A human jaw buried in travertine in Denizli and now the flooring of someone in Europe will be examined for dating and identification.
A man was visiting his parents’ newly renovated European home when he noticed something unusual in one of the floor tiles. Closer examination revealed it to be part of a human jawbone, with a few teeth still attached.
According to a post he made on Reddit last week, the man was able to recognize the bone because he was a dentist.
The lower jaw, located in the corridor leading to the terrace of the house, appeared to have been cut at an angle. This reminded the dentist of the Computed Tomography scans he examined at work.
The person who noticed the chin said, “Since I specialize in implant dentistry, I work with such images every day and it looks very familiar.” says.
The person, whose Reddit username is Kidipadeli75, refused to reveal his full name to protect his family’s privacy.
He found the jawbone in a tile made of travertine, a type of limestone that often forms near hot springs. This particular tile came from a quarry in Denizli, Turkey.
The fact that the travertines excavated here were formed between 0.7 million and 1.8 million years ago shows that the lower jaw did not belong to a recently deceased person.
Travertine forms when a change in chemical conditions causes dissolved calcium carbonate to harden into solid rock. It often solidifies in layers, giving travertine tiles a distinctive and visually appealing appearance. These layers can trap anything that falls into them, such as leaves, feathers, and even dead animals.
“So we consider this jawbone discovery somewhere between rare and common,” said Andrew Leier, a geologist at the University of South Carolina and chief of the sedimentary geology section of the Geological Society of America. But it’s nothing crazy.” says.
Wherever you find travertine tile, you can also find fossils. For example, the travertine-covered Getty Center in Los Angeles is a treasure trove of fossils, including feathers, algae, bacteria, animal feet and leaves.
Since the anonymous dentist posted about the discovery, he has been contacted by an international team of researchers and they are working with him on a plan to remove the tile for study. Negotiations were also initiated with the company that sold the tile to search for additional traces in other travertine pieces from the same quarry.
Just by looking at the photo, scientists cannot tell how old the jawbone is or what species it belongs to (modern humans or a relative of early humans). So to reveal this information, they hope to run the sample through a CT scanner and create a three-dimensional model of it.
Chemical analysis of the rock can reveal its age, and samples of tooth enamel may hold clues as to what the jawbone’s owner ate. Teams may even try to recover ancient DNA from this sample.
However, the photo has already revealed at least one interesting piece of information: Some of the teeth of the person buried in the travertine may have been processed.
“There appear to be missing teeth, and bone tissue has filled in where the teeth were,” said forensic dentistry consultants Amber D. Riley and Anthony R. Cardoza. “Another human potentially intervened and removed the teeth due to injury or disease,” he says.
Paleoanthropologists have previously discovered many fossils, including deer, mammoths and reptiles, in the Denizli Basin travertines. At least one other group of human remains has also been discovered: fragments of human skulls showing signs of tuberculosis. The skull, which is at least 1.1 million years old, represents the first Homo erectus found in Turkey and is known as the “Kocabaş hominin”.
So why didn’t anyone notice the jawbone in travertine before? John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, answers the question, “How many bathrooms have Neanderthals on their tiles?” discussed in a blog post titled.
Hawks writes that quarry workers roughly cut the travertine to create large panels. While doing this, they check whether there are large flaws and gaps before starting to polish the stone. They then usually stack the tiles for shipping and move on quickly.
“The reason people want travertine in the first place is because of minor imperfections and inclusions, so they don’t deserve special attention. “Consumers purchasing travertine often browse samples in a showroom to select the rock type and do not see the actual panels or slab until installation.”
So next time you renovate your home with travertine, take the time to inspect the tiles thoroughly.
Smithsonian Magazine. April 23, 2024.
