We are the tool-making ape, and now it’s looking like our ancestors didn’t confine themselves to fashioning their kit from stone. They could and did make utile implements out of bone and wood as well. Isolated items had been found, but that propensity had gone widely undetected until quite recently, because while stone survives forever in the archaeological record, bones and wood almost never do, leading to discovery bias. There is also a question of whether a ratty ancient bit of wood or bone is recognizable as having been worked.

Yet under extraordinary circumstances, such as immersion in bogs, ancient wood may survive the eons, not fossilizing into mineral but remaining organic; and archaeologists may recognize that something smacks of artificiality. Now an international team reports an assemblage of 35 wooden digging sticks and pointed tools around 300,000 years old at the open-air hominin site of Gantangqing in southwestern China.

Stone tools were also found there, Xing Gao of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Bo Li of the University of Wollongong, Australia, Jian-Hui Liu of the 1 Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and colleagues reported in a paper published Thursday in Science.

Finding stone tools too would have been predicted. Organic tools are softer than stone, and each would have had its place in the prehistoric scheme of things. As one would expect, the team also reports finding deer and other animal bones with cut marks, indicating butchery and meat consumption, and also found rare “antler billets” that served as soft hammers. The discoveries were pre-reported in 2021 and are now elaborated in the new paper.

Among the advances in the last four years were use-wear analysis, which detected starch grains on the tips of the shaped sticks. The hominins had been digging up nutrient-rich roots of aquatic plants on the edges of what was then and is now Lake Fuxian, the team suggested, using digging sticks and “grubbing tools.” Thus, in their recent research, they have demonstrated the earliest tangible evidence for the exploitation of rhizomes for food in Asia, they add.

Open gallery view Wood tools from Gantangqing, from over a quarter-million years ago Credit: Jian Hui-Liu, Xing Gao, et al.

It is also the first solid evidence for the “bamboo hypothesis”: namely that the abundance of this tough reed in Asia was inviting for early human exploitation. There hadn’t been any evidence of wooden or organic toolmaking in the region until now, the team stresses.

Note that the team at Gantangqing didn’t just grab at any ancient wood and call it a tool. There were over a thousand pieces of preserved ancient wood at the site, most unremarkable. The 35 were chosen for clear signs of having been worked, they explain.

“The sophistication of many of these tools offsets the seemingly ‘primitive’ aspects of stone tool assemblages in the East Asian Early Paleolithic,” the team adds.

But mainly, the find is extraordinary for having been made at all. What were the conditions at Gantangqing that enabled wood, or bamboo, to survive for 361,000 to 250,000 years?

Open gallery view The wooden structure in Zambia. Credit: Prof. Larry Barham, University of Liverpool

The bamboo economy

Gantangqing is located on a slope descending to Lake Fuxian in the Yunnan plateau of southwestern China. Excavation began in 1989. Separate work suggests that the paleo-climate at Gantangqing in the Middle Pleistocene, when our woodworking occupants lived, was lovely, an environment of subtropical to tropical evergreen broadleaved forest.

In short, the climate in southwestern China at the start of the Middle Pleistocene was warm and wet, according to a plethora of evidence, and the lake was rich in water plants. Bamboo could have been legion.

In 2012, a multi-disciplinary team including Ofer Bar-Yosef from Israel and Metin Erin, then of Southern Methodist University, wondered if the bamboo hypothesis was even plausible. Could complex bamboo tools could even be made using simple stone tools? Yes they could, the team concluded.

Okay. From about 315,000 years ago there was some global cooling, but the important point is that it wasn’t freezing, and the abundance of aquatic vegetation and ferns indicate that the Gantangqing site was swampy. The lakeside also featured some of early humankind’s favorite prey animals – deer abounded, and so did the towering Stegodon elephantid and the giant tapir, and the rhinoceros, whose presence supports the thesis of a balmy climate.

So in short they lived in a marshy area and that is how the tools survived 300,000 years: They were waterlogged pretty much throughout. A similar circumstance applies to a wooden plank wood discovered at the hominin site of Gesher Benot Yaakov in northern Israel from about 800,000 years ago, which had been in wet mud all that time; the earliest structure made of wood dating back half a million years in Zambia, by a waterfall; spears found in the bogs of Schoningen, Germany which were thought to be 400,000 years old but may be a mere 300,000 or maybe even 200,000 – oysh; and digging sticks found in Poggetti Vecchi, Italy from about 177,000 years ago.

All were spared digestion by bacteria, mold and other microbes by being in anoxic, oxygen-free environments where the organisms of decay cannot thrive.

Open gallery view The Schöningen spears, left, along with several double-pointed sticks on the bottom right. Credit: Matthias Vogel

In short, the wooden tools found at Gantangqing join a short but growing list of finds suggesting that archaic humans routinely made tools of organic material too, not only hardy stone.

Which archaic humans? The paper doesn’t go there, but we know one species that had been in the area at the time were Denisovans, so maybe them. By now we know that their cousin species the Neanderthals were also making tools out of bone.

Actually, although we know that our genus has been making tools from stone by precision knapping for at least 3.3 million years, it was only recently that work in other source materials was recognized. It had been assumed that the exquisite ability to finesse friable bone and wood into utile tools was a modern skill, the sole fief of Homo sapiens. It is already very clear that was wrong, and if anything – if Denisovans or anybody else were making tools of wood 300,000 years ago in China, they may have been perpetuating a practice that goes back to the dawn of our genus.

Just this April, a collection of bone tools, an actual industry, was identified at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania and dated to 1.5 million years ago.

What bones were used to make tools at Olduvai? Not the neighbors, but long bones of giant animals such as elephantids and hippo. What wood was used to make the whittled tools in Gantangqing? Mostly pine but some were made of a harder wood, the authors discovered.

Open gallery view The Clacton spear is approximately 400,000 years old. Credit: Geni/Wikimedia Commons

There was a key difference between these artifacts and the wooden ones discovered in Italy, where Neanderthals had heated wood in fire before working it (to make it easier to work the wood). Charcoal was detected in the hominin strata at Gantangqing, but it may not indicate routine fire use there: No hearths were found and none of the wooden artifacts show charring, the authors clarify. On the other hand, the wood was clearly shaped at the tip and bottom to be sharp or rounded, and only one piece retained bark. The Chinese pieces are complete at both ends, unlike fragmented wood tools reported from Ohalo in Israel, Clacton in the U.K., and Aranbaltzar in Spain.

Two of the postulated digging sticks, maybe used to grub for edible roots, were probably too big to use with one hand, the authors say. That may have been true of our puny human hands. But possibly the species using these digging sticks 300,000 years ago in China were Denisovans, who – relying on the very little bone evidence we have of them so far – were apparently a beefy lot. Maybe a Denisovan could have wielded one of these giant digging sticks with one hand. But the other tools were small and could have been used with one human-sized hand.

Also, four of the pieces were hook-shaped, but that doesn’t necessarily mean these were the earliest meat hooks, even though there is a new theory that ancient hominins smoked meat, which they presumably hung over a fire. The round edge of the hooks shows wear and could have been used for slicing through roots.

So what have we? Wood going back hundreds of thousands of years that evinces unmistakable signs of being whittled and smoothed, and all in all – a wider range of wood implements than at other sites. Also, while the Schoningen spears for instance seem oriented toward hunting, the Gantangqing assembly speaks of hominins going to the lakeshore and digging for roots – possibly revealing differences in nutritive strategy in the temperate northern environments of prehistoric Germany, compared with the lovely weather of prehistoric China.