A dentist got a big surprise when he visited his parents’ house and saw a familiar piece of anatomy embedded in the hallway of their newly renovated home.
The newly laid tiles appeared to contain a human jaw, just inside the threshold leading to the terrace, according to a Reddit post where he shared the find.
Reddit is rife with fake posts, but several experts confirmed to DailyMail.com that this really does appear to be a jawbone and that it probably belonged to a modern human (Homo sapiens) or, more likely, an extinct hominid like Homo erectus. or a Neanderthal.
And if the fossil belonged to one of these ancient human ancestors, it is between 24,000 and 1.9 million years old.
A Reddit user posted this photo of a jawbone found in his parents’ house. was embedded
Redditor Kidipadeli75, who said he is a dentist, aware a photo of the mosaic on the r/fossils forum.
The tiles in question are made from travertine, a calcium-rich limestone that is often quarried and cut to make tiles.
“While fossils are often found in travertine, hominin fossils are much less common,” archaeologist Kristina Killgrove told DailyMail.com. “This is definitely the lower jaw bone of a hominid, cut transversely somewhere down the middle.”
As you can see in the photo, the jaw was cut at an angle. Some cross sections of teeth remain on one side, while the teeth have been cut away on the other side, exposing the fossilized interior of the jaw.
“It doesn’t surprise me at all that there are bones embedded in this type of stone,” Angelique Corthals, associate professor of forensic anthropology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told DailyMail.com.
‘It’s quite common. “What’s unusual is being so lucky to find the embedded hominid jaw,” he said.
Travertine, a common and desirable material for tile, is cheaper than marble and its veins of calcite crystals give it an interesting appearance.
It forms near natural springs, including Mammoth Springs in Yellowstone National Park.
Many large and small animals live and die in these springs. And when they die, their remains end up trapped in sedimentary rock until they are dug up to line someone’s house.
In this case they ended up at the home of Kidipadeli75’s parents, who had not noticed the jaw until he pointed it out to them.
“They chose ‘second option’ travertine, meaning with more defects than the first option, so it would be cheaper and less slippery,” Kidipadeli75 wrote.
Many people must have missed the jawbone for it to end up on the tiles of a newly renovated house, Corthals said.
When workers cut stone at the quarry and when retailers cut it to make tiles, no one tends to pay attention to the fine details, he said. “Stone retailers are primarily concerned with the integrity and soundness of the stone, and they don’t really care what’s in it.”
In fact, some architects look for travertine stone for tiles because they tend to contain fossils, but they mostly tend to be leaves and insects, Corthals said, not hominids.
The fossilized jaw may have belonged to a member of the ancient human ancestral species Homo erectus, which lived between 1.9 million and 108 thousand years ago.
Travertine is a common and desirable material for home tiles. It is cheaper than marble and its veins of calcite crystals give it an interesting appearance.
Neither Killgrove nor Corthals could say for sure what type of hominid species the jaw belonged to, but Corthals had some ideas.
‘The jaw is quite narrow. “It could be a human, but it looks more like a hominid,” he said.
«Fossils of Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis have already been excavated in this type of stone. They could be Neanderthals, they could be anything. “Any of the hominids,” Corthals added.
The tile was quarried in Turkey, wrote Kidipadeli75, and Corthals confirmed that travertine quarries in Turkey have been the site of multiple hominin finds.
Because of the angle at which the jawbone was cut to make the tile, it can also be difficult for a paleontologist to identify who the tile came from.
However, there are some clues there, Corthals said.
He pointed out the alveolar process, the thick ridge of bone that supports the sockets of the teeth.
At Mammoth Springs in Yellowstone National Park, you can see travertine forming in real time, as calcium-rich water precipitates its minerals to the surface.
The jaw in travertine tile, shown here with a scale banana. The redditor’s parents didn’t realize until he pointed it out.
In modern humans, this section of bone is not very long from front to back. But in this jaw there is a lot of material behind the front teeth.
This thickness is more characteristic of the anatomy of the Homo erectus jaw.
“My bet is on Homo erectus,” Corthals said. “There’s a lot more space there than in Homo sapiens.”
The overall width of the jaw also looks more like Homo erectus than Homo sapiens, he added.
If the jaw belonged to a Neanderthal, it could be between 200,000 and 24,000 years old. And if it belonged to a member of Homo erectus, it could be between 1.9 million and 108 thousand years old.
The jaws tend to be relatively fragile, Corthals noted, so the fact that they are intact suggests that they were probably fossilized before becoming embedded in the travertine.
And since fossilization can take a long time, the jaw is probably also extremely old, he said, making it unlikely it belonged to a modern human.
So, luckily, this freshly clad house is probably not a crime scene. But it is quite a find.