We here at Cracked take pride in our research department's ability to find the most mundane things and figure out how they changed the world, and also to make as many poop jokes in a 2,000-word article as is humanly possible. Delight in the head-on collision between the two as we discuss how poop has managed to change the world in utterly profound ways.

6 Poop Is the Reason Complex Life Evolved

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Millions and millions of years ago, evolution was in a bit of a slump. The Earth, instead of the blue planet bustling with life that it is today, was just some overheated rock with a lot of single-celled bacteria floating around. Evolution remained at a standstill for some three billion years, until getting suddenly jump-started by a process that has always mystified scientists.

Well, according to Australian geoscientist Graham Logan, the miracle that came along to cause the planet to explode with life was shit.

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"We've been telling you this for years, sheeple."

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Or specifically, the first creatures capable of shitting.

The problem, Logan says, was that at the time the oceans were very low on oxygen (i.e., the stuff pretty much every non-plant on Earth breathes) and very high in carbon. It just wasn't a mix that was conducive to a thriving ecosystem.

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"Fuck you, ocean! I'm sick of your shit!"

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But then came the shitters. These multicellular creatures could eat plankton and, more importantly, poop out dense turds of carbon that promptly sank to the ocean floor. Over millions of years, they turned the upper sunlit levels of the oceans from a carbon-rich dead zone into an oxygen-rich life factory that gave birth to the entire ecosystem we now know and love.

All thanks to this army of tiny, heroic shit machines.