Two young French volunteer archaeologists, Camille, 16, and Valentin, aged twenty years, discovered, Thursday, July 23 in Tautavel in Pyrénées-Orientales, a tooth of an adult individual who lived there 550,000 years.
Either 100,000 years before the famous Tautavel man, previously considered “the oldest French” . This is a “major discovery” , say the researchers working on this prehistoric site of the Arago Cave, near Perpignan.
“A large adult tooth – man or woman, you can not say it – was found during excavations in level ground which is known goes back 550,000 years, because we used many different dating methods “, explained the paleoanthropologist Amélie Viallet, head of excavations at the Arago Cave.
A similar tooth found year last
Yves Coppens, paleoanthropologist and professor at the College de France, confirms that this tooth is certainly old 550 000 years, since the place where it was discovered. “If this tooth has been reported elsewhere, we will notice, he said on France Info. But the most likely hypothesis is that the individual who lost his incisive to have lost there in that place. “
” We had already found last year in June, a tooth in that same square which dates from 560,000 years “, says Tony Knight, Another paleoanthropologist at Tautavel Research Centre. But this discovery, then unnoticed, does not detract from the find last week, which comes on the contrary strengthen.
“A piece of the puzzle”
Apart from the Mauer mandible, discovered in 1907 in Germany and dated around 600,000 years, very few human fossils are known in Europe for this period.
This tooth is ” a piece of the puzzle we were missing to help answer the crucial question: what the Neanderthals, 120 000 years, from a single line? “, said Amélie Viallet, member of the European Centre for Prehistoric Research at Tautavel and lecturer at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.
More than 140 skeletal remains from the Tautavel man, who lived there are about 450,000 years old, have already been discovered in the cave of Arago, near the village of Tautavel. This site, searched for fifty years by thousands of volunteers around the world, is one of the most important prehistoric sites in the world.
A site that has not revealed all its secrets
This tooth and the discovery last year are “extremely important elements as we approach the origin of species” , told Reuters Tony Knight . They will “help clarify the debate a bit” currently raging on the Homo heidelbergensis, the ancestor of the Neanderthals, says this expert of University of Perpignan.
“The” Homo heidelbergensis “is it just a European or African also? This is a very important debate. If we find an entire mandible, we can say whether there has been an evolution of the species or not. “
The expert has one regret, found that the tooth is a lower incisor:
” This n is not the most important element. These are very simple and teeth with few features. If we had a premolar or molar, we would have had more information on the species. “
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