500,000-year-old wooden structures were found by archaeologists in Zambia. These ‘never seen before’ structures are the earliest signs of wooden tools.
A group of archaeologists have found 500,000-year-old wooden structures in Zambia. In an article published in the Nature Journal on Wednesday, the archaeologists mentioned that these structures and tools were found at the Kalambo Falls in Zambia and date back to over 476,000 years ago.
The findings have “no known parallels” wrote the scientists in the article. The discovery of these findings changes the understanding of what humans were capable of in the early times, they added.
In an interview with BBC on Wednesday, Larry Barham, the lead researcher and a professor at the University of Liverpool said, “They used their intelligence, imagination, and skills to create something they’d never seen before, something that had never previously existed.”
Early people may have built these constructions to raise themselves off the soggy ground. They demonstrate the usage of wooden tools like digging sticks and the construction of platforms and constructions out of massive tree trunks by early humans.
In the article, the scientists stated that they used luminescence dating- a technique involving measuring the amount of radioactivity absorbed by the rocks over millennia- in order to determine the age of their findings.