A 700,000-Year-Old Elephant Tooth and a Refuge in Israel

Seven hundred thousand years ago, early humans worked near the water in what is now northern Israel and shaped basalt into handaxes. A giant elephant tooth ended up in the same layer as their tools. Nobody wrote anything down. So how can scientists now say what the land looked like, what the elephant ate, and why this valley mattered so much?

The answer sits inside a single molar.

A Giant Among Giants

The tooth belonged to Palaeoloxodon antiquus, the straight-tusked elephant, one of the largest land mammals of the Pleistocene. Archaeologists recovered the molar and fragments of tusk at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, a prehistoric site in the Jordan Rift Valley just south of the Hula Valley. Prof. Gonen Sharon of Tel-Hai University excavated the site, and the elephant remains lay right next to basalt handaxes and cleavers of the Acheulian tradition.

Micro-CT scans identified the find as a lower third molar. A research team led by Hannah Farrell, a PhD candidate at the University of Haifa, then pushed far beyond identification.

Reading a Landscape From One Tooth

The team combined CT scanning, 3D reconstruction, microscopic wear analysis, isotope chemistry and pollen analysis. Each method answered a different question.

• Isotopes: carbon and oxygen values in the enamel point to an elephant that lived in a well-watered setting.
• Wear marks: microscopic wear on the chewing surface suggests a mixed diet of tree leaves and grasses, likely gathered in woodlands and along rivers.
• Pollen: sediments beneath the tooth held pollen from Mediterranean trees, open grassland, and water-loving plants such as reeds, sedges, willow and tamarisk.

Put together, the evidence paints a mosaic of woodlands, grasslands, marshes, rivers and shallow water. That is a rich, green world, very different from what many people picture when they imagine the deep past of the Middle East.

A Refuge on the Road Out of Africa

Location makes this finding matter. The Hula Valley lies within the Levantine Corridor, the land bridge that links Africa and Eurasia. Animals and early human groups moving between continents had to pass through it. The study suggests the valley worked as a stable refuge, with steady water and food for wildlife and for the people who passed through.

“The availability of water, vegetation, and animal resources shaped where humans and wildlife could survive,” Sharon says. In other words, the elephant’s world and the toolmakers’ world were the same world, and water held it together.

Source

Farrell, H., Sharon, G., Jin, M., Langgut, D., Makarewicz, C. A., & Marom, N. (2026). Elephant dental remains from the Acheulian site at North Bridge Acheulian–Gesher Benot Ya’aqov: hominin behavior and environmental implications. Quaternary Science Reviews, 392, 110277. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2026.110277

Research team: Tel-Hai University, the University of Haifa, and Tel Aviv University. Announced in a Tel-Hai University news release, October 2026.