How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the tile? | Hacker News Reader

How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the tile?

johnhawks.net

543 pointsLuc230 comments

In 2022, I was able to visit the excavation site Bilzingsleben, which is mentioned in the article, and can highly recommend a visit to everyone interested in science. The site itself is just a quarry, but they have built a museum right above the place where they found fossils of thousands of creatures. You can then stand over a control table like in the spaceship Enterprise and trigger 3D animations of those animals and humans in their natural environment on a large screen on the wall on other side over an excavation ditch. But the best thing was getting to know to the curator of the site. He himself took part in the excavation, published scientific articles about it and seems to know everything about the site, its excavation history and palaeological topics related to it. I was able to talk with him for more than an hour.

The excavation site is located about 20km north of Erfurt (Thuringia, Germany). In the summer it is open Weddensday to Sunday and on holidays from 10:00 to 17:00. For those with a camper-van: it is no problem to stay in their very quite car park for the night for free. Its Web-site can be found at http://www.steinrinne-bilzingsleben.com/ (in German).

How about Grube Messel? Is it similar to Bilzingsleben?

Grube Messel is still on my agenda. (It is literally like this: I have bookmarked the location in my navigator app.) However, from what I heared, both must be quite different. In contrast to Messel, there are no spectacular finds on display in Bilzingsleben. What is associated with Homo Erectus is on display in the Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte in Halle.[1]

The scientific worth of Bilzingsleben is that it is sort of a Homo Erectus version of Pompeji (of a much, much smaller size, though): the place was covered with mud at a certain time during a flood disaster, which hindered decomposition and later errosion. It is now more or less completely excavated. So the site itself is just a big ditch.

As I said, the best thing about my visit was the opportunity to talk with a real expert curator. I have hardly ever met a museum guide who knew so much about his subject matter. I hope he is still there.

[1] Photos and descriptions of this and a few other nice finds are available online https://nat.museum-digital.de/search?q=Bilzingsleben (texts in German, navigation available in English)

In Bucharest we have an entire subway station tiled with marble containing countless very visible fossils [1], specifically of rudists [2]. Here are a few nice photos:

https://www.descopera.ro/wp-content/uploads/media/401/321/59...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politehnica_metro_station

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudists

Same thing can be seen in Bologna, Italy [1].

And if I’m not mistaken, several other Italian cities as well.

[1] https://pauls-bologna.blog/dsc08058/

There is a concrete pour next to the place I lived as a child which was done around 1970. A cat walked through and my parents showed the traces to me when I was a small kid, explaining how fossiles were created.

Fast forward 35 years or so, I live 2 km from the place I was born after travelling the world and I went there with my own child to "discover" the steps again, together with the story about fossiles.

I then had my kid take my parents to that place when they were visiting so that he could show them the traces and explain how fossiles are formed.

Full circle of life :)

It’s a heartwarming story, but I don’t understand how cat tracks have anything to do with fossils, which are usually the remains of a once-living animal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_track

The idea was to explain that one can find traces in stone in the form of imprints. Typically these would be trilobites or shells, but also leaves and actual animal steps.

It was more an introduction to the idea of fossilization, layers of sediments etc. than a university course :) with the general message of "you can find traces of stuff in stones, and next we will crack open a stone to show you that".

Not far away from that place there is a church with steps built from sedimentary stone where there are plenty of fossiles so it was a nice introduction.

After 35 years, I'm sorry to say, that cat is a once-living animal :-)

Well, that is the sad part I left to my wife to explain :)

Somehow I find marble and travertine in things like hotels a bit depressing. It took millions of years to form and it's a marvel of serendipitous geological processes. Then it gets sliced and stuck to a wall for a decade or two before another renovation or a demolition happens and it gets smashed up and thrown away.

This is what happens to essentially all materials. Metals, Plastics, Oil, Stone, Sand, Concrete all come from things that have been standing mostly still for millions of years before we extracted their components

Some materials are more replaceable than others. A pine wood fixture can be regrown relatively quickly. Even something like oak based furniture can be replaced in a few hundred years.

Heck, even plastic is pretty replaceable as reducing bio-material into plastic isn't unheard of. (The first plastics were made out of casein from milk).

I get anxiety when I see helium balloons.

You can make plastic from air and light.

Absurdly expensive though.

Depends on how literal/direct you are being. Algae plastic isn't terribly expensive to produce.

How?

Use lots of photovoltaic power (light) to sequester CO2 and H2O and jam it together into more complex carbon compounds? If trees can do it, we can at least approximate it (trees come from the air, not the ground).

A bio method will likely be a lot cheaper. Algae plastic would be three route to look at as you can grow a ton of algae very quickly. A little GMO and you could optimize it for CO2 sequestration.

Most iron (and steel) comes from iron ore formations which are at least 1 billion, and up to 3 billion years old: banded iron formations (BIFs).

The oldest of those are literally legacies of the first major burst of biological activity on Earth, which released oxygen into the atmosphere, which for most of a billion of years or so resulted in reducing unoxidized minerals, particularly iron, in the Great Rusting.

With relatively few exceptions, everything you ever owned or interacted with more than x years ago is rotting in some landfill.

Depends on how big you make x.

Another way to think about it -

It was formed and buried in ways that no one could ever see or appreciate it, until now.

A decade or two in a high visibility location is more attention than it ever would have gotten buried under ground.

"It took millions of years to form"

Not particularly. Travertine and dolomite limestone are hydrothermal depositions. They form quite rapidly, and in some locations you can watch it being formed to this day, like in some areas of Yellowstone (where the travertine is only a few thousand years old at best.) Dolomite is a little slower than Travertine to grow, but what we now understand about its formation also means it was very likely to have been rapidly-formed by simple geologic acid washes over shorter periods of time than we initially thought - read https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2023/11/27/scienti... and you'll catch on to what I'm saying.

> before another renovation or a demolition happens and it gets smashed up and thrown away.

That's sort of material has a high resale value and usually is sold for reuse in other applications.

... is that generally true? What are those other applications?

Like, if I want to put in new stone counters, in general I'm picking a kind of stone I like, and the firm measures or makes a template of my use, and cuts from a slab, right? If I have a really small job, perhaps it's possible to get a deal from the offcuts of some prior installation. I don't think it's generally an available option to e.g. get measurements and then peruse a list of countertops removed from recent local renovations where the dimensions are strictly larger than mine, and have my counter cut by trimming their 11' linear counter to my 10' space. But given that widths/depths are often determined by (standard) cabinet or vanity measurements, I feel like this ought to be doable, and these materials could have a straight-forward series of multiple uses.

There are two opposing extremes of building philosophy.

If there's an architectural design up front then there's a need to source materials that fit the plan, as you describe.

The opposite approach was taken by a friend of mine who was, for a decade, a prolific builder here in Australia .. he continuously had two or three houses on the go in staggered completion (clean builds and|or significant rennovation) that all sold well for their design, uniqueness and craftsmanship.

His starting point was salvage yards, looking for cheap big statement pieces; bay windows, big wall cabinets, doors, window sets, impressive looking ketchen sets, big counter tops, etc.

The next step would be to design a house plan that fitted around quality salvage and well suited the site for views, access, etc.

His arc in life was art school in Victoria followed by | interleaved with a salvage job that dismantled entire (small) towns ahead of dams, flooding, other projects - they prepped wooden houses for moving elsewhere, disassembled structures to "flats", reclaimed historic bridges, etc.

Then came the building that built up his cash reserves, then a big rural property with sheds, glassblowing studios, metal work, etc.

It's unclear if William Morris would've approved of this approach to an Arts & Crafts career, but I certainly do.

The running joke in the arts & crafts circles I was tangential to concerned the difference between an artist and a craftsperson; Craft people have to pay their bills ... :-)

Seems like there are lots of companies willing to sell you reclaimed marble slabs:

https://www.google.com/search?q=reclaimed+marble+slabs&oq=re...

I'd imagine this stuff is pretty local though because shipping heavy stuff like marble too far wouldn't make much sense.

Do some businesses exist which deal in old slabs? Sure. Though the large majority of results I see in your link are pretty small.

But more importantly there are a lot of kitchen and bathroom renovations (and I _think_ renovations outnumber new construction by a lot ...) so one might think that almost as many countertops being removed as installed, and that a large portion of these could be serviced by recycled ones. The comment from danans asserted that these materials are "usually" reused -- which I am doubtful of.

In Boulder CO there are incentives to deconstruct rather than demo houses. The materials are sold at a local yard. They send a weekly materials alert:

https://imgur.com/kFax0eK

Could you share the name of the yard?

https://resourcecentral.org/materialsreuse/

It's like a Home Depot for used building materials/kitchens/toilets/plumbing/electrical etc. Think of carefully deconstructing a 50s ranch built to GI bill specs and carting it off somewhere to sell it.

It's part of "recycling row" where they have a single stream recycling plant and drop off, "CHARM" for hard to recycle stuff like computers and a hazardous waste place for paint / lead / solvent etc.

https://ecocycle.org/services-and-facilities/zero-waste-faci...

Stone countertops haven't been in super wide usage long enough that there is a huge supply for used. But if getting one replaced there's certainly a market for a stone counter. Even the sink cutouts for real stone can sell for a good bit.

A lot of stone countertops though are actually cheap composites where the slab is mass produced. Like how you can walk into an apartment complex and they all have granite countertops with nearly identical patterns.

> A lot of stone countertops though are actually cheap composites

That still call themselves granite? Quartz is the well known man-made composite, but it tends to be a little more expensive than granite, not less.

I don't think they call themselves granite - caesarstone is one I've heard of.

Caesarstone (AFAIK) is just a brand of quartz countertops. As the previous poster said, quartz is usually more expensive than the cheapest granite, on par with mid or high-end granite in pricing.

"What are those other applications?"

For starters, Travertine is highly popular in jewelry. When a rockhound passed away here where I live, his custom house was being demolished by the new owners and they invited the community to come rescue any thing they could. I rescued a bunch of the travertine slabs to use as teaching material for new rock cutters.

As a private person wanting to decorate your own house in a fancy way you are something of an edge case. If your contractor came to you and said "this material has a questionable provenance but it's 20% cheaper and will look 99% as good" you might be likely to decline. Many businesses, faced with the same opportunity, would be delighted.

Really? As a private person I’d jump at that opportunity.

You must be an exception within an edge case.

Even our local Habitat for Humanities Restore wouldn't accept used natural stone countertops in good condition. The guys manning the donation drop off didn't know the reason.

Would it be better for billions of tons of it to just sit locked away in the Earth and never see the light of day?

It kind of feels like at least you "should" stick it to something that you expect will last a substantial amount of time, rather then something that is entirely expected to be gutted in, on the scale of how long a tile could practically last, relatively short order. Obviously, I know that The Market says "no", it's a few dollars a tile wholesale!

Don't worry, the market corrects - what's the market price on Galapagos turtle soup or dodo omelettes?

Others are right - the matter is neither created nor destroyed, but you are also right, that form is/was unique, and it is at least a bit sad to know that it's unlikely to be seen again. Take from that what you will, but I take from it that the world will only be like this for a moment, and if I want to see it, the only way to encourage that is to go and see it, not hope that society will realize it needs to (or wished it had) preserve things.

Whether these are the things we'll regret losing - different question, but I'm sure a british museum will hang onto one :)

This comment is all over the place. Is the market for marble good or bad in this case? Is it producing an efficient outcome? Can it be made to do so? What are the non market solutions? You fault something just because it exist but give no alternative.

Species like Dodo are expected to go extinct as humans flourish and move other things out of our way. All species eventually go extinct. We only exist because we out competed what came before us, which out competed what came before it.

You can mourn the loss of the Dodo not existing in a zoo for you to gawk at but I find that to be on the level of complaining about a TV show being cancelled. If it filled such an essential biological niche that its loss is noticed (it obviously wasn't - hundreds of years went by before anyone noticed it was gone) - if it were noticed, and was such a heavy loss, that's the first niche that will be filled by something else. You can't have Darwinian evolution without this.

The Galapagos Giant Tortoise will never go extinct because the market for protecting and investigating and gawking at them is too strong. If that interest ever wanes the animal will no longer occupy a useful niche and will cease to exist, unless it adapts.

Do you have a blog? If you do, please drop a link. If not, you should. You just put the thoughts that I had about this comment into writing more eloquently than I ever could.

> or dodo omelettes

we should definitely not let it get that far....

Or consider iron. Almost all of it has actually sank into the Earth's core, the deposits we extract it from are but tiniest scraps of the metal left on the face of the planet. So irreverent!

Ah well, but we could always get as much more of it as we want with an exciting enough mining project!

And if that fails, just sit tight and it'll be most of the universe for a few quadrillion years, somewhere between "cold, dark and quiet" and "very cold and very dark and very quiet"

We could probably even make more iron in a fusion reactor. But anything heavier than iron would probably require a supernova.

I don't think there's anything stopping us from making trace amounts of elements heavier than iron. The superheavy elements have only been synthesised in the laboratory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheavy_element

Way easier to just electrolyze olivine, of which we have plenty. Downside is that you actually get more silicon and magnesium out of it, and those are higher strength each than the iron you get from each chunk of rock. I.e., if you wanted to use them to make a bridge, it'd be mostly of something like silicon fiber reinforced magnesium instead of steel. Unless refining them to sufficient purity turns out to be too difficult to be worth it.

We’d at least be able to clad the interiors of the generation ships with them 10,000 years from now if we did

The bright side is more people will have seen and touched the marble than if it had stayed where it was.

although it is NOT what you're talking about, you reminded me of this article:

https://www.theonion.com/geologists-we-may-be-slowly-running...

Personally I think of those caves full of ancient crystals, or the stalag[mt]ites in newly unearthed caves. And the lost redwoods.

> It took millions of years to form and it's a marvel of serendipitous geological processes.

Wait until you hear what happens to oil...

The storage medium for sunlight are carbohydrates Ü

Doesn’t natural erosion have a similar effect on probably a much larger scale?

If only we felt this sentimental about human beings.

The tiles in my house are reclaimed.

I wonder how they get them off the wall intact? I took up a bathroom floor of (glazed ceramic) tiles and I barely had a piece larger than a handspan to show for it, they were nearly all absolutely welded to the adhesive. Would be great if there could be a 3M Command Strip style pull-to-release tab!

I do agree with your sentiment, however this is pretty much how geology works.

Rocks brought to the surface, and eroded by water, or plunged into the depths and melted to spew out as volcanoes, etc, etc, etc.

Perhaps the remnants of bathroom tiles will be subjected into the ground and mined in millions of year to decorate a future species bathroom.

     To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may
     not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander,
     till he find it stopping a bung-hole?

Oh god, I couldn't deal with having that in my floor; that tile would definitely be getting replaced.

My local grocery store has red marble flooring and one of the tiles has a ~1m diameter perfect ammonite fossil in it. It's huge and I pray they renovate the store one day cause I want to get that tile from the constructors.

Have you ever thought about just asking the owner for it in exchange for paying for a replacement tile and the labor expenses? Maybe they'd be up for it. Seems better than just hoping you notice their plans to renovate in time, or that it doesn't get shattered/damaged.

If you run across this situation, I'll buy you a new tile and take that one off your hands so I can put it in my floor.

I think this would probably be the coolest thing in my house. I'd love it.

Me neither.That is basically part of corpse in your home, right?

Limestone is generally made of dead corals and marine animals, this batch just included a slightly wider variety of species than average.

The magic ingredient in concrete is cement and the magic ingredient in cement is limestone, so our cities are literally built out of bones. Sleep tight.

this is a mistake i made for many years, so hopefully i can save someone else: bones and teeth are calcium phosphate, while corals and seashells and eggshells and limestone are calcium carbonate. that's why you can't dissolve teeth or chicken bones in vinegar. cement is made by calcining calcium carbonate (with silicates), not calcium phosphate

mineral calcium phosphate (apatite) is broken down for fertilizer with sulfuric acid. it is not used for cement to my knowledge

the phosphate and carbonate of calcium are not especially similar, not any more than the hydroxide and sulfate of sodium, or the sulfide and hydroxide of iron

in summary, your cities are not literally built out of bones

Valid point, but let's tease that apart: We're talking about seashells and coral, not the sort of bones you'd find in a mammal, but still the skeletal structures of animals. So maybe "skeletons" not "bones". Same difference.

true, your cities are literally built out of skeletons

> so our cities are literally built out of bones. Sleep tight.

They moved the cemetery but they left the bodies!

Interesting. Cities are built on death and suffering, literally and figuratively.

Much (most?) of the entire biosphere of earth comes from billions of years of life forms killing and eating other life forms.

The universe is a rough place. Beautiful in many ways, but quite gnarly.

  > The universe is a rough place. Beautiful in many ways, but quite gnarly.

It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid.

Unless you're a primary producer (photosynthesize your own food, or something of the sort), all life is built on death and suffering. We eat what we kill.

except, hooray for parasites and scavengers!

... in fairness, there's not really any particular reason to believe that the organisms which contributed to limestone suffered any more than their peers who didn't. And insofar as all the elements that are components of life exist in finite quantities which get recycled on earth, all life is built on death.

Yep. I have a few seashells poking out of my bathroom tile. It’s not (ugly) travertine though.

This makes it especially fun to climb on, there are pretty little shell indentations and such to appreciate on your way up.

Uh, sure, but that doesn't look like "an identifiable part of a human head" that's going to be catching your eye when you're using the bathroom.

It's not uncommon to build using human remains or on top of the human remains. Quite a few plague pits got uncovered in London in recent years by developers wanting to build on whatever scrape of land they can find. Developers are required to allow some time for researchers to go through the site before they are free to then pour concrete over them and erect their towers.

I live in a city that was founded by the Romans around the time of Christ. But has been abandoned and rebuild a couple of times (by a.o. Charlemagne). Everytime something is built, dug, or torn down, they find old or ancient foundations. Sometimes underneath old foundations. Fortresses underneath mideaval cellars, city walls below a casino. A Bathouse in a parking garage.

It makes building stuff, quite cumbersome. And I can only imagine the amount of ancient foundations that have been quickly eradicated, so that a real estate developer could keep on schedule to maximize profits.

Same. I would look at that every time I was in the bathroom and wonder how they died. Did they suffocate from toxic gasses while exploring a cave? Maybe it was more gruesome like falling into a hot spring and getting boiled to death...

It would bother me forever.

100%. No issue with someone else having it in _their_ house, but it'd horrify me to have that in my house

This is honestly either shitty workmanship or bad luck. They should have noticed this and swapped it for another tile during construction. Either the installer wasn’t looking at what they were doing (apathy) or there were other tiles with more obvious “flaws” and they ran out of spares.

But then I don’t think I want limestone in my bathroom in the first place.

Amazing... I have this stuff in my own bathroom, and assumed it was some sort of synthetically generated random pattern, e.g. a type of ceramic or concrete tile with coloring swirled in or something. To be honest, I find it a bit ugly and didn't understand why anyone would design a tile to look like this.

Can't wait to get home and actually look carefully. I suspect I'll appreciate it a lot more knowing what it actually is.

Travertine is a pretty “famous” stone and was used extensively by the Romans to build some of their most famous structures (including the Coliseum). Since then architects have used it in many famous buildings (e.g. the Seagram building’s lobby).

Unless you are certain "this stuff in your own bathroom" is real travertine, it most likely is "some sort of synthetically generated random pattern". They make it out of colored cement, which is pretty similar to a real thing, but obviously cheaper and more resistant to some hardships of everyday life.

You’re right, it’s fake! A pretty good fake until I found 2 identical tiles.

Can you post a picture?

There are photos in the article here, mine looks identical other than the jaw bone.

my first read of this title was: "how many bathrooms did neanderthals have?" making me wonder "neanderthals had bathrooms?"

I was stuck for ages trying to parse the title, thinking it was a Google-style interview question - "How many bathrooms are there in the Netherlands?"

Same. I re-read it at least four times. I kept seeing "How many bathrooms in the Netherlands have tile?"

I read "How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the title?" and thought "people name bathrooms?"

I'm sitting in Denisovan right now. Thank the maker for mobile devices to pass the time while nature does it's thing.

I parsed it right but still assumed Google was involved somehow.

Low risk assumption, since they seem to be involved in most websites today for some reason.

> thinking it was a Google-style interview question - "How many bathrooms are there in the Netherlands?"

Where does the idea that this is a Google-style interview question come from? They've never interviewed that way.

We called them fermi estimation problems in grad school

Whether it's true or not, there is the "How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?" meme interview question https://www.wired.com/2014/08/how-to-solve-crazy-open-ended-...

That style of question was notorious long before Google existed. It has never been associated with Google.

I thought it was associated with Microsoft.

It was. They're different companies.

Me too. It really crossed a wire in my brain!

It's because up until the very last word the sentence can be passed very differently: "How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the average household?"

Before reading the article, I thought it was about Neanderthal themed designs on the tile.

GPT kind of agrees: https://chat.openai.com/share/f52068c0-2668-4343-9446-aaa145...

Why did ChatGPT say that's fascinating? I thought it was a large language model that had no feelings or opinions.

Because it's tuned to be as positive as possible about anything you give it. Try asking it to review your poetry sometime.

To be fair it's kind of that.

that thought briefly crossed my mind too

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

Neanderthals certainly had bathrooms!

I read it as "How many bathrooms have Nederlanders in the tile?"

Would it be possible (even just theoretically) to discover fossils like this non-destructively via some form of scanning? If we would have a huge chunk of stone on a table, could we somehow tell if there is any humanoid bones in it without cutting it up?

I suspect the very low contrast between the fossil and the surrounding rock would mean that either we need a very sensitive sensor, very long exposures or likely both.

CT scanners can visualize the interior of stone blocks to locate fossils for the purpose of extraction planning but obviously you're limited to the dimensions of the scanner. They're also used to image the inside of fossilized eggs.

Ground penetrating radar can be used to visualize fossils but the conductivity of the material greatly impacts resolution (it's poor no matter what) and reach. Low-conductivity materials can be imaged up to tens of meters, high-conductivity materials you're lucky to get one meter.

There are other methods for imaging that can penetrate further but I don't think they have the resolution to be useful (think: "there's an oil deposit down there" not "there's a body").

I believe this can be done with CT scans - they are already applied to non-destructively learn more about known fossils.

Routinely scanning random chunks of stone would be prohibitively expensive, of course.

Depends really .. if the source quarry is pulling blocks and thin slicing them for tiles | counter tops then it's relatively easy (in the world of industrial mining) to photographically scan the top and bottom of every slice of stone after it's been cut to tile thickness.

A number of quarries already automate the slicing and "inspect" surfaces for defects via computer vision.

The trick is pattern recognition to catch things of interest so that if required the raw slices can be retrieved before they're shipped.

It's destructive tomography .. with an option to digitally reconstruct a solid, or even to physically rejoin slices.

Obviously the solution is to CT scan the whole planet. Then it'll be easy to spot the fossils.

Well :) if you would vote me to the emperor of everything (don’t recommend it, i have eccentric tendencies) I would dig up a mile by mile by mile of random cube somewhere and document it in excruciating detail. Kinda like a paleontological version of the Hubble Deep Field image. A very detailed and very good look at somewhere where otherwise we don’t expect to find anything particularly interesting.

Indiana Jones and the Tomography of Doom

I'd love to see an /r/TheyDidTheMath on the energy required to CT scan the entire Earth all the way thru. I assume you'd have to vaporize the planet.

You could do secants rather than diameters. Just image the surface layers. Although even just the 5km or so to the horizon sounds like a scary amount of energy.

How about neutrino imaging? (I thought I was joking, but... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-018-0319-1)

Finally, after all these years, I have a use for all of my real-estate investments in subterranean cave systems.

I believe statistically, you are almost certain when you are peeing in the bathroom to be peeing out some of the exact same water molecules that exact same Neanderthal who is in the tile peed out when they were alive.

Travertine Man is not on my Anthropology bingo card.

Dentist floored by Precarbonite Man?

Precarbonite man literally floored by dentist's parents.

Dentist floored by Precarbonite man's mandible floored by dentist's parents.

Still easier to understand then the goddamn title.

I'm not an anthropologist, but I saw right away that it was a jawbone. How could anyone miss it?

To be fair, you're only seeing that one small part in isolation.

Talk about the downtrodden.

This blows my mind because it reminds me of how we find dinosaurs!

I love time team, and I know it's not even close to neanderthals. But I've grown accustomed to them finding human remains in soil. But this is in sedimentary rock! It's like a fossilized human, sort of.

It is a fossilized human if you consider neanderthals human. They have now confirmed that they made art, that is good enough for me. The teeth aren't mineralized but they never are. A hundred million year old shark tooth is still a tooth not a fossil. But this jaw bone was mineralized, so it is a fossil. It doesn't take anything close 1.2 million years to fossilze a bone, and they think that is how old it was. I do see what you mean though, for something like 95% of our history, we had minds resembling our own, but lived such different lives.

I found out not long ago that Time Team episodes are officially available on YouTube, both old and new:

https://www.youtube.com/@TimeTeamClassics

https://www.youtube.com/@TimeTeamOfficial

Oh I know! :D

And also Prof. Alice Roberts has a great series called Unearthed History[1] where Phil Harding featured recently.

1. https://www.youtube.com/@UnearthedHistoryChannel

Does Phil still wear short shorts?

For that dig he sported a very trendy pair of naturally torn jeans.

Thank you.

I thought it ended years ago.

It did, but they've crowd funded at least one new episode through patreon subscriptions.

> Dating of the travertine by Anne-Marie Lebatard and collaborators in 2014 suggests that the individual lived sometime between 1.6 million and 1.2 million years ago.

What the…? Am I misunderstanding something? I didn’t think human ancestry started so long ago.

Homo habilis existed as long as 2.8 million years ago.

TIL, fossils exist from < O(1M+)ya

Also TIL, (from tangential reading) even dinosaur fossils contain original bone material from the organism, not just rock in the shape of the original bones.

Of course it makes complete sense in retrospect.

Good article.

I thought I was going to hear that some type of ceramic consisted in part of ground-up Neanderthal bones. I think I'd be unpleasantly surprised to find a human jawbone on the bathroom floor.

I couldn't parse the title until I read the article.

I couldn't parse the tile until I read the article.

Absolutely wild the number of people in the comments on the original Reddit thread who earnestly think OP should call the police to report human remains.

They should look up applicable laws in their jurisdiction. Police may not be appropriate, but most places govern how human remains should be handled.

Yikes, seeing someone's jawbone each day is off putting.

The odd ammonite would be sad, you'd think that this would be rejected on quality grounds.

This title made absolutely no sense until I read the article. Fascinating stuff.

Makes me sad to think of the fossils lost, but it's also kind of inevitable.

    "And if you do happen find a jawbone in your bathroom, my suggestion is first to contact the local authorities. Sure, a fossil in travertine likely comes from hundreds of thousands of years ago. It isn't a crime scene. But depending on your state or nation of residence, laws governing discovery of human remains on your property may be complicated and having the paperwork in order with the police, sheriff, or coroner is the first step for most investigations."

No thanks. I'm not going to complicate my life with paperwork and police investigators because of a small piece of a might-be-a-fossil from Turkey.

Well, I'm not telling you how to live your life, but someone who used to work in a related field, please at least consider it if you ever are in that situation. It's always useful to have more data, and some data will always come from random findings like this.

Maybe AI image recognition is good enough by then to actually determine if it is from a human or some other animal, so that you know beforehand that your paperwork will not be in vain at least. I don't expect that there will be much of a police investigation, the age should be rather obvious in most cases. On the other hand I've heard that there are states where the police get less than half a year of training, so maybe there will be one. But still, think of the potential scientific value :)

If the recommended course of action to contribute here is to involve the police and inform them there might be human remains on your property, then I strongly doubt you're gonna get many people willing at all. If this is a genuine and serious potential source of fact finding/analysis that is of value to the field, then the field needs to find a less... lets call it polarizing, option.

I think the other comment is more accurate: this isn’t about polarization, it’s a potential threat to your safety.

Involving the police for something like that is not a threat to your safety in a civilised country. It is, indeed, the best course of action in any country with a functioning police force.

Well, a functioning police force wouldn't mind if you reach to online communities and paleontologists to verify that those remains are human before reaching to police to file a report, I'd assume.

And so, if the law force action could have serious consequences, then the tiles would be better left untouched, no paperwork needed. And if it couldn't, then it's okay not to file paperwork first.

Yeah, like if they said "call the archeology department of your local university to see if they want to document it", I'd totally do that. But I'm not going to call the police, explain to them what I'm calling about and potentially open a crime scene investigation in my own home.

Though realistically, I don't expect that the police would even come out or do anything at all, they don't bother to come out for car breakins, so I don't see them coming out for "I saw something in my new countertop that looks sort of like it could be a 500,000 year old human fossil"

Putting the lives of your family and yourself at risk by involving police would be incredibly irresponsible.

This is an unreasonable comment even for an American. But in other countries it's especially not a concern. You might have to report it to a different government agency (like an archaeologist or animal control) but you are supposed to report it to someone.

The other reddit category of things you should report to the police (or someone else) is of course people who find old grenades in their house.

https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/4x9u4p/unc...

Sure, it's different in other countries. But as a dark skinned person in America, this is not unreasonable, but pragmatic. Reporting to an archaeology organization is not at all the same thing as reporting to police.

Correct me if I am wrong, but this was in a cut limestone plate. So if it was a crime, I am sure the murderer is long deceased and probably not even a homo sapiens.

I think the theory is that if you don't tell the cops before anyone else, then when they find out they might try to bust you for failing to report human remains. Even the dimmest sheriff wouldn't try to persuade a prosecutor that a fossil was the victim of a living murderer.

>So if it was a crime, I am sure the murderer is long deceased and probably not even a homo sapiens.

If it was a "murder", it had to be a homo sapiens. Killings by wild animals aren't called "murders".

However, if this was a Neanderthal person, it's quite possible the murder was by a fellow Neanderthal, aka homo sapiens neanderthalensis.

(Apparently it's still debated whether the Neanderthals are a distinct species or a subspecies of homo sapiens.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal

You argue with someone and police makes a visit. Searches your criminal history and sees one line "investigated for murder". Guess what might happen. Nothing right? Because we live in a perfect world.

> "investigated for murder"

Seriously overestimating the willingness of police to give a shit about what are clearly _really old_ remains.

The CYA part about talking to authorities (whoever applicable in your jurisdiction, not necessarily police) still applies. There are often laws about human remains. THOSE would show on your record if this is mishandled.

> Searches your criminal history and sees one line "investigated for murder".

That's not even remotely close to how police records work in the US. It fits the narrative, but is completely ignorant of reality.

Not everyone lives in USA.

Still human remains.

[citation needed]

it's humanoid remains, but not modern human

Right back at you with the citation needed. Humanoid is not a taxonomic term anymore. All Homo are humans. Never said modern, which it obviously isn't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human

> Although some scientists equate the term "humans" with all members of the genus Homo, in common usage it generally refers to Homo sapiens, the only extant member.

There's no citation for that claim and it would be unlikely for there to be one.

It's just some dude's personal impression about a subjective matter (a word in transition), and carries no more weight than any other comment being made here.

A more meaningful source would be a usage guide like Garner's Modern English.

Actually, it is cited. The fragment you quoted is from the lede, which is supposed to summarize the rest of the material. So if you read on to the section "Etymology and definition", you find that the same claim is cited to Merriam Webster.

As it happens, this citation is useless, because it doesn't support the claim. Basically, I think it's fraudulent to cite that claim to that MW article.

Okay, link to your source

I don't wanna classify you like an animal in the zoo, but it seems good to me to know that you're Homosapien too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HwmO_GZfzI

I feel like this is peak HN pedantry, but it seems like there's some controversy amongst anthropologists these days as how to sort of colloquially define human; I've heard some say that any species in the genus homo should qualify.

And how to legally define human is extremely controversial and always has been.

Is this because there are people walking around today with a substantial amount of Neanderthal DNA and were being cautious not to denigrate them?

I thought the term "humanoid" referred to bipedal aliens with bilateral symmetry. Or to human-like robots.

"Humanoid" refers to anything with a human body morphology (i.e., bipedal, two legs, two arms, head). That can be actual humans, human-looking robots, bipedal aliens with bilateral symmetry, or even Barbie dolls I suppose.

It’s something that looks like human remains, and that needs to be imaged properly to have a definitive answer.

That will be a great comfort to know, after the trigger happy local yokel cops shoot you in the head while executing their no-knock warrant because they think that you are reaching for a hidden weapon.

I'm also pretty sure there are more human skeletal remains than any other species on the planet, whether comparing by count or mass.

Whether or not that's already making it into materials used in fancy house decorating materials is a more complicated question I guess.

Seriously. People have ended up dead from calling the police about things far less likely to cause concern/confusion than "I have dead human parts in my bathroom"

Maybe "I have dead human parts in my bathroom" is not the best way to explain the situation and one would be served better if they concentrated on how to make the communication convey the intended message the best, instead of being satisfied with "technically correct is the best kind of correct".

You need to read the old internet 1.0 lore "In The Beginning there was Plan" and then consider how communication happens in any bureaucratic organization. (Poorly, intermittently, and with multiple transmission errors)

You tell the dispatcher that you found a fossilized jawbone in your tile, by the time the report makes it's way to the responding officer the story is you found a severed head in your sink.

Like opening with "I'm pretty sure this is a non-issue, but there's a fossilized jawbone fragment in some travertines I just had installed. Do you need to investigate that or are we good?"

Yeah, most people's lives are complicated enough as is. This "suggestion" is asking you to go well out of your way to get buried in some tedious paperwork and investigations. Only those who are into fossils might give a care.

Also notice how smoothly they equate a potential fossil with "human remains". Yeah, technically right.

And misunderstandings about "human remains" somewhere in some complicated cross jurisdictional chain of command could end up with you in handcuffs, or shot.

Or the media could run some poorly researched human interest story about you that makes you sound like Jeffrey Dahmer.

Or something that's never happened can continue never happening. People have found hominid fossils out in public before and it's been obvious they were fossils. The worst that's happened is they're returned to native tribes who then keep them.

Wow, I wasn't aware that was a correct sentence.

This building has people in it.

I read that title and I was nearly convinced I was having a stroke.

But how many bathrooms Neanderthals had?

Continuing with the Neanderthal theme:

> how is babby formed? How girl get pragnent?

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-is-babby-formed

From the title, I fully expected the story to be about a next-generation CAPTCHA.

I still don't understand the title, no matter how hard I try. Is there a word missing? A misspelling?

"How many bathrooms have (fossilized remains of) Neanderthals in the (wall/floor) tile?"

I had to start reading the article before I was able to parse it correctly.

Just got it. Have is the possessive definition, not the helper verb for a past participle.

Read like: How many tiles contain Neanderthals within their tiles?

Quickly solved by inserting “remains embedded” after Neanderthals

They got civilised now, from caves to bathrooms.

I read this title early in the morning. Thought it said "Netherlands", now that I'm reading it more awake, I'll be honest when I say I'm not sure if Neanderthals is more or less comforting.

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