430,000-year-old wooden handheld tools from Greece are the oldest on record — and they predate modern humans
Greek archaeologists have discovered 430,000-year-old wooden hand tools, the oldest examples of their kind in the world, according to a new study. Both tools, found on the Peloponnese peninsula in southern Greece, were created by an unidentified hominid species that predates modern humans.
“These objects represent the oldest wooden hand tools ever discovered, pushing back evidence for the use of this type of tool by at least 40,000 years,” the researchers wrote in a statement. statement.
The other wooden tool is 5.7 cm long and has been completely debarked, with rounding and pitting at one end. It’s unclear exactly what it was used for, but it’s possible it was used to make stone tools, the researchers wrote.
The artifacts appear to have been buried in damp soil, the researchers wrote in the study. This helped preserve wooden tools and other organic remains in a low-oxygen environment.
Scientists also excavated animal and plant remains from the site, which allowed them to reconstruct what the landscape would have looked like during the time the tools were made.
“The fauna includes both terrestrial and semi-aquatic mammals, as well as freshwater molluscs, turtles and birds, indicating a rich lakeside environment,” the team wrote in the journal. The finds also include remains of elephants, hippos, deer and wild boars.
At the time wooden tools were used, the European climate was experiencing “an extremely cold ice age,” but this lakeside environment would have been a place of relative comfort, according to the study’s first author. Annemieke’s Milksarchaeologist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, told Live Science in an email.
The first humans
The tools date back to around 430,000 years ago, or about 130,000 years ago. Before Homo sapiens existed – and it’s not clear which hominid made them. “There are no human remains of [Marathousa] and for this period, there is currently a bit of ambiguity regarding hominid species. It could have been Homo heidelbergensisor maybe very early Neanderthals“Milks said.
Stone and bone tools have previously been identified at the site, and the new discovery of wooden tools means that early humans used a variety of materials, Milks noted. For example, the the oldest known wooden structure in the worldwhich was found in Zambia, is even older and dates back to 476,000 years ago.
We “understand that these hominids understood these different materials and their properties, and used different tools, presumably for different tasks,” Milks said. “I think it really helps us understand how humans, in the distant past, used so many different materials and resources in their environment.”
Co-author of the study Katerina Harvatiprofessor of paleoanthropology at the University of Tübingen in Germany, told Live Science in an email that these “tools provide a rare insight into a component of their technology that we know very little about, one that was based on [perishable] materials derived from plants rather than stones. “They “highlight the behavioral adaptability and flexibility of Marathousa hominins,” she added.
Excavations at the site were carried out between 2013 and 2019. The digging stick was found in 2015 and the wooden tools of uncertain function were discovered in 2018.
