Girl’s ‘mammoth’ bone find may be 500,000 years old

Girl’s ‘mammoth’ bone find may be 500,000 years old

A bone fragment unearthed by a seven-year-old girl on a Suffolk beach has raised intriguing possibilities, with an evolutionary biologist suggesting it could be as much as half a million years old.

Nina Evans, from Ipswich, was collecting rocks along Felixstowe beach with her father, David Evans, and younger brother, Ivan, on Easter Saturday. While searching for shark teeth, the child discovered a piece of bone that, when analyzed by an AI app, hinted at a potential connection to a mammoth.

“It’s from something bigger than a cow, from a mammoth, Irish elk and aurochs to more unusual stuff like wild horse or rhino,” said Professor Ben Garrod of the University of East Anglia. “So far as I can say, it is old, sub-fossilised, and probably Pleistocene—it’s a massive ballpark, but most likely somewhere between 100,000 and half a million years old.”

Garrod added that the bone might have shared its environment with early human populations. “When it was walking around Suffolk, it could have walked all the way to mainland Europe, as the North Sea wasn’t there then,” he explained.

Suffolk, renowned for its Pleistocene-era fossils, including mammoth remains, has a long history of such remarkable finds. David Evans revealed that he often takes his children to sites like Felixstowe and Southwold, hoping to inspire their curiosity. “She asked me what type of stone it was, and I thought it might be a bit of wood, but then it became clear that it was a bone, so we were quite excited,” he shared.

The father described Nina’s cautious pride. “Nina has hidden it in a special box in her safe in her bedroom at the moment and she is very protective of it. She is quite a quiet girl, and not one to brag, so I think she will be quietly happy that she found it, but she is not one to grab credit.”

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