Knife Fashioned From His Own Feces

A survival story in the 1998 book "Shadows in the Sun," inspired anthropologist Metin Eren to try to make a pocketknife out of his own frozen feces.

An example of a 'hand-shaped' frozen poop knife. (Submitted by Metin Eren)

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A Canadian book inspired Metin Eren to become an anthropologist — and to fashion a knife out of his own carrion.

When Eren first heard aboutShadows in the Sun by Canadian anthropologist Wade Davis, there was i story in the volume that stuck with him. It was about an Inuit human being who, under extreme circumstances, managed to forge a sharp blade from his own frozen carrion.

To Eren, information technology was fascinating. But was it feasible? Even under ideal circumstances, could you lot really fashion a performance blade out of poop?

As Information technology Happens host Carol Off spoke to Eren, an archaeologist at Kent State University in Ohio, about his decision to finally put the heroic story to the exam. The report was published in the Journal of Archeological Scientific discipline: Reports.

Here is part of their conversation.

Offset of all, can you just give u.s.a. the gist of this story that Wade Davis tells in his volume?

The story, basically, is that there was an Inuit man who is being forced to move off of his settlement, and his family took away his tools in society to convince him to come up along with them.

He refused to move off of his homeland. Then, in the midst of a wintertime gale, he defecated into his easily and he fashioned a pocketknife from the frozen feces, using a spray of saliva.

And so, the story goes, that he killed a dog with that knife, used its rib cage every bit a sled, and used its hibernate to harness some other dog, and he sped off into the nighttime.

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—@KSUExArchLab

Wow. That'southward quite a story.

It is quite a story. And information technology'southward 1 that, I think, has captured the imagination of a lot of people, including myself.

When that book came out in 1998, I heard Wade Davis tell that same story to Diane Rehm on NPR's Diane Rehm Show.

And considering I heard that story, I was inspired to go into anthropology. And, in fact, I still today have the tape cassette that I ordered from NPR of that Wade Davis interview.

The knives were frozen in dry ice and sharpened with a metal file. (Metin Eren)

But you decided to apply a lot of skepticism to this story. Why is that?

Little did I know that 20 years later the story came out, I would be co-director of an experimental archeology lab here at Kent Country.

We regularly reproduce ancient technologies in order to opposite engineer them and effigy out how they piece of work.

And it was tardily concluding yr that it merely sort of hit me that this idea of a knife existence fashioned from frozen human feces had never really been tested before.

And just, I retrieve as any good scientist, nosotros were curious.

You lot decided that in order to practise it, you had to recreate conditions that might have been around this Inuit human being and his decision to escape this fashion. Then how did you get about doing that?

It's first important to note that no experiment is ever perfect and no experiment tin can ever perfectly replicate reality. But we did the best we could.

So what I did was for eight days, I went on a high-protein and loftier fatty acid diet, which is sort of consistent with an Chill diet.

And afterward a few days of that, I started producing the necessary examination samples. We start freezing the samples, and to be honest, I was surprised at how difficult frozen man feces could get.

During the course of an experiment, scientists start to see a pattern. They have intuition about the results and I started to wonder ... this may just work. We may be able to make a knife out of frozen human carrion.

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OK. So the story is that he fashioned this knife out of his frozen feces and and then he proceeded to basically skin and disarticulate a dog that he used every bit a sled. So how did you reproduce that office of it?

What nosotros wanted to practise was give our knives the best possible chance to succeed.

We actually had dry out water ice with us. And then we were able to stick the knives into - 50 C dry ice to get these things actually, really cold.

Then, in improver to that, we had a metal file then we were able to sharpen these feces knives as all-time as we could.

So what we did was we used refrigerated meat instead of a fresh kill because we idea a fresh kill on that story would be a warm affair that would potentially melt the knives. And nosotros want to see if these knives could cut, so we used refrigerated meat.

Then nosotros actually put in place variables that immune these knives the best chance to succeed. Information technology was a very conservative examination.

When we went to employ these frozen knives — it was like a brown crayon, unfortunately. It just left very nasty streaks on our meat and they didn't cut at all.

OK. So, what have you learned from this?

You can't really approach this study with anything other than a sense of humour.

But we did this for a reason. We know from countless studies over the final 100 years that Indigenous and prehistoric people have produced mind-bravado technologies, and only in very innovative ways, to solve problems.

And I recall, in some ways, that's one reason why this story of a frozen knife made from feces was then widely adopted beyond the academic and public literature, because it fits that narrative.

The problem, though, is that once you have stories that are unsupported, supporting narratives and stances of any kind, and then it becomes a slippery gradient. And other stories that are unsupported tin can also then exist used to support stances and narratives.

And and so, once you're in that situation, you're in existent trouble. Considering then you lot can start using unsupported, not-testify based stories to support narratives and stances that are harmful to society — racist ones, prejudice ones, and the similar.

And and then I call up, at the end of the day, what this study does is it reaffirms the importance of testify-based scientific discipline.

Written past Chris Howden and John McGill. Interview produced by Chris Howden. Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.