Question: What is the benefits of burning elephant poo?

Jennifer Bates answered on 4 Nov 2016:

Burning elephant poo was a useful experiment to think about Palaeolithic (Stone Age) fuel and cooking.

We had a PhD student in our lab who wanted to think about cooking in the Palaeolithic in Europe when it would have been an Ice Age, so too cold for trees. So the main question was: what would the Stone Age people have used for fuel to cook over? We know from modern studies that grass-rich animal dung makes a great fuel, for example in India cattle dung is used as a fuel source. You need an animal that eats only plants (if they eat meat you can get ill because of bacteria) and makes dung that burns well but not too fast. The only animal that would have been around in the Stone Age in Europe that could provide enough grass-rich dung to make a good fire was the woolly mammoth. But there are no woolly mammoths around today to test whether the dung would burn well. The closest animal still living is an elephant, so the student (now a researcher at Southampton) got hold of elephant poo from a zoo and burnt it then looked at it down the microscope to see what it looks like. That way, if we find anything in Stone Age fireplaces that looks like it could be fuel we can test to see if it could be mammoth poo fuel.

Since this work, I’ve been using the burnt poo to practice reference slide making and looking at microscopic plant parts after they’ve been digested by animals and then burnt so even if we don’t find fireplaces we can look at the soil to see if we can find evidence of fires and cooking.

FYI: elephant poo makes a great fuel source, and doesn’t smell when burning, but it smells a lot when left over the weekend in the lab with the windows closed! 😛