Kvemo-Kartli

'It looks like he was maybe about 40, and the bone regrowth shows he lived for a couple of years after his teeth fell out,' says the anthropologist. 'This is really incredible.' How did the toothless old man survive, unable to chew his food? Maybe his companions helped him, says Lordkipanidze. If so, those toothless jaws might testify to something like compassion, stunningly early in human evolution. You have to flash forward more than one and a half million years, to the Neanderthals of Ice Age Europe, to see anything comparable. David Lordkipanidze describing his archeological find to National Geographic Magazine, 2005.