Wooden artifacts from the Stone Age are very rare because organic material tends to break down over time. But in 2019, a pair of logs were discovered at a river bank in Zambia that seemed ancient. They were deliberately connected at a right angle by carved notches in each log, like putting together Lincoln Logs. Or a real log cabin, for that matter. Archaeologists think it may have been a walkway, or part of a pen for storing firewood or food. Or it could have been the base of a dwelling. Now the results of a luminescence dating test are in, and the logs are 476,000 years old! That makes them, linked together, the oldest manmade wooden structure ever found.
But what kind of man made this? The oldest Homo sapiens fossils are 300,000 years old, and they were found in Israel. The people that used tools to make these logs fit together had a brain sophisticated enough to plan their work and carry it out with stone tools over time. The discovery also hints that wood was a more common material for Stone Age life than we knew. Read about the discovery and what it might mean at CNN. -via reddit
(Image credit: Professor Larry Barham/University of Liverpool)