This is scientific American's 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

For a long time archaeologists have dug for the shiny stuff, the sorts of artifacts that belong in museums.

They like pots, they like jewelry and gold and stuff like that.

Piers Mitchell, a biological anthropologist at the University of Cambridge.

Mitchell spends his time looking for something decidedly different from such handmade relics.

The thing he seeks?

The preserved piece of human feces.

Copperlites, as they're called, are dried or mineralized pieces of poop.

And Mitchell and his team found some prime specimens

in a trash heap at the ancient settlement of Cattle Hoiac.

That's in modern day Turkey, and dates from 6,000 to 7,000 BC.

Mitchell's team ground up the poop samples with a mortar and pestle,

then dissolve them and used microsives to filter out particles of various sizes.

The presence of certain molecules tipped them off that it was indeed human poop.

And in two of the samples, they found the intact eggs of whipworm,

an intestinal parasite that's far more likely to flourish in settlements than among people who poop and then move along down the road to a new location.

The discovery thus gives us a glimpse of how human health may have changed as hunter-gatherers

started to adopt a stationary agricultural lifestyle.

It's only by looking at these earliest villages, these earliest towns that were set up in the Middle East that we can really start to understand how

when humans change their lifestyle to a different way of getting food, how it can increase

or decrease their risk of different kinds of diseases.

The results are in the journal Antiquity.

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