Dried human excrement dating back 14,300 years and recently recovered from Oregon's Paisley Caves is apparently the oldest evidence of human DNA ever found in the Americas.

Some fossilized human feces, better known as coprolites, were exhumed by a team of archaeologists led by Dennis Jenkins from the University of Oregon. The archaeologists then did radiocarbon dating on the samples to determine its age.

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The fossilized samples were confirmed to be a thousand years older than the Clovis civilization, a Paleo-Indian people that used to reside in New Mexico around 11,500 years ago.

This ancient site has provided some pivotal information on how the first settlers in North America spread out across the continent, said Jenkins.

According to Eske Willerslev, director of the Center for Ancient Genetics from the University of Copenhagen, this evidence indigenous to the Paisley caves is probably the oldest form of human DNA evidence discovered in North America.

He adds there were other pre-Clovis sites but non-organic material was usually recovered in these archaeological sites.

Archaeologists said the origin of these coprolites is still unclear and they still haven't confirmed from which ethnic group it belongs to. After studying the composition the coprolites, archaeologists were able to deduce these people were probably Siberians or Eastern Asians because of their diet.

After the coprolites were tested in two independent labs, Jenkins and his team discovered these samples contained organic material similar to coyote, wolf and even red fox.

The team also found indigenous threads and plant fibers that provide more evidence of basketry, along with ropes, cords and wooden pegs in the Paisley cave system..

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