The DNA tests of some samples turned out to be fossilised human faeces found in deep caves in the Oregon desert have revealed a surprising fact: humans lived in North America 14,000 years ago.

Professor Eske Willerslev, director of the Centre for Ancient Genetics at Denmark's University of Copenhagen has conducted the analysis of the samples and he concluded that they contain two main genetic types of Asian origin that are unique to present-day North American Indians.

This finding is a not just a proof that the American Indians are descendants of the first immigrants to the continent, but is also demonstrates that immigration took place approximately 1,000 years earlier than otherwise believed.

Until now the most accepted theory was that the American continent was populated by people who have migrated from Siberia perhaps in search of mammoth, across the land bridge that once connected Siberia and North America. The migration passed through a corridor that opened up approximately 14,000 years ago in the giant glacier that covered the American continent.

This theory is based on the findings of stone tools from the Clovis culture in soil layers dating back to approximately 13,000 BC, but the new discovery challenges this conclusion.

The oldest of the droppings examined by Professor Eske Willerslev have been carbon-dated to be approximately 14,340 years old.

“Our findings show that there were people south of the ice cap several hundred years before the ice-free corridor developed. The first humans either had to walk or sail along the American west coast to get around the ice cap,” explains Eske Willerslev, and concludes, “That is, unless they arrived so long before the last ice age that the land passage wasn’t yet blocked by ice.”