Jawbone from ancient land bridge reveals a mysterious human ancestor Eth Mixer
An intriguing object my husband and I saw during our honeymoon was the Robenhausen door at Switzerland’s National Museum Zurich. More than 5,500 years old, the wooden board is one of the most ancient preserved doors in Europe.
Archaeologist Jakob Messikommer uncovered the prehistoric object from the marshes in Wetzikon in 1868, according to the museum.
The door likely belonged to a Neolithic home in a village on Lake Pfäffiker — and seeing it caused me to wonder who built it, and who passed through it, thousands of years ago.
Rare artifacts like this, as well as fossils, help us determine where we came from and reveal more of humanity’s story. When commercial fishing nets dredged up a fossilized jawbone off Taiwan’s coast in 2010, scientists puzzled over where it might fit on the human family tree.
Ancient protein fragments within the jaw’s teeth revealed the bone, known as Penghu 1, belonged to a Denisovan man who likely lived on a submerged land bridge that once connected what’s now China and Taiwan.
Denisovan fossil finds are hard to come by, which means scientists have scant evidence suggesting what our extinct mystery relatives might have looked like. But revisiting fossils in Taiwan’s National Museum of Natural Science may yield riveting clues.