A 700,000-year-old elephant tooth reveals the wetland where early humans lived in Israel

A giant elephant molar from the Daughters of Jacob Bridge site in northern Israel has handed archaeologists a chemical record of the wetland that sat beside early humans roughly 700,000 years ago. The tooth belonged to Palaeoloxodon antiquus, the straight-tusked elephant, and a team led by Hannah Farrell, a PhD candidate at the University of Haifa, read its carbon isotopes, wear patterns and CT scans alongside pollen from the surrounding sediments.

The result is a portrait of a lush, long-lived refuge on one of the oldest travel routes between Africa and Eurasia. Stone tools show that people were present at the spot, which sits in the Jordan Rift Valley just south of the Hula Valley, and the new work explains why a place with standing water, trees and big animals was able to support elephants and, nearby, toolmakers.

A molar, tusk fragments and basalt handaxes at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov

The site is known as Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, with the excavated area called North Bridge Acheulian, or GBY-NBA. Its sediments held the elephant molar and tusk fragments next to basalt handaxes and cleavers, the heavy, shaped stone tools typical of the Acheulian tradition. Prof. Gonen Sharon of Tel-Hai University, who excavated the area, excavated the area, and the elephant remains were found together with those tools.

The findings appear in a paper in Quaternary Science Reviews titled “Elephant dental remains from the Acheulian site at North Bridge Acheulian-Gesher Benot Ya’aqov: hominin behavior and environmental implications.” The study is observational, built on measurements of fossils rather than experiments, and the team combined four lines of evidence: CT scanning with 3D reconstruction, microscopic study of tooth wear, isotope geochemistry and pollen analysis. Each method answers a different question, from what the elephant ate to what grew nearby.

Carbon isotopes and pollen point to permanent water

Teeth record diet, and diet records habitat. Carbon isotope values from the molar indicate that the animal lived in a consistently well-watered environment, not a landscape that dried out for long stretches. Cheryl A. Makarewicz of the University of Haifa handled the isotope work, while Nimrod Marom, also at Haifa, contributed the archaeozoology, the study of animal remains, which ties the tooth to the other bones and to the question of how a very large herbivore fit into the local food web.

Pollen from the sediments supplied the second line of proof. Minji Jin and Dafna Langgut of Tel Aviv University found abundant wetland plants, including reeds, sedges, willow, tamarisk and other aquatic species. According to the university news release distributed on EurekAlert, the team reconstructed a long-lasting mosaic of woodlands, grasslands, marshes, rivers and shallow-water habitats, a mix that gives herbivores forage in every season and gives hunters and gatherers many reasons to stay close.

A refuge along the Levantine Corridor

The Levantine Corridor is the strip of land that linked Africa and Eurasia, and animals and people moving between the continents had to pass through it. The authors suggest the Hula Valley worked as a stable ecological refuge inside that corridor, a place where reliable water and resources let animal populations, and the early human groups that followed them, persist when conditions elsewhere were less forgiving. Earlier excavation reports on the site, including a 1992 paper in Quaternary Research, had already described fluvial and lake sediments deposited in an embayment of the Hula Basin.

That earlier work also set the age frame. Its biostratigraphy, magnetostratigraphy and potassium-argon dating placed the Benot Ya’aqov Formation between roughly 240,000 and 730,000 years ago, and its authors noted that large in-place assemblages of Acheulian artifacts are rare in the middle Pleistocene Levant. The new study’s figure of about 700,000 years sits near the older end of that span.

Sharon framed the stakes plainly. “The availability of water, vegetation, and animal resources shaped where humans and wildlife could survive,” he said, according to a Popular Archaeology account of the study. He described the work as a way of understanding how humans and animals responded to environmental change hundreds of thousands of years ago, a question that matters because climate swings repeatedly reshaped the places where early populations could live.

One limit applies. The published summaries establish that Acheulian toolmakers worked at the site and that the wetland probably supplied water and food for groups passing through, but they do not describe specific behavior such as butchery or hunting of the elephant itself. The paper’s title promises hominin behavior as well as environment, so the full text is where readers will find how directly the tooth ties to human activity.

The clearest result is environmental. A single molar, read with isotopes, wear, CT data and pollen from a team spanning the University of Haifa, Tel-Hai University and Tel Aviv University, indicates that around 700,000 years ago the Hula Valley offered something rare in the region: dependable water that did not fail, and the plants and animals that came with it. Readers who follow field reports can find more in the EurekAlert archaeology collection.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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