hoax, Jesus and Elvis live together in Area 51, and we never landed on the moon.

Quiet, the Illuminati will hear you.”

Evolution makes sense if you believe something can come from nothing. Just because you don’t believe in Darwinism, doesn’t mean you believe in all of Wok’s inflammatory, buzz word, off the subject, ad homonym, distracting, and emotionally inspired red herrings. When you have to defend Darwinism with crap like that, it just shows me that for you, it’s just a religion. (Your Truthiness) Screw Darwinism. Screw religion. Screw truthiness.
Behemoth
Feb 13th, 2009 at 8:07 am
argh!

It’s disappointing that a fairly interesting article on a pretty ‘neat’ blog is spoilt by religious spouting.

How do you or anybody else know there was nothing? Were you there?

Think about it.

Lets just enjoy Neatorama.
col
Feb 13th, 2009 at 11:22 am
Jebus put it there to confuse scientists.
jbh
Feb 13th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
darlzwik:

You seem to be confusing evolution (species changing over time) with abiogenesis (the origin of life). Evolution is not about something from nothing, it’s about living things changing over time.

It’s a very common misconception that evolution has anything to say about where life came from in the first place. It doesn’t. While we have some clues about how life came about on our planet, it is true that this is still something of a mystery. Happily, unknown does not equal unknowable; we’ll figure it out eventually!
Jared
Feb 15th, 2009 at 4:29 am
Yeah, just had to add my 2 cents to the verbal diarrhea of religious arrogance.

Like jbh said evolution has nothing to do with the creation of life. Abiogenesis, physics, chemistry… these are all our good efforts.

To speak of something from nothing is little more than parroting western philosophy of greece, much of which has dictated the translations of the bible. This same philosophy was a foundation of numbers (dating from the egyptian finds of geometry, to Pythagoras and Aristotle), that excluded the number zero from mathematics for centuries… a serious drawback in the acceleration of mathematics, science, and technology. Had this philosophy never existed Greeks would have very well discovered calculus, and solved Zeno’s paradoxes with simplicity. Point being this flawed philosophy is still holding modern progression back.

If god is infinite, what excludes the universe from such a luxury?

Lastly… what numbers don’t add up? I only have a few ideas at what you’re trying to get at.

4.5 billion > 6,000 years (TOTAL MELTDOWN!)?
Alejo Hausner
Feb 17th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
You guys are all missing the point. The interesting question is, how did that hair get into hyenna poop? Who was the unfortunate human victim?
Owen
Sep 26th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
You know something I came to realize was that when I was a little boy, and ignorant, I was told to believe in God. So I do this, but not under my love of him, it was my fear of him. Being told that if I don’t believe I will be externally punished. That is an awful thing for the creator of man to do. Religion is for either the ignorant, or simply the scared. Scared that when you die you simply rot and turn to dust, but that is not the point. The only question you should ask is did I live life well, not will I get to go to heaven. That is all you Christians do is worship under fear, fear of nothing. And if God truly does exist then he should let all religions into his kingdom, because I know for one if you are born atheist you will probably end up atheist without being told to believe in God. Oh and evolution has been proved through carbon dating. If you don’t know what that is look it up, evolution is the answer. The north and south poles are also huge proofs. Not to mention the dinosaurs, and even just our genes. Their is in fact a reason why we all have different color hair and it is not magic. So ask yourself this question and really ask, is it that you believe in God, or is it that you want to believe in God?

Oh and to quote Gandhi “I like your Jesus, but I don’t like your Christians.”

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