A French student has found an adult tooth dating back around 560,000 years in south-western France, in what researchers are hailing as a major discovery.
20 year old Valentin Loescher was volunteering alongside 16 year old Camille Jacquey on his first summer archaeological dig at the Arago cave near Tautavel, when they discovered the tooth.
The tooth could be the oldest human remains found in France. It predates by 100,000 years the famous 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."
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