5 of the Most Important Poops in History
One guy was so bad at going number two, he accidentally killed three Nazis.
Coprolite: Turds Trapped in Time
Most of the time, we imagine our dook slowly returning to the Earth, to have its atoms upcycled into something like a tree or a human brain. But under the right conditions, a pinched loaf can become fossilized just like any other organic matter. This shit rock is called coprolite, and it allows scientists to peer back in time like Apple’s Time Machine.
Some coprolite memorializes historically embarrassing events, like when an ancient gar fish gnawed on a hunk of dinosaur poop, or when a log of shit fell on an unsuspecting turtle and took an impression of its shell. The more important ones have names — the Lloyd’s Bank coprolite, found during the construction of a British bank, is a slice of Viking mud muffin that taught us a lot about the diet and travel of the ancients. When it was discovered in the 1970s, one paleontologist announced, “This is the most exciting piece of excrement I’ve ever seen. In its own way, it’s as irreplaceable as the Crown Jewels.”
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Indeed, it’s been valued at $39,000.
Sealing in the Flavor From the Middle Ages
A town in Belgium was doing some spring cleaning in 1996, and decided they wanted to spruce up their town square. Buried 12 feet underground, they found a little time capsule from their predecessors: 700-year-old airtight barrels of fudge donkeys. They had turned to coprolite by that point, making them the funniest paperweights in all of Europe. But just to be safe, a team of scientists carefully extracted them, keeping them as close to vacuum sealed as possible.
Why all the fuss over some dusty old sawed-off nut logs? Just as they’d hoped, they found a little bit of wet sewage in the center of those butt rocks, like a horrid little Boston cream donut, and were able to compare centuries-old gut bacteria to modern gut biomes for the first time in history. This allowed them to test a few hypotheses. Startlingly, “the ancient stool had more (antibiotic resistance) genes than modern stool samples,” indicating that modern diets may indeed be tanking our gut health, despite (or because of) the advent of modern antibiotics.
The Poop That Ended a War
Uesugi Kenshin was a 16th-century warlord who changed the course of history over his 48 short years of imperialism and murder. His rise up the ranks of the Japanese military started when he saved the life of his own feudal master, and he became so respected and feared, it was said he could command his army silently through nothing but gestures. Part of his bellicose mantra went: “If you fight willing to die, you’ll survive; if you fight trying to survive, you’ll die.”
He must have been trying to survive one karmically powerful butt dumpling, because he died on the toilet in 1577. He was in the process of amassing troops for an attack on an ally-turned-rival when he sat down for a long winter’s crap. It wasn’t the poop that killed him, though — a ninja assassin had infiltrated his cesspool, and skewered him right in the chocolate starfish when he mounted his throne. It’s also possible that he died of esophageal cancer, but historians haven’t ruled out the katana butt plug.
The Nazi-Killing Courtesy Flush
In March 1944, the Nazis launched the latest addition to their fancy-pants Kriegsmarine, a U-boat lovingly named U-1206. Just over a year later, it would be sitting at the bottom of the North Sea. The cause of death? Extravagant toilets. Late in the war, the Germans were getting a little too big for their britches, and installed high-pressure toilets in their submarines that could flush while deep underwater. They were so complicated, there were specially-trained sailors on board just to flush them properly.
It’s unclear how it happened exactly, but some doofus Nazi stooge had to run and tell his commander the devastating news: someone flushed the toilet wrong, and the ship had sprung a leak, kicking off a chemical reaction that was filling the whole place up with chlorine gas. They had no choice but to come up to the surface for air, where they were immediately bombed to hell by the British. Three Nazis died while evacuating, and the rest were taken prisoner. All this, less than a month before the end of the war.
Picasso Painted With Diaper Biscuits
Pablo Picasso was once asked what he’d do if he were trapped in prison with no access to art supplies. No one knew at the time just how real he was being when he answered “I would paint with my shit.” Painting with poop came somewhat into vogue around the end of the 20th century, largely after Picasso’s death. But in recent years, we’ve found that he had actually quietly pioneered the art of smearing grump juice.
Pablo’s granddaughter, Diana, went on the record in 2016 that her Pup-Pup was a world-class dingleberry fartist: “I would like to deliver a family secret. My grandfather used a cotton with excrement produced by his daughter Maya (my mother), then aged three, to make an apple in a Still Life, dated 1938. According to him, excrement from an infant breast-fed by its mother had a unique texture and ochre colour.”
If you’re curious, I’m pretty sure this is Picasso’s shit apple.
