Stick shaped by ancient humans is the oldest known wooden...

What’s Happening

So get this: Excavations at an opencast mine in Greece have uncovered two wooden objects more than 400,000 years old that appear to have been fashioned as tools by an unknown species of ancient human Humans Stick shaped is the oldest known wooden tool Excavations at an opencast mine in Greece have uncovered two wooden objects more than 400,000 years old that appear to have been fashioned as tools species of ancient human By Michael Marshall 26 January 2026 Facebook / Meta Twitter / X icon Linkedin Reddit Email Artists reconstruction of a Palaeolithic woman making a digging stick from an alder tree trunk G.

Harvati The oldest known wooden tools have been found in an opencast mine in Greece. They are 430,000 years old and were made species of ancient human – perhaps the ancestors of Neanderthals. (we’re not making this up)

Prehistoric wooden artefacts are “scarce”, says archaeologist Dirk Leder at the Lower Saxony State Office for Cultural Heritage in Hannover, Germany, who wasnt involved in the study.

The Details

“Every single find is welcome. ” Before the Stone Age: Were the first tools made from plants not rocks?

Yet it is likely that our extinct relatives used wooden tools for millions of years. “It might be the oldest type of tool that anybody used,” says Katerina Harvati at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

Why This Matters

Weak preservation and the difficulty of identifying wooden artefacts have limited our knowledge of them. Harvati and her colleagues found out the tools at a site called Marathousa 1 , which they first identified in 2013 in the Megalopolis basin in southern Greece. An opencast lignite mine had exposed layers of sediments, some of them almost a million years old.

This could have implications for future research in this area.

The Bottom Line

During excavations between 2013 and 2019, the team found the near-complete skeleton of a straight-tusked elephant ( Palaeoloxodon antiquus ) that showed signs of butchery, along with remains of other animals and plants and more than 2000 stone tools. The animals and plants are a mix of aquatic and near-aquatic species, including hippopotamuses, indicating that the site preserves an ancient lake shore.

Is this a W or an L? You decide.