https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dentist-discovers-human-like-jawbone-and-teeth-in-a-floor-tile-at-his-parents-home-180984210/

A dentist noticed a human mandible in the new travertine floor tile in his parents home

He found the jawbone in a tile made of travertine, a type of limestone that typically forms near hot springs. This specific tile came from a quarry in the Denizli Basin of western Turkey. The travertine excavated there formed between 0.7 million and 1.8 million years ago.

To sleuth out that information, they hope to run the specimen through a CT scanner and construct a 3D model of it. Chemical analysis of the rock could reveal its age, and samples of the tooth enamel might hold clues to what the jawbone’s owner ate. Teams might even attempt to recover ancient DNA.

The person may have had some dental work done. There appear to be absent teeth and the bone tissue has filled into where the teeth once were.

> Paleoanthropologists have discovered all kinds of fossils in Denizli Basin travertine, including deer, mammoths and reptiles. They’ve also discovered at least one other set of human remains: fragments of a human skull cap that showed signs of tuberculosis. The skull, which is at least 1.1 million years old, represented the first Homo erectus ever found in Turkey, now nicknamed the “Kocabas hominin.”