Which humans first made tools or art – and how do we know?

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When writing story titles about human evolution, the favorite superlatives are “oldest,” “earliest,” and “first.” I’ve lost count of the number of articles I’ve written that used them.

And it’s not just about attracting more readers – although it usually works that way. If a researcher can find evidence that a species or behavior is older than previously thought, that is useful information. Determining the order in which things happened is crucial to understanding why they happened.

For example, we used to think that all rock art was created in the last 40,000 years. This meant that it must have been created by our species (Homo sapiens), because other groups like the Neanderthals had then disappeared. But it turns out that some prehistoric art is older than that, so it’s possible that Neanderthals were artists too.

Over the last month we’ve had a lot of “first” discoveries, and they’ve made me think about how to interpret these things. When can we be sure we understand how long something actually existed?

First of all!

Let’s start with a story I wrote, if only to get it out of the way. During an excavation in southern Greece, archaeologists discovered two wooden objects that appear to be tools: one appears to be a digging stick, the specific use of the other is difficult to identify. Both are approximately 430,000 years old, making them the oldest known wooden tools.

They are not much older than previous record holders. The Clacton Spear discovered in the United Kingdom is thought to be 400,000 years old, although it was excavated several decades ago, so the dating is necessarily uncertain. A set of wooden spears from Schöningen, Germany, were thought to be of a similar age, but their ages have been revised downward: some methods put them closer to 300,000 years old, and a May 2025 study indicated they were only 200,000 years old.

Bone tools also appeared in Europe at this time. In Boxgrove, UK, researchers found a piece of bone from an elephant-like animal, possibly a steppe mammoth. It had been transformed into a hammer to reshape stone tools. The elephant bone is 480,000 years old, making it the first known use of elephant bone in Europe. However, elsewhere bone tools were used much earlier. In East Africa, ancient humans systematically made tools from bones, including elephant bones, as early as 1.5 million years ago. Of course, this practice may date back to even earlier times.

Let’s move forward a little in time. In Xigou, central China, archaeologists have just documented a trove of 2,601 stone objects, dating between 160,000 and 72,000 years ago. The artifacts included handled tools: that is, stone tools attached to something else, such as a wooden pole. According to the researchers, this is “the first evidence of the existence of composite tools in East Asia, to our knowledge.”

And finally, in early January, we learned that South Africans hunted with poisoned arrows 60,000 years ago. Archaeologists found five quartzite arrowheads covered in a sticky, toxic liquid, likely from a plant.

Each of these discoveries has more to offer than meets the eye.

Always further back

The oldest known wooden tools are certainly not the oldest wooden tools. The problem here is one of preservation: wood rots, so our records of prehistoric wooden objects are rather sparse.

When I spoke to Katerina Harvati, who led the wooden tool excavation, she was very clear that people were using wooden tools well before 400,000 years ago. It’s just that we couldn’t find them.

In fact, because wood is easier to work with than stone and chimpanzees sometimes make simple wooden tools, it may be that wooden tools are the oldest form of technology. If next week comes a paper claiming to have found wooden tools from a million years ago, it will be a significant discovery, but – apart from the fact of their preservation – it will not be surprising at all.

It follows that we should not attach grand narratives about human technological development to the age of the earliest wooden tools. We would need to systematically investigate sites where such tools might be preserved, at different ages, before we could be sure of when people started using them.

Now let’s reconsider these poisoned arrows. These are the oldest known examples of poisoned arrowheads. However, history points out that arrowheads whose design matches that of modern poison arrows can be found tens of thousands of years earlier. Additionally, like wood, poisons tend to biodegrade.

This is something I think we can be a little more confident in. Poison arrows are another form of composite technology – combining two or more objects – and this seems to only appear in the later stages of human evolution. This is not something we see evidence of from early hominids like Ardipithecus Or Australopithecus make – while I wouldn’t bet against them making simple tools out of wood or bone. We shouldn’t rely on the origin of poison arrows 60,000 years ago, but our margin for error is probably narrower.

And then there’s the question of the oldest art, which is a real horror show.

Prehistoric graffiti

The most famous ancient works of art are cave paintings, but there are also sculptures, engravings and much more. The problem with a lot of things is that dating is really hard.

If you find a sculpture buried in sediment, it is often possible to date the sediment. But cave paintings are much more delicate. If they were made from charcoal you may be able to use carbon dating, but only if they were made within the last 50,000 years: any older carbon dating is useless. Most rock art has never been dated and often cannot be dated given current technologies.

In recent weeks, we learned that a hand-painted stencil on a cave wall in Sulawesi, Indonesia, is at least 67,800 years old. This makes it the oldest known cave art in the world, surpassing a similar stencil in a cave in northern Spain, which has been attributed to Neanderthals.

Did you see the crucial warning? It was the words “at least.” The way these works of art have been dated is by sampling thin layers of rock that formed above them, due to water running over the rock surface and deposition of minerals. These “flowstones” can be dated, but that just gives you a minimum age. The underlying artwork could be much older.

In going through all of this, I don’t want to say that we don’t know anything: on the contrary, we have a lot of information, much of which was not available just 10 or 20 years ago. Instead, I want to think about how we might arrive at a reliable timetable for human evolution and cultural development, and which elements are seemingly doomed to uncertainty.

In the fossil record, volume is useful. Most paleontologists don’t study large, charismatic animals like dinosaurs, but rather small things like marine molluscs. The reason is that these organisms are fossilized in large numbers, which means that it is possible to trace evolutionary changes in great detail. If a species is common in the fossil record and suddenly disappears 66 million years ago, this is good evidence that the species actually became extinct at that time.

In the human and archaeological fossil record, what things do we have in large quantities and which are rare?

There are many species of hominids for which we have only a handful of specimens, especially early ones. This means that we have virtually no information about how long they have existed or how widespread they are. We also cannot determine whether one species evolved directly into another or whether a more complicated process occurred.

On the other hand, our repertoire of stone tools is quite extensive. It goes further back in time: the oldest stone tools currently known are the Lomekwian tools of Kenya, dating back 3.3 million years ago. I wouldn’t be surprised if some older ones showed up. However, early hominids like Orrorin (6 to 4.5 million years ago, perhaps) and Ardipithecus (5.8 to 4.4 million years ago, ish) seem to have spent a lot of time in the trees, so I would be surprised if they made stone tools.

Wooden tools are another matter. Our sample size is small and uneven, which is due to preservation limitations. I don’t expect to have a reliable timeline of the development of wooden tools over my lifetime.

As for art, our main limitation is technological. There is no shortage of preserved works of art: the problem is inventing ways to date them reliably. At the moment we cannot chart a timeline of the art’s development, and I am wary of any attempt to fit it into a larger narrative. But that could change as the art ages and new techniques are devised. By the time I retire, I hope to have a much better understanding of the evolving artistic practices of ancient humans.

In some sense, all our stories about human evolution are provisional. This is true for all paleontology, of course, but some stories are more tentative than others. There isn’t much wiggle room regarding the end-Cretaceous extinction that wiped out dinosaurs other than birds. But there is still a lot of room for maneuver in human history. Some of this can be solved by digging up more artifacts and creating better dating techniques, and some of it we may just have to live with.

Neanderthals, human origins and rock art: France

Embark on a captivating journey through time as you explore key Neanderthal and Upper Paleolithic sites in southern France, from Bordeaux to Montpellier.