A digging stick and a tiny tool of unknown purpose are among the oldest handheld wooden tools ever found. The objects, from 430,000 years ago, indicate early human ancestors were using wood for tools, weapons and maybe shelters.
Our team was “so lucky, incredibly lucky” to have found objects like this, says paleolithic archaeologist Annemieke Milks of the University of Reading in England. Wood usually rots quickly, she says, but it was preserved at an ancient site in what’s now the Peloponnese Peninsula of Greece. That’s because the ground there was heavily waterlogged when the objects were made and because they were buried so deep — about 30 meters