An anthropologist who decided to test an old urban legend by creating a knife out of frozen poop has been awarded a 2020 Ig Nobel Prize. The Ig Nobels, given out annually at a ceremony usually held at Harvard University, are a satirical award given to humorous yet thought-provoking scientific, medical, and technological experiments and achievements, and this in-depth and slightly gross research is certainly worthy of the honor.
- Metin Eren has always been fascinated by the poop knife. Ever since he was in high school, Eren wondered about the urban legend that an Inuit man in Canada had made a knife out of his own waste and used it regularly but didn’t know how true it was or if it would even work. Tired of wondering, he decided to find out.
- He worked with his colleagues to lift the veil on this mystery. Eren, an assistant professor of anthropology at Kent State University in Ohio and co-director of their Experimental Archaeology Lab, got a hold of some real human poop and fashioned a knife out of it by freezing the excrement to the temperature of -50C before sharpening the edge.
- He tried to cut meat with his poop knife. The result? It’s a no-go. “The poop knives failed miserably,” Eren said in a telephone interview, according to Huffington Post. “There’s not a lot of basis empirically for this fantastic story.”
- Eren wasn’t necessarily surprised by the result of the “study.” However, that wasn’t the point of doing the experiment. “The point of this was to show that evidence and fact-checking are vital,” he explained. And hey, it was probably a lot of fun to do, if not slightly icky.
- If you’d like to read the study yourself, you can. The paper written on it is called “Experimental replication shows knives manufactured from frozen human feces do not work.” That tells you pretty much everything you need to know, but it’s still an interesting read.
