Oldest tool ever found is stick shaped by humans 430,000 years ago

The earliest known wooden hand tools, used by our earliest human ancestors around 430,000 years ago, have been discovered by researchers at an archaeological site in Greece.

One is made from the trunk of an alder tree and could have been used for digging, and the other is a small willow or poplar artifact that could have been used to shape stones, according to a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“What’s particularly exciting about discoveries like this is that we very rarely have wood preserved for this long,” the study’s lead author, Annemieke Milks, told NBC News by phone on Tuesday.

Stone tools have been collected by archaeologists for centuries because they preserve so well, said Milks, a researcher and expert on early wooden tools at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. “So it’s really cool to be able to enrich our understanding of human evolution by finding these extremely rare objects,” she added.

Researchers knew that early human ancestors also used wood to make tools and there is now evidence of very early use, she added.

The tools were found at a site called the Megalopolis Basin in Marathousa, Greece, about 100 miles southwest of the capital, Athens.

Once on the edge of a lake, it provided evidence of other activities of early human ancestors, including the making and use of stone and bone objects, as well as the slaughter of elephants and other animals, researchers say.

The smaller tool is particularly interesting, Milks said. “We’ve never seen anything like this,” she said, adding that they don’t fully understand its function. “It’s really different and it’s tiny. We’re lucky to have found it.”

Researchers know these artifacts aren’t just pieces of wood because they recognize “specific marks made by stone tools on the wood itself,” she explained. It “helps us say: OK, this isn’t just a stick, this is something that humans did something with,” she added.

Methods for analyzing and identifying ancient wooden tools have really accelerated over the past decade, providing unprecedented insight into human history, Milks said.

Direct dating of organic materials, like wood, only goes back 50,000 years, so researchers had to rely on dating sediments and rocks from the site itself. This allowed them to conclude that the tools dated back 430,000 years.

It’s likely that the unearthed wooden tools were so well preserved because they were very quickly buried in sediment that remained moist and kept away from microorganisms that could eat away at the wood or cause it to rot, Milks said.

Conditions at the site where the tools were found are “exceptional” and have allowed the preservation of delicate organic materials, including wood but also seeds and leaves, Katerina Harvati, co-author of the study, said in an email Tuesday.

The discovery highlights the importance of Greece and the megacities basin in particular for human evolution, said Harvati, a paleoanthropologist and human evolution expert at the University of Tübingen in Germany. It provided “a very rare insight” into the technology used by early human ancestors that researchers know almost nothing about, she said.

“Not only do they extend the time horizon of our knowledge of this technology and expand its geographic reach, but they also provide new information, in the form of a completely new type of tool, which we are recording here for the first time,” she added.

Maeve McHugh, an associate professor of classical archeology at the University of Birmingham in England who was not involved in the study, told NBC News that the findings are significant, providing an important “snapshot” of the activity of early human ancestors that speaks to “how our brains were developing” during this period.

“The fact that it’s a wooden object, a piece of organic material — it’s a very rare survival outside of very arid conditions like Egypt, and especially that it’s so old and so really early in humanity or early in human history, I think that’s very interesting and important,” she said.