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

Cool that it was found. I'm aware of how many precious data are lost at quarries so it's neat that this made it through and will be preserved now.

Edit: not anti-quarry btw, it's just the nature of the game and at least sometimes they check now if fossils and stuff are important

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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.

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 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.

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.

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