Our early human ancestors used a wide variety of materials for their tools – stones, bones and even wood. Archaeologists have now discovered the oldest evidence of prehistoric wooden tools in Greece. It is a 430,000-year-old digging stick made of alder wood and a smaller wooden tool of the same age with an unclear function. Both finds show clear signs of processing and wear. They prove that early humans of the Middle Pleistocene already used plant materials for their purposes.
The period around 774,000 to 129,000 years ago – the Middle Pleistocene – was a crucial phase in human evolution. During this time, various early human species existed in parallel and spread across the world. At the same time, their intellectual and technical abilities developed rapidly and more complex behaviors emerged. This can be seen, among other things, in the fact that the early humans of that time began to produce more diverse and complex tools. In addition to stones and bones, they also began to use plant materials such as wood and tree bark.
Find at the early human slaughter site
However, it is still unclear when the early humans of the Middle Pleistocene began to use wooden sticks and trunks for their own purposes. “Unlike stones, wooden objects only survive over long periods of time under particularly favorable circumstances,” explains lead author Annemieke Milks from the University of Reading in England. The oldest finds include 300,000-year-old wooden spears and throwing sticks from Schöningen in Lower Saxony as well as around 390,000-year-old wooden tools and a 476,000-year-old construction made of wooden trunks in Zambia. For the latter, the wood was not used as a tool, but as a structural material.
Now Mieks and her colleagues have discovered the oldest evidence of wooden tools to date. They come from the Marathousa 1 site in the Peloponnese in Greece. Excavations there over the last ten years have uncovered numerous stone tools as well as the remains of a forest elephant that was slaughtered and dismembered by early humans. They show that this place, once located on the shore of a lake, was used as a battle site around 430,000 years ago. Among the finds were numerous pieces of wood, which Mieks and her team have now examined in more detail. “We analyzed them systematically in terms of shape and form as well as microscopically,” she reports.
Two wooden tools
During these analyses, the researchers discovered two wooden artifacts that show traces of human processing. An approximately 85 centimeter long stick made of alder wood was debarked and shows cut notches and signs of wear on one end. The archaeologists suspect that this stick was used by early humans for digging or for removing bark from trees. A second piece of willow wood, just a few centimeters in size, is also debarked and flattened at one end. Traces of processing and use can also be seen on this find, as Mieks and her colleagues discovered.
“The artifacts from Marathousa 1 are the oldest wooden tools known to date in the world and the only finds of this type from southeastern Europe,” state the archaeologists. “They expand our knowledge about the cultural adaptations and behavioral repertoire of hominins in the Middle Paleolithic.” The wooden tools from the Peloponnese confirm that the early inhabitants of this area already knew how to use wood for their purposes. “Once again it has been shown how extraordinarily good the preservation conditions are at the Marathousa 1 site,” says Harvati. “The fact that, in addition to humans, large carnivorous animals also left their mark in the area around the dismantled original elephant indicates tough competition between the two.”
Source: Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen; Specialist article: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), doi: 10.1073/pnas.2515479123