Renovation relic: Man finds hominin jawbone in parents’ travertine kitchen tile

Ah, Reddit! It’s a constant source of amazing stories that sound too good to be true… and yet! The latest example comes to us from a user named Kidipadeli75, a dentist who visited his parents after the latter’s kitchen renovation and noticed what appeared to be a human-like jawbone embedded in the new travertine tile. Naturally, he posted a photograph to Reddit seeking advice and input. And Reddit was happy to oblige.

User MAJOR_Blarg, for instance, is a dentist “with forensic odontology training” and offered the following:

While all old-world monkeys, apes, and hominids share the same dental formula, 2-1-2-3, and the individual molars and premolars can look similar, the specific spacing in the mandible itself is very specifically and characteristically human, or at least related and very recent hominid relative/ancestor. Most likely human given the success of the proliferation of H.s. and the (relatively) rapid formation of travertine.

Against modern Homo sapiens, which may not be entirely relevant, the morphology of the mandible is likely not northern European, but more similar to African, middle Eastern, mainland Asian.

Another user, deamatrona, who claims to hold an anthropology degree, also thought the dentition looked Asiatic, “which could be a significant find.” The thread also drew the attention of John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and longtime science blogger who provided some valuable context on his own website. (Hawks has been involved with the team that discovered Homo naledi at the Rising Star cave system in 2013.)

For instance, much of the appeal of natural stone like travertine for home decor is its imperfections. But who knew that it’s actually quite common to find embedded fossils? It’s rarer to find hominin fossils but not unprecedented. Hawks specifically mentioned a quarry site near Bilzingsleben, Germany, where an archaeologist named Dietrich Mania discovered parts of two humans skulls and a mandible dating as far back as 470,000 years. And a hominin cranium was found in 2002 in a travertine quarry in southwestern Turkey. It was later dated to between 1.2 million and 1.6 million years old.

The obvious question—asked by numerous Redditors— is how one could possibly install all that kitchen tile without noticing a fossilized human jawbone in the travertine. Hawks offered a reasonable answer:

Quarries rough-cut travertine and other decorative stone into large panels, doing basic quality checks for gaps and large defects on the rough stone before polishing. Small defects and inclusions are the reason why people want travertine in the first place, so they don’t merit special attention. Consumers who buy travertine usually browse samples in a showroom to choose the type of rock, and they don’t see the actual panels or tile until installation. Tile or panels that are polished by machine and stacked in a workshop or factory for shipping are handled pretty quickly.

What this means is that there may be lots more hominin bones in people’s floors and showers.

Most will be hard to recognize. Random cross-sections of hominin bones are tough to make out from other kinds of fossils without a lot of training. Noticing a fossil is not so hard, but I have to say that I’ve often been surprised at what the rest of a fossil looks like after skilled preparators painstakingly extract it from the surrounding rock. The ways that either nature or a masonry saw may slice a fossil don’t correspond to an anatomy book, and a cross-section through part of a bone doesn’t usually resemble an X-ray image of a whole bone.

Cue a horde of amateur fossil enthusiasts excitedly scouring their travertine for signs of important archaeological finds.

But as Hawks notes, chances are that one wouldn’t be able to clearly identify a fossil even if it was embedded in one’s tile, given how thin such tiles and panels are typically cut. And one is far more likely to find fossils of algae, plants, mollusks, crustaceans, or similar smaller creatures than human remains. “Believe me, anthropologists don’t want to hear about every blob of bone in your tile,” Hawks wrote. “But certainly somebody has more pieces of the mandible of the Reddit post.”

Kidipadeli75 posted an update to the Reddit thread providing a few more details, such as that he and his parents live in Europe. He’s also pretty sure the mandible doesn’t belong to Jimmy Hoffa. While Kidipadeli75 originally thought the quarry of origin was in Spain, it is actually located in Turkey—just like the hominin cranium found near Kocabaş in 2002. The story is still developing, given that several researchers have already contacted Kidipadeli75 for more information and to offer their expertise. The bone might turn out to be very old indeed and potentially a scientifically significant find.

Could a new HGTV series be far behind? Renovation Relics, perhaps, or Fossil Fixer-Upper.  Feel free to pitch your own show ideas in the comments.