Knives made of frozen excrement do not make the cut, refuting the well-known legend

Famous anthropologist Wade Davis inadvertently created an academic urban legend with the story of an old Inuit man of the 1950s who made a knife with his own frozen excrement and disappeared into the Arctic. This is the conclusion of a new study by experimental anthropologists at Kent State University, who made their own slides from frozen fecal matter – for science! – and tested them on skin, muscles and pork tendons under ideal conditions. The knives failed all the tests.

As Davis has told in his 1998 book, Shadows in the sunthe Inuit family had confiscated his tools in a vain attempt to persuade him to leave the ice and join them in a colony. Undeterred, the man "came out of the igloo, defecated and refined the excrement into a frozen blade, which he sharpened with a stream of saliva," wrote Davis. "With the knife, he killed a dog.Using his rib cage as a sled and his skin to harness another dog, he disappeared in the dark."

Davis acknowledged that the story could be apocryphal; his source was the grandson of the man in question. But there is a similar and credible story from the same time of the Danish Arctic explorer Peter Freuchen, who made a chisel with his own droppings when he was found caught at trap in a hollow of hardened snow.

A history of this good is naturally spreading like wildfire, not only in the scientific literature, but also in popular culture. The anthropologist Metin Eren, from the state of Kent, heard it for the first time in adolescence. "That's one of the reasons I turned to anthropology," he admitted. He now runs a cutting-edge laboratory devoted to "experimental archeology": he recreates historical tools and other artifacts and tests them to verify their operation. There are pottery and woodworking workshops, a ballistic range for shooting arrow replicas, metalworking facilities, and so on. "Basically, we can manufacture any artifact from the last three million years of human technology," Eren said.

"I'm in my house pooping in a bag and making knives with my own excrement."

Discouraged by the current era of false news and alternative facts, Eren was inspired to recreate the frozen faecal knife of Wade's famous narrative to illustrate the importance of scientific data and tests. He and his colleague, Michelle Bebber, decided to use their own droppings for experiments, rather than imposing too heavy a burden on modest graduate students. Eren followed for eight days a diet rich in meat and fat, characteristic of what would be an arctic diet: beef, turkey, salmon, perch, meatballs, sausages, salami, eggs, etc.

"It was harder than I thought with so much protein and fatty acids exclusively," he said. Meanwhile, Bebber kept his typical Western diet as a control: yoghurt, lentils and rice, cheeseburgers, bagels and cream cheese, spaghetti, and so on. Then they each collected and froze their excrement each time they had stool.

"It's funny, because we have this extraordinary lab," said Eren, but for this week, "I'm not in the lab – I'm at home pooping in a bag, making knives with my own faeces – it was a bit depressing. "

They made the fecal knives with ceramic molds or simply using their hands to mold the feces into a rudimentary blade before sharpening them with a metal file after solidification. Then it was time to test them.

There was no need to slaughter a dog. Eren and Bebber used pork skin – cold and hairless – muscles and tendons. The meat they used had been chilled, unlike fresh meat, which would have been hot, and the knives were chilled in dry ice at -50 ° C (-58 ° F) before it was cold. to be cut. "We really wanted to give our knives the best chance of success," said Eren.

Unfortunately, even under these ideal laboratory conditions, none of the molded or hand-shaped fecal knives made from the feces of scientists have been able to pierce the skin. The knives simply melted on contact, leaving behind brown streaks (skid marks) of melted poo. They managed to make shallow slices on the subcutaneous fat on the underside of the skin, but the sharp edge of the knife still melted quickly and became unusable.

"I was surprised that human feces become as hard as when they are frozen," Eren said. "So I thought," God, it can work. "It made the situation even more discouraging when we did the test."

The authors noted, however, that the cut had been made in a room where the temperature was about 10 ° C (50 ° F) and that, therefore, "future experiments could examine colder contexts".

Does this mean that Freuchen's story is also an urban legend? Not necessarily. Admittedly, Freuchen is the only source of his story, without any corroborating evidence. But "a chisel is a very different tool than a knife," wrote the authors. "The mechanisms of use are distinct and the substrates worked in the Inuit and Freuchen cases are different.The Inuit case includes the movements of cutting and slicing on tissues, muscles and tendons, the case Freuchen presents the pounding and grinding the snow. "

In terms of how legend has proliferated so long, Eren thinks it has to do with the fact that prehistoric and indigenous peoples have really been able to make awesome technologies out of rudimentary materials. Wade's account of the Inuit man confirms this positive attitude and, given his haunting reputation, history is essentially sidelined instead of being rigorously tested.

"The problem is that once you start using untested or unsupported stories to support a position, it becomes a slippery slope, because you can then use another untaken story." in charge, without any data, "said Eren. "Once you no longer have data, you can also use unsupported stories to support harmful positions in society, [like] racial prejudice. Science is an essential means of controlling these kinds of urban legends. In this age of alternative facts and false news, it is more than ever necessary to have evidence-based science. "

DOI: Journal of Archaeological Science, 2019. 10.1016 / j.jasrep.2019.102002 (About DOIs).