200,000 year old human hair found in dung

Palaeontologists found 40 strands of fossilised hair inside samples of coprolite, or fossilised dung, from a cave in South Africa that was used by brown hyaenas.

Until now the oldest samples of human hair were from a 9,000 year old mummy found in northern Chile. It is extremely rare for soft tissue such as hair, skin and muscle to survive more than a few hundred years and only hard tissue like bone is fossilised normally.

But scientists believe the new samples of hair are the remains of an early species of human that was scavenged by hyaenas after death, allowing the delicate hairs to be preserved inside the dung as it fossilised.

They now hope that future analysis of the hairs could help to shed light on exactly which species it came from, the colour of their hair and even the state of health of the person it came from.

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