1500 years ago, some people ate live rattlesnakes, went to the toilet to remove snake canines

Around 450, in the Chihuahuan Desert, some brave individual was alone eating a whole rattlesnake snake. At first glance, eating is nothing special but when it comes to looking at what this person is emitting, new scientists are surprised: they find a fang of 11 mm long.

In ancient petrified fossils, archaeologists found scales and solid bones, little bones of rodents and desert grass flowers. Since then, we deduce that the meal of the individual has excreted something, can expand the menu of an entire group of ancient people.

Rattlesnake.

The heat of the desert preserves things we can never think of. When archaeologists dig up the sediments of the Conejo Shelter area, a rocky refuge in the Lower Pecos River Valley in Texas, they find about 1,000 fossil heaps buried in one corner, equal to The evidence shows that this is an ancient toilet. The pile will be a great research target, as it reveals the composition of 1,000 (maybe more) ancient meals.

Conejo Shelter residents are only here seasonally, picking up the available items around the desert to live through the day. Their movement on this barren area must revolve around large water sources: there are three rivers that meet in the lower Pecos River, which are the streams that nurture a lot of plants and rainwater. It can also form into small ponds and lakes.

The downstream area of ​​the Pecos River.

The desert will bring lost food like rodents, rabbits, lizards, and fish, and luckily, there will be some stray deer, eaten with meat will be available plants like wild onions, agave , desert jade tree.

And at the very least, there was an individual who ate a rattlesnake snake, all the snake's bones and bones without even skinning or cooking the snake first.

Here we don't do that, except for this person

In fossil samples dating back more than 1,500 years, archaeologists found 48 solid scales, a long fang and many other bones. Based on the shape of the scales and the length of the canines, this is expected to be diamondback rattlesnake ; Besides, based on the number of scales and bones, it is also possible to guess that this person eats all the snake, from head to tail.

Diamond-backed rattlesnakes can be 1-1.3 meters long, the bad snake's fangs show that it is in the middle of the numbers. Even if the snake is dead, it will still carry a large amount of toxin.

The snake of the bell-ringed snake has a diamond back.

Archaeologist Elanor Sonderman and his colleagues wrote in the report: 'We think that eating a poisonous snake doesn't even appear in the lower Pecos River area or in Conejo Shelter'. Saying so, does anyone have to eat all the poisonous snake like that? In the thickness of history, this is the first evidence that people eat heads of poisonous snakes.

For a long time, many parts of the world still considered snakes as specialties, including poisonous snakes. But also in those areas, people will filter the snake head before cooking, at least give up the effort to peel off the snake skin to eat it well. For those reasons, finding both solid scales and fangs up to 11 mm long in the feces is strange.

We didn't do that here, except for the occasion of the ceremony

Archeology teaches us a great lesson: even in different regions and at different times, people are still strangely alike. However, Sonderman and his colleagues suspect there may be another motive behind this action: just as it was strange at first sight, but probably the procedure of a certain ceremony.

According to the faith of some cultures appearing in this area, including the Hopi and Aztecs, snakes are closely linked to rain, it can bring rain and hide rain.

1. During the Hopi ritual, the dharma teacher will suck the snake's head into his mouth, so that through the snake take the message to the supreme gods, bless as much rain as possible.
2. With the Aztecs, visual evidence shows that during the ritual of praying to the god of the rain, they also keep a snake in their mouths, not sure if they do it like the Hopi, or actually eat the snake for the sake of wind and rain. peace.

Tláloc rain god in imagination.

It is likely that individuals who eat snakes on the other person also participate in a similar rain ritual. If this is the case, the precious dung is evidence of ancient and sacred rituals; Archeology also shows such rare evidence. Only groups of people who live fixedly for such evidence, the group of hunters who gather, live in a nomadic way, do not leave much of the same valuable evidence.

Here we dig up feces for science

'When conducting archeological surveys of living areas of small groups, we rarely get traces of actions, events or people who have lived there', the scientific report writes. The nature of the feces is different, what is it that brings the same action and individual nature, in this case, even the event can be made.

More broadly, based on feces, we know how the campus structure is, the time of discharge is the time of year, what the weather is like.

For example, the individual who ate the snake ate the whole pearl flower, onion and cactus was removed. In the feces with pollen, it shows that the time of eating takes place in spring or summer, it must be raining, the emerald flower can only bloom.

Study the difficult stool, hear from the name you have already seen. Archaeologist Sonderman and colleagues had to cut the manure into two halves, then immerse them in a solution of trisodium phosphate. ' In the process of moisturizing manure, the solution part of the stool turns black, often proving that this is human feces '.

Sadly, since this is feces, it is too dirty and junk to analyze DNA samples. But the form and what's in the feces indicate that this is a large omnivore, and because it is found in the lower Pecos River area, it is almost certainly a 'man-made' product.

Fecal analysis, scientists found pollen, grass, small bones and a large amount of mammalian hairs. Further analysis shows that this is the hair of a small rodent, more likely to be a mouse, and a rat bone also appears in the stool component.

Evidence shows that the whole mouse is not cooked at all, but the team did not think that the snake-eaters directly ate the mice: they thought that the snake eating the mouse, which was badly digested, had a human body. This is eating.

There was also a certain rate that the other person was too hungry to take the dose, but if so, then Sonderman's archeological effort and his partner left the river to the end.

1. Fecal fossil analysis of ancient people