New discoveries from the Pleistocene-age Gantangqing site in southwestern China reveal a diverse collection of wooden tools dated from ~361,000 to 250,000 years ago, marking the earliest known evidence of complex wooden tool technology in East Asia. The findings reveal that the Middle Pleistocene humans who used these tools crafted the wooden implements not for hunting, but for digging and processing plants. Although early humans have worked with wood for over a million years, wooden artifacts are quite rare in the archaeological record, particularly during the Early and Middle Pleistocene. Most ancient wooden tools have been found in Africa and western Eurasia, with notable examples that include spears and throwing sticks from Germany and the UK, dating back 300,000 to 400,000 years, as well as structural elements like interlocking logs from Zambia and wooden planks and digging sticks from sites in Israel and Italy. While the long-standing Bamboo Hypothesis argues that early East Asian populations relied on bamboo for toolmaking, archaeological evidence for organic material-based tools from the region is scarce.

Here, Jian-Hui Liu and colleagues present new findings from the Gantangqing site in southwestern China, which has yielded a wide range of artifacts. Among these are 35 wooden artifacts that exhibit clear evidence of intentional shaping and use, including signs of carving, smoothing, and wear, suggesting that they were purposefully crafted by hominins. These tools, most of which were fashioned from pine, range from large two-handed digging sticks to smaller hand-held implements, and even include hook-like tools potentially used for cutting plant roots. According to Liu et al., compared to other well-known contemporaneous wooden tool sites in Europe, which are generally characterized by medium-sized hunting gear, Gantangqing stands out for its broader and more diverse array of small, hand-held tools designed primarily for digging up and processing plants. The sophistication of these wooden tools underscores the importance of organic artifacts in interpreting early human behavior, particularly in regions where stone tools alone suggest a more “primitive” technological landscape, say the authors.

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