“Almost Certainly Human” — Dentist Spots 1.75 Million Year Old Jawbone Inside Parents’ Home

While filming Haunted Discoveries, our production team was astounded after running a ground penetrating radar test in Lynch, Kentucky. Lost to time in the middle of the woods, we were able to find a mass grave site, housing miners and their families in the longstanding mining community.

These individuals who were lost to time weren't mining coal all that long ago, and it still felt like a remarkable find. Stumbling upon human remains while in the woods is one thing, however — what if you happened upon them in your home?

That's what happened to this dentist who spotted a human jawbone in their parents' tile floor.

Posted to Reddit's r/fossils sub, social media user @Kidipadeli75 posted a photo of what looks like a mandible that's been embedded into the travertine stone floor their folks renovated their home with.

They penned in their post: "Found a mandible in the travertine floor at my parents' house. My parents just got their home renovated with travertine stone. This looks like a section of mandible. Could it be a hominid? Is it usual?"

In a series of updates that were shared to another sub on the site, several relevant comments pointing to the lurid find were pinned to a long-form post.

One commenter who said that they're a dentist with forensic odontology training wrote that it is indeed a "hominid mandible" and that it's "almost certainly human."

They then sent on to explain why they believed this to be the case.

"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."

Getting even further into the weeds as to the origin of the mandible, the Reddit user went on to state that they believed they knew the jawbone's country of origin.

"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."

The original poster (OP) referenced the fact that they're also a dentist and that they agreed — they were pretty much convinced a human's jaw was in their parents' flooring. "I am a dentist also myself and I look at cbcts all day long which maybe why I immediately noticed it. I fully agree with you."

Another commenter urged the Redditor to look through other tiles to see if another slice of the mandible was trapped in another slab.

Then, in a following update, the dentist believes to have made another find: a potential slice of a "femoral head."

OP, who mentioned that the tile came from Turkey, received one response from a person who said that Travertine from the region has often been found to contain human remains.

"Fossils are often found in travertine from Turkey. While things like crabs and shells are more common, bones are much rarer. Some horse and gazelle bones are even on display at Ege University, but hominin bones have also been documented from there. I would strongly recommend contacting Serdar Mayda, one of the authors of the article on hominins from Turkish travertine."

In a series of other follow-up comments, OP went through the process of discussing the best ways to remove the tile in order to have it further inspected by paleontologists.

After weighing different ways to take the tile out without damaging the rest of the floor in their parents' home, OP reported that the tile was out of the floor and "in a lab being studied."

They also uploaded a series of other photographs, including workers carefully extracting the tile and another image showing off a tile that "potentially [contained] another bone fragment!"

So what were the results of this incredible find? OP shared that after the lab results, it turns out the human fossil was dated back to some 1.75 million years ago.

This is a staggering find: that's because up until finding this hominid mandible, one of the earliest human fossils ever found previously were dated to around 480,000 years ago.

And this dentist just re-wrote history after admiring their parents' home floor renovation.