[Regia-NA] FW: Fossilized feces are a veritable trove of human DNA

[rmhowe]

Jeanne/ VÖRÖSHAJÚ SOFFYA (a northern Atlantian of a newly nearly
unpronouncable titular? name) posted:

> "The thing that diabetes and ancient sh **  have in common is that they 
> produce condensation products because of excess sugar,"

 > "A bone now is completely boring to me," Dr. Poinar says. "Because the
 > bone gives the DNA of the organism itself, but the coprolite gives the
 > DNA of the organism, what it ate, of any parasites he may have
 > harboured. I mean it's a plethora of information."
 
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040619/POOP19/TPScience/ 


Thank you for the link, I finally had my curiosity sated as
to why diabetics lose their feet and lower limbs. I wondered.
A sad fact indeed. Never thought to be coarse enough to ask one.
I'm hyperglycemic myself but not a diabetic yet.
Hope I don't become one.

Somehow I think I'll stick with skeletal materials work, that
is -quite- smelly enough for me and SheWhoMustBeCountenanced.

Only the English would think of having scratch and sniff cards
made from genuine [reconstituted] Viking -pongs- for sale at York,
or a giant Viking Pong on display, recently in need of urgent
repair according to an internet archaeology article, as all the
sniffing likely dessicated and crumbled it. A national treasure.
[One would think De Gaulle got too close with his tornado chamber.]
I recall it first was advertised by the Jorvik Viking Center almost
a decade ago proudly on the web.

Of course there is that wonderful moment of reflecting on the
intended recipient's face when he truly realizes just what it is
you've joyfully sent to him, eh?  [Probably where the Irish got
their fractious dispositions from. Love the music. Wonder if
the rapid beat came from the drums warning first of the Normans
and then the English repeatedly.]

But the following is simply going too far:

 > "After two decades as a largely unheralded coprolite crusader,
 > Dr. Callen died in his bedroom-cum-coprolite lab....

See now, this is simply taking faecephilia too damned far, even
for a PhD. In fact this exceeds any PhD I knew in 16 years around
a university, even the most boring of the many anthropologists
I had for classes. Thought I learned all these cultural tidbits
on the web did you? Nah. Some I read in the local newspaper too.

As a teenager I used to get stomach cramps from sleeping in a room
with my oil paintings. It didn't take me two decades to figure out it
was making me sick. Mustard fumes are similar as I discovered when
I filled condiment bottles for the tables at the boarding school's
cafeteria. Would hit me two hours later. Same place.

 > in August, 1970, in the Peruvian mountain town of Ayacucho

Sounds remarkably like a sneeze to me...great for an exile's obituary.
Hell of a place in a place to expire and be thus immortalized.
Hamlet might have been in awe. I wonder if a Dane could even say that.
I find grokking (a la Thora) Swedish easier than Danish by far.

 > during his first coprolite field research trip.
 > His journal, collected by Dr. Bryant, notes that he
 > was running out of nitroglycerin tablets and experiencing chest 
pains. > "I must leave soon," he wrote, and **underlined**, a week 
before his
 > death.

This simply underscores the former above statement I made.
If you are running out of nitroglycerin tablets [Had these as a
medical guinea pig for an FMS treatment.] you don't have the headaches
they cause, and unless something else is more overpowering you should
be more clear headed. If he'd had any sense he would have kicked the
bucket a week earlier on the way DOWN the mountains to get them.

Now, curiously enough the Thames Mudlarks who compete for the best
sewers to dig into for artefacts so deep they are nearly up to their
necks, and reeking to high heaven, cite the apparent fact that their
predecessors cleaning those very drains were notorious for being
long lived and unusually healthy in Victorian London, a place world
notorious for it's filth. This is related in one of the Greenhill
Publishing books on artefacts we medievalists frequently buy
from England.
There is a reason Thomas Crapper is forever immortalized and revered
there - even if he might have borrowed the design. Purely saintly.
[That and whoever found London heating possible with something
other than coal - old what's-'is-name? Yeah - That's the one.]

The Thames Mudlarks would probably have a fit to compete for cleaning
out the Cloaca Maxima in Rome, were it not for the fact that it's been
in continuous use for 2000 years or more. I wonder who they date?
What is outstandingly funny is the opening into the Tiber is a giant
mouth in a face. I guess they loved their politicians as well.
I wonder who it was supposed to be. Surely it was an effigy of
someone in Republican Rome.

 > Since Dr. Callen's death, coprolites have been found to be taxonomic
 > treasure troves, preserving pollen, parasites, algae, viruses,
 > proteins, steroids, seed grains and bones.

Okay, I see viruses made it.  When I took a year and a half of
Life Sciences in early college as a wildlife science major at first, we
were told viruses don't die as they really aren't alive but only
partial strands of DNA called RNA and have a shell they persist in
waiting to come into contact with a cell to cannibalize and multiply.

Marmots in Mongolia, such chewy delicacies, have a history of carrying
the bubonic/pneumonic plague, which is incurable remotely on the
steppes, forbidden in the cities, and kills Mongolians every year.
Yet they love it. This is likely where the 1347-51 plague originated
that killed perhaps a third of England and a lot of the rest of Europe.

Similarly the Archaeologists of London KNOW there are plague pits
out there.  And unlike the remote Mongolians in the Steppes [who do
smuggle the marmots into Ulaan Baatar regardless of law and common
sense] they live in one of the world's most populated cities -
gradually sinking under the weight of them and a little bit of
global warming of the polar regions. Well, you build on a swamp
and heat with sea coal for centuries.

Does this mean that certain British Archaeologists and nutbar
Mongolians come from the same strain? :) Perhaps one should
inspect their young soon after birth for the tell-tail blue
spot above the tail bone (as some Hungarians and Swiss still
have, the remains of Attila's loving little bunch). Of course
marmots (groundhogs) keep digging all the time too.

One of my old issues of London Archaeologist [or Current Archaeology]
has one picture of them in a 5x5x20 foot deep wood-lined cesspit,
assuring us the smell is the same, playing happily as if in a sandbox.
Granted they find neat stuff, but... really. :O
And they have some 18,000 excavated earlier Londoners in storeroom
boxes of the Museum of London and can't keep up with the demand
hardly for yet more rescue excavations. 20 miles of storage shelves?
Somehow I think even Hieronymous Bosch would have found it alarming.
The doomsday horn hasn't blown yet even.

By comparison I should take a nearly side by side Viking barrel well/
barrel cesspit any day to excavate. At least you're not lying in it. :)
Or not so much anyway.

Now a bone I can make some things both pretty and useful from.
But nobody is gonna envy me for playing about with a pong. :)
Not over here anyway.

If I want to play with a coprolite I think it will be a dinosaur
coprolite that is sufficiently stoned. Surely some dinosaurs dined
on hemp. Alice B. Toklas brownies anyone?

Mayhap "them English" amongst us will find the truth humorous this
time. [Witness, with Harrison Ford, for those who missed the reference.]

Humor. Strictly Humor.

Magnus, OL, Great Barony of Windmasters' Hill, Great Dark Horde, Manx,
Regia, and a Curmudgeon - other titles are superfluous.

> VÖRÖSHAJÚ SOFFYA
> Argent, a patriarchal cross between three crescent gules on a chief sable
> three fleur-de-lys Or
> Haus Gebrochen
> Order of St. Roche
> Incipient Canton of Sudentur
> Barony of Stierbach
> Kingdom of Atlantia
> http://community.webshots.com/user/atasetofcreole