The application to the Paisley coprolites required adapting methods developed primarily for environmental sample analysis to the challenge of identifying human fecal material within individual solid coprolite specimens from a specific archaeological context.

This is analytically more demanding than identifying the presence of human-specific biomarkers in sediment cores or water samples, where the relevant compounds may be present in measurable quantities without the need to attribute them to specific discrete specimens.

The 2020 analysis successfully identified three coprolites from the pre-Clovis layers of Paisley Caves as having fecal biomarker profiles consistent with human origin.

The biomarker evidence was independent of the DNA evidence — it was produced by a fundamentally different biochemical pathway and analyzed through fundamentally different chemical methods.