National Geographic News, Reporting Your World Daily

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Photo: Oldest Human Hair Found in Hyena Poop Fossil?


Email to a Friend	<< Back to Full Story

The oldest known human hair could be the strands found inside a roughly 200,000-year-old piece of fossilized hyena poop, a January 2009 study says.

Based on the size and shape of the rock-hard dung, researchers think it came from brown hyenas, like the one seen above in Botswana, that scavenged the remains of an early human ancestor.

Photograph by Beverly Joubert