CANADA: A French student has found an adult tooth dating back about 560,000 years in southwest France, in what researchers are hailing as a major discovery.
Valentin Loescher (20) was volunteering alongside Camille Jacquey (16) on his first summer archaeological dig at the Arago cave near Tautavel, when he discovered the tooth.
The tooth could be the oldest human remains found in France. It predates by 100,000 years the famous remains of Tautavel Man, a 20-year-old prehistoric hunter and ancestor of Neanderthal man who was discovered at the site in 1971 and whose remains dated back about 450,000 years.
Amélie Vialet, a paleoanthropologist overseeing the excavation at the cave, told Agence France-Presse: “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.”
Yves Coppens, professor of paleoanthropology and prehistory at the Collège de France, who was part of the 1970s team that discovered the remains of the famous early human ancestor known as Lucy in Ethiopia, told France Info radio: “A tooth can tell us a whole range of things. Its shape and wear and tear tells us about the eating habits of the person in question; the tissue reveals a lot of information. The DNA can give an idea as to who this person was.”
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