Hey Lautif from Radio Lab here, we are partnering with the International Astronomical Union to give you a chance to name one of Earth's quasi-moons.

And this isn't like the naming a star after your dead pet kind of thing.

This will be the official forever name of this guazzi moon.

Submit a name now through September or vote on the name you like best in November. It's your chance to leave your mark on the heavens.

Go to Radiolab.org slash Moon to find out more.

This is Scientific American 60 Second Science. I'm Bob Hirschon.

A 10,000 year old archaeological site in Central Turkey is helping scientists unlock the region's pea 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 corrral between buildings or kept in other specific areas.

Archaeologist Jordan Abel from Columbia's

Lamont-Dorre Earth Observatory.

He's been studying the settlement of a Schickle Hoyak, 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

...