There are a lot of people who see shapes in certain places; like finding shapes in clouds or shapes in the floor tiles. But this dentist was not seeing things when they saw something incredibly interesting.
Keep reading to learn more about the shocking thing they discovered in the floor at their parent’s home.
A dentist was visiting his parents’ newly renovated European home when he saw something that made him look twice. One of the tiles in the floor, which led from the corridor to the terrace, held what seemed like a human jaw. The bone, referred to as the mandible, was sliced through at an angle that even included the cross-section of what seemed like a few teeth!
While the dentist was pretty sure of what he was looking at, he still posted the picture to Reddit to get more opinions on what people thought it could be.
“It’s not so much the teeth that I noticed but the shape of the mandible that is very recognizable,” the dentist said later. “As I am specialized in implant dentistry I work with this kind of image everyday and it looked very familiar,” he said, referring to CT scans he has seen that look eerily similar to this image.
The tile is made from limestone called travertine, which in this instance was imported from a quarry in Turkey! The dentist is now working with scientists to properly look at the suspicious-looking tile in question.
However, it seems while people are shocked, paleoanthropologists are not too surprised. Travertine is a type of stone that forms quickly, but the one used for commercial purposes, such as buildings, comes from deposits that formed hundreds and thousands of years ago. This rules out that the remains could be recent. Because of this, the dentist who discovered them says he has been inundated with interest by scientists who want to study the fossil firsthand.
This particular tile comes from a quarry in the Denizli Basin in western Turkey. According to Mehmet Cihat Alcicek, a professor at Pamukkale University in Turkey, the stone could have formed between 1.8 million and 0.7 million years ago. Professor Mehmet will be one of the few scientists studying the mandible.
This story is a testament to the fact that travertine that forms near hot springs often houses valuable fossils. Digging up this rock can often help uncover treasures. From plants to marine life to animal or human remains; it can be anything!
“Every time I am in Home Depot, I go through the travertine tile looking for fossils!” John W. Kappelman Jr., a paleoanthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin, said, alluding to the fact that there are fossils to be found in a lot of tiles!
“It is clearly a human relative of some kind, but to rule out modern human or find out which ancient population it may belong to will take detailed study,” Hawks said.
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Wow! Imagine finding an ancient fossil in the tiles of your home! This is absolutely fascinating! Share this with others who might find this story interesting!
