700,000-year-old elephant tooth reveals a lost ecosystem shared by early humans in the Levant

What happened

A remarkably preserved elephant tooth previously recovered from Gesher Benot Ya'aqov (GBY-NBA)—a prehistoric site in northern Israel where early humans made stone tools some 700,000 years ago—has now enabled researchers to reconstruct a lush landscape of woodlands, wetlands and waterways from the Pleistocene. The findings provide a rare glimpse into the environment shared by giant elephants and some of the region's earliest human populations.