Tyler Murchie

speaker

109 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 29 Jun

Tyler Murchie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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It's, you know, anatomically modern humans maybe arose about like 300,000 years ago.

So twice as old and more than that.

Yeah, and well, part of the effort is to get up to these burrows and see like, okay, what's all in there?

And a lot of them contain, you know, bits of plants.

There's unidentified bone, there's seeds and nuts and all this kinds of stuff.

And then there's this whole midden, this latrine area that's just full of poop.

And there's hundreds of poops all kind of packed together in one spot.

This is their pooping area.

And we thought, well, what if we looked at the DNA that's inside those?

I wonder what all's in there.

Yeah, so we're trying to pull the ancient DNA out.

And in part, that involves taking a small sample and then digesting the organic and inorganic parts of that to release the DNA.

That ends up in solution.

The funny part is that, you know, when you're working with samples, usually there's no smell.

But with these samples, it was only once you put them in solution and digested that you and you open the tube to pull out the superdate.

And then you realize, oh, wow, yeah, this is definitely liquefied poop right now.

The smell holds up.

Yeah, well, it's in part, they've been frozen in permafrost all that time.

So it's really spectacular preservation.

Yeah, and then so you're trying to get, you get the DNA out, and then you have to attach adapters to the ends of the fragments.

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