Half-million-year-old wooden structure unearthed in Zambia

[muriel_volestrangler]

The discovery of ancient wooden logs in the banks of a river in Zambia has changed archaeologists' understanding of ancient human life.

Researchers found evidence the wood had been used to build a structure almost half a million years ago.
...
Until now, evidence for the human use of wood has been limited to making fire and crafting tools such as digging sticks and spears.

One of the oldest wooden discoveries was a 400,000-year-old spear in prehistoric sands at Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, in 1911.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66846772

“When I first saw it, I thought this can’t be real. The wood and the stone suggest a high level of ingenuity, technological skill and planning,” said Prof Larry Barham, an archaeologist at the University of Liverpool who led the work.

“It could be part of a walkway or part of a foundation for a platform,” he said. “A platform could be used as a place to store things, to keep firewood or food dry, or it might have been a place to sit and make things. You could put a little shelter on top and sleep there.”

Scientists at the University of Aberystwyth dated the structure to at least 476,000 years old, from long before Homo sapiens are thought to have emerged about 300,000 years ago. The structure may be the work of Homo heidelbergensis, a predecessor of modern humans that lived in the region.
...
The findings are remarkable because wood so rarely survives for long periods. The material at Kalambo Falls was preserved by waterlogged sediments that are starved of oxygen.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/20/oldest-wooden-structure-discovered-on-border-of-zambia-and-tanzania

Evidence for the earliest structural use of wood at least 476,000 years ago

Abstract
Wood artefacts rarely survive from the Early Stone Age since they require exceptional conditions for preservation; consequently, we have limited information about when and how hominins used this basic raw material. We report here on the earliest evidence for structural use of wood in the archaeological record. Waterlogged deposits at the archaeological site of Kalambo Falls, Zambia, dated by luminescence to at least 476 ± 23 kyr ago (ka), preserved two interlocking logs joined transversely by an intentionally cut notch. This construction has no known parallels in the African or Eurasian Palaeolithic. The earliest known wood artefact is a fragment of polished plank from the Acheulean site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel, more than 780 ka . Wooden tools for foraging and hunting appear 400 ka in Europe, China and possibly Africa. At Kalambo we also recovered four wood tools from 390 ka to 324 ka, including a wedge, digging stick, cut log and notched branch. The finds show an unexpected early diversity of forms and the capacity to shape tree trunks into large combined structures. These new data not only extend the age range of woodworking in Africa but expand our understanding of the technical cognition of early hominins, forcing re-examination of the use of trees in the history of technology.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06557-9

Wow. That's a huge leap in what we know they were capable of conceiving and making.

[1WorldHope]

1. I'm not a professional in this area. But, I'd like to share some thoughts.

I don't understand why it is so hard to imagine the earliest of humans using wood to make things. Beavers cut down trees and build dams. We lived like animals with animals. Animals are not stupid. Why would early humans be unable to learn from their environment and other animals? Survival in the "wild" (the natural world before we destroyed it) requires a different set of skills and awareness that most of us have lost and maybe, can't even relate to.

[The Unmitigated Gall]

2. Agree.

We tend to not give our ancestors the credit they deserve. It's irritating to see modern humans look on their works and come to the conclusion that aliens did it.

[brush]

3. I don't think that's what's thought. It's just that wooden structure ususally don't...

survive as long as stone or metal structures because it decays, there are insects that burrow into it, hastening it's disintegration, there are termites.

These structural logs were discovered in an oxygen deprived, water logged state where they weren't subject to decay.

[Bristlecone]

4. It says that it was thought that humans' use of wood was limited

To tools and fire though.


Edit:iPhone typo

[brush]

6. True, but quite often that's whats assumed of societies in Africa...

or other non-European societies. And technological or architectural development is negated. If those logs were discovered in Europe it would be a whole different story than just tools and firewood.

[Bristlecone]

7. Makes sense

[brush]

9. It's a credit to this team that they didn't do that.

[cab67]

18. That's because that's what the evidence showed.

No one thought these people were stupid or incapable of doing these things.

Based on everything we'd found previously, wooden structures weren't known from that era.

And it was actually reasonable to suspect they weren't being made, too - or not being made on a widespread scale, anyway. The stone and bone tools used primarily at the time would not work very efficiently with wood.

By the way, we don't need to see the wood to identify traces of wooden stuctures, Houses and huts made of wood typically require post-holes, for example. Otherwise, the structure would collapse very easily. Post-hole fills are easily identified at archaeological sites. They've never been found at sites from that period of time.

(Full disclosure - I"m not my self an archaeologist. But I work closely with them for some of my work.)

[housecat]

13. I think the awareness that babies have gets smothered by cultural norms at a very young age. What a

missed opportunity for their "teachers." Think of the abilities children would have if allowed to develop them before being forced into boxes. I know someone with extraordinary animal instincts and skills, because he grew up in a rainforest with animals. Fortunately he was able to retain what he learned as a boy and still pick up the skills, abilities, and languages he would need as an adult in this culture.

[1WorldHope]

21. Exactly, our assumptions limit us.

[niyad]

5. KNR and thank you for sharing this fascinating information.

[Dem_in_Nebr.]

8. My Tongue in cheek response

It's ancient aliens!
(I know I know! I watch way too much history channel!)

[prodigitalson]

11. interstellar log cabin skills

Edited to say
Don't tell Graham Hancock

[prodigitalson]

10. what species of hominid did this?

too old for Sapiens.

[Sky Jewels]

14. From the second link:

“The structure may be the work of Homo heidelbergensis, a predecessor of modern humans that lived in the region.”

[prodigitalson]

20. Thanks

[Red Mountain]

12. It wasn't that scientists didn't think it was possible

just that they had no evidence. Journalists have a hard time with nuance, sometimes.

[LudwigPastorius]

15. Got wood?

.webp?v=1670262662

[Pas-de-Calais]

16. 500M year Tool Man

[Warpy]

17. They call it the Stone Age because that's about all that survived this long

absent a cache of spears in Germany and some odd shaped pieces of wood here and there. Evidence for things like boat building is indirect, meaning there are obvious Neanderthal coastal dumps of shells that had to have come far enough offshore for fishermen to have a boat to put them in to bring them home for dinner, that sort of thing. Many of the stone tools only make a lot of sense as woodworking tools. You know, that sort of indirect evidence. We might as well call it the wood age or, now that we've found it, the fine cord age.

They weren't us but they were people. Had bigger brains, too.

[cab67]

19. respectfully disagree on one point

Stone tools that work efficiently with wood didn't really exist between 400,000 and 500,000 years ago. Those came later.

[Warpy]

25. Then how was one dated to 560,000 years ago found in sediment in England?

Dates keep getting pushed back.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2325462-uks-earliest-hand-axes-were-made-by-ancient-humans-560000-years-ago/

[muriel_volestrangler]

26. No mention of wood there

It's just noting the earliest stone handaxe in the UK.

[Warpy]

27. ............

(eyeroll)

They didn't call it a knife or a butchering tool or a spear head, they called it an axe.

[muriel_volestrangler]

28. Really? When the article specifically says it was for butchering?

Yes, "handaxe" does not mean it was used for what modern humans would use an axe for. If its any consolation:

Hand axe does not relate to axe, which was overused in lithic typology to describe a wide variety of stone tools. At the time the use of such items was not understood. In the particular case of Palaeolithic hand axes the term axe is an inadequate description. Lionel Balout stated, "the term should be rejected as an erroneous interpretation of these objects that are not 'axes'". Subsequent studies supported this idea, particularly those examining the signs of use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_axe

[muriel_volestrangler]

22. 500,000 years ago is pre-Neanderthal - no, these didn't have bigger brains than us

This is Homo heidelbergensis, most likely - the "muddle in the middle" of Homo erectus and Homo sapiens. eg

Estimated age: 500,000 to 250,000 years
Date of discovery: 1969
Location: Petralona, Greece

This is a difficult fossil to classify, given its mixture of traits. The skull is classified by some scientists as late Homo erectus and by others as Homo neanderthalensis. The brain size is 1220 cc. -- large for H. erectus, but small for H. sapiens -- and the face is large, with a particularly wide upper mandible.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/humans/humankind/m.html

Their brains were about the same, or slightly smaller, than ours.

[Warpy]

24. It was H. Heidelbergensis, thought to be the ancestor species

of both Neanderthals and Denisovans. They were a fascinating species.

[eppur_se_muova]

23. And the list of *intelligent* species who went extinct grows longer again.

Intelligence is no guarantee against extinction -- but that's not part of the common worldview.

[Judi Lynn]

29. Archaeologists Uncover Notched Logs That May Be the Oldest Known Wooden Structure

The interlocking pieces, found near a waterfall in Zambia, date to 476,000 years ago—before Homo sapiens evolved

Will Sullivan
Daily Correspondent
September 22, 2023 2:24 p.m.

Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of the oldest wooden structure on record: a pair of interlocking logs connected by a notch that date to 476,000 years ago.

Discovered along the Kalambo River in Zambia, the simple construction predates the first appearance of Homo sapiens in Africa. The discovery, detailed in a new paper published Wednesday in Nature, suggests human ancestors built structures made of wood and may have been more complex than previously thought.

“This is a disruptive discovery,” Larry Barham, a co-author of the new study and an archaeologist at the University of Liverpool in England, tells Scientific American’s Tom Metcalfe. “I never would have thought that pre-Homo sapiens would have had the capacity to plan something like this.”

“It’s an important window into what these humans were capable of,” Annemieke Milks, an archaeologist at the University of Reading in England who did not contribute to the research, tells Maddie Burakoff of the Associated Press (AP).

Wooden artifacts typically don’t survive for millennia because they break down, disappearing from the historical record if they’re not well-preserved. But in this case, the researchers think that water may have protected the wood, which was discovered near a waterfall, per the Agence France-Presse (AFP).

More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-uncover-notched-logs-that-may-be-the-oldest-known-wooden-structure-180982942/