One tooth, a whole environment
A single fossil tooth found in northern Israel has given scientists a picture of a world that vanished nearly 700,000 years ago. The molar, along with fragments of tusk, belonged to a straight-tusked elephant, Palaeoloxodon antiquus, one of the largest land mammals of the Pleistocene.
The fossils came from Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, the site of the Daughters of Jacob Bridge, in the Jordan Rift Valley just south of today's Hula Valley.
Stone tools beside the bones
Elephant remains were unearthed alongside handaxes and cleavers knapped from basalt, a volcanic rock. The tools belong to the Acheulian tradition, one of the oldest and most widespread stone-tool technologies in human history, which places early humans at the same spot as the animals.
The research, published in Quaternary Science Reviews, was led by Hannah Farrell, a doctoral candidate at Haifa University. The site has been excavated by Professor Gonen Sharon of Tel-Hai University of Kiryat Shmona in the Galilee and his colleagues.
Forests, rivers and wetlands
From the tooth and the sediments around it, the team reconstructed a surprisingly rich landscape of forests, rivers, wetlands and dense vegetation, not the dry terrain the region suggests today. For a browser of that size, such a setting would have offered year-round water and abundant fodder.
The same resources would have mattered to the humans who left the tools behind. Reliable water and plant cover make a corridor, and the Jordan Valley is one of the routes that early populations used to move between Africa and Eurasia.
The finding adds detail to a wider debate about how much of early human travel was driven by climate and how much by landscape. A single well-preserved site cannot settle it, but it does show that this stretch of the rift was habitable, and heavily used, long before the ice ages people usually picture.