Anthropologists who have seen photos of the jawbone speculate that it belongs to an ancient human.
A European dentist who has seen his share of jawbones got a stunning surprise earlier this month when he spotted a human lower jaw in a most unlikely place: embedded in the newly installed tile floor in his parents’ home.
Since the dentist first posted a photo of the find on Reddit’s fossil subreddit, curious and enthusiastic paleontologists around the world have contacted him. An international team of scientists now plans to examine the fossil, which they suspect belongs to an extinct member of the human lineage.
“If it turns out to be a fossil hominin, which I think it is, it should be studied and put in a museum,” said John Kappelman, a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in the origins and evolution of hominids and humanoids. , according to an email.
The dentist, who goes by the name Kidipadeli75 on Reddit, found the fossil in travertine tiles from Turkey and located in a hallway leading to his father and mother’s outdoor patio. Travertine, a form of natural limestone deposited around mineral springs, is a popular choice for floor and wall tiles because of its natural beauty, ancient aesthetics and durability.
Travertine tiles are known to contain fossils of plants, algae and animals, including rhinos and giraffes, while human fossils are a much rarer find, University of Wisconsin paleoanthropologist John Hawks wrote in a blog post about the jawbone discovery. He called the piece How Many Bathrooms Do Neanderthals Have in the Tile?
“I expect there will be many twists and turns in the story of this jawbone,” Hawks wrote. “With some teeth preserved and abundant surrounding rocks, I expect specialists will be able to learn a lot about this person’s life and when he or she lived.”
Dental training comes in handy
The European dentist, who specializes in dental implants, says he immediately knew he wasn’t just looking at the natural pattern variations of stone tiles when he saw several teeth staring back at him.
“From my dental point of view, I had no doubt that it was some kind of human,” he said in an interview via Reddit chat. “The distribution of teeth and the size of the lower jaw are characteristic. The width of the cortex is also specific to old humans.”
“I don’t think it’s Jimmy Hoffa,” the dentist joked in a follow-up to his original Reddit post. He said he prefers not to reveal his name or the location of his parents to protect the family’s privacy.
A dentist in Europe made an unexpected and painful discovery in his parents’ floor tile.
To say that the dentist was surprised when he discovered a jawbone during the renovation of his parents’ home would of course be an understatement. Kappelman shares the surprise, but for a different reason.
“It is very, very unusual to find vertebrate fossils in worked travertine tiles, and hominin fossils a hundred times more,” says Kappelman. “We only have a handful.” Kappelman was part of a team that observed the earliest evidence of tuberculosis, etched on 500,000-year-old human skeletal remains, discovered by factory workers in Turkey who were cutting travertine tiles for commercial use. The scientists published the findings of their research in 2007 The American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
Another member of the team that studied the Homo erectus fossil, Mehmet Cihat Alcicek of Pamukkale University in Turkey, is among the scientists who will study the newly discovered lower jaw. The tile with the stone comes from a quarry in the Denizli basin in western Turkey, says Alcicek The Washington Postadding that scientists have previously dated rock in the area at 1.8 million to 0.7 million years.
The jawbone team, led by Mirjana Roksandic, a professor at the University of Winnipeg, plans to use a stonemason trained in mosaic and church floor removal to extract the tile without breaking the fossil. Physically removing the bone from the tile would risk damaging it, Kappelman said, so studying the artifact could include CT scans, DNA extraction and 3D printing the lower jaw to share with scientists who can’t see it in person.
“It might be possible to date the travertine tile itself, but this can be challenging because the tile itself is so thin, meaning the volume of original rock not exposed to sunlight is quite limited,” Kappelman added to. No original travertine rock survived the Homo erectus skullcap from Turkey, which revealed early signs of tuberculosis, “so this new specimen has that in it.”
Meanwhile, the dentist’s Reddit post continues to spark widespread fascination, with everyone from professional and amateur anthropologists to homeowners wondering what strange curiosities might turn up in their own building materials.
“I think it’s great that the public’s imagination has been sparked,” Kappelman said, “and that people are inspecting the tiles in their homes and kitchens.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the age of the human skull, which showed signs of tuberculosis. The skull cap dated from 500,000 years ago.