Two French students who were working as volunteers in the Arago Cave in Tautavel found a 560,000-year-old human tooth.
Tautavel is an important archaeological site in France, being the place where the Tautavel Man - a 450,000-year-old Homo erectus - was found, according to The Local.
The tooth is the oldest human body part discovered at the site to date, predating the Tautavel Man by 100,000 years. It was found by Valentin Loescher, who was on his first summer archaeological dig at the cave, together with Camille Jacquey, The Guardian reports.
Loescher said he was brushing a patch of soil in his area while Jacquey was on a break when he found a small tooth. At first, he thought it was an animal tooth. He and Jacquey then showed their find to paleoanthropologist Amelie Vialet, who was overseeing the excavation, according to France TV.
Excitement gripped the students when the tooth was examined by a computer and was later sent to the laboratory for further testing. Vialet said it was a "major discovery."
Découverte à Tautavel. Une dent repousse de 100.000 ans, à 550.000 ans, le plus vieux reste humain trouvé en France pic.twitter.com/L7HBGTOlKp
— Musée de Tautavel (@MuseedeTautavel) July 27, 2015
"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," Vialet said. "This is a major discovery because we have very few human fossils from this period in Europe," she added, according to The Guardian.
The Tautavel Museum of Prehistory announced the archaeological find, saying that it was unearthed at a level in the cave that corresponded to a cold and windy period 560,000 years ago. Artifacts discovered in the cave from the same time period included the remains of horses, sheep, reindeer and rhinoceros, plus stone tools, CBC News reports.
The tooth, identified as an adult incisor, was called Arago 149. Scientists have not yet determined if it belonged to a man or a woman. The tooth can be used to study the morphology of the first Europeans, and it can help explain the gap between recent human fossils and some of the oldest ones.
