Two intentionally intertwined logs and a series of tools made of wood could change what is known about Stone Age hominids. A discovery in the Kalambo River basin in Zambia shows that humans were building structures with this material as early as 476,000 years ago, earlier than previously thought possible. Although it is not known with certainty what use was given to these artifacts, the authors of the discovery affirm that they appear to be the foundations of a platform or some part of a house.
What is clear is that the hominids of southern Africa, half a million years ago, transformed their environment to make life easier. Professor Larry Barham, from the Department of Archeology at the University of Liverpool (United Kingdom), publishes this discovery today in Nature: “this “This discovery has changed the way I think about our early ancestors.”
The discovery could challenge the prevailing view that humans were nomadic half a million years ago, in the middle of the Lower Paleolithic, the most remote stretch of the Stone Age. In present-day Zambia, they were located next to the 235-meter-high Kalambo Falls, as a constant source of water and surrounded by a forest with enough food. These conditions allowed them to settle and therefore created the need to build structures.
Until now, evidence of human use of wood was limited to making fires, digging sticks and spears, but the findings of this new study go further. They are remains of modified pieces of wood, which correspond to two phases of hominid occupation in the Kalambo archaeological zone, located on the border of Zambia with the Rukwa region, in Tanzania. The first is a structure of two intertwined trunks, worked to fit with another trunk and dates back to about 476,000 years ago. In a second phase, between 390,000 and 324,000 years ago, there is evidence of smaller artifacts, including a wedge and a digging stick. Experts have never ruled out the use of wood by Lower Paleolithic hominids, but it remained in the realm of speculation and this is the first direct evidence.
The researchers found stone tool marks on the wooden pieces, with a deliberate motive to make them fit together, which adds further relevance to their find. The use of tools to make other tools is a characteristic behavior of the genre Homo. However, examples of structures created by hominids in the Stone Age are very scarce, and the evidence of the modification of structural elements is even more so.
Wooden structures, carved with stone
Furthermore, archaeologists’ understanding of the use of wood as a raw material during the course of hominid evolution is limited by its preservation. Generally, wood rots and disappears, so it is not common to find artifacts made of this material in such ancient sites. But the permanent high water levels in the Kalambo area preserved the pieces until they were discovered in 2019 by the team from the British universities of Liverpool and Aberystwyth.
Given the rarity of wooden archaeological records, researchers had to use modern techniques to determine its age. Luminescence revealed the last time the sand surrounding the finds was exposed to sunlight. Professor Geoff Duller of Aberystwyth University, a research collaborator, states in Nature that these methods allowed us to date much further back in time: “This area had already been excavated in the 1960s and similar pieces of wood were recovered that could not be dated, so the true meaning of the period had not been clear. until now”.
The archaeological discovery not only advances the emergence of carpentry in Africa, but also broadens the understanding of the technical skills of early humans. The Algerian archaeologist Mohamed Sahnouni, from the National Center for Research on Human Evolution, in Burgos, highlights the relevance of the finding: “It is important to know the cognitive abilities of hominids. It seems very likely that they used construction to make life easier in this environment.”
According to Larry Barham, author of the study in published Nature, those hominids “used their intelligence, imagination and skills to create something they had never seen, something that had never existed before. “These people were more like us than we thought.” If throughout history it has been used as shelter and in homes, furniture and vehicles, today wood continues to be a key resource for the modern economy, half a million years after those Zambian hominids began using it to build.
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