A tooth dating from 560,000 years before our own time has been discovered in France, providing new insights into our distant ancestors. The remarkable find was unearthed by a pair of young archeology students.
Tautavel is a cave well known for housing some stunning archaeological finds. The students were exploring this area in southwestern France for artifacts when they came across the ancient tooth.
"We are pretty confident that the site has a lot more to reveal. Human remains from between 500,000 and 800,000 years ago are more than scarce in Europe nowadays, and this tooth fills a bit of the gap of the incompleteness in this 300,000-year period," Christian Perrenoud, a geo-archaeologist who participated in the study of the artifact, said.
This tooth now represents the oldest human remains ever found in France. The remains could help answer several questions archaeologists have about this distant era. Many of the oldest human fossils are found in Germany and Spain, while this tooth provides information about more recent human inhabitants of the land that would one day become France.
A 16-year-old identified only as Camille first saw the tooth while she was working with another student at the site.
Tony Chevalier, a Paleoanthropologist working at Tautavel's archaeological laboratory, called the finding a "major discovery."
"A large adult tooth — we can't say if it was from a male or female — was found during excavations of soil we know to be between 550,000 and 580,000 years old, because we used different dating methods. This is a major discovery because we have very few human fossils from this period in Europe," said paleoanthropologist Amelie Viallet.
Tautavel has been carefully examined by archaeologists and other researchers for five decades, as investigators piece together secrets of ancient biology and human civilization. One form of early human, Tautavel Man, lived in this region 450,000 years before our own time. This newly-discovered tooth dates back 100 millenia before even this distant epoch.
More than 600,000 artifacts have been recovered from around Tautavel by researchers over the last 50 years that the location has been studied. A baby tooth from a Homo heidelbergensis, the ancestor of Neanderthals and our own species, was found there in 2011. Other artifacts recovered at Tautavel include fossils of horses, reindeer, buffalo and other animals.
Due to the fact that people did not practice burial of their dead 5,600 centuries ago, there is little chance of finding the complete skeleton of the person who once possessed the tooth.
