Dentist Spots Human Jawbone in New Tile Floor

A European dentist visited his parents' newly renovated home and noticed something in a hallway floor tile that his years of CT scans made instantly, unambiguously recognizable: a human jawbone, still with a few teeth attached.

The bone was embedded in a travertine tile that originated from a quarry in the Denizli Basin of western Turkey, where travertine deposits date to between 700,000 and 1.8 million years ago. That age rules out any recent individual. The mandible probably belonged to either a modern human or, more likely, an extinct hominin such as Homo erectus or a Neanderthal.

The Denizli Basin is not new territory for this kind of discovery. Researchers have previously found fragments of a human skull cap showing signs of tuberculosis in the same travertine; that skull, at least 1.1 million years old, represented the first Homo erectus ever found in Turkey, now known as the "Kocabas hominin." The jawbone is rarer still.

Even from photographs, the specimen is yielding early data. Forensic dental consultants noted absent teeth where bone tissue had filled in, suggesting another person may have removed them due to injury or disease.

Since the dentist posted about the find, an international research team has been working with him on a plan to remove the tile for study, and has initiated discussions with the tile company about searching for additional remains from the same quarry.

The records of ancient humans apparently run through home renovation depots, and nobody flagged it until a dentist came over for dinner.

Read the full story at Smithsonian Magazine, April 23, 2024

Hot Take: It's easy to miss in this story that somebody was doing dental healthcare up to a million years ago. Yet we still haven't solved the insurance problem.