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This is Scientific American 60-second science. I'm Bob Hirshan.

A 10,000-year-old archaeological site in central Turkey is helping scientists unlock the region's

P historic past.

That's right.

The salty residue of ancient urine can reveal how and when humans went from hunter-gatherers

to herder farmers,

who kept and raised animals in their settlements.

And so we thought, okay, what's a process that an animal would go through

if it was being kept at the site, whether it's corralled between buildings

or kept in other specific areas?

Archaeologist Jordan Abel from Columbia's Lamont-Dority Earth Observatory.

He's been studying the settlement of a Shikla Hoyek, located on a 16-meter-high mound near Turkey's

Melendez River.

We thought, okay, these animals would be urinating all the time that they were on the mound.

In the dry climate of central Turkey, the sodium, chloride, and nitrates from all that animal excretion would be trapped in the layers of earth onto which they were originally peed.

Excavating those salts layer by layer should provide a timeline of animal populations at the site.

And so we calculated using a simple mass balance approach, an estimate of number of organisms that it would take to produce these large quantities of salt.

...