[Scientists have unearthed logs in Africa that are nearly a
half-million years old, the remnants of large wooden structures
crafted by our early ancestors.]
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SUNDAY SCIENCE: ANCIENT LOGS OFFER EARLIEST EXAMPLE OF HUMAN
WOODWORKING
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Carl Zimmer
September 20, 2023
New York Times
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_ Scientists have unearthed logs in Africa that are nearly a
half-million years old, the remnants of large wooden structures
crafted by our early ancestors. _
Larry Barham and colleagues discovered Pleistocene-age wooden
structures dating to a time before modern humans in Zambia., Larry
Barham/University of Liverpool
Nearly half a million years ago, humans in Africa were assembling wood
into large structures, according to a study
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Wednesday that describes notched and tapered logs buried under sand in
Zambia.
The discovery drastically pushes back the historical record of
structural woodworking. Before, the oldest known examples of this
craft were 9,000-year-old platforms on the edge of a British lake.
Ancient wood products are extremely rare because the organic material
typically degrades over thousands of years, said Annemieke Milks, an
archaeologist at the University of Reading who was not involved in the
new study, which appeared in the journal Nature. “It almost never
preserves,” she said.
It’s not clear what early humans were building in Africa. Dr. Milks
said that the new discovery suggested that they used wood not just for
spears or digging sticks, but also for far more ambitious creations
such as platforms or walkways.
“I think most early human groups would have been using wood in some
form,” she said. “We just don’t see it.”
The logs were discovered by an international team of scientists in
2019 near an enormous waterfall in Zambia known as the Kalambo Falls.
There, the Kalambo River drops 770 feet before flowing into Lake
Tanganyika.
For archaeologists, the site has a checkered history. In the 1950s, a
British archaeologist, Desmond Clark, found ancient stone tools near
the falls, as well as pieces of wood that he proposed had been digging
sticks and spears. Other pieces looked as if they had been burned; it
would have been some of the oldest evidence of people making fires.
Kalambo Falls, where the wood artifacts were found. Credit...Geoff
Duller/Aberystwyth University
By the early 2000s, however, much of the luster of Dr. Clark’s
discovery had disappeared. For one thing, he never got a firm fix on
the age of the wood. The only reliable method available at the time to
determine age was radiocarbon dating, which can be used only on
objects less than 50,000 years old. The wood pieces at Kalambo Falls
proved to be older than that — but how much older?
Other researchers questioned whether people had actually crafted the
wooden objects. Dr. Clark acknowledged that they might have been
branches that had fallen into the Kalambo River and were reshaped by
sand grains carried in the water flowing toward the falls.
In 2006, Lawrence Barham, an archaeologist at the University of
Liverpool, and his colleagues returned to the Kalambo Falls. By then,
researchers had developed a new way to determine the age of
archaeological sites, taking advantage of how quartz grains can act
like geological clocks. As naturally occurring uranium atoms break
down in the ground, they release energy that gets trapped inside the
quartz. Over time, the grains store more and more energy, which
scientists can later measure in their labs. The more energy, the older
the specimen.
On their trip to the Kalambo Falls in 2006, the scientists found more
stone tools. Geoff Duller, a geophysicist at Aberystwyth University in
Wales, collected sand from the riverbanks, and spent the next few
years measuring its trapped energy. He determined that the oldest
layers of sediment that contained stone tools were 300,000 to 500,000
years old.
That meant the tools were made well before the evolution of modern
humans. The scientists suspect they might have been made by an earlier
species present in Zambia, known as Homo heidelbergensis
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The researchers made another trip to the falls, in 2019, and Dr.
Duller had planned to use an even more powerful dating technique based
on feldspar grains rather than quartz.
But when they arrived at Dr. Clark’s old site, they discovered it
had vanished. In the 13 years since their last trip, the river had
shifted away. All that was left was a reed-filled marsh.
Fortunately, Dr. Barham had prepared a Plan B. Before the expedition,
he used Google Earth to spot a promising strip of beach along the
Kalambo River. When they got there, Dr. Barham immediately saw a stick
jutting out of the sand. In the water, he found a sharpened tip that
fit perfectly on one end of the stick. If he had come a year later,
the fragments might have washed away. “It was just a moment of
luck,” Dr. Barham said.
In the same area, the researchers found stone tools along with wood
shaped into wedges and V’s — clear signs of handiwork.
Dr. Duller used the feldspar grains to determine the age of the
artifacts. He found that the objects came from three distinct ages:
487,000 years ago, 390,000 years and 324,000 years. It’s possible
that people lived by the river throughout that time or returned to it
over thousands of generations.
A flint found at the site used to shape the wooden structure. Credit:
Larry Barham/University of Liverpool
At the end of the field season in 2019, the researchers made their
most spectacular discovery. In the oldest layer of sand, they
uncovered a four-and-a-half-foot log of a small African tree known
as Zeyher’s bushwillow [[link removed]].
Near the log’s tapered end, the researchers noticed a large notch.
When they dug farther down, they realized the notched part of the log
was resting on an even bigger tree trunk.
As the researchers exposed the wood, they took high-resolution
photographs. The pictures revealed chop marks on the log and the
trunk, suggesting that people had worked them with axes and scraping
tools. “This is deliberate,” Dr. Barham said. “This is
intentional.”
Dr. Milks said taking photographs of the ancient wooden objects as
soon as they were discovered was crucial for understanding how they
were crafted. The waterlogged sand allowed the wood to survive for
hundreds of thousands of years almost unchanged. But when ancient wood
is exposed to the air again, it can lose essential clues in a matter
of minutes. “It can shrink, it can warp — all sorts of things can
happen,” Dr. Milks said.
Dr. Barham and his colleagues collaborated with John Mukopa, a
traditional Zambian woodworker, to interpret their findings. They
suspect that people cut down live trees with stone axes. They then
worked the wood so that the two pieces could fit together into some
larger structure.
Dr. Barham speculated that the log and the trunk were part of a
structure built above the marshy land along the Kalambo River.
“It’s about keeping your feet dry, or keeping your food dry, or
keeping your firewood dry,” he said.
“Put yourself in the mind of somebody living there almost 480,000
years ago with a big brain,” he said. “Don’t be frightened of
complex suggestions.”
_CARL ZIMMER writes the “Origins”
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Times. He is the author of fourteen books, including “Life's Edge:
The Search For What It Means To Be Alive.”_
_Subscribe to THE NEW YORK TIMES
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THE SNEAKY FORCE BEHIND OUR SUN’S VIOLENT OUTBURSTS
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A strange discovery from flying close to the sun.
PAUL M. SUTTER
Nautilus
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