Dogs—like this ancient Roman pooch—may have left their “mark” in the archaeological record. By David GrimmIn 1981, then–graduate student Melinda Zeder was sorting through animal bones from a Paleolithic cave in southwestern Iran when she came upon a fragment she couldn’t identify. “When you can’t tell stone from bone, you place your tongue on it,” says Zeder, now an archaeozoologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. “If it’s bone, it will stick.”The object didn’t stick.
In fact, it began to dissolve on Zeder’s tongue. Puzzled, she turned to her more experienced colleague and asked what he thought it was. “Oh,” he smiled. “That’s hyena poop.”Such ancient feces can hang around for thousands of years, even