A dentist was visiting his parents’ newly renovated home in Europe when he noticed something odd: One of the floor tiles in a corridor leading to a terrace held what looked like a human mandible, sliced through at an angle, including a cross section of a few teeth.
Not knowing exactly what steps to take, the dentist posted a photo of the discovery on Reddit. The internet exploded with enthusiasm, interest and ick.
“It’s not so much the teeth that I noticed but the shape of the mandible that is very recognizable,” the dentist, known as Reddit user Kidipadeli75, wrote in an email. He spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his family’s privacy.
He pointed out that the object in the tile bears a striking similarity to a slice of an image taken with a form of CT scan used in dentistry. “As I am specialized in implant dentistry, I work with this kind of image every day and it looked very familiar,” he said.
The tile, made of a type of limestone called travertine, was imported from a quarry in Turkey. Scientists are now working with the dentist to make sure the tile is properly studied — along with a few other suspicious-looking tiles installed in the house.
While this all may seem quite shocking, paleoanthropologists were both fascinated and a little unsurprised. Travertine can form quickly, but the stones used for commercial purposes tend to come from deposits that have formed over hundreds of thousands of years, ruling out a recent death.
This tile came from a quarry in the Denizli Basin in western Turkey, where the stone has previously been dated to 1.8 million to 0.7 million years ago, according to Mehmet Cihat Alcicek, a professor at Pamukkale University in Turkey who is part of the scientific team that plans to study the mandible.
This viral photo is a reminder that travertine, which forms near hot springs and is valued as an architectural material, often contains old fossils, and that digging it up can unearth ancient treasures. Those fossils can be anything that washes into the spring, from plants, freshwater crabs, deer and reptiles to — on occasion — human remains.
John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, titled his blog post on the matter: “How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the tile?”
“Every time I am in Home Depot, I go through the travertine tile looking for fossils!” said John W. Kappelman Jr., a paleoanthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin.