A significant number of shark teeth dating back tens of millions of years have been uncovered in an eighth-century BCE structure in the archaeological site of the City of David in Jerusalem, and their presence is clouded in mystery.
More than 20 shark teeth were found in the so-called “Rock Cut Pool,” a structure hewn in the limestone near Gihon Spring that originally was probably part of the water system of the area, located south of the city walls, according to a study published in the academic journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
The pool was filled with soil and stones to allow the construction of a house, whose floor sealed it.
Archaeologists found several tons of pottery and other artifacts while excavating the structure, as well as more than 10,000 fish bones, including the shark teeth, which they proceeded to analyze.
“We found that the bones belonged to some 14 species of fish, some of them very interesting, offering proof that not only ancient inhabitants of Jerusalem ate a lot of fish, but that fish were brought in from as far away as Egypt,” said Prof. Omri Lernau of the University of Haifa, a top expert on ancient fish bones in Israel and one of the paper’s authors.
“We assumed that the shark teeth also were food residues like the rest of the fish bones,” he said. “It turned out they were not.”
Sharks were known to be part of the diet of ancient inhabitants of Israel, including of ancient Judeans themselves, as it recently emerged.
However, when the team of Israeli and international researchers, including some scholars from the University of Mainz in Germany, conducted their analysis on the teeth, they were surprised to find out that there was no way the sharks were caught and served on a table just 2,800 years ago, give or take a century. They belonged to a species that lived in the Late Cretaceous geological period between 100 million and 67 million years ago. In other words, they lived on the planet at the same time as dinosaurs.
“Most likely, someone collected them,” Lernau said.
Shark teeth were sometimes used as ornaments at the time. However, why these teeth were found together with fish remains for consumption and other garbage is not clear, Lernau said.
“It is strange, and we do not have an explanation,” he added.
Their origin also remains a mystery. These kinds of fossils are often trapped in ancient rocks that form around them, but such rocks are not found in Jerusalem, or at least not in the area of the City of David, Lernau said.
“Fossil shark teeth from the Late Cretaceous are abundant in the marine sediments of the Mount Scopus group in Israel and in the Menuha Formation of the Southern Negev,” the researchers wrote in the paper.
If the teeth were collected far away from the City of David, who brought them there and why? Were they used as ornaments or in any other way? And who then decided to throw them away?
These questions likely will remain without an answer. But the shark teeth will continue to offer a tantalizing glimpse of daily life in ancient Jerusalem.