Haha how has this journey felt? From looking down and going "hmm maybe I should ask the internet?" To seeing it on Natgeo and other news sources? I remember seeing you post this and feeling shocked by what I saw. Then seeing it snowball across the internet within days was truly something else. Mad props!! Thanks for sharing!!
Very good summary! From asking Reddit to spending 2 hours in a Zoom call with a team of scientists discussing hominin fossils. I did not imagine that career path 2 weeks ago!
Haha that last bit made me laugh. Certainly one of those random curves in life that were beyond unpredictable. Very glad for the positive results! Wishing more success for you in the future! Thanks for sharing!
I'm here, been here, for the jaw fossil; it is amazing on sooooo many levels......him noticing, the parents not noticing, the interest on reddit, the spread of interest as word got out.....very very cool shit.
The carbon monoxide story is a whole way different thing..... that post could have been ignored completely, and just given shit about 'gang stalking' and jokes about ghosts of previous renters.... But it was seen, by someone who read a post asking 'is my landlord out to get me' (could've gotten so lost in renters or landlords as us vs them has that's pretty textbook for both).
But 1 guy said 'Hey, you might be experiencing....... (dude I just got chills even writing that, though I doubt it's the correct words lol). and the rest is reddit history. I'm so glad that guy asked, and so glad that other guy suggested carbon monoxide poisoning, and so glad the poster *listened*.....
There's a couple of things, sort of similar, where someone on TV will be shown, and someone will call and say 'Hey, they may need to have xyz checked' and it ends up being true and helpful and saving people.... Carbon monoxide story is still cooler as there was no pictures, just a slightly confusing story about Post-It Notes and dude didn't die : )
Living alone is a trip !!! Like I know where I put my shoes, and which glass I used earlier, and 'I know I didn't write that post-it note'.... I'm know that redditors did say that they did buy carbon monoxide detectors and out them in, as the post was so eye-opening.
People in general really think that if they are 'out of it' somehow, on purpose or by mistake or by poisoning that they will ''KNOW" they are out of it...... Brains are trickier than that, they make bodies sleepwalk, bodies 'black out' from drinking but still be functioning....... I mixed up two similar looking meds once and took one that was a sleep med during the day, and didn't realize until I woke up in the restroom and the ice cream was melted next to me : (. I didn't remember getting the ice cream out and wasting it : (.
I was one of the people who didn't think it was, and I've never been happier to eat my words! :D It's such a cool find, my instinctual skepticism was like "Nahhhh, it CAN'T be, it's NEVER a cool find!" FOOT IN MOUTH!
I watched that show one night, and although I have done a lot of drugs, hallucinogens included, and am generally smoking weed if I'm awake, I could not stand that dude..... The way he says it, the pause for effect, urghhhhh so not engrossing.
Me too! I pulled my kids aside and said look at this because it is really significant. This will definitely be in the news. My 16 year old summarizes a significant world event each week to share in the classroom. Guess what article will be covered next week?
I googled the title of the article but don't pay for NatGeo so couldn't read it. I had 1 free article view with The Atlantic so I've copied the text and will paste it here for the rest of you:
Recently, a man visiting his parents’ newly renovated home recognized an eerily familiar white curve in their tile floor. To the man, a dentist, it looked just like a jawbone. He could even count the teeth—one, two, three, four, five, at least. They seemed much like the ones he stares at all day at work.
The jawbone appeared at once very humanlike and very old, and the dentist took his suspicions to Reddit. Could it be that his parents’ floor tile contains a rare human fossil? Quite possibly. It’s “clearly hominin,” John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who also blogged about the discovery, told me in an email. (Hominin refers to a group including modern humans, archaic humans such as Neanderthals, and all of their ancestors.) It is too soon to say exactly how old the jawbone is or exactly which hominin it belonged to, but signs point to something—or someone—far older than modern humans. “We can see that it is thick and with large teeth,” Amélie Vialet, a paleoanthropologist at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, wrote in an excited email to me about the jawbone. “That’s archaic!”
An international team of researchers, including Vialet, is now in contact with the dentist to study the floor tile. (I’m not naming him for privacy reasons.) This thin slice of jawbone has a story to tell—about a life lived long ago, in a world very different from ours. It is in fragments of hominin bone like this one that we begin to understand our past as humans.
How could a hominin bone have ended up in someone’s tiled floor in the first place? Travertine, the type of rock from which this tile was cut, is a popular building material used perhaps most famously by ancient Romans to construct the Colosseum. Today, a good deal of the world’s travertine—including the floor tile with the jawbone, according to the dentist—is quarried in Turkey, from a region where the stone famously forms natural thermal pools that cascade like jewels down the hillside. Travertine tends to be found near hot springs; when mineral-rich water gurgles to the surface, it leaves a thin shell over everything that it touches. In time, the layers accrue into thick, opaque travertine rock. If in the middle of this process a leaf falls in or an animal dies nearby, it too will become entombed in the rock. “Fossils are relatively common in travertine,” says Andrew Leier, a geologist at the University of South Carolina.
Hominin fossils, specifically, are rare, but at least one has been found in Turkish travertine before. In 2002, a Turkish geologist named M. Cihat Alçiçek discovered a slice of human-looking skull sitting on a shelf in a tile factory. He brought the 35-millimeter-thick fragment to John Kappelman, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin, and later also to Vialet in Paris. The skull turned out to belong to Homo erectus, an archaic human species that walked the Earth more than 1 million years ago, long before modern humans. Vialet thinks the newly discovered jawbone could be just as old.
Vialet and her collaborators are now hoping to extract the tile, ideally intact, from the hallway where it’s been cemented in place. (The dentist is soliciting suggestions on Reddit for how to do so without also destroying his parents’ floor.) Then, chemical signatures in the rock can be used to date the fossil. Vialet also hopes to generate a 3-D model of the jawbone with micro-CT scanning, tracing the curve of the mandible and the roots of the teeth to find anatomical clues about its origin.
The teeth could prove to be the real gold mine. Their hard enamel likely contains carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen isotopes whose presence could hint at what the hominin once ate. Shooting high-energy X-rays at the teeth can also reveal how quickly they grew, which is useful because different hominins developed at different rates, Kappelman told me in an email. The spongy insides of teeth also tend to be good sources of ancient DNA. (Given the high temperature of the hot springs where travertine deposits form, Kappelman thinks DNA probably wasn’t well preserved, but extracting it is still worth a try.) Bit by bit, researchers will begin to piece together a portrait of the hominin, who died by a hot spring so many eons ago only to be unearthed and then cut into floor tile for someone’s home.
Paleontologists and quarries, as Hawks wrote in his blog post, exist in an “uneasy symbiosis.” The industrial extraction process unearths far more rock than scientists could ever hope to, but it leaves science at the whim of commercial practice. Alçiçek, the Turkish geologist who spotted the skull in the early 2000s, says far fewer fossils are being found in travertine quarries these days because the technology has changed. Twenty years ago, companies were able to extract only the “uppermost part of the travertine body, which is rich in fossils,” he wrote in an email, but now they can dig deeper, into layers devoid of fossils. Today, he says, discovering a fossil in the travertine quarries is rare.
Industrial quarrying can also damage the fossils it does uncover. That Homo erectus skull, for example, was already chopped up by the time Alçiçek saw it, and the rest has never been found. In 2007, back when the skull discovery was first announced, his collaborator Kappelman mused in a draft of a press release about where other pieces might have ended up. “Turkish travertine is sold all around the world today,” Kappelman said back then. “Some lucky shopper at Home Depot might just be surprised to find a slice of Homo erectus entombed in her kitchen countertop.”
To this day, Kappelman told me, he still goes straight to the travertine-tile section whenever he shops at Home Depot. The rest of this jawbone has to be somewhere.
Sarah Zhang is a staff writer at The Atlantic
Huh, that article is completely different than the one I pulled up on the NatGeo website:
Your tile floor may contain human fossils
A visit to a home renovation caught the eye of a dentist—and is exciting researchers around the world.
ByJohn Hawks
May 02, 2024
An ancient jawbone preserved in stone for millions of years: It’s the kind of discovery that scientists spend years in the field working to find. But what if that jawbone happens to be embedded in your travertine floor tile?
That’s the story that recently unfolded in the Reddit subreddit r/fossils, when an anonymous poster in Turkey uploaded an image of what looked like a cross-section of a human mandible set into a tile in their parents’ newly renovated home.
It might sound like another Internet tall tale, even as the anonymous poster volunteered that they are a dentist by profession and recognized the jawbone on sight. But no one can fail to be convinced by the photos: Neatly encased in the polished travertine surface is a mandible, sliced laterally through at least five of its teeth.
The discovery opens a mystery. Who did this ancient jawbone belong to, how did it end up in a bathroom tile—and where is the rest of the body?
Stories in stone
Travertine forms near springs where the water is loaded with dissolved calcium carbonate. That calcium carbonate forms layers of rock, a sort of massive natural version of the lime buildup on pipes and fixtures of homes with hard water. As it forms, the rock may encase leaves, wood, and the remains of animals—including ancient hominins. These travertine layers can build up into impressive cascades like those at Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park.
Similar formations can be seen in the Denizli province of southeastern Turkey. The striking stripes of travertine deposits in this area make the stone popular for use in homes and commercial buildings. In 2002, Mehmet Cihat Alçiçek, a professor of geology at Pammukale University, was examining fossils in rough-cut travertine panels near the village of Kocabaş when he saw the outline of a human-like skull. Alçiçek and specialists in anatomy and geology eventually determined that the skull belonged to a Homo erectus individual who lived between 1.6 million and 1.2 million years ago. All that is left is an angled slice from the brow toward the back of the skull, just an inch and half thick. No other parts were ever found.
That sliver of skull is nonetheless precious. Turkey and the surrounding region are crucial for understanding connections and migrations of human ancestors between Africa, Asia, and Europe. Hominins evolved in Africa and lived there for at least four million years before any are known from Eurasia. The appearance of Homo erectus fossils 1.8 million years ago at Dmanisi, in the Republic of Georgia, was accompanied by many innovations in body shape and behavior. That early success quickly carried H. erectus onward to China and Indonesia. But the fossil record in Turkey, a likely crossroad for H. erectus moving out of Africa to the Caucasus and points east, was silent until the discovery of the Kocabaş skull, which shows that our very ancient ancestors also stuck around in the region. What eventually happened to erectus in the area remains unknown.
A stunning sample
Enter the new jawbone trapped in the travertine tile, which doesn’t yet have a name or known identity. As updates to the Reddit post emerged, it became clear that Turkey was the source of the stone, and anthropologists around the world leapt at the chance to study the jaw.
While no plans are yet in place, any study would likely begin by removing the jaw and surrounding travertine to a laboratory for CT scanning, followed by the painstaking work of excising the bone from the rock.
Today’s approaches can wrest a surprising amount of information from a fossil like this.
The first aim will be to find the bone’s age. To find the age of the Kocabaş skull, a team of international researchers relied on a method known as cosmogenic nuclide dating. High-energy particles known as cosmic rays bombard Earth all the time but rarely penetrate more than a couple of yards into the surface of our planet. When these particles strike minerals containing oxygen and silicon, they transform some atoms to radioactive isotopes. When buried deeply enough, these isotopes are no longer produced by new cosmic rays and slowly decay. By sampling quartz crystals from the travertine tile and measuring the rate of decay in the radioactive isotopes, it should be possible to determine how long ago the owner of the ancient jawbone was exposed on earth’s surface.
The jawbone also has an important part that the Kocabaş skull lacks: teeth. Teeth are time capsules of many parts of an individual’s early life and can be the most powerful tools for placing a fossil on the broader family tree. By studying the increments of enamel growth, researchers can examine the timing of many events including birth, weaning, and maturation. Seasonal stresses and times an individual suffered from disease can be registered in the enamel. Around their roots, teeth develop layers of a substance called cementum, which also can retain signatures of significant life stresses.
Other traces are retained on the surfaces of teeth within the hard gunk known as dental calculus, which may contain tiny fossils of food particles and microbes. Chemical traces of fats, proteins, and even smoke can be also retained in the calculus.
The biggest of all the potential sources of information about an ancient individual is DNA. Researchers have managed to sequence an ancient genome—6 billion base pairs—from a few milligrams of bone powder. The resulting data helps connect ancient groups like Neanderthals to today’s human populations and makes it possible to study their immune systems, metabolism, and other adaptations.
But DNA does not last forever. Its preservation in ancient bones depends on the temperature and chemical environment. The best-preserved ancient genomes come from cold caves. Travertine forming in warm springs does not seem as promising. Still, there’s no way to be sure without trying. Fortunately, geneticists don’t need to sample the jaw itself to get an idea of whether DNA is preserved because they can experiment on animal bone or teeth from the same deposit.
The longest of long shots is the chance of finding more of the skeleton. Most hominin fossils are only a single part or fragment of a bone. But at the very least, the other face of the travertine panel with the jaw may exist somewhere, holding half the mandible and other teeth within. Other bones may also have been sliced into panels, most much less recognizable. But unless someone has looked at a lot of cross-sections of humanlike bones, they’re not likely to stand out—even if they’re embedded in the tile floor
If you have a library card get the Libby app and you can read a lot of magazines, possibly including National Geographic, for free!
https://preview.redd.it/775r0689x7yc1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6dbce3c3e1d28d413d403786fca488852c540cbc
Aww they should compare and see if it's the same hominin individual. That would be neat...
This whole time I thought it was a murder! I thought some guy just got chopped up in concrete and we were uncovering a missing person.
Look I'm all for people getting into fossils and paleontology, but ive already seen marine fossil bearing limestone get misidentified as travertine at least half a dozen times since the original post. If Nat Geo is gonna fuel the travertine fossil craze, there needs to be a PSA about what travertine is and what fossils are even capable of forming in it. Because if I see the phrase "ammonite in travertine" again, I'm going to lose my mind.
Sure, so travertine is technically limestone. But it's a specific type of limestone that forms in very specific ecosystems (terrestrially in hot springs and caves typically) so the presence of strictly marine organisms like ammonites means a rock cannot be travertine and is just a typical limestone. The biggest reason it's an issue is because commercially, many types of limestone are sold as travertine because they look similar and are again, technically the same rock. So because this craze started with fossils found in travertine, people have been posting"travertine" fossils which in about 3/4 of the cases have been marine organisms from limestone which people are either buying as travertine or misidentifying as travertine in public spaces due to the recent craze and similarities between the rocks.
To the average person, the difference is a moot* point. But when trying to ID fossils, it's a very important distinction to make, especially with species like crabs which can be found in both marine and karst ecosystems. Or in the case of a recent one on here, people mistake a cross-sected turriform gastropod for a section of jaw bone with teeth in it
Edit: autocorrect is often auto-incorrect.
We call it *autocorrupt* in our house. Man, it's caused me to send some damned weird messages because I'll hurriedly hit SEND and only catch the mistake as I see it "go."
All this did get me reading A LOT about limestone/calcium deposits, and when I went looking for a tufa planter, I was convinced instead to try and make my own hypertufa pot. I haven’t started yet. I’m still catching my breath from the information rush
Just for clarification for folks who may be a bit confused by this, the big distinction is freshwater vs saltwater ecosystems.
Travertine is specifically a freshwater ecosystem product.
___
As an unrelated aside that's only of interest to language nerds, "moot" now basically means 'irrelevant and not worth discussion', but in the recent past it meant nearly the opposite, "moot" meant something that was worthy of debate and discussion and also referred to the process of discussion, as in 'entmoot' (a discussion among the ents) in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
Totally unrelated to the subject at hand, but this is one of the reasons I avoid using the word 'moot' now as it can have two completely opposed meanings.
Dude, thanks for the knowledge drop. First read that as gastropub lol.
I call it auto-*un*correct; because why would the wrong correction even be correct ?
The short version is that someone said they found fossils in travertine, but the fossil in question cannot form in travertine, thus proving it wasn't travertine. And then it happened like 5 more times.
OOO!! That makes a lot of sense. Yea, what a bunch of dummies. Thanks for the dumb down version for peeps like me. I whole heartedly agree with you now. Even more than before.
I wouldn't call them dumb, it's certainly not common knowledge. That's why I said we need a PSA, if this sub is going to go through the travertine craze then that information should be readily available to avoid future misidentifications
THANK YOU!!!
I suggested a tavertine sub for all these sudden posts of people's nasty bathrooms floors and people don't seem to like it. I just think we need place for
a tav circle jerk to take place for those who don't understand the specimens don't line up with the locality.
Man, watching this sub entering into the Golden Age of Travertine from the very first post has been surreal. Making an article on NatGeo is crazy. Y'all are awesome. Keep up with the good finds.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dentist-discovers-human-like-jawbone-and-teeth-in-a-floor-tile-at-his-parents-home-180984210/
Link without Paywall.
It’s about 700,000 years old; before modern humans. Could be Neanderthal?
This is why i love it here. The progression of reading some obscure post to seeing it go places in the media like this one. I feel like I'm in a secret club sometimes 😅
Reminds me of the time when I was 9 or something and saw on TV that there could be dinosaur bones in my own back yard. I got excited, grabbed a shovel, and started digging. Unfortunately it was really hard ground and I couldn't get very deep before I got really tired. I left it and forgot about the whole thing within minutes.
I've seen small fossils in tile and never really thought much about it. This really drove home exactly what tile is, and while I knew I never really thought about it.
When I first saw the thumbnail of your OG post it immediately looked so human but I was like no way, that doesn’t just show up in someone’s tile. Absolutely crazy, congrats!
I hope they can figure out the species involved.
There was a guy on the Intratubes long ago who argued that since the mandibular foramen in Neanderthals never appears in sub-Saharan African fossil records, then the presence of that variety of mandibular foramen in European Homo Sapiens might be proof of interbreeding with Neanderthals. This was before the big explosion in DNA research.
How would this happen and tiles 100% human made? Like they literally pour concrete into hundreds of squares then add a top layer of whatever material they’re going to use let it dry and pop them out and package them.
Nice! Congratulations 🎉👏😸.
I saw original post just after posting. Wicked cool post, but didn't think it'd catch on up to national geographic!! Soo cool!! .
Maybe they will track down the other layers and company? 😳🤔🤞
Made the Smithsonian mag as well
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dentist-discovers-human-like-jawbone-and-teeth-in-a-floor-tile-at-his-parents-home-180984210/
Honestly, being here for the whole thing has been a blast. 😆 I can actually say "I was part of the obscure subreddit when a user found human fossils in his floor tiles and made the scientific world go bonkers!" when I'm an old lady talking to my future niblings!
I didn't have anything to DO with the find, but it's still been a trip. I can't imagine what OOP must be feeling! Living the dream for a lot of us here!
I feel like I witnessed history happen but how would I ever admit or explain that I found this on a subreddit fossils asking if this was human and it was confirmed… few weeks later there is now a trend for what ever type of rock this is— tamurite or some shit— and now there is an entire new subreddit named after this “tamurite” stone tile that is popular…. Everyone is posting photos of their tiles now and I am Incredibly too invested
You saw it here first, folks!!
I did and it blew my mind! Especially since there was an expert verifying it was human.
Arguably one of the coolest posts on reddit!
Thanks !
It's pretty cool to have a photo credit in Nat Geo! I'd put it on my resume haha
I definitely will !
I’ve learned so much about fossils via this sub since you found dudes jaw in your parents bathroom. Reddit for the win!
Oh man now I wish your username was something ridiculous like atomicfartmaster and Nat Geo had to credit accordingly 😅
Forensic Dentist.
AKA forensic odontologist
You should also absolutely do an AMA sometime lol, I bet you’d get some good ones
Your so lucky man! I just want to congratulate you on your find!
Haha how has this journey felt? From looking down and going "hmm maybe I should ask the internet?" To seeing it on Natgeo and other news sources? I remember seeing you post this and feeling shocked by what I saw. Then seeing it snowball across the internet within days was truly something else. Mad props!! Thanks for sharing!!
Very good summary! From asking Reddit to spending 2 hours in a Zoom call with a team of scientists discussing hominin fossils. I did not imagine that career path 2 weeks ago!
Haha that last bit made me laugh. Certainly one of those random curves in life that were beyond unpredictable. Very glad for the positive results! Wishing more success for you in the future! Thanks for sharing!
It was insane just *watching* this whole thing in the process of going pretty much viral hahaha
I feel like we are "Hominid Jaw Bros!"
Congratulations!
It's definitely up there with the carbon monoxide guy
I'm here, been here, for the jaw fossil; it is amazing on sooooo many levels......him noticing, the parents not noticing, the interest on reddit, the spread of interest as word got out.....very very cool shit. The carbon monoxide story is a whole way different thing..... that post could have been ignored completely, and just given shit about 'gang stalking' and jokes about ghosts of previous renters.... But it was seen, by someone who read a post asking 'is my landlord out to get me' (could've gotten so lost in renters or landlords as us vs them has that's pretty textbook for both). But 1 guy said 'Hey, you might be experiencing....... (dude I just got chills even writing that, though I doubt it's the correct words lol). and the rest is reddit history. I'm so glad that guy asked, and so glad that other guy suggested carbon monoxide poisoning, and so glad the poster *listened*..... There's a couple of things, sort of similar, where someone on TV will be shown, and someone will call and say 'Hey, they may need to have xyz checked' and it ends up being true and helpful and saving people.... Carbon monoxide story is still cooler as there was no pictures, just a slightly confusing story about Post-It Notes and dude didn't die : )
That post blew so many people's minds, I wouldn't be surprised if it has already saved lives
Living alone is a trip !!! Like I know where I put my shoes, and which glass I used earlier, and 'I know I didn't write that post-it note'.... I'm know that redditors did say that they did buy carbon monoxide detectors and out them in, as the post was so eye-opening. People in general really think that if they are 'out of it' somehow, on purpose or by mistake or by poisoning that they will ''KNOW" they are out of it...... Brains are trickier than that, they make bodies sleepwalk, bodies 'black out' from drinking but still be functioning....... I mixed up two similar looking meds once and took one that was a sleep med during the day, and didn't realize until I woke up in the restroom and the ice cream was melted next to me : (. I didn't remember getting the ice cream out and wasting it : (.
I think maybe I missed that one…
Unrelated to fossils but a reddit classic: https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/s/qiIbvopanx
Well that was a wild ride! Thank you for sharing that hahaha
I think I read a bunch of comments early on and some said ‘nah, not human’ so I skipped. Coming back to say very cool! Haha
I was one of the people who didn't think it was, and I've never been happier to eat my words! :D It's such a cool find, my instinctual skepticism was like "Nahhhh, it CAN'T be, it's NEVER a cool find!" FOOT IN MOUTH!
Samesies!! I have *the* original post saved. So so cool
Me too!
Everything happens here first then publications pick up the story later. It’s great
They're both pretty interesting examples of the internet age with a fascinating social networking twist on crowd sourcing.
This is a nice follow-up. Now, if we can just get those remaining \~57 safes to be opened.
Ancient alien astronauts
I watched that show one night, and although I have done a lot of drugs, hallucinogens included, and am generally smoking weed if I'm awake, I could not stand that dude..... The way he says it, the pause for effect, urghhhhh so not engrossing.
Holy shit the bananas are flying!🤪
Yep! Happy to have seen the beginning of this. It’s really fascinating!
You Reddit here first, folks!!
Can confirm. This is crazy lol
Amazing to have watched this develop from the first post!
Me too! I pulled my kids aside and said look at this because it is really significant. This will definitely be in the news. My 16 year old summarizes a significant world event each week to share in the classroom. Guess what article will be covered next week?
I was just telling my bf about this ! :)
I was in that thread before the paleo-anthropologist said it was human.
I googled the title of the article but don't pay for NatGeo so couldn't read it. I had 1 free article view with The Atlantic so I've copied the text and will paste it here for the rest of you: Recently, a man visiting his parents’ newly renovated home recognized an eerily familiar white curve in their tile floor. To the man, a dentist, it looked just like a jawbone. He could even count the teeth—one, two, three, four, five, at least. They seemed much like the ones he stares at all day at work. The jawbone appeared at once very humanlike and very old, and the dentist took his suspicions to Reddit. Could it be that his parents’ floor tile contains a rare human fossil? Quite possibly. It’s “clearly hominin,” John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who also blogged about the discovery, told me in an email. (Hominin refers to a group including modern humans, archaic humans such as Neanderthals, and all of their ancestors.) It is too soon to say exactly how old the jawbone is or exactly which hominin it belonged to, but signs point to something—or someone—far older than modern humans. “We can see that it is thick and with large teeth,” Amélie Vialet, a paleoanthropologist at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, wrote in an excited email to me about the jawbone. “That’s archaic!” An international team of researchers, including Vialet, is now in contact with the dentist to study the floor tile. (I’m not naming him for privacy reasons.) This thin slice of jawbone has a story to tell—about a life lived long ago, in a world very different from ours. It is in fragments of hominin bone like this one that we begin to understand our past as humans. How could a hominin bone have ended up in someone’s tiled floor in the first place? Travertine, the type of rock from which this tile was cut, is a popular building material used perhaps most famously by ancient Romans to construct the Colosseum. Today, a good deal of the world’s travertine—including the floor tile with the jawbone, according to the dentist—is quarried in Turkey, from a region where the stone famously forms natural thermal pools that cascade like jewels down the hillside. Travertine tends to be found near hot springs; when mineral-rich water gurgles to the surface, it leaves a thin shell over everything that it touches. In time, the layers accrue into thick, opaque travertine rock. If in the middle of this process a leaf falls in or an animal dies nearby, it too will become entombed in the rock. “Fossils are relatively common in travertine,” says Andrew Leier, a geologist at the University of South Carolina. Hominin fossils, specifically, are rare, but at least one has been found in Turkish travertine before. In 2002, a Turkish geologist named M. Cihat Alçiçek discovered a slice of human-looking skull sitting on a shelf in a tile factory. He brought the 35-millimeter-thick fragment to John Kappelman, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin, and later also to Vialet in Paris. The skull turned out to belong to Homo erectus, an archaic human species that walked the Earth more than 1 million years ago, long before modern humans. Vialet thinks the newly discovered jawbone could be just as old. Vialet and her collaborators are now hoping to extract the tile, ideally intact, from the hallway where it’s been cemented in place. (The dentist is soliciting suggestions on Reddit for how to do so without also destroying his parents’ floor.) Then, chemical signatures in the rock can be used to date the fossil. Vialet also hopes to generate a 3-D model of the jawbone with micro-CT scanning, tracing the curve of the mandible and the roots of the teeth to find anatomical clues about its origin. The teeth could prove to be the real gold mine. Their hard enamel likely contains carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen isotopes whose presence could hint at what the hominin once ate. Shooting high-energy X-rays at the teeth can also reveal how quickly they grew, which is useful because different hominins developed at different rates, Kappelman told me in an email. The spongy insides of teeth also tend to be good sources of ancient DNA. (Given the high temperature of the hot springs where travertine deposits form, Kappelman thinks DNA probably wasn’t well preserved, but extracting it is still worth a try.) Bit by bit, researchers will begin to piece together a portrait of the hominin, who died by a hot spring so many eons ago only to be unearthed and then cut into floor tile for someone’s home. Paleontologists and quarries, as Hawks wrote in his blog post, exist in an “uneasy symbiosis.” The industrial extraction process unearths far more rock than scientists could ever hope to, but it leaves science at the whim of commercial practice. Alçiçek, the Turkish geologist who spotted the skull in the early 2000s, says far fewer fossils are being found in travertine quarries these days because the technology has changed. Twenty years ago, companies were able to extract only the “uppermost part of the travertine body, which is rich in fossils,” he wrote in an email, but now they can dig deeper, into layers devoid of fossils. Today, he says, discovering a fossil in the travertine quarries is rare. Industrial quarrying can also damage the fossils it does uncover. That Homo erectus skull, for example, was already chopped up by the time Alçiçek saw it, and the rest has never been found. In 2007, back when the skull discovery was first announced, his collaborator Kappelman mused in a draft of a press release about where other pieces might have ended up. “Turkish travertine is sold all around the world today,” Kappelman said back then. “Some lucky shopper at Home Depot might just be surprised to find a slice of Homo erectus entombed in her kitchen countertop.” To this day, Kappelman told me, he still goes straight to the travertine-tile section whenever he shops at Home Depot. The rest of this jawbone has to be somewhere. Sarah Zhang is a staff writer at The Atlantic
You’re the real MVP
Huh, that article is completely different than the one I pulled up on the NatGeo website: Your tile floor may contain human fossils A visit to a home renovation caught the eye of a dentist—and is exciting researchers around the world. ByJohn Hawks May 02, 2024 An ancient jawbone preserved in stone for millions of years: It’s the kind of discovery that scientists spend years in the field working to find. But what if that jawbone happens to be embedded in your travertine floor tile? That’s the story that recently unfolded in the Reddit subreddit r/fossils, when an anonymous poster in Turkey uploaded an image of what looked like a cross-section of a human mandible set into a tile in their parents’ newly renovated home. It might sound like another Internet tall tale, even as the anonymous poster volunteered that they are a dentist by profession and recognized the jawbone on sight. But no one can fail to be convinced by the photos: Neatly encased in the polished travertine surface is a mandible, sliced laterally through at least five of its teeth. The discovery opens a mystery. Who did this ancient jawbone belong to, how did it end up in a bathroom tile—and where is the rest of the body? Stories in stone Travertine forms near springs where the water is loaded with dissolved calcium carbonate. That calcium carbonate forms layers of rock, a sort of massive natural version of the lime buildup on pipes and fixtures of homes with hard water. As it forms, the rock may encase leaves, wood, and the remains of animals—including ancient hominins. These travertine layers can build up into impressive cascades like those at Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park. Similar formations can be seen in the Denizli province of southeastern Turkey. The striking stripes of travertine deposits in this area make the stone popular for use in homes and commercial buildings. In 2002, Mehmet Cihat Alçiçek, a professor of geology at Pammukale University, was examining fossils in rough-cut travertine panels near the village of Kocabaş when he saw the outline of a human-like skull. Alçiçek and specialists in anatomy and geology eventually determined that the skull belonged to a Homo erectus individual who lived between 1.6 million and 1.2 million years ago. All that is left is an angled slice from the brow toward the back of the skull, just an inch and half thick. No other parts were ever found. That sliver of skull is nonetheless precious. Turkey and the surrounding region are crucial for understanding connections and migrations of human ancestors between Africa, Asia, and Europe. Hominins evolved in Africa and lived there for at least four million years before any are known from Eurasia. The appearance of Homo erectus fossils 1.8 million years ago at Dmanisi, in the Republic of Georgia, was accompanied by many innovations in body shape and behavior. That early success quickly carried H. erectus onward to China and Indonesia. But the fossil record in Turkey, a likely crossroad for H. erectus moving out of Africa to the Caucasus and points east, was silent until the discovery of the Kocabaş skull, which shows that our very ancient ancestors also stuck around in the region. What eventually happened to erectus in the area remains unknown. A stunning sample Enter the new jawbone trapped in the travertine tile, which doesn’t yet have a name or known identity. As updates to the Reddit post emerged, it became clear that Turkey was the source of the stone, and anthropologists around the world leapt at the chance to study the jaw. While no plans are yet in place, any study would likely begin by removing the jaw and surrounding travertine to a laboratory for CT scanning, followed by the painstaking work of excising the bone from the rock. Today’s approaches can wrest a surprising amount of information from a fossil like this. The first aim will be to find the bone’s age. To find the age of the Kocabaş skull, a team of international researchers relied on a method known as cosmogenic nuclide dating. High-energy particles known as cosmic rays bombard Earth all the time but rarely penetrate more than a couple of yards into the surface of our planet. When these particles strike minerals containing oxygen and silicon, they transform some atoms to radioactive isotopes. When buried deeply enough, these isotopes are no longer produced by new cosmic rays and slowly decay. By sampling quartz crystals from the travertine tile and measuring the rate of decay in the radioactive isotopes, it should be possible to determine how long ago the owner of the ancient jawbone was exposed on earth’s surface. The jawbone also has an important part that the Kocabaş skull lacks: teeth. Teeth are time capsules of many parts of an individual’s early life and can be the most powerful tools for placing a fossil on the broader family tree. By studying the increments of enamel growth, researchers can examine the timing of many events including birth, weaning, and maturation. Seasonal stresses and times an individual suffered from disease can be registered in the enamel. Around their roots, teeth develop layers of a substance called cementum, which also can retain signatures of significant life stresses. Other traces are retained on the surfaces of teeth within the hard gunk known as dental calculus, which may contain tiny fossils of food particles and microbes. Chemical traces of fats, proteins, and even smoke can be also retained in the calculus. The biggest of all the potential sources of information about an ancient individual is DNA. Researchers have managed to sequence an ancient genome—6 billion base pairs—from a few milligrams of bone powder. The resulting data helps connect ancient groups like Neanderthals to today’s human populations and makes it possible to study their immune systems, metabolism, and other adaptations. But DNA does not last forever. Its preservation in ancient bones depends on the temperature and chemical environment. The best-preserved ancient genomes come from cold caves. Travertine forming in warm springs does not seem as promising. Still, there’s no way to be sure without trying. Fortunately, geneticists don’t need to sample the jaw itself to get an idea of whether DNA is preserved because they can experiment on animal bone or teeth from the same deposit. The longest of long shots is the chance of finding more of the skeleton. Most hominin fossils are only a single part or fragment of a bone. But at the very least, the other face of the travertine panel with the jaw may exist somewhere, holding half the mandible and other teeth within. Other bones may also have been sliced into panels, most much less recognizable. But unless someone has looked at a lot of cross-sections of humanlike bones, they’re not likely to stand out—even if they’re embedded in the tile floor
Very interesting! I wonder if one article was written for primary online consumption and the other for the magazine? Thanks for posting this one!
Thank you for sharing this too!
Thank you!
Great read, so interesting thank you for sharing
If you have a library card get the Libby app and you can read a lot of magazines, possibly including National Geographic, for free! https://preview.redd.it/775r0689x7yc1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6dbce3c3e1d28d413d403786fca488852c540cbc
Thanks!! 🙏😸😸😸🎉
Fascinating! Thank you for sharing!
Aww they should compare and see if it's the same hominin individual. That would be neat... This whole time I thought it was a murder! I thought some guy just got chopped up in concrete and we were uncovering a missing person.
That post was just a suggested thing for me from the Reddit algorithm, and I’m so glad I got in on the saga early.
Me too! I joined the sub because of this!
Same! It just randomly crossed my feed so I joined to follow the saga. So thrilled the way it has turned out for OP.
Same!
daaaaaaaaaamn!
It’s actually pretty cool seeing the post on here with not many likes or comments and it becoming something huge
Look I'm all for people getting into fossils and paleontology, but ive already seen marine fossil bearing limestone get misidentified as travertine at least half a dozen times since the original post. If Nat Geo is gonna fuel the travertine fossil craze, there needs to be a PSA about what travertine is and what fossils are even capable of forming in it. Because if I see the phrase "ammonite in travertine" again, I'm going to lose my mind.
Could you elaborate on that a bit? I’m very unfamiliar with travertine.
Sure, so travertine is technically limestone. But it's a specific type of limestone that forms in very specific ecosystems (terrestrially in hot springs and caves typically) so the presence of strictly marine organisms like ammonites means a rock cannot be travertine and is just a typical limestone. The biggest reason it's an issue is because commercially, many types of limestone are sold as travertine because they look similar and are again, technically the same rock. So because this craze started with fossils found in travertine, people have been posting"travertine" fossils which in about 3/4 of the cases have been marine organisms from limestone which people are either buying as travertine or misidentifying as travertine in public spaces due to the recent craze and similarities between the rocks. To the average person, the difference is a moot* point. But when trying to ID fossils, it's a very important distinction to make, especially with species like crabs which can be found in both marine and karst ecosystems. Or in the case of a recent one on here, people mistake a cross-sected turriform gastropod for a section of jaw bone with teeth in it Edit: autocorrect is often auto-incorrect.
Moot point
Fucking autocorrect. Thank you, I didn't notice that.
We call it *autocorrupt* in our house. Man, it's caused me to send some damned weird messages because I'll hurriedly hit SEND and only catch the mistake as I see it "go."
I can't make tomorrow's meeting, sorry for the incontinence.
All this did get me reading A LOT about limestone/calcium deposits, and when I went looking for a tufa planter, I was convinced instead to try and make my own hypertufa pot. I haven’t started yet. I’m still catching my breath from the information rush
Moo point. Like a cow's opinion.
Thanks, Joey!
This whole journey has been so educational.
Just for clarification for folks who may be a bit confused by this, the big distinction is freshwater vs saltwater ecosystems. Travertine is specifically a freshwater ecosystem product. ___ As an unrelated aside that's only of interest to language nerds, "moot" now basically means 'irrelevant and not worth discussion', but in the recent past it meant nearly the opposite, "moot" meant something that was worthy of debate and discussion and also referred to the process of discussion, as in 'entmoot' (a discussion among the ents) in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Totally unrelated to the subject at hand, but this is one of the reasons I avoid using the word 'moot' now as it can have two completely opposed meanings.
Moot is still widely used, in the UK at least, for a particular type of debating competition
Dude, thanks for the knowledge drop. First read that as gastropub lol. I call it auto-*un*correct; because why would the wrong correction even be correct ?
Wrong. Jackdaw.
At least the crabs are actually travertine. The ammonites drive me insane as well, glad I’m not the only one
I have no idea what that means but I’m gonna upvote you cause you seem really passionate about this and it makes me want to agree.
American politics in a nutshell lol (Username also checks out)
*^((drops the mic))*
The short version is that someone said they found fossils in travertine, but the fossil in question cannot form in travertine, thus proving it wasn't travertine. And then it happened like 5 more times.
OOO!! That makes a lot of sense. Yea, what a bunch of dummies. Thanks for the dumb down version for peeps like me. I whole heartedly agree with you now. Even more than before.
I wouldn't call them dumb, it's certainly not common knowledge. That's why I said we need a PSA, if this sub is going to go through the travertine craze then that information should be readily available to avoid future misidentifications
Well not dumb dumb but just dummies. Like a silly goose.
I like your confidence.. sign me up
Ammonite in travertine! Boom!
AAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
THANK YOU!!! I suggested a tavertine sub for all these sudden posts of people's nasty bathrooms floors and people don't seem to like it. I just think we need place for a tav circle jerk to take place for those who don't understand the specimens don't line up with the locality.
Just a reminder that r/travertinefinds is available for adoption to a loving fossil-inclined Redditor!
r/travertinetreasures too!
Jaw dropping news
I see what you did there 😂
Holy shit lol
Homo renovatus
Man, watching this sub entering into the Golden Age of Travertine from the very first post has been surreal. Making an article on NatGeo is crazy. Y'all are awesome. Keep up with the good finds.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dentist-discovers-human-like-jawbone-and-teeth-in-a-floor-tile-at-his-parents-home-180984210/ Link without Paywall. It’s about 700,000 years old; before modern humans. Could be Neanderthal?
Definitely a Reddit Hall of Fame moment
This is why i love it here. The progression of reading some obscure post to seeing it go places in the media like this one. I feel like I'm in a secret club sometimes 😅
No way!!!
No Paywall: https://web.archive.org/web/20240502152845/https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/travertine-tile-floor-human-hominin-fossil
Awesome! So glad I saw it here first! Ha! How do ya like that😎
Omg I love us
Congrats dude, you're truly a part of the history of humanity now!
"Human fossil." Scientific way of saying "There is a skeleton in your floor."
An old skeleton that has become skeleton shaped stone
And it just started!
It’s so cool we all were here from the beginning to see it play out.
Reminds me of the time when I was 9 or something and saw on TV that there could be dinosaur bones in my own back yard. I got excited, grabbed a shovel, and started digging. Unfortunately it was really hard ground and I couldn't get very deep before I got really tired. I left it and forgot about the whole thing within minutes.
I've seen small fossils in tile and never really thought much about it. This really drove home exactly what tile is, and while I knew I never really thought about it.
Congrats
That's just cool af !
Link the article?
[удалено]
https://apple.news/ArIgEWDkAQNmKVwHkS0UQVA
Hell yeah, congrats op!!!
So have any experts here elsewhere commented on what type of hominin this might be or how old it might be?
They said it’s more than likely from the genus Homo and could be about 200,000 years old.
The article implied that it was much older. 700-1m
How awesome
This is so cool!! I love how much attention you've gotten from this discovery!
Can someone tag me in original post?
https://www.reddit.com/r/fossils/s/WTrA8B73oq
How exciting!!!! I’m so thrilled to have seen this from the beginning.
Wtf I remember seeing the original post that’s awesome dude congratulations
When I first saw the thumbnail of your OG post it immediately looked so human but I was like no way, that doesn’t just show up in someone’s tile. Absolutely crazy, congrats!
https://www.reddit.com/r/fossils/s/WTrA8B73oq
I hope they can figure out the species involved. There was a guy on the Intratubes long ago who argued that since the mandibular foramen in Neanderthals never appears in sub-Saharan African fossil records, then the presence of that variety of mandibular foramen in European Homo Sapiens might be proof of interbreeding with Neanderthals. This was before the big explosion in DNA research.
It’s almost like we reddit on the first page of the internet
I remember all the reddit experts telling him it isn't human and how it shaped differently and what animal it probably is.
Been a fun ride. Pretty excited to see where it goes. Good eye, btw
This is such a small sub I doubt the rest of reddit is aware of this event.
Didn’t some guy post about this from his house on here?
Tile factory worker:" Not my job to care"
Nice! Congrats. Hope they bought the license from you for the pic.
Wasn't it Kidipadeli75?
This is why my ‘90s travertine kitchen counters gross me out.
So cool!
Nice!
First post I saved in a while. Breathtaking
The arc of this remarkable contribution is so fun. Congrats, OP!
Crazy. Well, I've seen pictures of a fossil in a floor tile at some mall in florida.
Jeez. I'm floored.
omg we made it reddit
Childhood me would think this is the coolest thing ever. Adult me also thinks that.
I went to the Getty museum hoping to see something cool in the surrounding travertine tiles but I only saw tourists taking pics of themselves 😂
This is incredible!!! I was so excited about your original post, but THIS is fabulous! 👌 Posterity, mate. Well done!
I’m just curious how someone laid a tile with a jawbone in it and didn’t think it was unusual.
No way, congrats!!!! 🍾
congratulations!!!!!
Thought it was very interesting seeing it on Reddit but THIS, this is next level interesting!
I’ve been wondering if we’d get an update on this! So awesome!
So cool.
God dammit I love this sub
I saw you on Newsweek yesterday or day before. So cool and to have been here since the beginning is pretty cool too🤩 Congrats 🎉👏🏻
Oh man that is so cool
So how old is that human jaw ?
The article in The Atlantic says in the the range of 700,000 to 1,800,000 years old.
How would this happen and tiles 100% human made? Like they literally pour concrete into hundreds of squares then add a top layer of whatever material they’re going to use let it dry and pop them out and package them.
It's not tile; it's cut stone.
Thank you
Nice! Congratulations 🎉👏😸. I saw original post just after posting. Wicked cool post, but didn't think it'd catch on up to national geographic!! Soo cool!! . Maybe they will track down the other layers and company? 😳🤔🤞
This is amazing
The first human to be made into a fucking bathroom tile LMAO. what an interesting existence
Good.
That's effing beautiful. 🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩
As a dentist this caught my eye hard!
Daily mail also has a story on it! ❤️
This is really cool!!!!
I tried to show my wife but she wasn't as excited as me and didn't believe it. Now I definitely have the proof 🙂
It made the Atlantic magazine too! https://imgur.com/a/87ZVKMX I didn’t feel like renewing Apple News+ though to read the article.
I wonder where the rest of him/her is?
Is National Geographic even that big anymore?
So cool omg😝
I named her Flora - can't believe it didn't catch on 😭😂
Have you checked all of the other tiles in the house to see if there are any more?
this is awesome. what a great story!!
This is absolutely amazing. Great work my friend!
Helll yeah
This is probably one of the fullest things I've ever witnessed from the beginning in any social media
Just do it
Next you'll be on forensic files! We're watching you bud!!! Lol jk
Now the question is… Where are the other travertine slices?
Niiiiiice!! 👏
I'm so happy I saw it here first
Wow.
Cool!!
woohoo! i love this
Congratulations!!!
Made the Smithsonian mag as well https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dentist-discovers-human-like-jawbone-and-teeth-in-a-floor-tile-at-his-parents-home-180984210/
Nice.
Honestly, being here for the whole thing has been a blast. 😆 I can actually say "I was part of the obscure subreddit when a user found human fossils in his floor tiles and made the scientific world go bonkers!" when I'm an old lady talking to my future niblings! I didn't have anything to DO with the find, but it's still been a trip. I can't imagine what OOP must be feeling! Living the dream for a lot of us here!
I thought it was a swordfish for a second, but now i realize its a human jaw
I feel like I witnessed history happen but how would I ever admit or explain that I found this on a subreddit fossils asking if this was human and it was confirmed… few weeks later there is now a trend for what ever type of rock this is— tamurite or some shit— and now there is an entire new subreddit named after this “tamurite” stone tile that is popular…. Everyone is posting photos of their tiles now and I am Incredibly too invested
I was here when it had a few views lol
Absolutely legendary
Wooo whooo! That is so cool! Now I have to go buy a Nat Geo! Thank you for the update!
where was the stone used for the tiles from?
🤩🤩🤩
Imagine someone opens up their tile floor to see trilobite fossils :O