Wouldn’t that just mean one of the other Homo species that existed before us made the tool?
jojojoy on
Besides unusual preservation of wooden objects this old, the find is exciting since it would have been made by another human species than ours.
Full paper (with paywall)
> Milks, Annemieke, et al. “Evidence for the Earliest Hominin Use of Wooden Handheld Tools Found at Marathousa 1 (Greece).” *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* 123, no. 6 (January 26, 2026). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2515479123.
There was a major other discovery of worked wooden objects recently in Africa, where two logs were joined with a notch. So much of our picture of the stone age is biased towards materials like stone that are favorably preserved. So much more probably existed out of wood or other perishable materials that we can only speculate at though.
> Barham, L., et al. “Evidence for the Earliest Structural Use of Wood at Least 476,000 Years Ago.” *Nature* 622, no. 7981 (September 20, 2023): 107–11. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06557-9.
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Wouldn’t that just mean one of the other Homo species that existed before us made the tool?
Besides unusual preservation of wooden objects this old, the find is exciting since it would have been made by another human species than ours.
Full paper (with paywall)
> Milks, Annemieke, et al. “Evidence for the Earliest Hominin Use of Wooden Handheld Tools Found at Marathousa 1 (Greece).” *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* 123, no. 6 (January 26, 2026). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2515479123.
There was a major other discovery of worked wooden objects recently in Africa, where two logs were joined with a notch. So much of our picture of the stone age is biased towards materials like stone that are favorably preserved. So much more probably existed out of wood or other perishable materials that we can only speculate at though.
> Barham, L., et al. “Evidence for the Earliest Structural Use of Wood at Least 476,000 Years Ago.” *Nature* 622, no. 7981 (September 20, 2023): 107–11. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06557-9.
So you have heard of this [London hammer](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hammer+found+in+coal&t=iphone&ia=images&iax=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.squarespace-cdn.com%2Fcontent%2Fv1%2F6047d405b02148755fb6e601%2Fce256485-d401-4e2d-818b-3dc0524c2dfc%2F17.1.png%3Fformat%3D1000w)
https://preview.redd.it/r1p5huo37ihg1.jpeg?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=355c6af5983a894298988cf3fa9007008de81375
400 million years old.
Very far cry from not half of one million. So yeah notched sticks have been used in the past I’m sure 👍
Oldest stone tool date to 1.7 million and more impressive in my perspective bone tools 1.5 million years old..